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Article: National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)
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National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)
James G. Pope
W
hen Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933, almost 13 million workers
—
about 25 percent of the workforce
—
were unemployed.
Industrial production was barely half what it had been in 1929. While millions faced starvation, dairy farmers poured fresh milk into the dirt to dramatize the fact that overproduction and cutthroat competition had driven milk prices so low that the farmers could not recover their costs.
To pull the nation out of this crisis, the new administration developed a strategy with two central elements: (1) spreading the available work among larger numbers of employees and (2) ...