HUGH SAMUEL JOHNSON, the first director of the National Recovery Administration, protege of Bernard Baruch, columnist, speaker, and exponent of industrial self- government, was a man of immense influence during the early years of the New Deal. In this, the first biography, Ohl traces Johnson's complex life from childhood in the emerging American West, where Johnson went to a school that his father had physically moved into their Oklahoma territory, developed an appreciation of music that would stand him in good stead‹ and win him the singing companionship of United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis in years to come and decided, rather ruthlessly, to set out on a military career.
Ohl follows the young West Pointer through four years of highjinks and a coinciding, if startling, development of deep loyalty to the military ideals of loyalty to enterprise and to one's comrades. He discusses, with wide knowledge of archival sources on the public men and women of the World War I and interwar periods, Johnson's initial military successes, his role in designing the draft, his frustrations with domestic military bureaucracy, his postwar entry into business, and his meeting and friendship with Baruch.
Johnson followed "the Boss" toward a meeting with FDR's brain trusters and eventually to the high position of NRA administrator, a post he filled with energy, a high and colorful profile, and deep commitment. Johnson's frenzied pace ‹he directed the formulation, for example, of more than 500 fair trade codes during his year and a half in the old Commerce Buildings vehement and picturesque language, and his hard verbal fighting and hard drinking led to his dismissal by Roosevelt. Leaving behind his codes, minimum-wage and maximum-hour negotiations, and his strike interventions, Johnson continued to serve and admire Roosevelt through some months during the formulation of the New York City WPA. His disillusionment with Roosevelt and his columns and speeches that followed provide insight into the evolution of the New Deal and, later, the opposition to both the president and his programs.
This much-needed biography is of value not only to students of Johnson and the New Deal but to readers on the development of the military draft, the managerial technology of industrial self-government, the presidential campaigns between 1928 and 1940, and the relationships among many of the public figures of the Great War and depression years. It also provides a clear and compassionate view of one of the most American of public men, a man who came, in his autobiography, to call himself a blue eagle‹so deep was his love for the work he undertook in 1933 and who could count on plenty of "wars and dead cats," the detritus of his vocal and public arguments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Kennedy Ohl is a professor of history at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona. ISBN 0-87580-110-2