Art In New Mexico? Who Sez? Where? Why? Starving Artists Edition

Carlos Vierra, painter of New Mexico scenes, c. 1917

On to the next talk at the New Mexico Museum of Art's series, "New Mexico: The Artists' Century."

• October 21: Depression and War Years

Independent Scholar, Lois Rudnick, has organized a session including presentations by Kathy Flynn of the National New Deal Preservation Association and Tey Marianna Nunn, Visual Arts Director at the National Hispanic Culture Center.

Now, this talk was really outstanding, I thought, in part because it got into aspects of Art (Big A) in New Mexico that I'm intrigued with and drawn to, including the Transcendental Painters and the extraordinary works of Hispanos during the Depression and War Years -- and before.

The premise basically was that were in not for New Deal programs (almost too many to list), Art (Big A) in New Mexico would literally have withered away. The support that had previously existed was scant to begin with, and when the Crash came, artists would have starved if not for the PWA, WPA and Kaune's (a well-known Santa Fe grocery store that extended credit to artists who stuck it out.)

On This Labor Day

A video sing along from Wisconsin:



An excerpt from "History of the American Working Class" by Anthony Bimba, revised edition, 1936
CHAPTER XXXIV  Recent tendencies, 1933 - 1936

The following main tendencies characterize this period:

(a) Inability of the ruling class to overcome the crisis.

(b) Contradictions in the ruling class over the uneven distribution of profits under the New Deal

(c) Disillusionment of large sections of workers, farmers and petty bourgeoisie with the Democratic and Republican parties, giving rise to the development of a Farmer-Labor Party movement

(d) The struggle for industrial unionism in the trade union movement

(e) Growing menace of fascism

(f) Inner crisis of the Socialist Party -- widening gulf between left-wing Militants and old-guard reactionaries

(g) The growth and influence of the Communist Party and the development of a movement for a united front.

The glowing promises of President Roosevelt to usher in prosperity through his New Deal did not materialize. The country still finds itself in the depression. The National Recovery Act has been ruled out by the decision of the United States Supreme Court which declared the N.R.A. unconstitutional for the simple reason that it was no longer needed by the uppermost strata of the ruling class. The N.R.A. had accomplished its mission. Prices had soared sky-high, the standard of living of the masses had been lowered, the profits of the big bankers, great corporations, and the trusts had been restored and greatly increased, the illusion of the workers that the N.R.A. guaranteed the right to organize and strike had begun to be dangerous. The Supreme Court had to act according to the wishes of the Bankers' Association and the Manufacturers' Association.

Americans Haven't Quite Reached This Spot Again...Not Yet

 

Florence Owens Thompson and children, March 1936

Dorothea Lange's iconic photo of Florence Thompson and three of her children will, it seems, forever be imprinted on the psyches of Americans as an image of untellable suffering in this Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Most people will have little or no idea what was going on or who these people were or even where or when this picture was taken. It is the most singular icon of the Dust Bowl Era/Great Depression, without doubt or dispute. There are other photos from the era that resonate to be sure, but nothing like this one.

First off, I think it is of some note that this picture was taken in 1936, when the Depression, or at least its worst aspects of mass suffering, was perceived to be mostly over. FDR, the New Deal and all that.

It was taken on California's Central Coast, not Dust Bowl Oklahoma, and though Florence and her older children (not these -- her younger children were born in California) were from Oklahoma, they had been in California mostly working in the fields up and down the state since 1931. They were not Dust Bowl refugees -- at least not any more. They were migrant laborers in the fields of California, like tens of thousands of others did then -- and still do.

 Of course in those days, many of the California field hands were white. Nowadays, not so much. Nearly all of the field hands today are Hispanic, mostly from Mexico, though many are from Central America, and not a few were born and raised in California of Mexican or Central American parents.

For a time, and even in Thompson's time, it seemed to be possible to go from the fields in California to a fairly comfortable, fairly middle class lifestyle in one or at most two generations. That passage seems far from certain now. In this country today, if you're born poor, you'll most likely stay poor the rest of your life. Same for any children you might have. There is less social and economic mobility in the United States today than perhaps at any time in its history, less mobility in fact than in most other places in the developed world.

Florence and her children were poor to be sure, but they were not truly destitute at the time of the photo, though that's how they were portrayed by Lange and the press, a press which glommed onto the photo immediately and presented it as a portrait of despair and destitution of unparalleled magnitude in this land of plenty, and this after three years, three years!, of the New Deal.

