^{This page is part of © FOTW Flags Of The World website}

National Recovery Administration (U.S.)

Historical

image by Dave Martucci, 25 April 2011

National Recovery Administration flag
Red variant

See also:

National Recovery Administration flag

The National Recovery Administration was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's program to help America get out of the depression. The logo was used in basically two formats, a white flag with the red and blue logo and a red flag with a white ball in the upper center with the logo on it except that the lower motto "WE DO OUR PART" was placed below the ball in white.

From "The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America" by T.H. Watkins, pages 198 & 199:

By mid-July [1933], [the head of the NRA General Hugh S.] Johnson was ready to launch a nationwide sign-up campaign, utilizing every advertising and promotional gimmick his publicity team could dream up. He had even seen to the development of a symbol 'designed for visibility and uniqueness,' as he put it. The result was the image of a Blue Eagle patterned after the thunderbird ideograph common in the ritual art of the Navajo Indians. The bird's wings were outspread, its head and beak facing left (naturally, some suspected). In its left talon it held the cog from a factory wheel and it its right, a clutch of lightning bolts. At the bottom of the image appeared the words, 'We Do Our Part.' Any business that signed a blanket agreement was entitled to display the birdly symbol with pride, and as poster, flag, banner, window sign, windshield sticker, lapel badge, billboard, magazine cover, and editorial cartoon, the Blue Eagle of the NRA was destined to become as enduring a symbol of the times as the swastika of the German National Socialist Party (indeed, the Communist party organ, 'The Daily Worker', smelling fascism at the heart of the NRA program, would publish an editorial cartoon in which the bird spun itself into the actual shape of the grim Nazi emblem)."

The book goes on to say further down on page 199, "There was no escaping the eagle that summer and fall of 1933. In one form or another, it fluttered and screamed its way into nearly every cranny of the American social landscape.

Dave Martucci, 25 April 2011

Red variant

image by Dave Martucci, 25 April 2011