ER N EST S . GRIP F ITH 15 



survive the perhaps inevitable reaction. Its successor was abolished 

 by legislative action in 1943. 



Other acts applying to various sectors followed shortly. The Bitu- 

 minous Coal Act of 1935 and the Connally Act of the same year were 

 more in the National Recovery Administration mood — the self-regu- 

 lation of a separate industry which sought a protected or favored 

 place in the capitalist order, free from the rigors of unrestricted com- 

 petition. It will be recalled that one of the permanent — and to many, 

 the least fortunate — aspects of the spate of New Deal legislation was 

 the extent to which the intervention of government in the economic 

 struggle was sought so as to give one group after another the oppor- 

 tunity to obtain the alleged benefits of hmitations on competition and 

 even of cartelization — though usually called by other names. The 

 NRA codes were to a considerable extent of this character. So were 

 the "fair practice" laws in retail trade, the marketing agreement au- 

 thorizations in milk, the induced scarcity and parity legislation of 

 basic agricultural crops, the collective bargaining and minimum wage 

 laws in the field of labor, and certain single-industry laws of the char- 

 acter of the Connally Act for petroleum and the Bituminous Coal Act. 

 Many of these were harnessed to socially desirable goals — the preser- 

 vation of the soil and the family farm, the orderly use of basic mineral 

 resources, raising the standard of living and purchasing power of 

 labor, and other values, real and alleged. Yet in the end what emerged 

 — in the resources field no less than in other fields — was a type of 

 mixed, regulated, and even rigid economy quite different from the 

 orthodox picture of a competitive, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The 

 fact that government regulation was to some extent substituted for 

 the privately administered price may or may not have been a long- 

 run asset. The role of government itself — in resources, as well as else- 

 where — was basically transformed in the popular mind from that of 

 a policeman to that of a weapon in the economic struggle. Hencefor- 

 ward, business, labor, agriculture and the professions alike (and not 

 merely the industries sheltered by a protective tariff) came to look 

 to government for both defensive and offensive intervention in most 

 of the major sectors of what had become a political economy. 



Two other acts deserve notice in this period. The Flood Control 

 Act of 1936 was particularly extensive, and also incorporated prin- 



