AN APPALACHIAN NEW DEAL: WEST VIRGINIA IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION

5. The Blue Eagle

5 The Blue Eagle While Governor Kump and the legislature struggled through the financial , legal, and constitutional quagmire brought about by the Tax Limitation Amendment, Congress passed numerous measures during the hectic first hundred days of the New Deal that would directly affect West Virginians. Proposed by President Roosevelt and his advisers , many of these measures were passed with slight debate by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress eager to move quickly in the emergency. Among them were banking reforms and legislation to deal with agriculture, industry, unemployment relief, and social welfare. Committed to capitalism but unsure how to stop the Depression, Roosevelt was willing to try new ideas. Responding to critics, he asserted , "The country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation.'" Members of Roosevelt's cabinet who spoke in West Virginia in the early days of the New Deal made no secret of the experimental nature of their programs. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes visited Shepherdstown in October and declared that the election of 1932 had been a "social revolution" that marked the passing of the old order of "rugged individualism" and the rise of a new order more committed to the common destiny. In the new venture, he said, "we will all go up or down together."2 Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace told a meeting of the West Virginia Dairymen's Association in Martinsburg that the nation could solve its economic problems if "we are willing to pass through a period of social experimentation." With disarming candor, Wallace added: "There is no kidding ourselves. We do not know how the things we are trying to do will turn out."3 The key legislation for business and industrial recovery in the early New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which, though short-lived, had far-reaching economic, social, and po- 92 An Appalachian New Deal litical consequences for West Virginia. The result of substantial debate within the administration, the industrial recovery legislation exemplified New Deal experimentation and a tendency toward what historian Ellis Hawley has called /I economic ambivalence./1 Some advisers believed the solution was to protect business from too much competition and antitrust laws. Others wanted to promote competition . Some adhered to the classical notion of rigid government economy, and others wanted a massive government spending program. Friends of organized labor wanted to promote labor's interests. In the end, the National Industrial Recovery Act failed because it tried to accommodate too many of these contradictory interests.4 The act established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), provided for suspension of the antitrust laws for businesses that accepted industrial code agreements, stipulated that the codes would contain minimum wages and maximum hours for labor, guaranteed collective bargaining for organized labor, and established a pump-priming public works program under the Public Works Administration (PWA). At the presidents's urging, funds were provided for experimental resettlement communities. Roosevelt entrusted overall supervision of the National Recovery Administration to Gen.Hugh S.Johnson, an emotional, hard-working administrator given to strong drink and colorful language. Donald Richberg, one of the main authors of the act, was chief counsel. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes headed the PWA and the resettlement projects.s One of the most immediate consequences of the NIRA in West Virginia was a stunningly successful organization drive by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). As 1933 opened the UMWA languished near extinction in West Virginia and dispiritedly faced the rivalry of the independent West Virginia Mine Workers Union and the communist National Miners Union. Yet even before Roosevelt signed the act on June 16, 1933, John 1. Lewis, the UMWA leader, seized the opportunity offered bysection 7a, the NIRA clause guaranteeing labor the right to collective bargaining. He sent a hundred UMWA organizers to West Virginia, and they fanned out across the coalfields, ready to sign up new union members.6 Van Amberg Bittner , president of the UMWA's District 17, coordinated the drive from the union's Charleston headquarters. For a leader of mine workers, Van Bittner was atypically mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and wellgroomed . He talked like a college economics professor and ran his organization with cool efficiency.7 The success of the UMWA's orga- The Blue Eagle 93 nizing drive would make him one of the most influential figures in the state. Organizers told the miners: liThe President wants you to join a union...