Robert Collins

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Some New Dealers spoke longingly of the day when they would be able to ease off on the economic brakes and step on the gas. 'Rationalize it any way we have to,' said Rexford Tugwell, 'we can't make a religion out of growing or making fewer goods with this whole country and the whole world in bitter need.' As early as 1934, Tugwell and other Department of Agriculture economists, notably Mordecai Ezekiel, sought to devise programs for industrial and agricultural expansion rather than restriction, a kind of 'AAA in reverse.' 'The only way each of us can enjoy bigger income slices,' wrote Ezekiel, 'is by making the whole pie of production and income bigger.' As secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace became perhaps the nation's most visible restrictionist and a prime example of the New Deal's ambivalence. In two short months in 1933, Wallace oversaw the plowing under of ten million acres of cotton already in the fields and the slaughter of six million piglets whose existence threatened a future glut in the hogmarket. The uproar was immediate. 'To hear them talk,' Wallace complained, 'you would have thought that pigs were raised for pets.' But he felt keenly the obscenity of attacking poverty in the midst of plenty by eliminating the plenty. 'We of this administration,' he wrote the next year, 'are not committed indefinitely to crop control or to NRA codes.' It was a matter of playing the hand you were dealt; the failures of the past made scarcity economics necessary. Agriculture had to be brought into some sort of balance with industry. Significantly, however, Wallace remained uncertain whether the goal was 'balance and continuous stability' or 'a continually moving but balanced state.'

The ambivalence exemplified by Wallace was expressed in, and compounded by, the inconsistency of New Deal policy. Although it is probably unrealistic, especially in a boisterous democratic republic, to expect national policies to march in lockstep toward a well-ordered set of goals, the confusion of what the historian Alan Brinkley has described as the New Deal's 'combination of vacillation and eclecticism' was nevertheless striking. Much of that confusion derived from the fact that throughout the 1930s there existed beneath the main current of the New Deal's scarcity economics and state cartelism a subsidiary policy stream best characterized as state capitalism or, more simply, public investment.

Even as the major New Deal policies for industry and agriculture—the NRA and AAA—sought to control production and curtail competition, a variety of other New Deal measures aimed at economic development.