The Acid Test of the New Deal
The National Recovery Administration, 1933-1935
In August 1933 representatives of the crushed stone, sand and gravel, and slag industry gathered in Washington for hearings on the industry's proposed code of fair trade and labor practices under the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Among other things, industry leaders proposed a minimum wage of twenty-two cents per hour in the South and thirty cents per hour in the North. Southern employers claimed that the inefficiency of their "negro labor" justified the regional wage differential. Paying black workers more than twenty-two cents per hour allegedly would "upset the whole sociological conditions" in the South. Most of the people present probably were quite startled when a white-haired woman with a soft southern accent took the microphone and denounced the proposed code. She accused southern employers of playing black and white unskilled laborers against each other, "with consequent submerged purchasing power." As for the supposed dangers of paying black workers higher wages, she continued, "That negroes will earn enough to subsist on and then stop work I believe to be a fallacy." Like anyone else, she insisted, African Americans would use their higher wages to raise their living standard, stimulating the economy in the process. The speaker was Lucy Mason, representing the National Consumers' League.[1]
In 1933 the NCL, like the nation, was under new leadership. Florence Kelley had died in 1932, after recommending Mason as her successor. Mason left her native Virginia for the league's headquarters in New York City, "feeling too small for the work, but impelled to go into it." Her first challenge was to impress Kelley's loyal colleagues, a few of whom seemed skeptical of this southern newcomer.[2] These reservations dissolved in the flurry of activity that followed the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House. The league had close ties to the Roosevelts, and league activists confidently joined the jostling crowd of people who surrounded the new president, seeking to shape his appointments and his policies.
The first New Deal program to address the heart of the NCL program was the National Recovery Administration. One of the most ambitious and controversial programs to emerge from Franklin Roosevelt's "First Hundred Days," this two-year emergency agency aimed to restore economic health by creating a "code of fair competition" for every industry. The labor provisions of each code established minimum wages and maximum hours for that industry. Thus the NRA represented the federal government's first peacetime regulation of adult labor standards. The NRA also granted workers the right to organize and bargain collectively. Some employers welcomed these labor provisions as a way to stabilize production, but most did not. To employers, the NRA's chief appeal was its relaxation of antitrust rules. Its codes allowed competing firms to cooperate in controlling overproduction and downward price spirals. In practice, various interests inside and outside the agency assigned different priorities to labor standards, collective bargaining, and price stabilization. Because the NRA's many drafters had not specified an economic strategy, the agency embodied three conflicting visions for recovery: a "rational, cartelized business order in which the industrialists would plan and direct the economy"; a "cooperative, collectivist democracy" in which organized economic groups (employers, labor, consumers) planned together for the public interest; and a system of enforced competition, under which vigorous anti-monopoly policies would take care of "market riggers." These internal conflicts facilitated the domination of code drafting and enforcement by industry, particularly by the largest firms in each industry. The NRA was under attack from all sides well before it was found unconstitutional in May 1935.[3]
The NCL was in the thick of the fight for the soul of the NRA. League leaders hoped the agency would be a showcase for democratic economic planning. The league had friends among both the planners and the antimonopolists, but its core activists believed that too much competition, not too little, was the chief threat. Above all, the NCL opposed the "industrial self-government" approach to recovery.[4] The league offered a detailed program for preventing industry domination and making the NRA a successful exercise in democratic planning. It urged NRA officials to listen to labor and consumer voices, to defend union rights aggressively, to set high labor standards, to prohibit race and sex discrimination, and to empower existing state and national labor agencies to enforce code labor provisions. The league also agitated for state wage-hour laws to plug gaps and bolster NRA enforcement. However, the NCL had to fight to share the lessons of its own experience with NRA officials; its broadest recommendations were not taken up.
The NRA failed because its codes were not enforced fairly. Enforcement was poor because industry leaders ran the authorities that were charged with code administration.[5] Some scholars suggest that business domination of the code authorities resulted from a lack of "administrative capacity" on the part of the government. In this view, the federal government's lack of expertise left it little choice but to recruit businessmen to implement the codes.[6] In fact, there was an alternative. A group of women with a quarter-century of expertise in labor standards regulation lobbied hard for authority over the labor provisions of the NRA. Consumers' League activists and their allies in state and federal labor departments had worked for years designing and administering state labor laws for women, implementing minimum wage laws on the same cumbersome industry-by-industry basis used by the NRA. But most government officials, employers, and labor leaders doubted these women were qualified to shape national policies that would affect male as well as female workers. Others may have recognized their expertise but did not like their politics.
The Consumers' League and the Origins of the NRA
During Herbert Hoover's presidency, NCL activists were prominent among the policy experts searching for fresh approaches to national labor standards policy.[7] In the late 1920s some league thinkers began to argue that high wages and short hours were vital to national economic health as well as to workers' health. Among the NCL officers were such leading proponents of raising consumer purchasing power as Wesley Clair Mitchell and Stuart Chase. Several league women were economists whose own research supported an underconsumptionist analysis of the Depression.[8] In late 1930 and 1931, while promoting the Cotton Textile Institute's effort to reduce night work, Florence Kelley aided a Taylor Society committee in drafting a model industrial code that was similar in concept to the NRA codes. The Taylor Society had emerged as a prominent advocate of industrial democracy; its members included social scientists, labor leaders, consumption-oriented industrialists, and quite a few female labor reformers. Even before the start of the Depression, policy intellectuals in groups like the Taylor Society and the Consumers' League had begun developing the ideas and creating the alignment of political forces that would forge the New Deal.[9]
Immediately after Roosevelt's election, NCL leaders began lobbying for Senate hearings on wages and hours. In December 1932 the league sponsored a national conference that brought together trade unionists, lawyers and economists, labor department officials, and a wide array of activists. After taking stock of the Depression's devastating impact on workers, the conference concluded that "not only are thousands of wage earners being exploited, but legitimate industry is undermined by unfair competitive practices, and the purchasing power of wage earners . . . is dangerously reduced." When FDR took office, the NCL board authorized Molly Dewson, who was close to both the president and his wife, "to explore the possibility of national legislation."[10]
The Consumers' League was quick to move for national regulation, but it also foresaw that federal policy alone would not eliminate low wages and long hours. Unique to the NCL was its fight for an integrated system of state and national labor standards laws. Its leaders were certain that both local and federal rules were necessary to cover all groups of workers and to prevent evasion. The NCL also believed state-level laws helped generate the civic participation that it believed was so important to effective and democratic policy. In late 1932 the league prompted the formation of state labor standards committees in dozens of states around the country. These committees promoted bills for shorter hours and a model minimum wage bill newly drafted by NCL lawyers. These coalitions, which drew on local women's groups, female-employing unions, settlement houses, church groups, and labor departments, were behind the passage of six minimum wage laws for women in 1933, in addition to numerous improvements to hours laws and labor departments.[11] However, promoting state and national laws simultaneously would prove to be an enormous challenge, one that the NCL would wrestle with long after the NRA's demise.
