My attempt at talking about “Subscribing to faith” in three parts was a great example of why sometimes REwriting is the only way forward.
This includes deleting long passages, painful though that can be for a writer.
It was started under one sort of influence, and developed under another, and ended up trying to sum up too many complex topics in one essay (even if it became a three part essay). I won’t erase them from Substack, but I definitely want to come at it with a bit more focus and clarity, which is why I’m not linking them here.
The point was to talk about how we manage our expenditures in general, and giving in particular, even more specifically to our congregations. It was triggered by my first experience doing from inside what I’d been asked to assist with more peripherally many times: take up an elderly person’s income and expenditures, make sense of where they were getting their money, how they had to spend it to maintain their household, and forecasting the net flow from savings if the income was less than the outgo.
As a pastor, I’ve done that more times than I can recall now, and the process was always very paper-centric. Sometimes we’d talk, list on a lined tablet some guesstimates, then we’d meet later, at the church or at their home, and look at actual figures on stubs and check registers. Not infrequently we’d run into some harsh barriers of reality, and have some tough conversations. Rarely, I hate to say, I could make some modest suggestions and help a person or couple find relief from their anxieties. More often, it was even worse than they had first represented to me.
This kind of experience shadowed most of my reactions to stewardship campaigns over the last twenty years, let me assure you.
But with my father-in-law, when things got to where I needed to take over all bill paying for him, it was much more straightforward on one level. He could not handle numbers at all, and I had full access to everything. Confusion had led to some filing errors, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what was coming in, what needed to be going out, and how he was situated more generally. That’s an oversimplification, but for these purposes, that will do.
Except, I was entering a world I had so far largely avoided. All of his regular bills wanted him to go to electronic payments, and paperless billing. My wife and I had avoided credit cards until the point when you could not get a rental car or hotel room without them, and until very recently, we used them sparingly. And on the “other end” of life, I’d had many occasions as a pastor to commend to younger couples the “cash envelope” approach to household management, which I’m not going to outline in detail other than to say it boils down to having a budget based on reality, then cashing your paycheck, sorting cash into envelopes, and sticking to the cold hard reality of “what’s left in that envelope.”
So my experience with my father-in-law was bracing in two directions. One was realizing that the “cash envelope” approach was increasingly unrealistic in 2022, when most people aren’t carrying cash let alone a checkbook, and credit card swipes or taps are the new normal — something COVID helped turbocharge. How would I counsel a struggling younger family today to manage their finances? That needed rethinking.
And as I converted all of my father-in-law’s household expenses to electronic, paperless accounts, it occurred to me: how the dickens would I help reconstruct the finances of an anxious, indebted 94 year old today, if they had gone down this road, then came to me? Not that it would be impossible, but it would at minimum be different, and in some ways harder. Plus there’s a nervous tension about handing someone (pastor or otherwise) a stack of personal papers . . . and I’m sure there have been some occasions where the final conversation didn’t happen because of the hesitation around that last revelatory handover. How does this pastoral process work if you have to turn over passwords, and let someone look at your accounts with access in that way?
The quick dismissal of this aside would be to say, as some have pointed out to me already: ministers shouldn’t get involved in this stuff. The moment money issues come up, make a referral to a professional, just as you would with diagnosable mental health issues. That’s another discussion for another time — I’ve drawn the line at refusing to become a guardian or to manage accounts even indirectly, but I know clergy who’ve done that for parishioners who don’t have other options. We all draw these lines in different places. ‘Nuff said (for now).
Where the online accounting line of thought took me, though, was into the reality I’ve seen at five of the last six churches I’ve visited or preached at recently, with the offering time entirely “verbal,” as in no passing of offering plates at all during the service. I get how it happened, from the COVID restrictions to concern about viral spread, all reinforced by a long-developing problem with getting enough people mobile and agile enough to do the physical side of passing the plates. (Not passing communion through the pews is a parallel discussion for another day.) The default is now to online and electronic giving.
That is going to continue to be a primary means for some time, because the old check-centric model of offering envelopes and weekly donations is gone. A financial services website noted helpfully that the high-water mark for paying by check came “(i)n 1979 (with) 86 percent of all payments were made by check—33 billion checks to be exact. The number of annual checks written peaked in 1995, with 49.5 billion.” That’s now down so sharply as to be trending to zero in just a few years, though it may be bumping along for some time at near-zero, as late adopters muddle on with checkbooks, as did my father-in-law until 2022. We’ll come back to these numbers more recently towards the end.
