Gardiner C. Means

The Brain Trust (or The Brains Trust, as coined by James Kieran, a NYT report) was a group of academic advisors that FDR gathered to assist him during the 1932 presidential campaign. The term used only to apply to three men: Raymond Moley, Adolph A. Berle Jr., and Rexford Tugwell. Eventually, Basic O'Conner, Samuel I. Rosenman, and Hugh Johnson completed the group after being recruited by Moley. They were responsible for the rapid development of an economic plan that would become the core of the New Deal: regulation of banks, stock, large scale relief, and public work programs. The Brain Trust, in the first 100 days of FDR's administration, enacted 15 major laws, including the Banking Act of 1933, which ended the banking panic. Under the National Industry Recovery Act, The National Recovery Administration, or NRA, authorized the president to institute industry-wide codes to eliminate unfair trade practices, establish minimum wages and maximum hours, reduce unemployment, and guarantee the right of collective bargaining for labour. The NRA established 557 basic codes and 208 supplementary codes, affecting 22 million workers--more than half the population of the United States. The NRA was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1935 unanimously in the Schechter Poultry Corp v. United States case, but many of its provisions were reinstated in future legislation, such as in the Wagner Act. The grounds for its invalidation were that it the NRA and its overarching National Industrial Recovery Act improperly took the role of legislating which ought to be the right of Congress.