While the NRA was in the gestational stage, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins proposed a national wage-hour law based directly on the NCL's model state bill. This plan was killed by the ambivalence of the American Federation of Labor to minimum wage regulation and by broad-based hostility to female administrative authority over labor policy. Perkins's plan, which the NCL supported, was an alternative to Senator Hugo Black's thirty-hour-week bill. Black's bill was introduced in December 1932 with AFL approval. The NCL welcomed the AFL's new warmth toward hours laws for men and supported the "share-the-work" principle behind the Black bill. However, like Perkins, league leaders feared the bill would be found unconstitutional. They also believed it would cause severe hardship to the lowest-paid workers (who were disproportionately female). Without any minimum wage provision, the bill's drastic reduction in hours, from the typical forty-eight or more per week to thirty, would worsen poverty. Perkins suggested amending the Black bill to include a minimum wage provision administered by industry boards representing labor, management, and the public. Perkins's proposal created an uproar. Organized labor and business leaders alike declared themselves appalled at her "bid for unlimited power." Perkins stressed that her bill was nothing new, just an extension of the state minimum wage commissions for women. But what organized labor and some businessmen had accepted in the states for women workers they found unacceptable as part of a federal program that included men. Business leaders denounced Perkins's bill as "grossly impractical" and dangerous in its plan to substitute "the judgment of a Federal officer for that of experienced and responsible management" on wages and hours. The AFL's William Green opposed minimum wages for men as well as the "board method" of administration.[12]
NCL leaders lobbied unsuccessfully to close the door to industrial self-government, and then they clashed with the man appointed to head the new agency. Molly Dewson wrote to all the various groups involved in NRA drafting, urging them to mandate a short workday and mandatory minimum wage, and warning against entrusting recovery to trade associations.[13] The final bill remained vague, however, and FDR's selection for the NRA's executive was a poor omen. General Hugh Johnson, who had worked for the War Industries Board during World War I, was a former businessman who envisioned industrialist-led recovery.[14] Johnson suggested skipping the public hearings phase of code drafting. Instead, he proposed setting each industry's code by meeting with the executives of the companies involved. The Consumers' League network was horrified. Public participation in policy making was at the core of the league's faith in a planning-oriented administrative state. The NCL believed public input not only yielded fairer policy, it also legitimized that policy. Grassroots interest enhanced enforcement. Frances Perkins insisted on public hearings at which labor and public representatives could speak: "We're operating a democracy here. You're going to adopt a code which will affect thousands of people's lives. . . . If [the people] don't cooperate, it will be a failure."[15]
Hoping its own vision of the NRA would triumph over Hugh Johnson's, the NCL combined public agitation with what Lucy Mason called "behind-the-scenes" work, which required mastery of the NRA's intricate bureaucratic channels. In the code-drafting process, each industry submitted a proposed code to NRA administrators, who consulted with labor representatives to arrive at a preliminary code, which then was discussed at a public hearing. Each code established fair trade practices, labor standards, and a code authority empowered to administer the code. From the public hearing, the revised code went to the NRA's Industrial, Labor, and Consumers' Advisory Boards for approval and then to Johnson, who submitted it to the president for final authorization. The NCL influenced this process at various stages, mainly through direct lobbying of NRA code administrators. In some circumstances, the league appealed for intervention to Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt, or to the Department of Labor (DOL).[16] Other channels of NCL influence were through the Consumers' Advisory Board (CAB) and Labor Advisory Board (LAB). The league had good connections on these boards, which, although weak, did exert some pressure against employer demands.
The Consumers' Advisory Board, the Consumer Movement, and the NCL
The existence of the NRA Consumer Advisory Board was an indicator of the extent to which the Great Depression had made policymakers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens more conscious of the economic and political importance of the consumer. The new consumerism had diverse manifestations with varying political implications. A social democratic strain asserted that a mass consumer movement would be an indispensable complement to a strong labor movement in the fight against corporate domination of the nation's economic and political life. These laborite consumerists included New Dealers like Paul Douglas, Frederic Howe, Leon Henderson, and Caroline Ware, who with others used federal agencies such as the CAB, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later the Office of Price Administration to organize citizens into grassroots consumer councils and cooperatives. These government-backed initiatives emerged with the approval of new left-leaning voluntary associations such as the Consumers' Union and the League of Women Shoppers. But not all consumer activists were pro-labor. Groups like Consumers' Research complained that higher labor standards translated into higher prices and therefore did little for purchasing power. Moreover, to counter the growth of labor-allied consumer groups, trade associations began funding their own consumer movement, which blamed government spending and unions for high taxes and high prices.[17]
The NCL welcomed the wider recognition of the consumer's importance, but the league's relationship to the consumer movement was ambiguous. The NCL board repeatedly rejected proposals to expand the league program to include consumer protection, worried about losing focus and diminishing the commitment to high labor standards. Time and time again the NCL explained to people confused by its name that its field was labor standards, not product prices and quality. The league also took pains to discourage new groups from taking names too close to its own. Although league officers tried to preserve some distinction between the NCL and the new consumer movement, as individuals many of them were active in consumer cooperatives and the Consumers' Union. Eventually, the emergence of antilabor consumer voices pulled the league into a struggle to keep the consumer movement united with the cause of labor. The NCL joined the Consumers' National Federation, an umbrella group, and league officers helped expose "fake consumers' organizations" that were "falsely attributing price increases to wage increases." High wages and low prices could go together, they explained, if workers and consumers allied to take away employers' power to command unreasonable profits. "We the consumers can have a functioning democracy only as we consciously organize to break the bonds of a monopolistic dictatorship which now can control prices, wages, and production," one league leader proclaimed.[18]
The Consumers' Advisory Board, on which the NCL was represented, became a platform for forceful criticism of NRA policy by dissatisfied liberals.[19] However, the CAB's authority was limited, in part because it was trivialized as a female-dominated group. Hugh Johnson did not take the consumer movement seriously, holding firmly to a producer-centered vision of economic recovery. He created the CAB as a token gesture and then generally ignored it. Johnson selected Mary Harriman Rumsey (who was Frances Perkins's housemate) to head the board. Other members included Molly Dewson of the NCL, Belle Sherwin of the League of Women Voters, and a long list of academic men, several of them NCL officers.[20] Critics often attacked the CAB in latently antiwoman terms, even though men outnumbered women on the board. Frederick Schlink of Consumers' Research grumbled that the CAB was dominated by "dull social worker types," "gutless economics professors," and "society matrons." (Schlink's real gripe was that Consumers' League influence helped keep the CAB committed to high wages. Not incidentally, Schlink's own organization soon would be embroiled in scandal over unfair labor practices.) Johnson's appointment of Rumsey to the CAB may have been a deliberate attempt to marginalize it by "feminizing" it. In any case, the appointment reflected his low opinion of the board's significance.[21]
The NCL sought to influence CAB policy without compromising league autonomy. Both Lucy Mason and Elinore Herrick (Consumers' League of New York) took turns pinch-hitting for Molly Dewson on the CAB, but they declined a permanent seat. Mason declared that being on the board impaired her freedom to criticize proposed codes. Later, when some members argued that the Consumers' League should have greater representation on NRA consumer boards, Mason reiterated her view that "it is necessary to be free of affiliation to effectively represent the consumers' conscience on labor standards."[22]
The league took a similarly supportive but aloof attitude toward the Women's Section of the NRA, which amounted to a public relations effort to encourage women to buy only from businesses that displayed the Blue Eagle, the symbol of compliance with the NRA codes. Hugh Johnson announced, "It is women in homesand not soldiers in uniformswho will this time save our country."[23] Contemporaries noted the debt of the Blue Eagle campaign to the NCL's older methods of ethical consumption, and many activists in branch leagues led Blue Eagle drives in their states. Kentucky league president Anna Settle organized a Blue Eagle campaign that obtained almost 50,000 signatures in Louisville, for example. The Consumers' League believed that civic involvement by grassroots constituencies resulted in more effective public policy, but national league activists also sought more direct authority over the NRA. They appreciated the benefits of mobilizing shoppers, but they did not accept that it was only as "women in homes" that they could wield influence.[24]
NCL women thus worked primarily through the agency's policy-making divisions, despite repeated NRA efforts to recruit them into public relations work. In New York, state NRA official Averell Harriman asked Elinore Herrick to head the state Women's Division, but she refused. One reason was that she was "not sure what kind of campaign would be put on" and did not want to lend "the prestige of [the Consumers' League] to a campaign of which we might be ashamed." However, Herrick also sought a more powerful role. She persuaded Harriman to let her be his behind-the-scenes adviser on NRA policy, which worked out "very satisfactorily." Herrick reported to the league that Harriman consulted her extensively and that she directed NRA policy throughout the state. She wrote most of Harriman's speeches for him, and she created a Division of Investigation that implemented "the Consumers' League technique of inspection." Eventually, Herrick "allowed" Harriman to appoint her to the state NRA's executive committee.[25]
In April 1934 the NRA tried to hire Lucy Mason to do publicity work among social workers and church groups. Some league board members thought the invitation offered an opportunity to influence the NRA for the better, and that "such an offer could not be turned down lightly." Others argued that the NCL was more effective "from outside" and should not put itself in the position of "whitewashing NRA." By this time quite disillusioned with the agency, Mason declined, explaining that the job "would not give me sufficient opportunity to be critical of the weak places in NRA."[26] Gratified as they were to see the principle of federal labor standards established, league leaders saw that the battle had only begun, and they strove to maximize their leverage over NRA policy.