According to the story Florence told later, what happened was that the family -- which included Jim Hill, her (common-law?) husband at the time, her older children and these younger ones -- were traveling from fields they'd been working in the Imperial Valley toward Watsonville near Salinas, where they hoped to find more work, but the timing chain on their Hudson broke and they coasted into a large ad hoc migrant camp (that held at that time maybe 2,000 or 3,000 hopeful workers) in Nipomo. (I'm very familiar with all these places, having lived and worked in or near California's agricultural areas most of my life. There are also other connections which may come up in other posts.)

The workers were there because they'd heard there was field work to be done picking peas, but when they got there, a freezing rain had ruined the crop and there was no work.

Many of the migrants in the camp were destitute and starving, but Florence's family were not. Comparatively speaking, they were doing OK.

Florence and her children were laying over in the camp while Jim Hill and the older boys were in town getting the car fixed so they could continue their journey north toward Watsonville. While in the camp, Florence said they subsisted on frozen peas they collected from the fields and the few birds the children were able to kill for the cooking pot. Hungry children came by and asked if they could please have a bite. Once the car was fixed, they moved on.

That they had a car and were used to the migrant labor life in California was to their advantage. While they had advantages that many others didn't, their life in the fields could not have been pleasant.

California's field hands were and are terribly exploited, often wretchedly housed and provided for, and frequently treated with feudal levels of abuse. Migrant field workers in California were and are beneath the level of an oppressed underclass; they were frequently seen and treated as disposable slaves by their employers.

Eventually, the Florence and family moved to California's Central Valley, still doing mostly farm labor, but apparently settling down near or in Modesto,  where Florence would meet and marry George Thompson, a hospital administrator, and from 1945 onwards, the family would live in modest financial security.

Florence claimed to be a full-blood Cherokee, born ("in a teepee") and raised outside of Tahlequah, OK. Her blood father was a Christie, and so could have been full-blood Cherokee, but he abandoned Florence's mother (of the Cobb family, and thus likely not full-blood Cherokee) before she was born. Her mother then married Charles Akman, of Choctaw descent. (All this, according to the Wiki...)

The other day, I was in the company of a genealogist out of Tahlequah who is a Christie descendant on his mother's side, and he said he'd been trying to trace Florence's Cherokee ancestry and was coming up short. Of course Cherokee lineages can be complicated. Just ask anyone who's tried to demonstrate their blood quantum to the satisfaction of the authorities of the Cherokee Nation. It can be quite a complex and drawn out process, even for full-bloods.

Of course Florence, even if a full-blood Cherokee (which is unlikely in any case), would not have been born "in a teepee" as teepees were not used by Cherokee people (nor by Choctaw) at any time.  But then, people tell tales...

The Cherokee Christies were and are based around Wauhillau, OK, not far from Tahlequah, and Florence's biological father was said to be Jackson Christie, who appears on the Dawes Rolls from Wauhillau as a full-blood. Her mother, a Cobb, however, is the more problematical ancestor, as there is no Mary Jane Cobb listed on the Dawes Rolls, and the only Mary Cobbs listed are of 1/4th and less Cherokee blood quantum. Of course, there were plenty of Cherokee of all blood quantums who were never listed on the rolls, so nothing conclusive can be said about Florence's mother's Cherokee ancestry -- or lack thereof.

That a Cherokee genealogist cannot trace her with any certainty is interesting but not unusual, given the fact that Florence's biological father (apparently a full-blood Cherokee) ran off before she was born, and she was raised by a (supposed) Choctaw adoptive father. Well, in Indian culture, she wouldn't have been raised by either father but instead would have been brought up in her mother's matrilineal household, with slight contact with "fathers." But if Florence's mother was a Cobb (there's no reason to doubt it), it's quite possible she was less culturally Cherokee, and so she might not have raised her daughter in the culture. On the other hand, she just as well might have.

Florence kept company with several men and (officially) married two of them though both died before she did. She had six or seven children, all of whom seem to have had great admiration for her. She appears to have engaged in field work in California for as long as she had to and was physically able to, but when the opportunity arose, she left the fields to work in hospitals, and by 1945 she had settled down in Modesto with her last husband, a hospital administrator -- which no doubt relieved her of any obligation to work the fields of California again.

