Rexford Tugwell

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Rexford G. Tugwell

Rexford Guy Tugwell (born July 10, 1891 in Sinclairville , New York , USA ; † July 21, 1979 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an agricultural economist and member of a group of academics from Columbia University , who were part of the first advisory board to Franklin D. Roosevelt successfully developed recommendations for action with the aim of electing Roosevelt as President of the United States in 1932. After achieving this goal, Tugwell worked in the administration under Roosevelt for four years and was one of several intellectuals who worked out essential parts of his New Deal . Tugwell later also served as director of the New York City Planning Commission , as governor of Puerto Rico and as a professor at various universities.

Life

Early life and education

In his youth, Tugwell became aware of these issues through the works of Upton Sinclair , James Bryce and Edward Bellamy on labor rights and liberal politics. He began his business studies at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania and received his PhD from Columbia University . During his studies he was significantly influenced by professors such as Scott Nearing , Simon Patten , Carl Parker and John Dewey . After graduating, Tugwell worked as a professor at universities in Washington , Paris and Columbia University.

Tugwell approached economic questions experimentally and viewed industrial planning of the First World War as a successful experiment. He defended industrial agricultural planning as an effective tool against rural poverty, which was widespread after the war. This method of controlling production, price and cost levels became particularly important with the onset of the Great Depression .

Staff member of Franklin Roosevelt

In 1932 Tugwell was invited to Franklin Roosevelt's team of consultants, which later became known as the Brain Trust . After Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933, Tugwell was employed as assistant secretary and from 1934 as undersecretary in the US Department of Agriculture . He worked on the development of the under New Deal known Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) with and was later its director. The AAA consisted largely of an agricultural quota allocation program that paid farmers to voluntarily reduce their output by around 30%. It was financed by a tax on manufacturing companies that used agricultural products as raw materials. The ministry controlled the production of important agricultural goods by adjusting the allocated funds for non-production.

Tugwell also played a major role in the installation of the Soil Conservation Service ( Natural Resources Conservation Service since 1994 ), the primary objective of which was to contain and restore poor quality properties. This particularly affected the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains, which was plagued by dust storms during the 1930s . In 1938, Tugwell helped draft the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act .

In April 1935, Tugwell and Roosevelt founded the Resettlement Administration (RA) as a sub-section of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (from 1939 Works Progress Administration ). The RA was run by Tugwell and aimed to create healthy settlements for the unemployed in the countryside to give them access to urban amenities. Some of the RA's activities have been land conservation and aid to rural populations, but the most prominent program has been the design and construction of new satellite cities near major cities. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities , the author Jane Jacobs critically quotes a statement by Tugwell about this program: “ My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them. ”( Jane Jacobs : The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 16, p. 310, German:“ My idea is to take cheap land on the border to the centers of the population, to build a settlement and to lure people there. Then we go back to the cities and tear down the slums and make parks out of them. ”) Three of these so-called Greenbelt settlements were built before the United States Supreme Court stopped the program as being unconstitutional. Building houses was deemed the sole power of the states and the RA closed as an illegal part of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration .

Tugwell had previously been defamed as "Rex the Red", and the RA's resettlement program brought him further denigration as " Communist " and "un-American" .

American Molasses Co.

With the onset of resistance to his policies and methods, Tugwell resigned in late 1936 as an employee of the Roosevelt administration and became vice president of the American Molasses Corporation . At this point, he also separated from his first wife and married his former assistant Grace Falke.

Director of the New York City Planning Commission

In 1938, Tugwell became the first director of the New York City Planning Commission , now known as the New York City Department of City Planning . The reformist mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia , established the Commission as part of a municipal statute reform, which was aimed at reducing corruption and existing inefficiencies. However, the planning committee had limited influence - all decisions had to be approved by the New York City Board of Estimate . Undeterred, Tugwell sought to exploit and reinforce the power of the commission by attempting to allow post-erroneous land uses regardless of the lack of public or legislative support. The commission he led strove to establish social housing in moderate building density, but nevertheless regularly approved applications for a higher density. Finally, Robert Moses Tugwell's proposal for a 50-year plan for the protection of open spaces dealt the death blow with a very violent public counter-campaign.

Governor of Puerto Rico

Tugwell was the last US-installed governor of Puerto Rico from 1941 to 1946 . He worked with the local legislature and founded the Puerto Rico Planning Board in 1942 . In addition, he promoted Puerto Rican self-government in 1948 by repealing the Jones – Shafroth Act , which had been in force since 1917 , according to which all residents of Puerto Rico were automatically US citizens. Tugwell also supported the popular political movement of Luis Muñoz Marín .

In the course of his preparations for retirement from governor, he was instrumental in the process of installing a Puerto Rican to replace him. The choice finally fell on the previous Resident Commissioner Jesús T. Piñero , who later also became Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico .

Return to the academic world

After serving as governor, Tugwell returned to academic teaching. He was employed at the University of Chicago for a long time and supported them in developing their planning program. Significantly, he moved to Greenbelt , Maryland - a suburb of Washington, DC that was designed and built by the Resettlement Administration under his leadership.

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , Tugwell saw the concept of global governance as the only sure way to avoid a nuclear apocalypse. From 1945-48 he participated in the Committee to Frame a World Constitution . He also saw a revision of the US national constitution as necessary for future economic planning and, at an advanced age, drafted a constitution for the new states of America. In this he assigned planning as a new responsibility alongside elections and supervisory activities of the federal government.