The Labor Advisory Board and a Changing Labor Movement
The NRA's Labor Advisory Board was closer to the concerns of the Consumers' League than either the CAB or the Women's Section. The LAB was appointed by and reported to Frances Perkins. Its chairman, Leo Wolman, a Columbia labor economist with ties to the ACWA, was on the NCL board.[27] Other LAB members included William Green of the AFL, John Lewis of the United Mine Workers, ACWA president Sidney Hillman, Rose Schneiderman of the WTUL, and Reverend Francis Haas of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Schneiderman and Haas were regulars at NCL conferences.[28]
The LAB had more influence over NRA policy than the CAB, but it was weak compared to the Industrial Advisory Board and the trade associations. This accurately reflected the relative power of organized employers, unions, and consumers. During the 1920s, welfare capitalism and other, harsher anti-union practices had combined with general prosperity to erode the labor movement's numbers and spirit. When the Depression hit, employers rapidly cut amenities and wages. Many workers in formerly organized industries reconsidered the open shop bargain. Unorganized workers, too, were increasingly militant, most obviously in the southern textile strikes. Section 7a of the NRA emboldened workers by putting the official stamp of approval on the right to organize. Union memberships swelled during the NRA's short lifespan, but even by 1935, unions represented less than 10 percent of the nonagricultural workforce.[29] In industries that were at least partially unionized, the LAB had some success in negotiating better labor provisions and stronger representation on code authorities. But labor's power in Washington remained modest.
The Depression stimulated the emergence of new voices that were transforming the labor movement. The initiatives of people like John Lewis and Sidney Hillman in "industrial unionism"organizing an industry's workers across boundaries of skill and craftincreased the pressure on the AFL to do more for unskilled workers in mass production industries. Also, insurgents within the AFL were forcing the old guard to modify its antistatism. In 1932 the AFL's annual convention endorsed national hours standards and unemployment insurance. However, unskilled workers, especially those outside the manufacturing sector, continued to be a low priority for most labor leaders.
The NCL directly influenced the leaders who would transform the labor movement's attitude toward wage-hour regulation. John Lewis and Sidney Hillman, who soon would found the CIO, came to believe that the state could play a positive role in setting a floor for labor standards. Lewis's support of an administrative state was more grudging than Hillman's, but both men represented workers in industries plagued by the sorts of problems that the NCL long had railed against. In coal mining and the needle trades, labor surpluses combined with workforce divisions (of race, ethnicity, age, or gender) to inhibit organizing and to enable employers to play workers against each other. Unlike garment factories, coal mines could not migrate toward cheaper labor, which may help explain why Hillman was more eager for national wage-hour regulation than Lewis. Nevertheless, Lewis was receptive to new ideas, in part because he had been impressed by his union's positive experience with a Colorado coal mining company owned by the NCL's Josephine Roche. Roche impressed the miners again during negotiations over the NRA's coal code, when she persuaded a group of coal operators to compromise on the code's labor provisions.[30]
The ACWA's Sidney Hillman owed his rise to power in part to support from female labor reformers. The Chicago WTUL promoted Hillman after he demonstrated his ability during the dramatic garment worker uprisings of 1909. When Hillman moved to New York, he sought out Florence Kelley, who introduced him to Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter. Kelley, Hillman, and Frankfurter were the chief actors in the wartime experiments with labor policy that convinced Hillman and many others of the positive potential of the state. In New York in the 1920s, social scientists in the league's orbit helped shape Hillman's ideas about the importance of consumer demand to a modern mass production economy. During the New Deal, it was Frances Perkins who promoted Hillman, this time to the position on the LAB that greatly advanced his career as a "labor statesman."[31] Other union officials who became key league allies came from the Hosiery Workers and the United Electrical Workers. It was no coincidence that most of the first labor leaders to actively promote government labor standards came from industries with large numbers of female workers.
An Independent Voice for Unorganized Workers
Because most union members already had higher wages and shorter hours than the codes would set, unions' interest in code labor provisions depended on whether they faced unorganized competition within their industry. The interests of unorganized workers were attended to only when they coincided with those of employers or unions, unless a group such as the NCL intervened. The Consumers' League submitted written criticisms and appeared at hearings on "countless" codes, "especially on codes that deal with unorganized labor, as that group most needs help." North Carolina tobacco workers, for example, not organized enough "to feel safe in openly making demands," asked Lucy Mason to testify against their employers at a hearing on the proposed tobacco code.[32]
Mason's work on the NRA codes continued the NCL's long tradition of focusing on the interests of less skilled workers. Mason once observed, "Industry includes both skilled and unskilled tasks. . . . The conditions of those who do the hardest and most unskilled work, which is a necessary part of our whole industrial system, should be our first concern."[33] Throughout her career, Mason implored skilled workers to see that their own interests were intertwined with those of the unskilled groups they often despised. As she put it some years later, "The special bargaining power of the skilled is linked with the mass power of the greater number of semiskilled and unskilled. All workers in the industry must be organized and protected without discrimination because of race, religion, or sex. There must be a fair distribution of wages to each group according to its skills, but the least skilled workers must be adequately paid for the essential labor they perform."[34]
One hallmark of the NCL effort to influence the NRA was its attack on code provisions that perpetuated competition between groups of workers. The league argued that raising purchasing power required the elimination of "underbidders" who pulled all wages down. Beneath this technocratic language of economic recovery lay a genuine commitment to justice for workers who were vulnerable because unions had been unable or unwilling to organize them. As the league emphasized again and again, setting different minimum wage provisions by race, sex, age, or job classification exploited the lower-paid groups. Codes on which the league testified or submitted criticisms included cotton textiles, rayon, retail dry goods, newspapers, paper and pulp, crushed stone, laundries, restaurants, canning, tobacco, knitted outerwear, lace, embroidery, and candy making. Heavily reliant on the labor of women and racial minorities, these industries were prone to the practices the NCL abhorred: sex- and race-based discrimination, homework, child labor, below-subsistence wages, and long hours.
The league outlined its goals at the hearings on the first NRA code, for the cotton textile industry. The code would affect in particular the thousands of impoverished southern women who comprised the lowest paid segment of the industry's labor force. Almost eight hundred people crowded into a hot Washington, D.C., auditorium for the hearings in June 1933. The Cotton Textile Institute, reflecting its experience with the voluntary ban on women's night work, had shaped the NRA code in the drafting stages, seeking a more comprehensive and compulsory measure than the trade association could enforce on its own. But the trade association's proposed labor provisions were hardly generous. CTI offered a forty-hour week and minimum wages of $10 per week in the South and $11 in the North. Its proposal exempted outdoor help, cleaners, learners, and office workers exempted from all labor provisions. The United Textile Workers' representative responded by demanding shorter hours and a minimum of at least $14 per week. Cotton textile wages were notoriously low, averaging $13 a week for unskilled males in the northern branch. Women in the southern branch received significantly less.[35] After sitting through three days of testimony, those who had requested to appear as "representatives of the public" at last had their turn. Among these were Lucy Mason, along with Margaret Wiesman of the Massachusetts Consumers' League.
