FDR and Chief Justice Hughes by James F. Simon

Author:James F. Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Frankfurter and other New Dealers did not have long to wait to learn how the justices might rule on the historic legislation. On November 8, the Hughes Court heard arguments in a constitutional challenge to the Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium Act of 1933, a measure that had been rushed through the Minnesota legislature to provide temporary relief to the tens of thousands of homeowners who faced foreclosure in the state. The Minnesota law, like most major New Deal legislation, was conceived as an emergency measure. It was passed under duress in April 1933 by lawmakers who deliberated while several thousand farmers, threatened with the loss of their homes, milled restlessly outside the legislative chamber. The governor, meanwhile, issued an executive order directing all sheriffs to refrain from conducting foreclosure sales until the legislative session had ended.

Six months later, the justices calmly listened to the constitutional challenge to the state law made by the attorney for Minnesota’s Home Building and Loan Association, which held the defaulted mortgage of John and Rosala Blaisdell. Under the mortgage moratorium statute, the Blaisdells had been given an additional two years to make good on their mortgage payments. The state law was unconstitutional, the mortgage company’s attorney argued, because Article I of the Constitution forbade any state to pass a law “impairing the obligation of contracts.” Like earlier challenges under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Blaisdell case invited the justices to answer an essential question of constitutional interpretation: Does the Constitution allow a state to pass economic legislation for the general welfare of its citizens even though it may impinge upon private contract or property rights?

Chief Justice Hughes answered the question affirmatively for a narrow 5–4 Court majority that included Roberts and the three liberals (Brandeis, Cardozo, and Stone). His opinion focused on the dire economic circumstances surrounding the emergency legislation. “While an emergency does not create power,” he wrote, “an emergency may furnish the occasion for the exercise of the power.” Just as a state may act to give temporary relief to citizens devastated by a natural disaster such as a fire, flood, or earthquake, he reasoned, it may meet an urgent public need produced by an economic depression. Earlier Court decisions, he observed, confirmed that “there has been a growing appreciation of public needs and of the necessity of finding ground for a rational compromise between individual rights and public welfare.” He emphasized that the Minnesota statute did not destroy the agreement between the mortgagee and the Blaisdells, but only modified the conditions to accommodate the economic reality of the depression. Finally, he responded to Justice Sutherland’s charge in dissent that the Court majority had disregarded the Framers’ intent. “It is no answer to say that this public need was not apprehended a century ago,” he wrote, “or to insist that what the provision of the Constitution meant to the vision of that day it must mean to the vision of our time.”

Great political significance was attached to Hughes’s opinion in the press and especially the fact that the Chief Justice had joined the Court’s liberals.

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