Corporatism, the NRA, and the Oil Industry

Abstract

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) of the 1930s was the most extensive corporatist experiment in American history, and its administrative history challenges widely accepted conclusions in interest group theory. The NRA exemplifies almost every characteristic of government regulation of business which interest group theory has associated with the capture of bureaucratic agencies by private interests. A broad delegation of congressional power in the National Industrial Recovery Act gave bureaucrats little guidance in identifying the public interests to be promoted by the NRA, increasing the likelihood that the New Dealers would turn to the industries they regulated for aid in defining the goals of the program. Cooptation of the NRA appeared even more likely because trade associations were formally incorporated into the administrative agency responsible for the program. Yet, surprisingly, business efforts to control the program failed. As this case study of the oil industry under the NRA demonstrates, big business was neither the interest group sponsoring the NRA nor its beneficiary. Even the independents in the industry who did benefit from the act were forced to accept benefits as favors granted by these bureaucrats, who remained firmly in control of the program. The conclusion which emerges from a study of the NRA is that of the robustness of the American state and its capacity to coopt private interests in the pursuit of its own ideologically defined goals. Support for the pluralist conclusion that political power in the United States is widely distributed has suffered steady erosion over the last decade. Even prominent pluralists of the late 1950s and early 1960s have repudiated their earlier contributions, acknowledging theoretical deficiencies in their own paradigm. Criticism of pluralism has focused on two related assumptions of the plu-