Mason's testimony rapidly established her expertise on the textile industry and the latest economic theories. (The presiding administrator introduced her as representing the consumer's concern about price increases resulting from higher labor standards, but Mason politely set him straight.) After a few conciliatory sentences commending CTI for its cooperative spirit, Mason launched into a penetrating indictment of the proposed code. Her chief concern was raising the minimum wage and making sure it covered all workers. She also addressed daily hours, night work, the stretch-out, enforcement, labor representation, and the regional wage differential. Mason sought to define the NRA's first objective as raising wages, rather than stabilizing prices. She held no illusions about the industry's motivations in submitting its code. Mason observed that CTI's proposal would "merely remove the cotton-textile industry from regulation of the anti-trust laws without providing that basis of rising wages and increased purchasing power which it is the purpose of the Industrial Recovery Act to insure." She invoked FDR's definition of a living wage as not just a subsistence wage but a "decent living" to every worker.[36]
Mason's analysis stressed the interdependence of regional and occupational labor markets to suggest that national recovery depended on addressing the interests of the lowest-paid workers. She challenged the idea that cotton textiles were an inherently low-wage industry (because of the alleged sensitivity of demand to price). She argued that the industry's low wages stemmed from overexpansion during the First World War and from the existence in the South of a "large surplus supply of cheap labor constantly recruited from an agricultural population which has an excessively low standard of living." Low wages in the South dragged down northern wages and also compounded the "overproduction" problem by reducing the size of "home markets" in the South. Furthermore, Mason warned, shortening hours without increasing wages would defeat the NRA's goal of spreading employment, because textile workers would seek additional employment in their new free hours to meet the gap between their textile wages and their survival needs.[37]
Scholars of the textile industry and the NRA note that the federal government and the industry lacked experience in setting minimum wages, but they overlook the contributions that the Consumers' League was able to make at the hearings. Organized labor rarely could fill this gap, but the NCL could marshal impressive amounts of data to make specific recommendations. A New Hampshire Federation of Labor representative protested CTI's proposed minimum wage as insufficient, but when questioned he "frankly admitted that he had no figures on the situation."[38] Mason (and Margaret Wiesman after her) presented extensive statistics on earnings in various branches of the industry and from cost-of-living studies to demonstrate that the proposed minimum rates were "dangerously near the substandard rates hitherto in effect." Although they did not stress this, Mason and Wiesman used data gathered in surveys of women workers to estimate the cost of living for men and women alike.[39]
After Mason's and Wiesman's testimony, industry representatives offered to raise the code minimum wage by 20 percent, to $12 a week in the South and $13 in the North. The Consumers' League and the unions had hoped for more, but it was a significant improvement, particularly as the cotton code set a precedent for the hundreds that followed. Confident that the league's participation had been worthwhile, Mason wrote that "we have a very definite point of view to express in connection with the code hearings, and I have made a real dent in the administration on the cotton code." The NCL may not deserve full credit for the increased minimum, but its statistics and vigorous critique of the industry's proposal increased the leverage of labor and liberals within the NRA.[40] The LAB and CAB indicated their appreciation by keeping the league supplied with up-to-the-minute information on proposed codes. Many code hearings later, one LAB employee urged the NCL to keep up the pressure against industry proposals, because it was "perfectly clear that the Administration is uncertain as to what to do."[41]
The Consumers' League and NRA Race Discrimination
The NCL struggled unsuccessfully at the cotton textile hearings to eliminate racially discriminatory occupational exemptions from the code. This defeat triggered a sustained campaign that placed the NCL at the side of outspoken black critics of the NRA and well ahead of most white liberals. This activism by the Consumers' League, and also by the YWCA, illustrates that women were prominent among the few whites to organize against race discrimination in the New Deal, but it also highlights the indifference of other white women's organizations to the problems of black workers. Neither the League of Women Voters, the U.S. Women's Bureau, nor the National Woman's Party lined up behind the NCL to demand racial justice under NRA codes. This failure contrasts sharply with the well-coordinated attack these groups would launch against NRA sex discrimination.
The exclusion of black-dominated occupations from many NRA codes was neither accidental nor unopposed. The cotton textile code's exemption of outside help and cleaners effectively denied blacks any code protection, because these were the only jobs open to blacks in that industry. Many other industry codes discriminated through similar exemptions, or by setting lower labor standards in regions where African Americans dominated the workforce.[42] Black protest of the NRA codes was sparked by John P. Davis and Robert C. Weaver, who met as graduate students at Harvard before returning to their hometown of Washington, D.C., in 1933. Dismayed by black organizations' inattention to NRA policy, Davis and Weaver established themselves as the Negro Industrial League and spoke at code hearings affecting black workers. In late 1933 this group metamorphosed into the Joint Committee for National Recovery (JCNR), a coalition of organizations concerned with the welfare of black workers. These included, in addition to black church and professional associations, the NAACP, the National Association of Colored Women, the Federal Council of Churches, and the national YWCA. (The YWCA in fact provided staff support and much of the funding for the JCNR.) With John Davis as its most prominent spokesperson, the JCNR led the protest against race discrimination in the NRA and other New Deal programs.[43]
Outside of the JCNR, the National Consumers' League was the most forceful and knowledgeable critic of NRA race discrimination. Lucy Mason, who was on the NAACP board at this time, was the league's most energetic opponent of white supremacy, but many league branches protested race discrimination in employment.[44] Like the JCNR, the Consumers' League denounced code exemptions of black-dominated occupations, race differentials in wages and hours, and the lack of black representation in the NRA. At the cotton textile code hearing, Lucy Mason spoke against the exemption of "outside help," agreeing with John Davis that the purchasing power of all workers should be raised. When asked whether paying the same minimum to all employees might result in the replacement of blacks with whites, Mason conceded that there was such a risk. However, she preferred to "see the principle [of equal wages] established" to test whether experience would justify it. She also cautioned against "that tendency to believe that the colored worker needs less than the white worker." The administrator's private notes suggest that Mason's statement, in conjunction with Davis's, convinced him to eliminate the exemptions. However, the exemptions were restored as a last-minute concession to southern mill owners.[45]
After the cotton textile code, Mason followed the code-drafting process especially closely for industries that employed large numbers of black workers. At hearings for the crushed stone, sand and gravel, and slag industries, Mason met employer justifications of regional wage differentials head on. Southern industry leaders explained that because their operations depended on "inefficient" black workers, the southern branch could not afford the higher rate paid in northern states. They claimed that southern blacks were used to receiving a maximum of seventeen cents an hour. (It was hastily added that "of course we work no white man at any such scale as that.") Raising black wages would create havoc, employers warned. They alleged that blacks would quit work until they had burned up all their money on vice.[46] Mason's response was indignant: "If the negro is to live in a little better home and smoke a little better tobacco, and perhaps have a little Ford and buy gasoline for it, it is going to be a blessed good thing for purchasing power." Here Mason used underconsumptionist thought to insist on black workers' rights to equal pay and a higher standard of living.[47]
Mason's exasperation with the code hearings prompted her to file a lengthy memorandum on race discrimination with all 120 NRA deputy administrators as well as General Johnson and President Roosevelt. Mason noted that "in southern states legislative battles have been fought over excluding from women's hours laws occupations in which Negro women were chiefly employed. We do not want to set the stamp of [federal] Government approval on this attitude." As for the efficiency of black workers, Mason insisted that "there is nothing inherent in the Negro which disqualifies him from being a good worker." She dryly observed that "if it did not pay to employ Negroes they would not be employed at all."[48] Mason also challenged the claim that equal minimum wages would worsen "race relations." She argued that "though he himself is unaware of the cause of his antagonism, deep rooted in the southern white unskilled wage earner is fear of [cheaper] Negro competition." Equal wages would reduce white fears, she implied. On the controversial question of black displacement by whites if equal wages were paid, Mason pointed out that it was employers who were invoking the specter of black displacement. Skeptical of this charity, she asked, "Have Negro workers or their representatives been consulted as to whether they wish to be excluded from such protective provisions, or have white wage earners demanded that Negroes be excluded?"[49]
