The National Recovery Administration Reconsidered, or Why the Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Code Succeeded

The Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry Code was one of the only successful codes in the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Compliance was high. It increased production, wages, employment, and product diversity. NRA administrators marveled at its success. Why? And why have historical and rational-choice institutionalists, studying the NRA, overlooked the container code? This paper provides two answers: one microbehavioral, the other macrohistorical. At a micro level, it is impossible to understand the container code with rational-choice theory. It was successful not because it coordinated and enforced collective action, but because it organized “collaborative learning.” The code showed manufacturers how to compete over productivity and product diversity instead of volume. At a macro level, historical institutionalists miss the movement that spawned the container code, because they search in vain for liberal corporatism and state autonomy. Instead, this paper shows how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) led a movement of cost accountants, trade associations, and peak business associations in an effort to channel competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes through “developmental trade associations.” The container code drew its personnel and practices from this project. In order to make sense of the container code, I introduce a novel theory of institutions, called “creative syncretism.”