Meanwhile, the new normal is a “subscription model” for donations: you know, the “just $19 a month” automatic giving that TV non-profit ads and mass mailers love so much, where you get a fleece throw or a printed certificate, and the money just quietly and silently vanishes without any further effort on your part, whether you think about it or not.
Which is my problem. I do not love “sustaining gifts” or “authorized withdrawals” or any other ways to put lipstick on that pig, because the key is that you don’t have to think, you don’t even know after a while, for this giving to keep going. No initiative, no motivation (after the initial authorization) , no consciousness. Does this sound like stewardship to you?
I get the upside. No lost gifts if someone goes on vacation, or if they are snowbirds; you don’t sweat a string of bad weather Sunday mornings knocking the month’s fiscal report into a deficit that the board will get all angsty over. Having a big chunk of your giving income on automatic smooths out variables and should tend to support increased giving over time . . . add in that people travel more, and miss church more often these days, and the arguments for automatic withdrawals are legion. (Heh.)
Now, one argument I make against myself — you argue with yourself, don’t you? — in not liking this is that the way we’ve always known offering in worship is not, in fact, how we’ve always done things. Shocking, I know. This is where history can be, if not a corrective, at least a counterweight. Knowing how we’ve done basic operations and functions in church life can help us get out of ruts, especially non-productive ruts, once we can see clearly that even if something has been true all of our own lives, that’s not the same as always.
Looking at American Midwest Protestant Christianity (note the four qualifiers I’m using here), I can identify four particular if broad eras. In the last two hundred years, we’ve gone through the following phases of how church folk support their local congregation:
1810-1860 The era of barter and exchange
The stories of how we built our first church buildings drives this point home. Just up the road from me, as a leading congregation of our community then and now was building their first non-log building in 1816: “Mr. Harris started with a [subscription] paper, seeking aid from any and all… The result was a subscription which finally reached $6,000 — in trade. Corn, in trade, was worth 25 c. a bushel, but to buy cash goods, or pay cash debts, it was worth only half that sum. At the same time nails cost 22 c. and 25 c. a pound, and glass $20 a box. So it took two bushels of corn to pay for a pound of nails, and 160 bushels of corn to buy a box of glass. On this basis a building committee was appointed, of whom were Azariah Bancroft and Augustine Munson. The subscriptions were paid in timbers for the frame, lumber, labor or ought else that men could furnish.”
Another account from the same period noted “From 1818 to 1822 money was exceedingly scarce and produce low. The inhabitants had to live chiefly on what they were able to raise and manufacture themselves. Business of most kinds was conducted by exchanging one article for another. It was next to impossible to get money to pay debts. About this time a stay law was enacted by the legislature which virtually suspended the forced collections of debt for some time. Produce would scarcely pay enough for transportation to any market that was accessible… The prices of some articles of produce, about that time, were about as follows: Wheat, twenty-five to thirty-seven and one-half cents per bushel; oats and com, from twelve and one half to twenty cents; flour, from one dollar to one dollar and twenty-five cents per hundred weight; pork, one dollar and fifty cents to two dollars; chickens, thirty-seven and one-half to fifty cents per dozen, butter, six to eight cents per pound; eggs, three to four cents per dozen; country sugar, six to eight cents per pound; country molasses fifty cents per gallon (no foreign sugar or molasses to be had); coffee, when obtainable, about fifty cents, and tea two dollars and fifty cents to three dollars per pound. Salt retailed for three dollars and fifty cents per bushel; whiskey, twenty-five cents per gallon; potatoes and turnips, twelve and one-half to sixteen cents per bushel, and other articles in proportion. Even at these prices money could not be obtained freely for them, there being no other than a home market. Merchandise and goods of all kinds could be obtained only with great difficulty. The stores were bare of the real necessaries for the people, and all had to depend on their own resources.”