When Dorothea Lange took that iconic picture, Florence's situation was not as dire as it was made out to be in the press, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking it was somehow "good" just because she and her children weren't actually stranded and starving, and she hadn't actually sold the tires on her car to buy food. The family's car would be repaired, and they would move on. But that didn't mean their situation was much better than miserable.

The status of the thousands of others at the Nipomo camp really was dire, though, and some actually were starving. The "Migrant Mother" picture of Florence and her younger kids led to the transport of tens of thousands of pounds of food to the camp to help succor those still trapped there. The fact that Americans could still be in such appalling circumstances, years after the advent of the New Deal under Roosevelt, came as a shock to many who had convinced themselves the New Deal had eliminated this level of destitution and desperation.

It did not. It wasn't until the 1960s and the Great Society programs of the Johnson Era that "Freedom from Want" was actually made a social and political principle in this country, a principle that we may note is being dismantled as our governing representatives seek ways to cut benefits for the masses, including Social Security and food stamps, while continuing to increase rewards and benefits for the highest of the mighty.

This is why the National Surveillance/Security State has become so essential to those few who are accumulating such remarkable rewards during a period of such economic decline and hardship for so many. As we see the identity of "terrorist" re-defined over and over and over again to include more and more individuals and groups that might one day prove problematical to the rule by the very few and the unfettered exploitation and impoverishment of the masses, we see the true nature of the Security fetish of Our Rulers. We see the "why" being answered with action.

We are all, ultimately, potential suspects and thus we all must be surveilled. This is essential for the survival and continued prosperity of Our Betters. Uppitiness must be channeled and controlled, revolt must be suppressed.

I find it interesting that some people who point out that this is the way it has been for a long time are being denounced as "Obots" and whatnot, when they are trying to get across the notion that some people have been yelling about the Surveillance State and the Security Fetish of the Ruling Class for many years and have generally been ignored or shushed, on the fictional basis that it's not really happening, or if it is, it isn't really all that worrisome, or if it is worrisome, it's better to keep quiet about it. Instead of taking it seriously when something might have been done about it, too many of those with prominent platforms in the media and on the internet were either silent or extra cautious, fearing that if too much was said or made of it, or if objections actually led to action, the Stasi would be on their tails like white on rice.

Now, interestingly, they aren't afraid, nor do they hesitate to accuse those who were calling for action years ago of being tacit supporters of universal surveillance and the security state all along. It is very much a through-the-looking-glass and down-the-rabbit-hole situation, by no means the first in these realms.

Now it's an all-important issue, but what's to be done about it -- apart from arguing and debating in endless circles?

In 1936, Americans discovered to their shock and horror that the New Deal hadn't really accomplished what they thought it had set out to do, and many millions of Americans, symbolized by Dorothea Lange's portrait of Florence Thompson, were still suffering severely. They would be reminded again in the 1960s with exposés of economic and social hardships  all over the country. In those days, Americans and their representatives in Congress assembled were empowered to and capable of doing something to alleviate that suffering.

Now? Not so much. No, let's be honest: not at all. Our Rulers are actively instituting programs of impoverishment and suffering for the masses, and the public is advised to acquiesce quietly or be subjected to the tender ministrations of or brutal suppression by the bloated National Security State -- as has been demonstrated against various groups and individuals for years. We are well past the point where the People might have intervened to halt or reverse our collective disempowerment.

Now the options for reversing what's been under way for so many years are highly constrained. Lawsuits are among the options available. But when the courts are part of the problem...

Congressional agitation is potentially useful, but when congress itself is part of the problem...

Popular outrage is hard to sustain when the Ruling Classes really don't give a shit about what the People want any more...

It's another fine mess we've got ourselves into...

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

The last installment of excerpts from Magil and Stevens' 1938 antifascist polemic, "The Peril of Fascism," focused on some of the fascistic characteristics of the early New Deal, particularly the National Recovery Administration ("We do our part"). This was a particularly interesting observation to me because the hagiography of FDR and the New Deal doesn't allow for these sorts criticisms of the Roosevelt efforts to tame if not end the Great Depression.

It was interesting to me partly because from the time I first learned about the New Deal, I was aware that it was at least partially based on fascist models, and the N. R. A. was among its most fascistic elements. It might be hard to imagine now, but at the time, there were only two activist models for dealing with the recurring Crisis of Capitalism: Communism and Fascism. The Standard Model for dealing with economic downturn and the suffering it caused was for government to do nothing, the theory being that the downturn would be rectified shortly by usual economic means and forces, bugger the sufferers (the herd could always benefit from a good cull, after all. Haw. Haw.)