During the 1930s, advocates of black workers and women workers often confronted the argument that if race or sex differentials were eliminated, blacks or women would be displaced by whites or by men, since employers would prefer those groups if all received the same wage. On both race and sex, NCL leaders stuck by the equal pay principle. They worried about displacement of formerly underpaid groups, but they believed that in the long run allowing any group to underbid another was detrimental to that group, and to all workers collectively. On the question of race, the JCNR also embraced this position, overruling a few black spokespersons who argued that blacks should accept a lower wage in order to protect their jobs. An official race differential ultimately would be stigmatizing and disadvantageous to blacks, the JCNR insisted.[50] Lucy Mason made a point of gathering data on blacks' replacement by whites, which was less common than defenders of race differentials claimed. One analyst observed that even without the NRA, the new willingness of whites to work at low-paid, formerly stigmatized jobs would have caused some black displacement. In other words, it may have been the Depression, not the codes, that in a few places was causing whites to replace blacks.[51]
Even more unusual than the NCL's protest against discriminatory code labor provisions was its pressure for the appointment of blacks to prominent NRA positions. Mason early supported black demands for representation. "Would it not be advisable to have well qualified Negroes on each of the advisory boards and in the research divisions of NRA?" she asked Hugh Johnson. When the Research and Planning Division did hire a black woman, Mason wrote other NRA staff urging them to work with her. These efforts to encourage interaction with the NRA's sole black professional apparently were to no avail. A subsequent report found that the woman, Mabel Byrd, had never been allowed to function as an investigator and had not even been invited to the staff meetings of her division. After much delay, the NRA finally appointed a black economist, Dr. Abram Harris of Howard University, to the Consumers' Advisory Board, but he resigned after only a few months.[52]
Despite exhaustive efforts by John Davis and Lucy Mason, regional differentials were encoded for over one hundred industries by late 1934. These usually were nothing but camouflaged race differentials. The North-South border was located differently in different codes, depending on the proportion of black workers in an industry. For example, most codes defined Delaware as northern, but the fertilizer code, which in Delaware affected primarily black workers, defined it as southern. Furthermore, regional differentials were largest in industries where the southern workforce was mostly black; hence the differential was narrow in cotton textiles but wide in fertilizer.[53] However, without JCNR and NCL protests, the outcome would have been even worse. At the crushed stone hearing, for example, Mason was only one who criticized the race-based regional wage differential. In the approved code, the regional differential was narrowed, although not eliminated.[54] As Walter White of the NAACP told a discouraged colleague, "We cannot always measure effectiveness by things gained; we must also measure results by considering evils prevented."[55]
The Consumers' League and NRA Sex Discrimination
The JCNR did not address the question of sex discrimination in NRA codes. John Davis spent most of his time on codes that affected black men's occupations, not black women's. Davis's personal attitudes, as described by women he worked with, suggest that he would not have been a great advocate of gender equality.[56] Although black women's groups mobilized against NRA race discrimination, they did not protest the agency's sex discrimination. This may be explained in part by the structure of the workforce. Most black women worked in occupations untouched by the NRA, such as agriculture and domestic work, and where black women were in industries covered by the NRA, such as laundries, restaurants, and canneries, their higher-paid competitors were not men but white women. Black women probably perceived their low wages as a function primarily of race discrimination between themselves and white women.[57] However, white activists bore some responsibility for defining sex discrimination as a white women's issue, because most white women's groups did not protest against code race discrimination. The historical tendency of white women to define discrimination against black women as a "race issue" may well have alienated black women from the campaign against sex discrimination.[58]
A long list of white women's groups agitated against NRA sex discrimination. The campaign was led by two camps: the anti-ERA coalition, which included the U.S. Women's Bureau, the Consumer's League, the WTUL, the YWCA, and the League of Women Voters, on one hand, and the National Woman's Party and its pro-ERA ally, the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, on the other. Both camps worked vigorously to eliminate sex-based wage differentials, and both tried to claim exclusive credit for the fact that such differentials were removed from many codes.[59] However, only the NCL group concerned itself with the details and practical effects of each code, and thus only that group was informed enough to protest latent as well as explicit sex discrimination.
The two factions waged their battles for NRA sex equality in different languages. The pro-ERA group drew on general principles about individual citizenship and property rights. Letters to Hugh Johnson from the Business and Professional Women's Clubs emphasized that discrimination against any class was "unAmerican" and that women paid the same taxes and prices as men. By contrast, the labor-oriented feminists took a technical approach, emphasizing labor market factors such as women's skills, occupational sex segregation, and competition between groups of workers, and stressing the need to raise the purchasing power of the poorest workers. The resistance of NCL allies to the individualistic feminism of the ERA camp made them less comfortable arguing from a women's rights position.[60]
The difference between the Woman's Party and the Consumers' League approaches emerged at the first code hearings, for cotton textiles. Both groups adamantly opposed setting a lower minimum wage for women. Margaret Wiesman of the Massachusetts league observed that a woman could not live any less expensively than a man, and that "she has dependents as much as a man has." She also argued that neither sex should work more than eight hours a day, and that six hours would be even better. On the question of night work, Lucy Mason vacillated at first. The textile union had proposed banning women's night work. Mason thought all night work should be banned, but she hinted that if that was impossible, then women's night hours should be restricted. The code administrator asked Mason whether equal protection was "more strongly done by making no . . . attempt to discriminate or set up those two distinct classes" or by sex-specific measures. Mason answered frankly that he asked "a question which is rather unresolved." When pressed to clarify her position, Mason concluded that the textile code should make no sex-specific provisions.[61] The Woman's Party limited its comment on the codes to an insistence that they make no distinctions by sex. The final code did not distinguish between male and female workers. Night work was in effect eliminated for all workers by the code's establishment of an industrywide maximum of two forty-hour shifts per week.[62]
Subsequent industry codes did set lower minimum wages for women than for men, and the Consumers' League coalition stepped up its campaign against sex differentials. Mary Anderson analyzed code approval patterns to identify which NRA administrators were authorizing lower wages for women and organized conferences with the offenders. Joint press releases by the NCL, WTUL, YWCA, and LWV kept the arguments against lower wages for women fresh in the minds of NRA officials and the public. In September 1933 these groups filed a protest with President Roosevelt and NRA administrators: "Wages should be paid for the type of work done and not on the basis of sex. . . . We believe that the codes adopted by the N.R.A. should not perpetuate an economic injustice." Sex differentials undermined the NRA's objectives of spreading employment and increasing purchasing power, they asserted.[63] The NCL coalition pointed out that in certain occupations lower minimum wages for women displaced men. This was not an argument that women's wage rates should be raised to discourage their employment and restore "natural" sex roles. Rather, these groups emphasized the injustice and economic folly of allowing exploitation of one group of workers to hold all wages down.[64]
