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This article explains FDR’s plan for the Court and then goes a good deal deeper. This unnamed journalist pointed out that these frustrations were not new to the executive office. Earlier presidents had similar dustups in 1823, 1869 and 1900.
The attached article was written by FDR himself, and in it he explains the ‘court crises’ (as he called it) quite clearly. On page five, he eloquently lays out his plan for the Supreme Court.
When FDR sat down and planned whose voice on the Supreme Court he would most like to nullify, it wasn’t always that of Justice Van Devanter. Although Willis Van Devanter was a conservative, he was a thoughtful jurist who was known to, from time-to-time, vote in support of some of the New Deal legislation.
Justice Pierce Butler “was born in a log hut near Northfield, Minn., on St. Patrick’s Day, 1866… Butler believes in few laws and little regulation because he himself grew up under a system of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
Bingo! Justice James Clark McReynolds was the stick-in-the-mud FDR wished to have disappeared from the court. This journalist observed that McReynolds “seemed to regard himself as the last Bulwark of a social order which Woodrow Wilson deemed too antiquated in 1914”. Indeed, he was cranky and crusty and disliked Jews and black people equally and didn’t seem to care who knew it.
Oldest and most consistently liberal of the justices is Louis Brandeis. Together with the three younger members of the court – Roberts, Cardozo and Stone – Brandeis has frequently seen eye to eye with the objectives of the present administration.
Attached is a three-and-a-half-page summation of Associate Justice George Sutherland and the various cases he heard while sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It has been pointed out that a number of cases in which Justice Hughes (1862 – 1948) sided with Liberals have involved civil liberties. On this phase of liberalism, Hughes has consistently upheld traditional American freedoms…”
Attached is an article by James A. Farley (1888 – 1976), who in 1933 was appointed by F.D.R. to serve as both the Postmaster General as well as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. During the Thirties, Farley was also FDR’s go-to-guy in all matters involving politics on Capitol Hill, and he wrote the attached article two years after Roosevelt’s death in order to explain how the Court-packing scheme was received in Congress and how his relationship with FDR soon soured.
Boss, I asked him, why didn’t you advise the senators in advance that you were sending them the Court bill?
Jim, I just couldn’t, he answered earnestly. I didn’t want to have it get to the press prematurely…