But the Standard Model was tried during Hoover's Administration -- he was much more of an economic activist than he is usually given credit for, but he (like Obama)  delivered almost all of his activism at the top of the economic pyramid and left those in the middle and those on the bottom to fend for themselves -- and get severely punished if they got out of line.

This installment of Magil and Stevens looks into some of the characteristics of the pre-Depression "boom" and the Hooverite acts against the People:

Revealing the whole character of the "prosperity" era are the estimates of the distribution of income in 1929 published by the Brookings Institution, in a study, America's Capacity to Consume. According to these figures, 36,000 of the wealthiest families -- or one-tenth of one percent of all the families in the United States -- received an aggregate income of 9.8 billion dollars. At the other end of the social scale were 11,653,000 families, 42 per cent of the total receiving an aggregation of about 10 billion dollars -- or approximately the same as that of the 36,000 families at the top of the heap.

...

In the period of apparent prosperity, the weaknesses and contradictions of capitalism, not only in the United States but throughout the world, were combining to make inevitable the crash of 1929. These weaknesses in the New Era were discernable to all who cred to see, but there were not many who were willing to look. Marxists who attempted to call them to the attention of the country were denounced as crackpots too demented to glance at the soaring lines on the stock market charts for confirmation of the New Era of permanent prosperity. The loudest denunciation of these sour prophets of collapse came from the gentry in high offices of the American Federation of Labor, who assured the workers that those who doubted the New Capitalism and the benefits of collaboration with employers were troublemakers in the pay of Moscow.

In November of 1928, workers, farmers, and lower middle class people went to the polls and in overwhelming numbers cast their votes for Herbert Hoover or Alfred Smith -- the tweedledum and tweedledee of capitalism, both closely connected with the most powerful groups on Wall Street. The combined vote of the Socialist and Communist parties was less than half a million.

...

The 1929 crash came as a profound and bewildering shock to a country which had been fed the New Era buncombe. All classes shared in the bewilderment and incredulity, unable to believe that the rosy promise of the New Capitalism could end in the wreckage which they saw accumulating around them.
...

The great majority of workers were desperate and confused; they had been forced by the crisis to abandon the New Era philosophy and they had not yet acquired a clear conception of the source of their difficulties or of the method of solving them. But life, rather than formulated doctrine, dictated militant struggle. Gigantic unemployment demonstrations and hunger marches swept the country, striking panic in the "well-stocked clubs" where bankers and businessmen fearfully discussed the possibility of imminent revolution. The more clear-sighted and progressive sections of the labor movement demanded that the capitalist class shoulder the burden of the crisis, for which it was responsible, and they succeeded in mobilizing large mass movements behind demands such as adequate unemployment relief, social insurance, and a shorter working week without a reduction in pay. In these movements, the Communist Party played a leading and the most dynamic role.

Gradually, under the pressure of its membership, even the top leadership of the A. F. of L. was compelled to revise its position. During three years of acute crisis, Green, Woll, and other chieftains of the A. F. of L. stubbornly opposed unemployment insurance, echoing Hoover's pronouncement that the "dole" was un-American and more degrading than picking scraps of refuse from garbage pails.

...

Hunger and destitution were rampant among those who grew the nation's foodstuffs.

Stubbornly, the farmers resisted foreclosures and fought for farm relief. Farm strikes broke out throughout the rural middle west. Farmers, who had been bullwarks of "law and order," picketed highways with clubs and pitchforks and dragged foreclosing judges from the bench. Throughout the great  corn and hog belt, where private property rights had been regarded as sacred , there arose a cry: "Human rights above property rights" -- a slogan which revealed the profound changes among the farmers of the middle west.

...

The profound unrest of these vast masses of people expressed itself in growing demonstrations for unemployment relief and unemployment insurance, in the farm strikes, in resistance to foreclosures of small homes, in student strikes and demonstrations, in war veterans bonus marches, in the leftward movement of intellectuals. Everywhere there was ferment. Millions began to question the fundamentals of the existing order, vaguely realizing there was something basically wrong with a system which condemned men and women to die of hunger next to warehouses bulging with food and to gather decaying food from garbage heaps while wheat was burned in the fields and vegetables and milk were dumped into rivers.

...

