The Obama Administration Invites General Hugh Johnson's Drunkeness Into the Story.
For 1933, Time Magazine made the strangely aggressive, secretive, belligerent, hard-drinking, false-witnessing, ludicrously loose-living General Hugh Johnson, boss of the just invented N.R.A (National Recovery Administration) into its the "Man of the Year" just because it was out of plaudits for FDR and couldn't find a member of the New Deal cabinet it liked or trusted. Johnson was a fresh face to the nation then, and the NRA sounded loony, spontaneous, desperate but harmless and well-intentioned. Soon, after Johnson's frantic travels and loud mouth, after his threats, harangues and hostile notes, after his aping a dictator as he campaigned and manipulated in opposition to large and small businesses, store-owners, unions, the unemployed, the governors and Congress, everyone knew to stay away from him and ignore him. Johnson talked and talked about minimum wages, child labor laws, maximum work weeks, compliance, enforcement, rules, the so-called "blanket code." An endless stream of hooey and paper emerged from the NRA teeming offices of clerks and snitches. Johnson stayed in power long enough to wreak havoc and invite mockery of all aspects of the New Deal before FDR fired Johnson for loutishness, drinking, lying and womanizing. What Johnson did that was most damning is that he lied about the results of the programs, claiming he put four million people to work in the first year of the NRA. Does that number sound familiar? Four million jobs saved or created? Please note that the NRA did especially create 1555 NRA jobs in Washington right away: we can see the busy, earnest, paper warrior youths hard at work (below). Here is a telling excerpt (my italics) from Time Magazine's tribute to Johnson as the "Man of the Year" 1933:
Reviewing NRA's first six months, during which General Johnson mustered 1,500,000 volunteer workers and speakers, issued 100,000,000 "pieces of literature," plastered millions of Blue Eagle posters throughout the land, the historian will look to net results as well as dates. When the NRAdministration first settled down in the Department of Commerce Building, it had 87 employes, with a half-month payroll of $6,619.41. NRA now employs 1,555 people, uses 105,000 sq. ft. of office space, meets a $166,608.40 bi-monthly payroll. General Johnson gets $6,000 a year. His secretary, nurse, guardian and constant companion at Washington, in airplanes, on trains, at banquets, Frances ("Robbie") Robinson, gets $5,780. When that news got out last month, Man of the Year Johnson hotly announced: "I think that was one below the belt. Sheknows more about this organization than anyone else. I am sure that nobody here ever thought she was a mere stenographer or secretary. She has been my personal assistant straight through." Not on the payroll is Mrs. Hugh Johnson of the Consumers Board. Son Kilbourne, 26, on leave from the Army, who spells his name with a "t" as his father used to, draws only his 2nd lieutenant's pay ($143 per mo.) as a member of NRA's compliance Board.
Of the 3,000,000 Blue Eagles NRA has issued, only 48 have been revoked. It has fought eight code violators in the courts, has won seven cases. Pending are twelve more. To date 168 codes have been approved. Seventy-five more will be approved by New Year. Man of the Year Johnson believes that he has put 4,000,000 people to work, has upped the national payroll $2,500,000,000 in the past half-year. last week the President extended his blanket re- employment agreements to May 1, but these have lost their importance since 70% of the nation's workers will be covered by regular codes by Jan. 1.
The Obama Team Tries More Graphics.
The new Recovery.gov sticker pushes and pushes the comparison to the NRA. Is this wise? Is this on purpose? Do they know the history? The NRA failed as Hugh Johnson failed. The NRA was never more than a hodge-podge of tricks, schemes, guesses, wage and price controls based upon hearsay and influence-peddling, and a gigantic patronage boondoggle -- what Huey Long of Louisiana called government "boodle." Johnson was a bully, a liar and a crude politician, who after 1936 denounced FDR as a dictator. It is passing peculiar that the Obama administration wants to be associated in any way with Johnson's folly. In the heyday of the NRA, with stickers plastered on windows and cars and schoolbags, with the country giddy for a display of togetherness, Johnson was just another power-grabbing hack. Consider the scale of the NRA hiring. The jobs it created were government jobs, and when those jobs went away after 1936, the depression deepened and lengthened. Johnson was a petty, petty bully who enjoyed having thousands march by him in salute. There is a picture of him raising his arm in a Fascist salute to a crowd marching by. He claimed it was doctored. The blue eagle was a farce with a big stick for awhile, then Johnson blew up and the courts knocked down the NRA enforcement mechanism (the famous Schecter kosher chicken case in NY and the Supreme Court ruling that swept the NRA into the dustbin of history Schechter Poultry Corp. v. US) and the blue eagle turned into a blue chicken, then a dead chicken, then just silliness.
