Tugwell, Rexford G. (1891-1979) government official
Rexford Guy Tugwell was a noted economist, a member of the Brain Trust of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, governor of Puerto Rico, and historian of the New Deal.
Tugwell was born near Buffalo, New York, in 1891, and received his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1920, he joined the Economics Department of Columbia University in New York, and taught progressive ideas of activist government and cooperative LABOR-management relations. A respected scholar, Tugwell’s central tenet was the “magnificence of [government] planning,” which he believed could produce prosperity by ensuring balanced investment, production, and consumption.
After the Great Depression struck, Tugwell criticized the approach of the Hoover presidency. Believing that the depression had resulted from structural flaws in the U. S. economy, he maintained that underconsumption was the primary cause of the depression and that recovery must start in agriculture. In 1932, Raymond Moley asked Tugwell to join Roosevelt’s inner advisory circle, which soon was known as the “Brain Trust.” Witty, confident, assertive, and a resourceful thinker, Tugwell had FDR’s ear even when they disagreed. He was regarded as the most radical member of the Brain Trust and saw the key to recovery in government economic planning and controls.
After Roosevelt’s victory in the election of 1932, Tugwell was appointed assistant secretary of agriculture and became undersecretary in 1934. He was instrumental in drafting the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), both of which reflected his belief in government planning, though neither of which went nearly as far as Tugwell desired. In 1935, Roosevelt appointed Tugwell to head the Resettlement Administration, which sought to resettle farmers from depleted to arable farmland and also sponsored model “greenbelt” towns—planned communities designed to avoid urban congestion.
Tugwell resigned from the government after Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936. Though still on good terms with
FDR, he was unhappy with the limits of the NIRA and the AAA, indeed with the more general limits of the New Deal to provide the sort of planning, controls, and policy he thought essential, and he had become a controversial target of conservatives. He had lost a battle in 1935 to have AAA payments go to tenants and sharecroppers, and he had also argued unsuccessfully for a national system of unemployment compensation and health insurance as part of the Social Security Act. Two years later, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed him chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. In 1941, Tugwell was named governor of Puerto Rico, serving in that position until 1946. In later years, Tugwell was a prolific and influential writer on the history of the New Deal, writing prize-winning studies of Roosevelt and of the Brain Trust. He died in 1979.
Further reading: Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964).
—Robert J. Hanyok
World History
