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so much happened that it seems like a five or ten year period in retrospect, although it was only a year and a few months. The pace of the NRA and the pace of the public support for the NRA was so great that it made it all seem like a longer period.

There was a tremendous enthusiasm for the NRA. Even up in country villages like Franconia, New Hampshire they had their NRA committees. They were all worked up about it. Everybody was enthusiastic. The enthusiasm, the excitement and the pace was so great that it tended to push an administrator of the temperament of Hugh Johnson into a series of actions that were almost greater both in number and in content than anyone could digest, or could fully understand. In other words, the pressure of the work behind him was so great that he tended to fly rather than to walk soberly to his objectives.

All this had a very deleterious effect upon Johnson as a personality, because he got nervous and tense, and moving so rapidly that he had to live on his nerves. He was always endowed with a strong imagination. Whatever sober administrative talents he might have had didn't have time to harness and control this imagination as they might have if the pace could have been slower. Also, of course, the adulation which he received was, I think, a factor in his own confusions. He had not been accustomed to adulation.