Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox: 1882–1940 by James MacGregor Burns

Author:James MacGregor Burns [Burns, James MacGregor]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781453245156
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

PART 4

The Lion at Bay

FIFTEEN

Court Packing: The Miscalculated Risk

WAS IT AN OMEN? The famous Roosevelt luck seemed to forsake the President on the January day in 1937 when he entered his second term. Bursts of cold rain soaked the gay inaugural decorations, furled the sodden flags around their staffs, and drenched dignitaries and spectators alike while they gathered below the Capitol rotunda. The rain drummed on the cellophane that covered Roosevelt’s old family Bible, as he stood with upraised hand facing Chief Justice Hughes.

They eyed each other, the old judge, his wet whiskers quivering in the wind, the resolute President, jaw stuck out. Hughes read the oath with slow and rising emphasis as he came to the words “promise to support the Constitution of the United States.” Roosevelt gave the words equal force as he repeated the oath. At this point, he said later, he wanted to cry out, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy—not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.”

The President turned to the rain-spattered pages of his inaugural address. “When four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision—to speed the time when there would be for all the people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.”

But the covenant “with ourselves” did not stop there. “Instinctively we recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.”

The rain poured down, dripped off Roosevelt’s bare head, dulled the cutting edge of some of his sentences. As the intricacies of human relationships increased, he said, so power to govern them also must increase—power to stop evil, power to do good. “The essential democracy of our Nation and the safety of our people depend not upon the absence of power, but upon lodging it with those whom the people can change or continue at stated intervals through an honest and free system of elections.” Did the Chief Justice, sitting a few feet away on the President’s right, catch the faint warning in the sentence?

The President was turning now to the future. “Shall we pause now and turn our back upon the road that lies ahead?” He looked at the crowd.

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