FDR v. the Constitution by Burt Solomon

Author:Burt Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2000-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Solid South, by and large, had accepted the New Deal, at least at first. Especially when the federal spigot opened, the poorest and most backward region of the country stood to gain more than it lost. But by 1935 or thereabouts, conservatives in the South and elsewhere had begun to feel that the New Deal "had gone far enough—or too far," as a historian recounted—and they worried that an expanded Court would make everything worse, by ridding the New Deal of its last constraint.

Conservatives, however, accounted for less than a fourth of the Senate's seventy-five Democrats, and to the dinners they shared around Millard Tydings's table, they invited some unlikely guests: Republicans. After the 1936 election, their presence in Congress had collapsed. The number of Republican senators had dwindled to sixteen, and on most issues they stood disunited—conservatives, mainly from New England and the Midwest, versus the handful of noisy progressives from the West. As a political force, they had perished, at least on their own, and they needed an instrument outside of themselves if they were to reunite and to restore their soul. The president's plan for the Court had supplied it.

Within weeks, the bipartisan dinners to chew over the Court bill led to bipartisan meetings and joint discussions of strategy. Soon a tactical collaboration began to jell into a heartfelt alliance. Historians would detect in the battle over the Supreme Court the birth of a congressional coalition between Republicans and conservative Democrats that would dominate the political dynamics in Washington for decades to follow. For the president, this raised the political stakes, but in a way that he welcomed. If he pushed his Court plan too forcefully, as a matter of party loyalty, it could provoke a realignment of the political parties into conservative and progressive groupings, possibly as early as 1940. The president had already confided to Harold Ickes, his interior secretary, that this was a prospect he savored.

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