Strikes: The Emergency Railroad Transportation Act of 1933 was designed to relieve obstructions and burdens on interstate commerce resulting from “the present acute economic emergency.”[83]
The Railway Labor Act of 1934 thereupon sought, by imposing collective bargaining upon the railroads and through a National Mediation Board and ad hoc emergency boards appointed by the President (nothing new, of course, in railroad regulation), to avoid exacerbation of the emergency through rail strikes.[84] The War Labor Disputes Act permitted drastic presidential and War Labor Board regulation of labor-management relations to avoid impeding or delaying the war effort in consequence of strikes.[85] The Labor Management Relations Act, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act, created special procedures for delaying strikes whenever in the opinion of the President a threatened strike or lock-out affecting an entire industry or substantial part thereof would imperil the national health or safety if the strike occurred or were allowed to continue. This Act of course, grants the determining power to the President only where interstate commerce, in all its varieties, is involved.[86]
Housing: The Veterans’ Emergency Housing Act of 1946 declared that the long-term housing shortage and the war combined to create an unprecedented emergency shortage of housing, particularly for veterans of World War II and their families.[87] President Truman promptly cited the building program provided for in the Act and the unprecedented emergency shortage of housing in exercising his authority under the Tariff Acts to remove the duty from articles certified by the Housing Expediter as timber, lumber, or lumber products suitable for the construction or completion of housing accommodations.[88] The Housing and Rent Act of 1949 also was directed at this emergency.[89]
Agricultural Commodities: Congress occasionally has recognized the existence of an emergency with regard to a particular agricultural or other commodity. Without using the term emergency, Congress plainly was taking emergency action when it adopted a concurrent resolution in June 1934 directing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate conditions with respect to the sale and distribution of milk and other dairy products.[90] Decline in the price of milk to the farmer had produced severe hardships and suffering to milk producers throughout the United States and strikes and violence in many rural and metropolitan centers. The Resolution went on to say that the continuation of the practices then engaged in by milk distributors and certain leaders of milk cooperatives, seriously endangered the efforts of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and of the several States to alleviate and remedy the distress so widespread among dairy farmers in the United States at the time. If this distress were permitted to continue the result would be the destruction of the already sorely pressed agricultural industry. Congress clearly noted the inability of the states to cope with an emergency situation and proceeded to initiate its own action.
In like manner the Tobacco Control Act of 1934 was aimed at improving conditions in the tobacco-growing industry by placing it on a sound financial and economic basis and by eliminating unfair competition and practices in the production and marketing of tobacco entering into the channels of interstate and foreign commerce. Moreover the Act was in general designed to “relieve the present emergency with respect to tobacco.”[91] The Sugar Act of 1937 permitted the President to suspend certain of its provisions upon a finding that a national economic or other emergency exists with respect to sugar or liquid sugar.[92] The President found conditions sufficiently severe in the sugar industry to declare a sugar emergency in 1939, 1942, and 1947.[93]
A 1942 Presidential Proclamation noted that codfish constituted one of the basic staples in the diet of the low-income groups in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, the war imposed severe limitations on this import from Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, thereby vitally affecting Puerto Ricans dependent on this basic food in their diet.[94] The President sought a quick remedy by invoking the emergency provisions of the Tariff Act of 1930[95] to authorize the duty-free importation of “jerked beef ... a satisfactory substitute for codfish,” at least according to the proclamation. Invoking the same statute, the President, again in April 1942, authorized the duty-free importation of food, clothes, and medical, surgical, and other supplies by or directly for the account of The American National Red Cross for use by that agency in emergency relief work in connection with the “war emergency.”[96]
EMERGENCIES OCCASIONED BY NATURAL CATASTROPHES
Drought: Two statutes and one Presidential Proclamation in this category attribute emergency conditions to drought. In February 1934 Congress authorized the Farm Credit Administration to make loans for feed for livestock in drought- and storm-stricken areas.[97] The Emergency Appropriation Act for fiscal 1935 appropriated funds to meet the emergency and necessity for relief in stricken agricultural areas and in another section referred to “the present drought emergency.”[98] The Presidential Proclamation noting that an unusual lack of rain in several western and mid-western states had caused an acute shortage of feed for livestock,[99] declared an emergency under the suitable provision of the 1930 Tariff Act and authorized suspension of duties on livestock feeds. Only livestock owners in the affected area were eligible to benefit from duty free livestock feeds.[100]
The Communications Act of 1934[101] and its 1951 amendment[102] grant the President certain powers in time “of public peril or disaster.” The other statutes provide for existing or anticipated emergencies attributable to earthquake, flood, tornado, cyclone, hurricane, conflagration and landslides.[103]
Agricultural Pests: A joint resolution of April 1937 made “funds available for the control of incipient or emergency outbreaks of insect pests or plant diseases, including grasshoppers, Mormon crickets, and chinch bugs.”[104] Funds were appropriated on this authorization later that month.[105]