Consumers & Conscience

I will cooperate in re-employment by supporting and patronizing employers and workers who are members of NRA.

To that pledge thousands & thousands of NRA volunteers were getting millions & millions of U. S. consumers' signatures throughout the land last week. Club women, Boy Scouts, society girls, political ward heelers, postmen, newspaper circulation solicitors, even school children went from door to door, reciting little set speeches about "putting more men to work and increasing buying power." Most householders quickly agreed to do their buying at Blue Eagle shops but few of them pretended to comprehend the economics of the campaign. Here & there an oldtime "rugged individualist" loudly refused to go along. By last week the following Big Names had signed up as Blue Eagle consumers:

Herbert Hoover

Kenneth Raleigh Kingsbury (Standard Oil of California)

Philip Knight Wrigley (gum)

William Henry Cardinal O'Connell of Boston

Victor Macomber Cutter (United Fruit)

Andrew Wells Robertson (Westinghouse)

Samuel Harden Church (Carnegie Institute)

Senator James Couzens of Michigan.

John Jacob Raskob, onetime Democratic national chairman who opposed the Roosevelt nomination declared: "Let's follow our leader. He may not be right all the time but he is making progress."

A cornerstone of President Roosevelt's whole NRA campaign is that the buying public will patronize Blue Eagle concerns, boycott others. Only thus will employers who have raised wages, cut working hours be rewarded for their pains. Yet no machinery exists to make consumers keep their promises. Last week General Johnson declared he was relying entirely upon the public's civic conscience.

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