During this time, Tugwell wrote several books, including a biography of Grover Cleveland , subtitled A Biography of the President Whose Uncompromising Honesty and Integrity Failed America in a Time of Crisis (Macmillan Company, New York (1968)). He also wrote a biography on Franklin D. Roosevelt entitled FDR: An Architect of an Era and the book A Stricken Land , in which he published his memoirs for the years in Puerto Rico. This book was reprinted in 2007 by the Muñoz Marín Foundation .

Mentions in the literature

The novel The Oracle from the Mountain by Philip K. Dick contains a book in the book entitled Heavy Lies the Locust , in which Rexford Tugwell is President of the United States of America.

Tugwell also is in the book Country Home of Ernie Pyle mentioned.

Publications

  • The Economic Basis of Public Interest . George Banta Publishing, Menasha WI 1922.
  • Industry's Coming of Age . Harcourt, Brace, New York 1927.
  • Mr. Hoover's Economic Policy . John Day, New York 1932.
  • The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts . Columbia University Press, New York 1933.
  • The Battle for Democracy . Columbia University Press, New York 1935.
  • Changing the Colonial Climate: the Story, from His Official Messages, of Governor Rexford Guy Tugwell's Efforts to Bring Democracy to an Island Possession Which Serves the United Nations as a Warbase , selection and explanatory comments by J. San Juan Lear. Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1942.
  • Puerto Rican Public Papers of RG Tugwell, Governor, San Juan . Service Office of the Government of Puerto Rico, Printing Division, 1945.
  • Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the Governor, 1945, San Juan . Government of Puerto Rico, 1945.
  • The Knitting Land: The Story of Puerto Rico . Doubleday, Garden City NY 1947, ISBN 978-0-8371-0252-8
  • The Place of Planning in Society: Seven Lectures . Office of the Government Planning Board, San Juan 1954.
  • A Chronicle of Jeopardy, 1945-1955 . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1955.
  • The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt . Doubleday, Garden City NY 1957.
  • The Art of Politics, As Practiced by Three Great Americans: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Luis Munoz Marin, and Fiorell H. LaGuardia . Doubleday, Garden City NY 1958.
  • The Enlargement of the Presidency . Doubleday, Garden City NY 1960.
  • The Light of Other Days . Doubleday, Garden City NY 1962.
  • How They Became President . Simon & Schuster, 1964.
  • FDR: An Architect of an Era . Macmillan, 1967.
  • The Brains Trust . Viking Press, 1968, ISBN 978-0-670-00273-3 (Received the Bancroft Prize , through the group of Advisors to Roosevelt in the New Deal in the 1930s, of which he was a member)
  • In Search of Roosevelt . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1972, ISBN 978-0-674-44625-0
  • The Emerging Constitution . Harper's Magazine Press, 1974, ISBN 978-0-06-128225-6 .

literature

  • Michael V. Namorato: Rexford G. Tugwell . A biography. Greenwood Pub Group, 1988, ISBN 978-0-275-92961-9 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Namorato (1988) , pp. 11-18.
  2. ↑ Namorato (1988) , pp. 21-54.
  3. ↑ Namorato (1988) , pp. 35-54.
  4. ↑ Bernard Sternsher: Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal . Rutgers University Press, 1964, ISBN 978-0-8135-0440-7 , pp. 183-193 .
  5. ^ Agriculture. Domestic allotment. In: TIME Magazine . December 26, 1932, accessed August 1, 2011 .
  6. ↑ Namorato (1988), p. 81 f.
  7. ↑ David Myhra: Rexford Guy Tugwell. Initiator of America's Greenbelt New Towns, 1935 to 1936. In: Journal of the American Planning Association . tape 40 , no. 3 , 1974, ISSN  1939-0130 (English).
  8. ^ Joseph L. Arnold: New Deal in the Suburbs. History of the Green Belt Town Program, 1935–54 . Ohio State University Press, 1986, ISBN 978-0-8142-0153-4 (English).
  9. ↑ Jess Gilbert, Carolyn Howe, Beyond “State vs. Society ”. Theories of the State and New Deal Agricultural Policies . In: American Sociological Review . tape 56 , no. 2 , 1991, ISSN  0003-1224 , LCCN  37-010449 , pp. 216 (English).
  10. ↑ Namorato (1988), p. 114 f.
  11. ↑ Milestones, Dec. 5, 1938. In: TIME Magazine . December 5, 1938, accessed August 1, 2011 .
  12. ^ Mark Gelfand: Rexford G. Tugwell and the Frustration of Planning in New York City . In: Journal of the American Planning Association . tape 51 , no. 2 , 1985, ISSN  0194-4363 , pp. 151-159 (English).
  13. ↑ Namorato (1988) , pp. 138-143.
  14. ^ Constitutional Convention. Proposed Constitution for the Newstates of America. Retrieved August 2, 2011 .
  15. ^ RG Tugwell: The emerging Constitution . 1st edition. Harper's Magazine Press, 1974, ISBN 978-0-06-128225-6 (English).
  16. ↑ Namorato (1988) , pp. 149-162.
  17. ^ Ernie Pyle: Home country . William Sloane Associates, New York 1947, OCLC 419503 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Tugwell, Rexford
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tugwell, Rexford Guy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and governor of Puerto Rico
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Sinclairville, New York , USA
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1979
Place of death Santa Barbara , California