tition; in effect, laws against combinations of large businesses were to be suspended in exchange for guarantees to workers. These guarantees specifically included minimum wages, maximum hours, and the right to bargain as a group.Unfortunately, the NRA did not work as its supporters had hoped. The administrator, the colorful former army officer Hugh S. Johnson, let the code-making get out of hand. Eventually there were hundreds of codes for different industrial groups. Johnsons patriotic speeches, with which he sought to sell the NRA to the American people, began to wear thin after a while. Johnson resigned in 1934, and the NRA was unanimously declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1935.A special recovery agency for one major segment of the economy was the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), set up in the Department of Agriculture and supervised by Secretary Henry A. Wallace, a farm editor, scientist, and son of a former Republican secretary of agriculture. The AAA sought to eliminate overproduction of basic crops and thus to bring prices back to the average prices of the period from 1909 to 1914, a time of agricultural prosperity. The AAA had authority to buy surplus crops and to make payments to producers to restrict production. It concentrated at first on cotton, wheat, corn, and hogs, the most important products of the Midwest and the South. The plans of the AAA to restrict production and to raise prices were aided by a series of droughts and windstorms on the Great Plains, and farm prices rose steadily during Roosevelts first term. The AAA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936, but a so-called voluntary system was established by Congress in 1936 for the same purposes as the AAA. In 1938 the second AAA was created by Congress. This AAA was more complex and did not rely on a special tax, and it survived. The laws that later generations tended to think of as the New Deal w...
