Like the AAA, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) tried to solve the challenge of deflation. Why? How? Did it succeed? Why or why not? Please explain.
Bruce Bartlett, "The NRA, AAA, and Black Employment" ...Unfortunately for black workers, it quickly became clear that minimum wage rates established by the NRA tended to disadvantage them relative to whites. Previously, blacks had often been able to overcome discrimination and get jobs even from racist employers by agreeing to work for lower wages or longer hours. But the NRA effectively eliminated these options. Faced with the necessity of paying blacks and whites the same wages for the same hours, employers generally kept their white workers and laid off their blacks. As historian Philip Foner explains: It rapidly became clear that the code mechanism under the NRA was valueless for black workers; it merely legalized for all American industry the pattern of racial discrimination that had long been the practice of Southern employers. Conditions of blacks worsened under the NRA. Thousands were fired and replaced by white workers on jobs where blacks were being paid less than established minimum-wage scales; by August 1933 , blacks were calling it the "Negro Removal Act." NRA wage minimums were considered "too much money for Negroes." In August 1934, the federal government's highest-ranking black economist, Dr. Robert C. Weaver of the Interior Department, admitted that "Negroes have lost jobs as a result of the NRA." The minimum wage policy, he said, "resulted in wholesale discharges in certain areas." A 1937 study by the NRA itself concluded that the minimum wage provisions of the NIRA put 500,000 blacks out of work in 1934 alone. The idea of forcing prices up also underlay Roosevelt's agriculture policy. Farmers were paid not to grow crops in order to restrict supply and thereby raise prices for farm commodities. But the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) only paid those who owned the land, thus excluding sharecroppers and tenant farmers. This policy hurt black farmers because most were not landowners. Although landlords were supposed to share government payments with their tenants, in practice they did not. Indeed, the AAA effectively encouraged landlords to evict tenant farmers in order to maximize their payments. Historian Paul Moreno recently summarized the impact of Roosevelt's policies on black farmers: Scholars generally agree that New Deal farm policy had a disastrous effect on blacks, despite the bureaucrats' claims of sensitivity to black hardships....New Deal agricultural policies amounted to an "American enclosure movement, "pushing blacks off the land in a period when the pull of northern industrial employment was slack.