I know, that was long, but I love this stuff. And you can see: there’s no money to speak of. When you had it, you held onto it for emergencies. These are the roots of preachers being paid in turnips (and I got paid a bonus once in turnips for supply preaching, it can still happen). People had coins, but even those were husbanded cautiously: shave and a haircut? “Two bits” are two of eight pie shaped pieces cut from a dollar coin, what we’d call a quarter today. As in, a quarter of a dollar’s circumference.
And collections were not a regular part of early worship. They happened, but more in the business meeting of the congregation than as a regular part of weekly services. Because few had anything to put in an offering plate.
1870-1920 The era of cash
The Civil War was the actual beginning of federal paper money. Paper money existed before 1860, but they were banknotes, issued by individual banks, and liable to collapse and loss of value, or least be challenged if you traveled far away from the originating financial institution. The Federal Government went to war against the Southern secession government, and that was a conflict of both men and material . . . including the battle of U.S. greenbacks versus “Confederate money.” The lasting echo worthlessness embodied by “the crackle of Confederate money” in our culture reminds you who lost.
During the war, and in the decades after, paper currency became a standard that helped bring the country back together, and was a new normal for compensation. A pay envelope at the end of the month was filled with cash. And it was in the 1880 neighborhood you start to see offering plates become a standard part of church furnishings, because by this time, most people had paper money in their pockets, at least right after payday. Pew rents had been an annual means to raise the budget for a church, but after the Civil War, pew rents fell out of favor (they had been protested by some like the Free Methodists and other before 1860) and were rarely in effect by 1900.
1920-1970 The era of paychecks
Two issues are in play through this era. The first is the shift from pay envelopes, with cash in them and a pay stub to account for our withholding and such, to actual pay checks. This adds a layer of deposit and withdrawal to the capacity of an individual worker to give of their income, but they regularly would cash their checks and have money to put in the plate. We also see in this era the arrival in 1940 of the first Social Security checks, meaning seniors began to become a meaningful segment of givers in a church. This too is a subject for a whole ‘nother essay, but before about 1940, it was rare for retiree age people to be elders or deacons, and I infer on multiple bases that it was not common for elderly people to give unless they were well-to-do: the giving base was the wage earning worker.
The second issue is where I have to offer up an even more unsupported hypothesis which is still being tested and researched by yours truly. But I have seen in old congregational records the fact that, among my own Disciples of Christ, in the 1910s & 1920s, the amounts a family gave to the church was quite often public knowledge. Public, as in posted on a bulletin board in the back of the sanctuary. This is an approach we can’t even imagine today — and that’s where my historical hypothesization comes in.
Somehow, this practice changed, and changed dramatically. I mean, DRAMATICALLY. The only church life I’ve ever known is where the amount a family or individual gave was more secret than the confessionals we didn’t have. Breaching that confidentiality was a firing offense, for lay or clergy office holders. Why? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that question addressed even obliquely. It just is. How much we give is between us and God. Oh, and the counters, who in every church I’ve ever served say loudly and often “we don’t even look at . . . we aren’t interested in how much people give . . . we never tell our spouses what we see.” Sometimes, methinks they doth protest too much. Anyhow, as a parish minister, I can personally testify, the information is kept very closely, and in truth I’ve not known nor tried to know what people give.
But the manic confidentiality impulse is so strong I’ve consistently gotten resistance and pushback from even getting blind, cohort-sized information about giving units and amounts or even trends. What is up with that? No other non-profit works on the level of willful blindness that most congregations insist on.
My strong suspicion is it has to do with . . . the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA, no not that one) of FDR’s early administration, with a “blue eagle” logo. Holding a gear in one talon and lightning bolts in the other — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration — the NRA eagle in a shop window meant the business was supporting the “We Do Our Part” ethos of the government’s attempt to fight the Great Depression. The NRA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, leading to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) which still continues, as amended.
It was a HUGE political fight, but the point was FDR’s administration was attempting to impose, or nudge a volunteer participation, in wage and price controls. It was as partisan as anything going on today, with a serious division between Republican Party supporters and Democratic Party adherents, the latter including most union members who were largely “all in” for the NRA Eagle and federal wage & price controls. In fact, the ball started rolling with Herbert Hoover (R-Iowa) signing a Revenue Act in 1932 which put a two cent tax on each paycheck, intended to fund responses to the Depression economy, but considered by some economists to have hurt employment and increased inflation (sound familiar?).
