New graphic history tells how 4 Brooklyn shochtim beat FDR

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Amity Shlaes is author of three national best-sellers — The Forgotten Man, Coolidge, and The Greedy Hand. The Forgotten Man/Graphic will be published by HarperCollins in May.

Chatter about President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is everywhere, as each angle of the great reform is analyzed and debated; the U.S. Supreme Court got into the act when Justice Samuel Alito asked if through laws like Obamacare the federal government might proscribe kosher or halal butchering.

But few remember that in the 1930s, a small business defendant fought back against a similarly ambitious federal institution and actually managed to topple it. Back then, too, key parts of the story, played out in Brooklyn, touched the kosher marketplace

The facts of that 1930s case evoke eerie parallels. A new administration — in that case the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — had a big plan to regulate not healthcare but industry. The idea was to make companies more efficient and thereby improve the struggling economy.

The New Dealers created a giant regulator, the National Recovery Administration, to write codes governing each sector of industry — and even non-industrial companies, like poultry firms, were included.

The administration took its new agency seriously: the NRA’s emblem was the American eagle, and its launch was celebrated by a ticker tape parade in Manhattan. Together, industry and regulators wrote numerous rules. In the case of the poultry industry, those rules included health regulations, wage regulations, regulation of hours worked.

But just as now, the new rules sometimes conflicted with common sense.

Companies were losing money in the Great Depression, yet the NRA demanded they raise wages. NRA codes also intruded in areas where government had not gone before: the poultry codes, for example, denied wholesale costumers the right to pick the chickens they bought. Yet one of the essential features of the meat marketplace was that customers could select animals for slaughter.

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