As growing numbers of workers and farmers demonstrated their refusal to starve quietly and loudly voiced their demand for relief, the capitalist class, and the government authorities representing it, increasingly resorted to force. In scores of cities, unemployment demonstrations were broken up with police bullets and tear gas; troops were sent out against strikers; Negro sharecroppers attempting to organize unions were hunted down and lynched; a wave of deportations swept the country; states revived old criminal syndicalism and sedition statutes and professional patriots clamored for new repressive laws.

As the lines on business charts dropped, the number of violations of civil liberties rose. By 1930 the wave of suppression had reached the highest crest since the post-war hysteria of 1921. One survey of civil liberties in 1930 says:

There was a marked increase in 1930 in official and mob violence, a continued and a greater violation of the rights of labor, a larger number of deportations, and increased official interference with the expression of civil liberties... The year brought 25 lynchings, compared with 12 in 1929; 27 cases of mob violence, compared with 5 in 1929; 121 meetings and demonstrations forbidden, contrasted with 52 in 1929; a nation-wide drive against Communists; denial in 6 cases of citizenship to aliens for pacifist or radical views; a large number of deportations, mainly of Communists...

Not since 1921 has official interference with freedom of speech reached such proportions as in 1930... The 1930 cases are exclusive of the police attacks on the Communist-led demonstrations of February, March, May Day, August and Labor Day. Hundreds of arrests took place at these demonstrations all over the country, accompanied by brutal police tactics, resulting in the injury of scores of persons.

An incomplete compilation by the International Labor Defense listed the arrest of 5,851 persons in civil liberties cases -- including 1,137 in strikes, 860 for distributing leaflets and other literature, and 1,703 in unemployment and other demonstrations.

Police raided headquarters of workers' organizations in Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Buffalo, Portland, and other cities, destroying property, seizing private correspondence, and arresting hundreds... in California, where the criminal syndicalism law was invoked for the first time since 1924, eleven organizers of an agricultural workers strike were railroaded to long jail sentences...

Official and mob violence further increased in 1931. The most acute terror prevailed in the Harlan, Kentucky, coal fields where a local regime of fascist terror was established by coal operators in an effort to suppress a walkout by 18,000 mountaineer miners. Twelve miners were killed in the Harlan fields by deputy sheriffs and gunmen imported from the slums of Chicago; scores were wounded; several kidnapped and beaten; workers' headquarters [were] destroyed. In Texas, Iowa and South Carolina, labor organizers were seized in the dead of night by armed mobs (some of them acting with police connivance) and brutally beaten. At Pontiac, Michigan, a "vigilante" mob seized and flogged fiver men who had participated in an unemployment demonstration, and (parroting the methods of the Italian fascists) compelled one of the victims to drink castor oil. The year 1931 also witnessed an intensification of the terror against Negroes in the South, exemplified by the arrest and frame-up of the nine Scottsboro Boys in the spring.

In 1932, suppression and murder of demonstrations and demonstrators intensified, culminating with the violent eviction of the Bonus Army from Washington, DC. 

That's just a taste of how the official and its allied suppression worked in those days. Surely we can see stark echoes of those tactics in the suppression of the Occupy Movement nowadays. And of course the reasons why are very similar. Those who sponsor and own the government were the same forces then as they are now, and they demand the silencing of all but "approved" dissent, and the crushing of any movement which might threaten their hegemony.

We are right back where we were -- except for the fact that there is no Communist vanguard any more -- despite the chattering of some "progressives" who are so fearful one will re-emerge from somewhere in the shadows and take over the pleasant and secure movements for (eventual) change that have long been underway, though more as academic exercises than as real movements for fundamental changes to a failed economic and political system.

"The Peril of Fascism" is written from a CPUSA point of view. It is strikingly familiar, but at the same time we don't see the kind of ferment today as was so paramount then, and one of the reasons is that there is no ideological counter to the rising tide of fascism today as there was then. Fascists will win under the circumstances...

From the AntiFa Trenches, c.1938 (contd)

Unidad de accion en todos los frentes para aplastar al fascismo.
ca. 1938

I find I  really like "The Peril of Fascism" by Magil and Stevens. It's obviously a rush job in the face of what looked to them like the triumphant march of fascism and Nazi-ism over Europe and much of Asia and Latin America in the prelude to World War II, but their primary mission is to try to wake Americans up to the perils of fascism in their midst, and to suggest, not too subtly, that the United States was well down the fascist path itself.

This contrasts starkly with the conventional wisdom then and now that FDR was some kind of socialist, and that the New Deal was some sort of Left Wing Plot to overthrow American democracy and institute an American Soviet. Far from it.