The point here is that we had with the rise of the NLRB a sharp increase in collective bargaining agreements, and alongside those usually union-negotiated contracts, there came a very strong management driven push for . . . wait for it . . . salary confidentiality.
It doesn’t take a militantly progressive viewpoint to see where management would want salary confidentiality. It serves their purposes both in fighting off unionization, and dealing with union pressures to improve compensation; sadly, unions would support this trend, because what they’d work out in the collective bargaining agreement wouldn’t always make everyone happy, so they had a vested interest themselves in keeping talk about who made what to a minimum. Interestingly, salary confidentiality continues to be an American norm, but never has been law. In fact, it’s been litigated to the Supreme Court, and it’s illegal to forbid employees to share salary information. But in general, we don’t, because management in general has long discouraged the practice. (I’ve been told in some work places “it’s the law” and friends, it is not.)
You can see where I can’t prove it, but I’m quite certain: the shift in church life around knowing how much people give is tied to a major shift in American labor relations in knowing how much other employees make. The timing simply can’t be a coincidence.
Add in the fact that in places like Ohio the growth of Disciples membership during this period was strongly focused in union strongholds (especially in the greater Cleveland area), and you can see how some of these labor tensions in the workplace around compensation might be playing out in church stewardship expectations.
1970-2020 The era of electronic transfers
Quietly, while most of us had gotten accustomed to receiving paychecks and not pay envelopes (containing cash) in the previous era, the means of transfer of funds had been getting more and more automated: by necessity. There were simply too many paper checks to be handled manually. Those odd characters on the bottom of a check? That’s technology that began in 1951; a skilled check processor could handle (I have read) about 250 checks an hour by hand, but automated systems quickly showed they could accurately handle thousands a minute. As the volume of checks increased in the economy, electronic funds transfers became invaluable.
And in a practical aspect of paychecks to fund access, this from a data-processing company’s website:
“In the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. employers encouraged workers to have their weekly wages paid directly into a bank account. Paper paychecks were more secure than cash, but they created traffic jams at local bank branches as people waited to withdraw their wages.
The use of paper checks — including paychecks — plummeted as the adoption of electronic bank transfers increased and the use of debit cards rose. In the United States, check payments accounted for almost 80% of all purchases in 1995 but fell to about 45% in 2004 and just 7% in 2017.”
Meanwhile, most churches were trying to hold onto the passed offering plates, the offering envelope system of regular giving, and processing paper checks . . . and may I note, paying more each year for the privilege. I would point this out at each of my last few church positions, in contrast to the objection that electronic giving usually comes with fees, sometimes an upfront cost with a lower percent to the frequent 3.5% per transaction charge. For many years, the point could be made that the paper check processing fee was still less than an ideal 2% processing change for e-gifts, but those lines have been converging for some time. When COVID took a whack at our common use of a roomful of volunteer counters to process the offering each Sunday, the lines effectively crossed, in my opinion anyhow.
The aforementioned debit and credit card use rate took off as fast food drive up windows and even high school sports concession stands began to accept cards, and with COVID even to discourage cash. Handling cash is both labor intensive, and a “risk factor” from a management point of view. Taking cash out of the retail equation is an initiative that was building up well before 2020, and had been seen in a variety of settings. COVID simply confirmed and solidified long-standing trends to get away from cash in most financial transactions.
2020 - ???? The new era of giving and offering
I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say we are all, in church life, still finding our way. Some churches are bringing back a moment for passing offering plates, with new customs. I’ve seen laminated cards in the pews which people can take out of a holder and use as their “donation” to indicate they’ve given electronically — just to offer a kinesthetic action to the worshiper. Similarly, I’ve been in churches where the custom is to simply touch the plate, with a smile, indicating support while not putting an object in the offering. That felt better than I thought from a distance, a means of participation that is not nothing.
For those calling for a return to everyone making a commitment to placing an actual gift in an offering plate, I would humbly ask “why?” Yes, it’s what I grew up with, too. It had a spiritual discipline to it, and a personal meaning, with all sorts of memories tied to the act of placing a dollar or an envelope into the plate as it passed. So does the act of writing a check, but I’m not doing that very often. I learned how to make change on my paper route, too, with a cool belt device you clicked and sifted coins into your hand to give in exchange for the crisp bills at the door. They don’t have paperboys anymore, either.
