Rexford Guy Tugwell was born in 1891. As an undergraduate at the Wharton School, he was jarred by textbooks reciting classical economic theories but ignoring real life; he wrote:

I am sick of a nation’s stenches,

I am sick of propertied czars,

I will roll up my sleeves,

– make America over!

This did not bespeak revolutionary inclinations; it merely noted the unacceptable and his resolve to do something about it.

As head of the Economics Department in Columbia College, the undergraduate school in Columbia University, Tugwell stood against the graduate economics faculty; he insisted that more of the best economists should be assigned to teach undergraduates who later would vote upon or directly make public policies, rather than being used excessively in the graduate faculty to shape economics professors. And to counteract classical texts, he wrote for classroom use an institutional study, American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement. And, The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, showing preference for national economic planning.

During F.D.R.’s last two years as Governor of New York, Tugwell joined in advising how a President should fight the Great Depression. His revealing book, The Brains Trust, depicted F.D.R.’s innate conservatism but also made clear that his advisers prompted him toward boldness and experimentation.

Tugwell next served as Assistant and then Undersecretary in the Department of Agriculture. In these posts, his fight for improved pure food and drug laws stirred up violent opposition, and his outspoken liberalism made him a whipping boy for the Administration. More proximately, his siding with Jerome Frank, General Counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and others on behalf of small rather than the large farmers championed on Capitol Hill led to his being transferred to head the Resettlement Administration, initiating towns like Greenbelt, Maryland.

However, his most vital role in Washington was as leader of an informal but influential group favouring centralized national planning, rather effective during the ‘first New Deal’. A second informal group, led intellectually by Louis D. Brandeis (and fortified by his Supreme Court votes) and Felix Frankfurter, turned action considerably toward the ‘second New Deal’, marked by a slowdown of strong policies, and with much inveighing against ‘the curse of bigness’ and ‘economic royalists’.

Rex’s ideas were in no way totalitarian; they urged peacetime application, with appropriate modifications, of the type of comprehensiveness economic planning later used during World War II, with large interpenetration between Government and business. Sensing increasing frustration and official rejection, Tugwell left the Government to become Vice-President of American Molasses Company and the Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. Roosevelt then appointed him the first Governor of Puerto Rico, with good accomplishments as reported in The Stricken Land.

Thereafter, Tugwell taught planning at the University of Chicago, and finally spent many years at the Hutchins Center for the Study for Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. His views never altered, that New Deal ‘patchwork’ would never work and that centralized national planning was imperative. Coming to feel that current trends in economics were hopeless and incorrigible, he turned to institutional proposals for rearranging the structure of government. Hence, his monumental work, The Emerging Constitution. He knew that none of his recommendations would be adopted, but felt that stating them would be of value. His many books about the Presidency included The Democratic Roosevelt, beautifully written like all his work, and an objective and critical evaluation of one whom he admired endlessly. It is probably the most revealing book about F.D.R.

At memorial services in 1979, I spoke of a man who, among all whom I got to know during a half century of public service, was truly one of ‘the best and the brightest’.

Selected Works

  • Tugwell’s publications are far too numerous to be listed here, but those listed are representative of his work and interests.

  • 1922. The economic basis of public interest. Menasha: George Banta Publishing Company.

  • 1924. The trend of economics (editor and contributor). New York: Knopf.

  • 1925. (With Thomas Monroe and Roy E. Stryker.) American economic life and the means of its improvement. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

  • 1927. Industry’s coming of age. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

  • 1932. Mr. Hoover’s economic policy. New York: John Day.

  • 1933. The industrial discipline and the governmental arts. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • 1934. (With Howard C. Hill.) Our economic society and its problems. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

  • 1934–5. Redirecting education (ed. with Leon H. Keyserling, and contributor). New York: Columbia University Press. Vol. 1, 1934; Vol. 2, 1935.

  • 1947. The Stricken Land: The story of Puerto Rico. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

  • 1957. The Democratic Roosevelt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

  • 1967. The light of other days. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

  • 1967. F.D.R.: Architect of an era. New York: Macmillan.

  • 1968. The brains trust. New York: Viking.

  • 1974. The emerging constitution. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press.

  • 1982. (Posthumous.) To the lesser heights of Morningside. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Introduction by Leon H. Keyserling).