Whereas the Woman's Party limited its attention to the question of formal sex differentials, the NCL recognized that gender-blind legislation was no guarantee against sex discrimination. By November 1933, not only had fourteen of the eighty-one approved codes set sex-based wage differentials, but eight other codes discriminated against women more subtly by paying less for "light and repetitive work" or to workers who as of July 1929 had made less than a certain wage. The NCL challenged "light and repetitive work" clauses, asserting that lighter machines often demanded more accuracy and endurance, and that, in any case, women had proved themselves to be quite capable on the "so-called heavy machines." The league also urged NRA administrators to curb the use of "learner" provisions, which were notoriously abused by employers with unorganized female workforces.[65]
Eliminating industrial homework was another high priority for the NCL. This practice took advantage of the desperation of women with dependents. It was essentially a code-dodging method because it was so difficult to monitor. In opposing homework, the league emphasized raising purchasing power and protecting workers, not motherhood. Homework was a "chisel" that undermined factory labor standards and the whole purpose of the NRA. When the league used family-oriented arguments, it was to counter those introduced by the opposition. One NCL board member called for combating "the sentimental point of view of not breaking up the home and forcing the mother into the factory. We ought to develop some sort of propaganda . . . meet sob stuff with sob stuff and show how the homes are actually being broken up by the introduction and continuation of homework."[66] The league understood women to be a permanent part of the labor force, entitled to the same benefits from NRA codes as men. It sought to protect women and men alike from underbidding by particularly exploitable groups.[67]
Organized women did not eliminate code discrimination against women, but they significantly reduced it. In May 1934 the Women's Bureau claimed that at least 224 changes had been made in 119 codes as a result of pressure it had applied in conjunction with the NCL and WTUL.[68] That one-quarter of the NRA codes did, in the end, contain sex differentials has been taken as evidence of the failure of women's organizations during this period.[69] But it was due to the constant vigilance of organized women that three-quarters of the codes did not incorporate sex differentials. Furthermore, the NCL network made substantial headway on other issues that disproportionately affected women, such as industrial homework and lower learner rates. In some respects NRA codes benefited women more than men: in many industries, women's wages almost doubled, hours were sharply reduced, mechanization opened new jobs to women, and unions grudgingly opened their doors. Of course, not all major woman-employing occupations had codes, with domestic service as the most obvious example.[70]
Enforcing the NRA Codes
"Thay are breaking your code in ever way they can," an anonymous cotton textile worker from South Carolina wrote to FDR. "Thay hade to take the Blue Eagle away from the Clinton Mills . . . and we are almost starved." Imploring the president to take action, the worker concluded, "But rember we poor pople are your friend."[71] The Consumers' League had predicted that enforcing code labor provisions would be as difficult as getting good ones approved. Molly Dewson remarked in 1933 that "the NRA is a great pipe dream come truebut pipe dreams are rather nebulous."[72] In some industries, strong unions were effective enforcers of code labor provisions, thereby converting some employers into grudging supporters of union rights. However, the number of codes in which unions were able to play this role was small. Also, unions rarely were able to enforce their codes as effectively in the South as elsewhere. The NCL's multiprong efforts to improve NRA enforcement policy were an important supplement to the efforts of organized labor.[73] The league's detailed proposals for translating statutory protection of workers into real protection illuminate its hopes for a more democratic NRA, which might be achieved by empowering both organized labor and veteran administrators of women's labor laws. The ambivalence of the agency's response convinced the league that it needed to sustain its state-level, sex-based strategies.
The league sought to improve NRA enforcement in several ways. First, it worked to have codes drafted without loopholes and with explicit enforcement mechanisms. Second, the league pushed for more labor and consumer representation on code authorities. Third, it agitated for a national NRA compliance system that would rely less on the code authorities and more on NCL allies in the federal and state departments of labor. Fourth, the league demanded stronger guarantees of collective bargaining. Lastly, the NCL lobbied for new state laws to supplement NRA codes.[74]
Using Worker Input to Draft Enforceable Codes
Employers, NRA administrators, and most unions lacked practical experience with wage and hours laws, and representatives such as the National Woman's Party and the Negro Industrial League made general statements of principle rather than concrete suggestions for improving the NRA codes. NCL research helped fill this gap. The league's close contact with workers enabled it to make specific recommendations on drafting codes that would be harder to evade. Lucy Mason visited seventeen states in 1934, most of them in the South, asking workers whether NRA codes were being enforced and whether the codes benefited them. The NCL located workers (primarily women, although their sex was not emphasized to the NRA) by contacting the Summer Schools for Women Workers, labor unions, branch leagues, and YWCA industrial secretaries. Sometimes workers who feared that NRA compliance boards would not protect them from reprisals reported code violations to the Consumers' League.[75] In 1933 and again in 1934, Mason circulated 2,000 questionnaires on code effectiveness and tabulated the responses for each year's Labor Standards Conference. Mason also compiled a long list of employers' "chiseling" methods, which she aired at code hearings and conferences. In this respect the Consumers' League acted as a liaison between workers and the NRA.[76]
The league believed that informed workers were the starting point for good enforcement. The NCL advised that codes require conspicuous posting of hours, wages, and other regulations in workplaces, a simple step without which employers easily misled workers about code provisions. Mechanisms were needed to prohibit falsifying payroll records, stretching out or speeding up production, paying by check and forcing the employee to return cash, deducting from wages the cost of meals or uniforms, making employees take work home, and other abuses.[77] The enforcement issue also was one more argument against varying minimum wage rates for different occupational groups, such as learners, executives, or outdoor help. Exemptions and differentials "open[ed] the door to evasion" by tempting employers to reclassify employees into the exempted or lower-paid categories. At code hearings, Mason educated audiences on the notorious abuse of learner and apprenticeship clauses, whereby employees were fired as soon as the learning period expired and replaced with new employees at the low learner rate. Unskilled, unorganized workers were most powerless against this type of exploitation.
Offsetting Employer Control of Code Authorities
In addition to getting enforcement techniques written into the codes, the NCL demanded more labor and consumer representation on the code authorities.[78] Each code authority was to have industry, labor, and "administration" (public or consumer) representatives. However, from the first code on, the authorities tended to be made up of the same trade association bodies that had submitted the proposed codes. Labor representatives often were weak and isolated, and they generally were men who assigned low priority to women's interests. The NCL occasionally managed to have its members appointed as labor or administration representatives to the authorities, or to advisory committees. Lucy Mason was on the advisory board to the coat and suit authority, one of the few authorities able and willing to enforce its code. But, as one LAB official observed, "code authority" remained synonymous with "industry leaders" except in the case of about ten codes. This official complained to an NCL conference that the "standard Chamber of Commerce type of executive who is typical on the code authorities is not equipped to enforce labor provisions." He urged the groups represented at the conference to place their accumulated "experience in enforcing labor provisions . . . at the disposal of the Federal Government."[79]
The NCL managed to get some members appointed to other NRA administrative positions. Dozens of league members volunteered for NRA compliance and mediation boards around the country, bringing specific league techniques with them. League members such as Arthur Altmeyer, Clara Beyer, and William Davis held staff positions in the Compliance Division, and they solicited NCL suggestions for appointments to regional and local NRA boards. Elinore Herrick, executive secretary of the New York Consumers' League and adviser to NRA officials in New York, attributed the relatively successful enforcement there to the adoption of the league's own method of inspecting payrolls and timecards.[80]
In January 1934 Lucy Mason was still optimistic that placing league expertise "at the disposal of the Federal Government" would constructively influence the NRA. She believed her comprehensive statement, "Proposed Principles for Labor Provisions of NRA Codes," had "undoubtedly led to the reopening of the whole subject of labor provisions and had gotten the LAB to bring undesirable features to General Johnson's attention."[81] Soon thereafter, Johnson held what became known as the "Field Days of Criticism," hearings during which the NRA was attacked from all sides. The league was well represented at the open hearings.[82] But the hope that the hearings would usher in significant reform of code labor policy proved to be unfounded.