But as I hope this exercise has demonstrated, there’s no enduring Christian mandate to put coins or cash or checks into trays passed along the pews. That practice has a history, but it is tied to the local economy and how financial matters are normally handled by average citizens. We had coins or specie, but it was rare, and giving was more an annual thing. Then we got cash, and began what we think of as “traditional” offering during worship; a cash economy and better organizational methods created the offering envelope system which was closely allied to the rise of both checks, and confidentiality around those amounts.
The most recent era was, quite frankly, marked by our attempts in church life to maintain older forms as the economy was transforming, in banking and retail and compensation mechanisms, to electronic means. Some are complaining we’ve let COVID change how we do business, but it simply forced through some shifts that had been building up for quite some time. We “all” had credit cards before COVID, and Girl Scouts were selling cookies with card readers on sidewalks well before 2020.
It’s been a shock to me, I will admit, to see all manner of homegrown, local event transactions go “cashless.” But on reflection, it’s where we’ve been heading for a while. You simply can’t rent a car with cash now, and I would be nervous about any motel that would take cash only. Fast food is moving to apps and kiosks to reduce staffing because they’re struggling to fill positions as it is, and the barriers to electronic payment (think about those Girl Scouts with Thin Mints) are much lower in practice.
The remaining barrier is psychological.
I’ll own my own psychological barriers first. I do not like automatic anything. It offends my need to have control. I can justify it at length, if need be, but it’s a desire to manage and monitor expenditures in a society that subtly and openly encourages us to consume without thinking, without reflecting. I do not want to support that sort of consumerism. This is why the subscription model — and I subscribe to a large number of news and informational outlets! — is worrisome to me. It represents a not-mindful approach to stewardship which I believe is directly in contradiction to the sort of spiritual discipline giving can be.
For the same reason, I’ve puzzled many congregational leaders in multiple churches I’ve served in disliking and not actively encouraging “loyalty programs.” This is where the church gets a kickback (okay, slanted language, or is it?) on purchases made by members who go through a business or brand’s loyalty card if you set it up for that. Brick and mortar and online retailers have loyalty programs, and I dislike them all for faith communities. Some do a “Church Day” or week where “come in and we give x% of all our income to the church of your choice.”
The issue, to me, is in the name. It’s a loyalty program. The business goal is to do business, and in a market economy where people could shop at one business or another, they’re looking for an edge, for loyalty, to drive past one place you could buy goods or services and go to the place to which you are loyal. And the price of your loyalty? It’s to trade on your loyalty to your faith — to co-opt it, quite specifically, in service to buying one product and not another. It is NOT something I’ve ever said “get thee hence” to or absolutely forbidden, I just don’t pastorally feel like I want my ministry of Good News to include “and remember to shop at Macy’s.” God loves Gimbel’s and Wanamaker’s, you know? Put me with Kris Kringle on this one.
Okay, that’s me. My issues. Now for the church.
I think there’s a strong correlation between how a church is adopting and deploying technology in general with how they make use of modern means of giving. A church that dislikes and corporately resists screens and online messaging is also one that wants people to write checks and put them in envelopes to place in a plate on Sunday morning. There’s not much more for me to say here. If the ethos of worship is closely held to hymnbooks and organ music and a printed bulletin, I would expect the norms of stewardship to still hold to signing up new recurring givers to receive a box of offering envelopes.
There is a great deal I continue to love about traditional worship, and even pipe organs. Where I worry is how a congregation that might have some vision and intentional stewardship in their makeup might let some of these cultural factors obstruct opening up paths to encouraging new forms of giving, which in many cases may be the only way people can give. Younger adults often do not have checks, and are not going to be interested in getting them simply to support a means of giving that’s alien to them, and not central to the Gospel. Paying by card is something I have personal concerns about, but there’s no moral basis for refusing to accept donations through those means; interest payments when you are carrying a balance represents an ethical question for personal stewardship, but on the recipient end of giving, we take checks from people with huge mortgages.
