ss. Recovery Legislation When he took office, Roosevelt must have felt that his basic problem was how to bring about economic recovery. His predecessor, in spite of his philosophy of rugged individualism, had reluctantly accepted some government responsibility for improving the economy. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), established under Hoover, provided loans to financial institutions, railways, and public agencies. Roosevelt reappointed the head of that organization, and with congressional approval, he made RFC loans easier to get and the RFC became a major recovery agency of the New Deal.Another Hoover policy, direct spending on major public works, was taken over and greatly expanded by Roosevelt. He set up a Public Works Administration (PWA) and put it under the jurisdiction of Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, a Republican reformer from Chicago. Ickes proceeded slowly with PWA projects, for he had an obsessive and probably well-founded idea that if he did not watch closely, the PWA would provide politicians with opportunities for corruption. As a result of this slowness, Ickess PWA did not play a very important role in the early New Deal, and an increasingly larger share of money was given to the less tidy but more energetic relief operations of Ickess rival, Harry Hopkins. However, the PWA came into its own after the recession of 1937, when carefully prepared plans were ready to be implemented almost at once. Huge public buildings, great dams, and irrigation and flood-control projects are part of PWAs legacy.The most spectacular agency designed to promote general economic improvement was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), an organization set up (along with the PWA) by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which was passed by Congress in June 1933. The NRA was designed to help business help itself. Unfair competition was supposed to be eliminated through the establishment of codes of fair compe...
