The “Brain Trust” was the collective name given to a small group of academics who advised Franklin D. Roosevelt and provided ideological foundations for the First New Deal of 1933. Assembled at Roosevelt’s request in 1932 by Raymond C. Moley, a professor of government at Columbia University’s Barnard College, the original and most important members of the Brain Trust were Moley, Columbia University economist Rexford G. Tugwell, and Columbia Law School professor Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Roosevelt referred to these advisers as his “privy council,” and then a newspaper reporter dubbed them the “Brains Trust” in September 1932.
While the members of the Brain Trust often disagreed about what specific policy measures would end the Great Depression, they did agree that the depression was the result of structural flaws in the American economy, that antitrust and other efforts to restore an economy of small units were misguided, and that the economy should function, with appropriate planning, as an organic structure of interdependent parts. Corporate interests, in their view, had gained a disproportionate amount of power over the American economy in the years preceding the depression and had upset the balance of parts. Borrowing from the English economic theorist J. A. Hobson, the Brain Trusters held that, left unchecked, this imbalance had caused a crisis of “underconsumption” in which consumers could no longer afford to buy enough products and services to sustain prosperity. Moley and Berle believed this imbalance would be best remedied by allowing business to regulate itself to eliminate unfair business practices. Tugwell, who believed that depressed farm prices caused by agricultural overproduction were central to problems in the domestic economy, maintained that a GoVERNMENT-planned economy was required for economic recovery and balanced prosperity.
The First New Deal, as it took shape under the leadership of the Brain Trust, combated the Great Depression much differently from previous attempts by the HooVER presidency. In its insistence that the causes and solutions for the depression were domestic in nature, the Brain Trust rejected Hoover’s internationalist approach. The ideas of the Brain Trust contributed to the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), both of which involved economic planning and controls coordinated by the government. The NRA, created to implement the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933, sought to implement industry-wide codes of fair competition and improve employment practices in the manufacturing sector, while the AAA sought to raise agricultural prices by reducing output and granting subsidies to farmers who cut production. In practice, both the NRA and the AAA faced significant obstacles in achieving their established goals and had disappointing and sometimes unintended results.
The Brain Trust was most influential during 1932-33 in creating philosophical foundations of the First New Deal, but was less successful in directing the subsequent implementation of New Deal policy. Many Democratic Party politicians were suspicious of the Brain Trust and feared that their status as nonelected advisers to the president gave them undue influence in policy decisions without the accountability of having to answer to constituents. Political considerations made Roosevelt reluctant to associate himself with any specific economic philosophy for fear of alienating the conservatives within his own party. The problems of the NRA and the AAA only heightened Roosevelt’s increasing tendency to turn to other advisers and ideas. The Brain Trust was effectively disbanded when Raymond Moley left the Roosevelt administration in 1933. The other two original members, Tugwell and Berle, continued to work closely with Roosevelt until 1936 and 1944, respectively; but like Moley, although not for the same reasons, they would express disappointment with the subsequent path of the New Deal.
Despite the limits on their actual influence on policymaking, the Brain Trust left an important legacy, for their proximity to Roosevelt helped inspire a generation of idealistic and ambitious young liberal lawyers and scholars to enter careers with the federal government.
Further reading: Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: From Depression to New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
—Mary E. Carroll-Mason
World History