"Not Beauty but Guts": Women's Bid for Authority over Labor Standards Administration
Despairing of the code authorities, the NCL suggested taking the task of enforcing labor provisions away from them altogether. At the open hearings in February 1934, Molly Dewson and Elinore Herrick called for enforcement machinery allied with labor departments. Code authorities could continue to administer fair trade provisions, the league suggested, but enforcement of labor provisions should be turned over to a national NRA compliance network headed by the U.S. Department of Labor. The NCL urged that this compliance effort take advantage of state labor departments, where good ones existed, instead of creating new agencies in every state. Here the league anticipated and hoped to avoid jurisdictional conflicts between the NRA and state agencies. To the NCL it seemed logical to merge administration of existing state laws and of NRA codes. This would produce more strict and efficient enforcement, in the league view. Furthermore, it would keep code labor provisions in the hands of people who would not neglect the interests of female workers.[83]
The labor department officials who had been administering state hours and minimum wage laws for women were the people whose experience was most directly relevant to enforcing labor provisions of the NRA codes. The NCL had long struggled to reform state labor departments and staff them with "qualified" personnel; by the 1930s many league trainees held positions in these departments. "Unless you have the right people to do it," Clara Beyer observed, "the laws are not worth a tinker's damn."[84] When NCL activists spoke of "the right people," they thought especially of league members, who had practical knowledge and, they assumed, the right principles. An advocate of civil service reform, the NCL insisted that appointments be based on qualifications rather than political cronyism. The league did not perceive this effort to insulate labor departments from party politics as undemocratic, because in its experience political appointees did not always operate in the interests of all constituents, especially women workers. Mistrust of party appointments had feminist content in another respect as well: reformers' demand for objective criteria for labor department personnel represented an attack on "custom" and "tradition" as barriers to women officials' advancement.[85]
In some states, such as New York and Wisconsin, league allies dominated relatively clean and strong departments. In other places, they found themselves in constant struggle with "pols," political appointees who were incompetent or made sly deals with employers. These conflicts were not generally with trade union-backed appointees; rather, they were with people who had no labor affiliations or loyalties whatsoever. The Kentucky league found that after women factory inspectors were dismissed, the state industrial commission began closing its eyes to violations "if the offender is politically 'right' or contributes to the party."[86] This sort of incident, which often pitted trained women against less knowledgeable or less scrupulous men, reinforced some league leaders' female chauvinist assumption that women made the best labor law administrators. In 1934 the NCL took the lead in developing standardized qualifications for labor inspectors, which in its view served the double purpose of keeping the corrupt out and helping qualified women get in.[87]
Many league allies headed women's or minimum wage divisions within state labor departments. (Because minimum wage laws affected only women, minimum wage divisions were in effect women's divisions.) Since the 1890s the league had recommended that the staff of such divisions include a certain minimum number of women. Although this demand contained antifeminist potential, it had feminist roots. In the absence of women's departments and under all-male administrations, women workers' interests often were ignored. NCL leaders also were asserting the value of middle-class women's training and expertise. However, the league and its allies rarely offered these feminist rationales publicly. They relied on the loose assumption that a woman could best understand another woman's problems.[88] This reasoning could hamper women's opportunities instead of expanding them. In not being clear about the reasons for women inspectors and administrators, the league network invited the argument that if women should administer policies for women, then men should administer policies that affected men. This was not the scenario that the NCL expected or desired.
Recognizing that a transition to sex-neutral labor laws would require some adjustment, Frances Perkins created the Division of Labor Standards (DLS) within the U.S. Department of Labor in 1934. The DLS was to be a "rallying point" on working conditions for labor unions, "welfare organizations" like the NCL, and state labor departments. It fielded inquiries, drafted model bills, held regional conferences, trained inspectors, and disseminated data on laws and working conditions. As such, the DLS represented the institutionalization of functions long performed by the National Consumers' League and its branches in the states. Because women already headed the Department of Labor and two of its divisions, Perkins appointed a man, Verne Zimmer, to head the DLS. Perkins feared the perceived feminization of her department was grist for critics' mills. However, Consumers' League veteran Clara Beyer was named as Zimmer's assistant, and she was widely recognized as the real executive of the DLS. Lucy Mason was appointed to the DLS steering committee, as were later NCL general secretaries. Through the DLS, the female-dominated labor standards network was to retain a strong voice in the field, but under an officially sex-neutral rubric.[89]
Consumers' League support of the DLS reflected the league's long-standing commitment to a system of integrated state and national regulations. The DLS was dedicated to improving the quality of state labor departments and state laws, an unusual mission for a federal agency. The NCL assumed that because of constitutional limits on federal authority, some occupations would be reached only by state laws. The league also believed that state-level enforcement, with vigilant oversight by local watchdog groups, had a greater chance of success than enforcement by a centralized agency alone. The hope was that state administrators with standardized qualifications would cooperate with federal authorities to enforce both national and state labor standards. State-level regulation held potential benefits: flexibility to set standards higher than national ones, fuller coverage, and more civic participation. On the other hand, the drawbacks of state-level regulation included the "race to the bottom" tendency produced by interstate competition, as well as discriminatory or corrupt administration as a result of domination by local elites. It was the latter problem that the DLS, by setting uniform standards for personnel and procedures, sought to control. In seeking to empower the DLS and state labor departments, the Consumers' League was not questioning federal authority over labor regulation, or intending to leave some workers at the mercy of weak and discriminatory state bureaucracies. Rather, league thinkers hoped to capture the advantages and avoid the disadvantages of regulation at each level.[90]
The league's advocacy of a decentralized NRA compliance system using the state labor departments was embodied in the November 1934 report of William H. Davis, the recently appointed NRA special adviser on compliance and enforcement.[91] Davis, a New York lawyer, had become friends with Frances Perkins in the 1920s, and he would soon join the NCL board. Although many hailed Davis's involvement as the best hope for saving the NRA, the agency was slow to adopt his proposal. Neither employers nor most labor leaders were enthusiastic about turning administration of code labor provisions over to the national and state labor departments.[92]
This resistance seems to have reflected, in part, a reluctance to entrust such important matters to female-led agencies. Many policymakers, labor leaders, and businessmen assumed that labor relations and national economic recovery were problems for men to handle. Rhetoric about the New Deal as the "analogue of war" may have further masculinized the crisis.[93] AFL leaders had never been happy with the appointment of a female secretary of labor. The outrage of AFL and business leaders at Perkins's "bid for unlimited power" in her pre-NRA wage-hour bill seems to have been intensified by the fact that she was a woman. Molly Dewson briefly dreamed of becoming assistant secretary of labor under Perkins, but she abandoned the idea after testing the political winds. Having two women in charge of the department would be "too much," she decided. Dewson no doubt remembered how the Consumers' Advisory Board was caricatured as run by social workers and "society matrons." Even when women were invited to participate in policy making, they were perceived as women first and experts second. "This hearing needs some beauty," wrote an NRA official in a note asking Josephine Roche to speak on the coal code. "What this hearing needs is not beauty but guts," Roche retorted.[94]
Opponents also disliked the U.S. Department of Labor because they perceived, correctly, that the agency had strong support from progressive women reformers. Union men often were suspicious of reformers, not least because of their emphasis on unorganized workers. Conservatives viewed women reformers as naive advocates of "pink" solutions to aid the downtrodden. In the late 1920s, North Carolina reformers were assailed for asking the DOL to survey the state's mills: they were labeled "radical women," allegedly in cahoots with female bureaucrats who sought jobs for "an army of women friends." Reformers and their agendas were mocked in gendered terms. Advocates of child labor laws were "sentimental people" who would deprive American boys of "manliness" and turn the country into "a vast kindergarten." Those who would reform labor conditions in textile mills were "muckrakers, uplifters, and sob sisters."[95] Such attitudes help explain the resistance to empowering the labor departments to enforce NRA labor provisions.
