Legacy: A Novel by Michener James A

Author:Michener, James A. [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780804151528
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Sam, You Can Make the Pants Longer or Shorter but You Better Not Charge More Than $2.50

‘My God,’ Grandfather shouted, slamming his paper to the floor. ‘Now he’s interfering in the work of tailors.’

And then, in his moments of apparent defeat, came triumph. It was a Supreme Court decision handed down in 1935 during the depth of the Depression, and it bore the curious title Schecter Poultry Corporation v. United States, and Grandfather claimed: ‘It’s the greatest case in the history of the United States. Saved this nation.’ And in later years I’ve found others who felt somewhat the same.

The facts were clear. N.R.A. officials appointed by Roosevelt, not Congress, had issued a regulation, not a legally passed law, saying that you could not move sick chickens from one state to sell in another. The Schecter people found the order somehow oppressive and refused to obey. They continued to move chickens, well or sick, from New Jersey and into New York, so they had to be arrested. The case went to the Supreme Court, which declared 9 to 0 that the whole N.R.A. was unconstitutional in that it allowed the President to enact law, rather than Congress.

Well, when I first heard this story about Grandfather, I could understand little and I suspected my parents might have the facts garbled, but when I later learned the interpretation Grandfather gave the case, I tended to agree with him. He went about Virginia telling everyone: ‘Roosevelt was a dictator, make no mistake about that, and the N.R.A. was his trick for fashioning chains of steel about our necks. Now, the history of the world is filled with cases in which dictators have used a temporary crisis to install illegal, crisis legislation. “The times demand it,” they bellow, but mark my words, when the crisis ends, the dictators never leave office. They hang around until they destroy their countries.

‘The miracle of the United States, we’ve just had our dictator, a dreadful man, but when the crisis was over we had an agency, put in place more than a century before, which could say: “Crisis is over. Hand back the reins. We play by the rules again.” Read about Cromwell in England. He came in just like Roosevelt, had many of the same kinds of laws. To get rid of him, they had to have a civil war. We did it with our Supreme Court.’

Roosevelt, outraged by the Schecter decision, which struck at his effort to restore the nation’s economy, retaliated petulantly. He tried to pack the Supreme Court with additional judges guaranteed to vote his way, and when Grandfather heard of this plot he went berserk. An old man, still living in Virginia when I went off to West Point, told me: ‘Your grandfather, always a patriot, assembled a group of us who knew something about politics, and we toured the South lambasting F.D.R. as a dictator and calling for impeachment. Your grandfather was especially effective, for he could shout at the crowds: “My

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