I’ll move to a conclusion by picking up an observation from earlier here. There have been fellow clergy express surprise that I have ended up working with parishioners through financial messes. To some degree, I believe that happens because I try to talk regularly, and broadly, about stewardship in the widest possible sense as one of the core disciplines of Christian life. Those choices and responses in how we make use of the gifts we’ve been given have to be seen in the light of the Gospel as soaked in forgiveness and grace, even if the banking system doesn’t feel the same way. So I think people have felt I’m a safe place to admit they’re in a crisis, and that to me is a positive sign. The caution in general is, if I’m right about this, if a church does comprehensive and healthy discussion around stewardship, you will have people come in feeling freed to admit “I may not be perfect here, in fact I’m a mess; help me do better.” And yes, many cases call for a good lawyer, and I know where that line is. But the journey towards that line often calls for a first step, and at church may be where some will find the ability to make that initial move.
This is where my only real advice around giving and congregational life and finance is: we have to talk about it. Openly, honestly, and with a bit of a view towards how we got where we are. Some of the history around how church members have given and used to contribute to the work of their congregation can open up the limitations of our current “normal” methods.
If we talk about finances, we will hear about problems, and we need to be ready to either help, direct to resources which are in line with our basic moral and ethical assumptions as a faith community, or to bring on board some assistance to respond both gracefully, and professionally. This is where the Center for Faith & Giving out of the Office of General Minister and President, for my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (other church traditions have their own similar offices, even if they’re not as good), or our Christian Church Foundation staff, can be of great help. They have been for me.
For how a particular church should handle their giving, and in what directions they should be promoting donations, so much depends on that local, immediate history. If 90+% of the congregation has been giving by check, you’re not going to shift the whole membership overnight, nor should you. On the other hand, you need to get some finance team members and good advisers looking at what the current income streams actually are — because a church treasurer can say “all our members and almost all our income is from offering envelopes,” but that doesn’t mean it’s true. It may well mean it’s what they think it true, but eras change. Technologies shift, and methods of giving can turn on a dime if the ways your donors receive money and compensation change.
In the end, that’s what’s key. A searching and fearless inventory, as some wise friends say, of where your church folk get their fiscal resources from, and how that points you towards how you can help them make stewardship part of their Christian walk. If you are taking Bible reading to recorded texts they can listen to on a long commute, and offering multiple services to meet family schedules, but push people into a single mode of giving that’s not in line with their usual financial practices, you have your stewardship ministries misaligned with the rest of your ministries.
Giving is naturally, and appropriately, going to follow getting. How our fellow Christians are getting their resources, in practical terms, is going to at least point towards how they’re likely to give them.
Offering is an element of worship that I don’t see going away, and it shouldn’t, but it does have to change. We might as well demand our worshipers put cut pieces of Spanish silver dollars into the offering plate as maintain some more recent “how we’ve always done it” methods. Two bits, written out signed checks, Confederate money . . . they’re all means to an end, not a Biblical mandate in the bunch. Pew rents aren’t coming back either, thank the Lord.
Meanwhile, I’m less concerned with how people choose to give to their local church or to wider missional causes, than I am with how we can articulate a consistent ethic of stewardship in our preaching and teaching as Christian communities. That’s my real interest in all of this, more than supporting the annual budget (let the budget bury its own line items).
Our economy is steadily shifting to a so-called frictionless, invisible, automatic system of payments. To some degree, I want us to find ways to throw some loving sand in those gears, to degrease a mechanism or two to make them squeal, and even to stick a holy monkey wrench in the works. How we make use of the gifts we’ve been given, whether earned or inherited or won in the lottery, is a calling of God. We call it stewardship, then try to stuff it into the locking blue sack that goes to the night depository of the bank. Stewardship is much more than money or budgets or even offering.
Stewardship is how we live, and how we spend. Giving is the one form of spending we should be most aware of, most conscious about, most mindfully engaged in. If we can give with a godly awareness, it might just help us spend more intentionally as well. That’s the offering I’m looking for.
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Footnotes:
https://archive.org/details/oh-licking-1881-graham/page/441/mode/2up?q=Wing+&view=theater
https://archive.org/details/historyofgranvil00bush_0/page/110/mode/2up?q=Harris&view=theater
https://fin.plaid.com/articles/checking-out-a-brief-history-of-checks/
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-national-recovery-administration-2/