Six Thousand Cinema Workers Led By Al Jolson.
Below the opening graphs of a Time Magazine story on NRA parades the summer of 1933. Juvenile, pointless, brutish, goofy, infantilizing, and the product of a mind that likes propaganda as much as policy:
People, thousands and thousands of people, more people than there are in Indianapolis and St. Louis and Birmingham, Ala. combined, jam-packed the stone-cliffed canyon of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue for half a day last week. Three out of every ten New Yorkers were there, 2,000,000 strong. They fainted, they cheered, their feet hurt, their clothes got mussed. At 58th Street their sheer bulk bulged through splintering plate glass windows. The Governor's motorcycle escort rode one down. A pack of them upturned a policeman and his screaming horse. There never had been so many people gathered anywhere in the nation since Armistice Day. Nobody in town, not even the blind news dealers and the invalids and sick folk in their beds--for the bands brayed ten solid hours--will soon forget New York's NRA parade.
For hours the side streets around sunny Washington Square were bursting with marchers waiting their turn in line. While they waited many of them visited speakeasies, got tiddledy. There were a quarter-million of them: 20,000 dressmakers, 10,000 brokers & bankers and their clerks, 1,000 barbers, 35,000 city employes, 6,000 cinema workers led by Al Jolson, 5,000 oil workers led by Walter Teagle, metal workers, hatters, florists, waitresses, soda jerkers. Every guild, every trade and calling was on hand to honor the Blue Eagle. that hopeful bird with lightning in his claw.
"Well," said Grover Whalen, local NRA Administrator, just before 2 o'clock, "forward march!"Up the Avenue chattered a smoky-tailed vanguard of motorcycle police. Out stepped spectacled Major General Dennis E. Nolan, commander of the 2nd Corps Area and Marshal of the parade. Along came Administrator Whalen, who once was Police Commissioner. Behind them, on the parade's lone official float, rode two symbolic beauties, "Miss Liberty" and "Miss NRA," the Misses Elise & Doris Ford of Brooklyn, Howard Chandler Christie's models. When the head of the parade reached the Public Library at 42nd Street, Grover Whalen and General Nolan joined General Hugh Johnson, Governor Lehman of New York and prognathous, bag-jowled Mayor O'Brien on the reviewing platform.... (more)(Below see Hugh Johnson, Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses on Grand Street to start a section of the FDR Drive, an infrastructure project of make work jobs and patronage and graft, 1934).
Propaganda is always “juvenile, pointless, brutish, goofy…” It is the reason why we fast-forward through commercials; or go to the bathroom, kitchen; or just change the channel. I’ve often wondered just how effective the endless ads about ‘Stimul-X Libido Enhancing Strips’ actually are. It would seem it would take something more to get people to actually come out into the streets – some compelling Zeitgeist that yearns to give expression to itself.
Too many pictures of Obama (or of the Coca-Cola logo, for that matter) would simply engender apathy to the point of rendering him (or it) anonymous. The product of printing presses and cookie cutters alone is no substitute for the heat of an agitated human aura. It was our numbers, not our placards, that resolved the issues of the Second World War; it was our numbers, not our placards, that inspired our now iconic victory celebration in New York’s Times Square; it was our numbers, not our placards, on the Mall in Washington DC that helped end our Vietnam adventure; it was our communal self-loathing, not our placards, that put Barrack Obama in the White House. It will take nothing less than our communal outrage to take it back.
Image is everything these days. The Gray Lady has determined that BHO's gray hair is page one news. Based on his performance to date, it makes me wonder if he has been visited by Bob, last seen in Twin Peaks.
Is not Biden filling the General Johnson role.
As to the Rush Kerfuffle it was a smokescreen so the public would not pay attention to the testimony by Geithner and Orzag to Congress about the carbon credit (consumption tax) that they are trying to impose. The testimony flew under the radar.
Obama and the democrats are disingenuous in their efforts. Of course you will not raise 'income' taxes on 95% of Americans when your intent is to create a consumption tax. Create a smokescreen by bullying Rush, Cramer Sentelli et al and press class warfare by claiming that you are only increasing the income tax on only the top 2% of earners while quickly creating a consumption tax regime stealthily.
Rush should play Obama's audiotape to the San Fransisco Chronicle January 2008 about the coal industry and say how his policy of bankrupting that particular industry is having an effect on the stock market because he may do it to a whole host of indutries like Big Pharma and HMOs.
That guy doesn't look like a womanizer to me.
The secret to eternal youth is to be always in awe and to be always be open to learn new things. I'm 35 years old and I've recently learned how to fold 50 paper airplanes found at http://www.paperairplaneshq.com and it was a fun and challenging experience.