The signature program of the early days of FDR's New Deal was the National Recovery Administration or NRA. Created in 1933 by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the NRA was designed to stabilize the economy by setting wages and prices through a series of negotiated agreements between the federal government and industry. In 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the NIRA and NRA were unconstitutional. But long before it ceased to exist, the NRA had proven to be a failure at ending the Great Depression. The most significant policy legacy of the NIRA proved to be Section 7(a), which created the National Labor Board and took large steps toward recognizing the right to organize.
Following the Supreme Court's ruling against the NIRA, the rights recognized in Section 7(a) were incorporated into the Wagner Act (1935). And the New Deal adopted other strategies to counteract the Depression, including the creation of the Social Security system and the Works Progress Administration, a series of policies collectively known as the Second New Deal.
But one aspect of the failed NRA proved to be a success. Hoping to encourage participation and to show NRA success, the Roosevelt administration created an eye-catching logo for industries working under NRA agreements to display: the Blue Eagle.
During the brief life of the NRA, the Blue Eagle became ubiquitous. Here's Jimmy Durante in a famous Hollywood-produced clip promoting the NRA. Note the prominent role given the Blue Eagle:
Today, the Obama administration announced that they're taking another page from the New Deal, adopting the one aspect of the NRA that really seemed to work: a logo that will let Americans see in concrete terms how their government is responding to our economic catastrophe.
The ARRA (for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) Logo will be prominently featured on projects payed for with stimulus funds. As befits a 21st-century Blue Eagle, it features a website address, which would take those interested to recovery.gov, the website that tracks the billions of dollars that's being spent to jumpstart the economy.
The ARRA Logo forms an interesting contrast with the Blue Eagle. The 21st-century logo is more abstract and features a name that's considerably more bureaucratic. Roosevelt and his NRA inaugurated the alphabet soup of modern government bureaucracies, but the Blue Eagle was called the Blue Eagle, not the NRA Logo. Like the Blue Eagle, the ARRA Logo prominently features red, white, and blue (though it adds green to the mix).
While the Blue Eagle is essentially a version of the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States...
...with a cog and lightning bolts, representing industry, replacing the olive branch and arrows, representing peace and strength, the ARRA Logo rifs on the American flag, though adding more cogs plus a leaf suggesting both environmental friendliness and growth.
The Blue Eagle was as much as anything supposed to represent America coming together. The NRA's goal of solving the Depression through voluntary agreements and the slogan "WE DO OUR PART" emphasized labor and industry pulling together to get us out of the Great Depression and urged others to join the fight. This was a message particularly appropriate to a moment on U.S. history when many felt that American society was falling apart and that even more wrenching class conflict might be right around the corner.
The ARRA Logo and its web address have a slightly different spin. First and foremost, they're about accountability:
"We’re also making it easier for Americans to see what projects are being funded with their money as part of our recovery. So in the weeks to come, the signs denoting these projects are going to bear the new emblem of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," Obama said. "These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you, the American people -- a commitment to investing your tax dollars wisely, to put Americans to work doing the work that needs to be done. So when you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government -- your government -- is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery."
This different function mirrors different social anxieties. While Americans in the 1930s feared the possibility of social collapse and, by 1933, craved decisive government action, today, after decades of conservative, anti-government propaganda and eight years of conservative mismanagement, the greater fear is that government will not be accountable and that the billions of dollars will be hideously misspent.
Here's hoping that the program represented by the ARRA Logo works out better than the NRA did. And, if it doesn't, that Obama, like FDR, is enough of a pragmatist to try something else.