Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands

Author:H.W. Brands [Brands, H.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, non.fiction, biography
ISBN: 9780385519588
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2008-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

THE COURT’S VERDICT against the NRA, and especially the unanimity of the decision, dealt a mortal blow to the New Deal, at least as originally configured. Roosevelt had made industrial planning the centerpiece of his economic policy; the Schechter result negated the premises on which the planning rested. Conceivably Congress could have overseen code writing similar to that of the NRA. But only conceivably, for in the real world of politics, no code with any teeth could have passed muster with the legislature, which would have been lobbied to paralysis by the interested parties. If there were to be codes at all, they would have to be the work of the executive branch. And the Supreme Court now said this was unconstitutional.

Had the decision been close—by a vote of 5 to 4 or even 6 to 3—Roosevelt might have hoped for a reversal before he left office. Several of the justices were nearing retirement, or so he could reasonably expect. He would replace them with men more attuned to his philosophy of government, and all would be well. But the decisiveness of the defeat—even Louis Brandeis voted against the government—made clear that the problem ran deeper than the personnel of the court.

The rejection of the NRA cast the entire framework of American industrial relations into chaos. The seven hundred codes were presumptively illegitimate; the twenty million workers whose pay and conditions the codes covered were thrown back on the mercies of a capitalist marketplace that had treated them badly since the start of the depression. At the time of the Schechter decision, the Justice Department was prosecuting some four hundred cases of code violations. The court’s action compelled Roosevelt to drop the charges and abandon the prosecutions.

The Schechter decision was handed down on Monday, May 27. That same day the Supreme Court, by equally unanimous votes, demolished two other pillars of the New Deal. The decision in Louisville Bank v. Radford overturned the law that furnished mortgage relief to debt-strapped farmers. The verdict in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States disallowed Roosevelt’s removal of a member of the Federal Trade Commission and thereby severely constrained his ability to bring government agencies into line with his policies.

Black Monday, as Roosevelt’s supporters remembered the day of the conservative trifecta, seemed to halt the New Deal in its tracks. The conservatives had contended from the start that the extraordinary delegation of power to the president was not merely unwise but unconstitutional. They had lacked the votes in Congress to prevent it, but now they found the votes where they mattered more, in the Supreme Court. What made the anti–New Deal decisions so frustrating for Roosevelt was that they followed by mere months the New Deal’s ratification by the public, in the elections of 1934.

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