New Deal Recovery Legislation

Roosevelt set up a Public Works Administration (PWA) which was put in control by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, a Republican reformer from Chicago. Ickes proceeded slowly with PWA projects, for he had an obsessive and probably well-founded idea that if he did not watch closely, the PWA would provide politicians with opportunities for corruption. As a result of this slowness, Ickes’s PWA did not play a very important role in the early New Deal, and an increasingly larger share of money was given to the less tidy but more energetic relief operations of Ickes’s rival, Harry Hopkins. However, the PWA came into its own after the recession of 1937, when carefully prepared plans were ready to be implemented almost at once. Huge public buildings, great dams, and irrigation and flood-control projects are part of PWA’s legacy.

An agency designed to promote general economic improvement was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), an organization set up by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), it was supposed to guarantee minimum wages, maximum hours, and the right to bargain as a group.NRA was unanimously declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1935.

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA),was set up in the Department of Agriculture and supervised by Secretary Henry A. Wallace.The AAA had authority to buy surplus crops and make payments to producers to restrict production.The AAA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936 and in 1938 the second AAA was created by Congress. This AAA was more complex and did not rely on a special tax, and it survived.

New Deal Reform