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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Old Regime
- Part II Early Progressivism
- Part III Late Progressivism
- Part IV The New Deal
- 18 The Hundred Days
- 19 To the Brink
- 20 The Second New Deal
- 21 The Court Fight
- 22 The Abortive Third New Deal
- 23 The New Deal Court
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Primary Sources
- Index
- References
22 - The Abortive Third New Deal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Old Regime
- Part II Early Progressivism
- Part III Late Progressivism
- Part IV The New Deal
- 18 The Hundred Days
- 19 To the Brink
- 20 The Second New Deal
- 21 The Court Fight
- 22 The Abortive Third New Deal
- 23 The New Deal Court
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Primary Sources
- Index
- References
Summary
THE COURT-PACKING REVIVAL
Roosevelt persisted in his effort to expand and pack the Supreme Court despite the Court’s reversals and the opening of Van Devanter’s seat. Roosevelt worried that the conversion of Hughes and Roberts might not last – that the justices espoused an expedient “shotgun liberalism,” as The Nation put it. Roosevelt had good reason to doubt the permanence of the switch. The Court had vacillated on minimum wages, making a permanent settlement of that issue hard to believe. Nobody could tell that Parrish meant the end of economic due process forevermore. Many lower courts had interpreted the Court’s earlier liberal decisions (Nebbia and Blaisdell) narrowly, and might do likewise with the Wagner Act cases, particularly since the latter were more unprecedented than the former. Hughes’s evasion of old precedents made even the Jones & Laughlin victory uncertain. Justice Roberts did revert to a more conservative position in the years after his switch. Above all, Roosevelt wanted more than just victories, by margins narrow or wide. As court-packing chroniclers Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge put it, “he wanted a Court which would ‘cooperate’ with the White House. He needed six new justices who would be friendly and approachable, men with whom he could confer,” such as those on the New York Court of Appeals. The craftiness of the court-packing plan has obscured the political philosophy that Roosevelt brought to the fight. His repeated stress on the Court’s failure to “pull in tandem” in the “three-horse team” of the federal government served as a homely metaphor for a deeper, Wilsonian view of the Constitution. Roosevelt rejected the separation-of-powers, checks-and-balances basis of the Constitution for a cooperative, organic one – the Newtonian for the Darwinian basis of politics, as Wilson had put it. Such constitutional safeguards had become unnecessary in a fully democratic America.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The American State from the Civil War to the New DealThe Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism, pp. 296 - 309Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013