The "Davis plan" had not been carried out by the time the NRA was found unconstitutional. It is difficult to know whether NCL-allied administrators might have prevailed in their bid for control of national labor standards enforcement. By the time the labor provisions of NRA codes were re-created in the form of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the political terrain had changed again. League allies would win positions in the FLSA, but not nearly to the extent they would have liked. This was due largely to circumstances beyond the control of the NCL. However, women labor reformers did not help themselves by tolerating the assumption that women's administrative authority was based on an intuitive connection with women workers rather than on acquired expertise.
The NCL Advocates Stronger Union Rights
The Consumers' League steadily lost confidence in the NRA over the course of 1934, particularly as a result of the agency's seeming indifference to union rights. Voicing its frustration with the NRA's failure to "put teeth in Section 7a," the league became more outspoken than ever before in its support for labor's right to organize, strike, and bargain collectively.[96]
Employers' sweeping disregard of Section 7a, especially in the South, prompted Lucy Mason to join several prominent progressives in drafting a searching critique of the early New Deal. After presenting their proposals in person to FDR in April 1934, the group published an open letter in The Nation, Survey Graphic, and The New Republic. Among the two hundred left-liberals who signed the letter were several dozen Consumers' League activists. The letter proclaimed that "the acid test of the New Deal lies in its effect on the actual distribution of wealth which the machine age creates." The authors called for unemployment, old age, and health insurance, and for permanent relief programs, public housing, increased taxes on the wealthy, and public control of banking, natural resources and other industries. The centerpiece of their argument was for labor rights. The authors regretted the "inability of the NRA to check the growth of company-controlled unions which deny the very essence of true collective bargaining." Flagrant code violations were defeating what they argued was "the real objective of the NRA: the increase of purchasing power." Unions were needed to make the NRA codes enforceable. Beyond stimulating consumption, the goal was to promote industrial and political democracy. Unions must be given their share "not only in the profits of their industry, but what is far more important, in the control of their methods of work, their conditions of life, and their own industrial government." At stake was whether "Government or Big Business will dominate America." The letter recommended the creation of a labor relations board, to be located, significantly, within the U.S. Department of Labor. Little of this agenda was enacted. Nonetheless, Mason believed that the open letter bolstered FDR's resolve to resist pressure from the Right.[97]
Hugh Johnson's actions in the summer and fall of 1934 destroyed Mason's hopes that Johnson would ever crack down on code violations. In July, Johnson's red-baiting speeches during the general strike begun by the West Coast longshoremen triggered vigilante violence against strikers. In September, after the cotton textile code authority refused to consider United Textile Workers' complaints about earnings lost through curtailed production, the stretch-out, and anti-union practices, almost 400,000 textile workers struck. In five states, strikers ended up in bloody confrontations with the National Guard. At this delicate moment, in a Carnegie Hall speech to code authority heads, Johnson denounced the textile strikers and unions in general. Enraged, Mason wrote FDR demanding Johnson's removal: "Section 7A of the [National Industrial Recovery Act] has been consistently disregarded by the Cotton-Textile Industry, and the whole set-up of enforcement machinery in this industry seems to be designed to prevent labor from organizing and leave complete control with management. . . . [I]t is tragic that General Johnson should use his position and prestige to arouse public opinion against workers who are exercising a right specifically given them by the organization he heads."[98] Mason's letter was part of a flood of protest, and Johnson resigned shortly thereafter. However, code labor enforcement improved only slightly after the five-person National Industrial Recovery Board replaced Johnson. The league strongly endorsed the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, which Congress passed in 1935.[99]
Back to the States
The NRA's failure to implement NCL recommendations convinced the league that the most vulnerable workers needed state labor laws as well as guarantees of collective bargaining rights and national standards. Lucy Mason's southern travels confirmed that NRA codes were enforced best in places where good state labor laws were in effect. The local staff had experience, employers were accustomed to factory inspectors, and the recordkeeping required by state laws facilitated NRA payroll inspections. Moreover, local citizens who had worked to pass the laws took an interest in their implementation. State laws also were crucial to employees of intrastate services, in which code enforcement was notoriously lax. Women and minorities were concentrated in these services, which included laundries, beauty parlors, and hotels and restaurants.[100]
Unfortunately for these workers, a perception that federal regulation made state wage and hour laws unnecessary hampered NCL campaigns for new state laws and bigger state labor agency appropriations. Seven state minimum wage bills passed in 1933, but then progress at the state level halted until after the NRA expired. A New Hampshire league member lamented that the NRA codes made the public think state regulations were superfluous. In Kentucky, the local league president reported, the NRA most definitely had undermined support for state wage and hours bills.[101]
League work for state laws to bolster the NRA was complicated by the attitudes of groups who never had been sympathetic to such laws. William Collins of the AFL placed a low priority on state-level action. He told his audience at an NCL conference that no code was worth its paper without a strong unionstate laws or not.[102] The National Woman's Party also discounted the need for state wage and hour laws. Maud Younger wrote that "protective [state] laws for women and children have been swept asidesuperseded and rendered obsolete by the higher standards imposed by the NRA codes."[103] In fact, NRA codes did not cover all workers, code standards often were lower than state standards, and, in any case, NRA labor provisions often went unenforced. Furthermore, the NRA was a two-year, emergency measure whose constitutionality had not been ascertained. State laws were necessary to supplement the NRA and also "to fall back on at such time as NRA goes out of effect."[104] During and after the NRA's existence, the NCL commitment to state laws required that the women-only strategy be preserved as an option.
Although the NCL welcomed national, male-inclusive wage-hour regulation and did all it could to make the agency a success, the NRA greatly complicated the league's work. Initially, league officials were delighted by the surge of interest in labor standards and of demand for league services. Elinore Herrick declared in 1933 that "the League has never had such widespread publicity as it has this year." However, many branch leaders came to agree with Margaret Wiesman, who reported that the NRA had dramatically increased the Massachusetts league's workload, "due to the demands of government agencies upon us." At the same time, "the uncertainty of the NRA plans makes a definite program for the Consumers' League difficult."[105] The NRA not only drained momentum from the league's local programs, but it created a false and dangerous impression that the league's work had been done. Membership contributions to the NCL declined after the agency was established. One league official attributed the drop-off to "the widespread public belief that the NRA has wiped out all industrial evils."[106]
Thus the agency's demise was in some ways a relief to the NCL, despite the fact that it erased hard-won progress in many industries. On May 27, 1935, "Black Monday" for New Deal legislation, the Supreme Court found the NRA unconstitutional. The 9-0 decision in favor of the Schechter brothers, Brooklyn poultry jobbers, held that the NRA represented an "excessive delegation" of legislative power to the executive branch, and also that the Schechters' business was intrastate and hence not subject to federal regulation. The NCL shed no tears. "Our prophecy comes true," a league bulletin announced. "The NCL, never having deviated from its chief function of building up a bulwark of state labor laws, stopped long enough to express its regret at losing what was good in NRA and then continued on its way." This was putting a good face on it, because many league leaders had devoted enormous energy to the NRA. But the gap between the agency's promise and its reality entitled the league to a bit of self-righteousness. The NRA "tried to do in a few months what the league had been doing inch by inch for forty years."[107]
The Consumers' League was present at the NRA's birth, and it did not give up the labor standards field when New Deal administrators stepped in. The NCL formulated a distinctive critique of NRA policy that stressed workers' rights and the right of "the public" to participate in code drafting and implementation. League efforts improved the labor provisions of many codes and in some locations strengthened enforcement. However, the league and its allies were unable to offset employer domination of NRA policy. Resistance to empowering labor departmentsbuilt in large part by women to administer laws for women and childrenand opposition to unions were too strong. This defeat did not dissuade the NCL from its pursuit of a social democratic state, however. The league believed the failure of the NRA demonstrated the futility of industrial self-government, not the futility of national economic planning. Industrial democracy had not been given a fair test.