Here's Magil and Stevens to explain:

First Stage of the New Deal

The Roosevelt program even at this stage had certain progressive features, providing partial relief to the unemployed -- which Hoover had refused through three and a half years of unemployment and hunger -- and holding out the promise of collective bargaining. But these progressive features  were heavily overshadowed during the first phase of the New Deal by the big business program. In fact, from a historical viewpoint, they helped to make the program palatable to a people driven by misery and hunger to a point where it was ready, as General Johnson put it, to hang the bankers. An openly reactionary regime such as Hoover's might conceivably have thrust the big business program down the throats of the people with bayonets. The progressive features of Roosevelt's program persuaded the people to swallow the program in its entirety.

Insofar as the first phase of the New Deal carried out the program of the economic royalists, it contained certain definite fascist elements. It was for this reason that the Communists sharply attacked the Roosevelt administration at a time when practically every other political group, including the Socialists. accorded it warm support.

Although the leading plutocratic groups camped for only a brief period within the Roosevelt administration and quickly moved into bitter opposition to it, it is important to examine briefly this aspect of the first stage of the New Deal before passing on to later developments.

The fascist elements in the New Deal program of this period were clearly the handiwork of the financial tycoons who played so important a role in the Roosevelt administration during its first few months. The duPonts, the Aldriches, the Swopes, and others who later rallied under the banner of the Liberty League, occupied key posts in the early New Deal set up and formulated many of the laws which they later denounced as subversive and unconstitutional.

Compare the program of big business as formulated by H. I. Harriman in May, 1932, with the first acts of the New Deal during the "coalition" period. Harriman in May, 1932, demanded government economy; Roosevelt, in March, 1933, pushed a bill through Congress slashing war veterans' pensions and cutting salaries of government employees 15 per cent. Harriman demanded the relaxation of anti-trust laws and the enlargement of the powers of trade associations; the N.R.A. [National Recovery Administration] set aside the anti-trust laws and gave trade associations vast powers to draft codes of "fair competition." Harriman asked for the establishment of an "economic council" to consider the fundamental problems affecting "all business"; Roosevelt set up the Industrial Advisory Board. Harriman demanded the enlargement of the powers and funds of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Roosevelt, in the first few months of his administration, increased the capital of the RFC from $3,800,000,000 to $4,450,000,000 and in addition authorized the RFC to issue an unlimited amount of debentures for the purpose of bank stock. Harriman demanded the strengthening of the powers of the President; Roosevelt assumed more powers than any President had exercised in peacetime.

The promotion of monopoly through governmental sanctions was the most conspicuous fascist element in the first stage of the New Deal. The N.R.A. -- fathered, as Professor Moley later admitted, by the Chamber of Commerce -- frankly listed among its major aims "the organization of industry for the purpose of co-operative action among trade groups." Actions taken under the industrial codes were exempt from prosecution under the anti-trust laws. The provisions of the N.R.A. industrial codes -- which for the most part encouraged price fixing and monopolistic practices -- were legally binding and violators were liable to heavy penalties.

Thus, in effect, the N.R.A. placed the full weight of the law and governmental authority behind the big business offensive against small competitors. With the government threatening to "crack down" on small price-cutters, the monopolies and trusts were able to raise prices and force out of business thousands of petty establishments. In March, 1934, the Federal Trade Commission informed the Senate that the iron and steel code strengthened monopolistic practices and price-fixing. Two months later the official National Recovery Review Board, headed by Clarence Darrow, published a report charging that the N.R.A. was encouraging monopoly to the disadvantage of all consumers and was crushing small business.

The implications of this policy of promoting monopoly with the aid of government sanctions were clearly stated by William O. Thompson, a member of the Darrow board, in his letter of resignation to President Roosevelt:

The trend of the National Recovery Administration -- he wrote -- has been and continues to be toward the encouragement as development of monopoly capitalism in the United States ... Its development day by day reveals more clearly a marked trend toward fascism in the United States.

The N.R.A. was later deemed unconstitutional and was shut down, but there was a very heavy propaganda campaign while it lasted promoting the concept of "paying more" for goods and services as a means to support economic activity and recovery. Workers, however, were not to receive higher wages in order to pay these higher prices, and of course unemployment was still at nearly 25%. The devastation to small businesses brought on by the Crash and its aftermath was deliberately and consciously compounded by the advent of the N.R.A. and its monopolistic, corporatist and fascist characteristics.