FDR, New Deals, and the Limits of Power 181of business, where they were usually bought up by the bigger firms. Similarly,
a New Jersey businessman was jailed because he charged less than 40 cents to
dry clean a suit. Imagine this in all industries, and one gets the sense of the
NRA’s mission—it provided government support and funding to limit produc-
tion, while allowing the most powerful Industrial Capitalists to dominate even
more. In fact, the NRA probably made it more difficult to fix the depression
by restricting trade and raising prices, and it surely hurt small businesses. The
Supreme Court then invalidated the NIRA [the “Sick Chicken Case”] in just
a couple years because it gave the federal government too much power, but
it did little to help the economy anyway, as unemployment was at 24 percent
in 1934 and businesses often kept the government funds they received rather
than open or expand businesses and create jobs. Roosevelt, attacked as a
radical and even Socialist by conservatives, had in fact given the NRA power
to do as it pleased, but with no real success. The NRA worked successfully,
as Hugh Johnson saw it; it was “exactly what industry organized in trade
associations makes it.”
FDR’s approach to the agricultural crisis was the same. Congress passed
the Agricultural Adjustment Act [AAA] to, again, limit production and raise
prices, this time on farm commodities. Farmers, led by those with the most
acreage and generally loyal Democrats, got together to determine the codes
for the agriculture industry. They set limits on production and prices and
determined which farms would receive the largest government payouts. In a
controversial move, the NRA also created programs to reduce the surplus in
farm goods already produced. Farmers who planted wheat, corn, rice, tobac-
co, rye, barley, peanuts, sugarcane and potatoes, among other goods, could
dump their goods and get a government reimbursement. The AAA also cre-
ated hog-reduction and cattle-reduction programs, so livestock farmers could
kill off their animals to reduce their surplus and raise prices. Just in Nebraska,
the government paid farmers to plow under over 10 million acres of cotton
and slaughter 470,000 cattle and over 400,000 pigs. The same methods took
place in Oklahoma and other farm states. Overall, in 1933 the AAA paid
farmers to slaughter over 6 million hogs and over 220 thousand mother sows,
at a cost of $30 million. For most farmers, this became their most important
source of income and it instituted the system of “farm subsidies”—paying
farmers to not grow crops that has existed since then. While it helped some
farmers, the biggest agricultural interests gained the most and even then,