Show here Is president roosevelt s own nv w n story 0 r y tells of fight for supreme court reform A biffi am y t I 1 1 7 d 1 3 r ARM 11 V 4 q A AMP the nine justi justices that constituted the supreme court it the time feb 5 1937 president roosevelt firt made mil his i proposals for changing ch the th high tribunals tribunal organization they thear The yr are left to right front rows louis D rl randel willis ills van devanter chief justlee charles charle evans hughes james 0 and george sutherland back bi row left to rights owen J roberts alerce Pl erce butler harlan F Stone and be nj am in N cardozo by special arran arrangement gemeni with colliers weekly arid and western newspaper union this newspaper presents in condensed tonn form aser a series lesof of four articles by president roosevelt currently appearing in enthat that magazine the articles are taken from the presidents newly written introductions to forthcoming volumes of his state papers the first condensed below contains the presidents own story of the fight for supreme court reform THE FIGHT GOES ON the constitution prevails by franklin D roosevelt copyright C ight 1941 by franklin D roosevelt roos it nd by the browell crowell cailler publishing Pub lishin is company I 1 HIS was the year of the fa THIS supreme court fight 1837 1937 this was the year which marked a definite turning point in the history ot of the united states for this was the year which was wall to determine whether the kind of government which the people ot of the united states had bad voted for in 1932 1931 1934 and ad 1936 was to be permitted by the supreme court to function if it had not been permitted to function as a democracy it is my reasoned opinion that there would have been great danger that it might have been ultimately compelled to give way to some allen alien type of govern ament irs the vala vain hope that the new form of government might be able to give the average men and women the protection and operative cooperative co assistance si al which they had the right to expect for tivit that reason I 1 regard the effort initiated by the message on the federal judiciary of february 5 1937 and the immediate results result of it as among the most important domes bornes tie tic achievements of my first two terms in office for or two decades the supreme court court of the united states had been successfully thwarting the common will of the overwhelming mijo majority rity of 0 f the american people and had been diverting the functions and philosophy philo s ophy of government into channels which ran counter to the thought and objectives of progressive opinions throughout the modern civilized world the big choice before the amerlean american people in 1932 had been to determine whether they should continue the old type of adamini administration or install a new one definitely corn com bitted to the proposition that federal government had not only the power but the duty auty to step in to meet with bold action the economic forces at play the people had made their choice in 1932 and had emphasized it in 1934 by the time of the election of 1938 however it had become clear that this new concept of government and of its relation to economic and r social ocial problems was in danger of 0 complete frustration and the road ahead for further or even dl different ff erent effective effect lye action to meet these problems seemed to be completely blocked for a dead hand was being laid upon ulon this whole program of af progress to stay it all it was the hand of the supreme court of the united states I 1 the executive and legislative branches of the government had gone into action immediately in 1933 but they soon found that athwart the path of progress along which they were moving a majority of the supreme court of the united states was erecting a barrier which it was impossible to climb over under or around true not everything had bad been destroyed by judicial flat but the whole question of the power of the federal government to handle these problems in an effective decisive way had been placed not only anly in doubt but in positive jeopardy in the struggle between the political power of the people as expressed by their representatives and the economic power of private property the supreme court in the generation preceding the spring of 1037 1937 seemed almost invariably to lean toward the latter NOTABLE EVENT A series of articles by the president of the be united states is a notable event in journalism seldom has any newspaper had an opportunity to publish anything under the name of any president while the present series of artiles articles c Is of historical rather than of current moment it Is a notable whistles contribution con both to history and journalism this newspaper publishes the he artle articles 1 es without bias as to the opinions contained in the them M and the judicial process was being more and more frequently exercised by the court to lay low the efforts of government to meet the pressing needs of the times in which it was functioning in the first 70 years of our constitutional history the court invalidated only two acts of the congress in the next 70 years it nullified 58 between 1920 and 1930 it declared 19 federal statutes unconstitutional to climax this growth the court in the three years beginning in october 1933 2933 set aside 12 statutes five of which occurred in a single court year october 1935 I 1 hive have already discussed in the introduction to the 1935 volume the more important supreme court cases involving new deal legislation recapitulation will show how hopeless it looked by the time I 1 started the so called supreme court fight on february 5 1937 th that a t any really effective legislative program could the assaults being made by the judicial branch of the government the first major blow had come in january 1935 our efforts to remove chaos from rom the third largest industry in the country petroleum were struck down the olles producing states stat had been unable individually to meet the problems which came from overproduction of oil wasteful competition and consequent bankruptcy prices only the national government could save the industry it proceeded to try to do it pursuant to congressional statute it prescribed quotas of oil for each oll oil producing state and permitted each state to prescribe fair quotas for each well within its boundaries it then prohibited any interstate shipments of hot oil that Is oil produced in excess of these quotas the states alone could themselves never nevee have prevented these interstate shipments the decision of the court however was that the statute was unconstitutional as a delegation of legislative power to the president this was the first time that a federal statute had ever been nullified on such puch a ground but unfortunately it was not to be the last this new doctrine nowhere specifically mentioned in the constitution added much doubt and perplexity to framing all future legislation some delegation is of course necessary if government is to function at all but neither from the words of the constitution nor from the mouth of the court came any standards to fix the amount of delegation permissible the next decisions were on the question of the governments power to abrogate geld clauses in private and public contracts these decisions therefore involved the entire control by the congress of the currency of the united states and the whole gold and silver policy of the duly elected government this policy was to a great extent the basis of the recovery program the means means used to bring order out of chaos in foreign 6 exchange change and domestic currency andio and to remake the unfair debt structure then in existence it can well be said that in these decisions the court was passing on the validity ot of the whole american economy which had bad been accepted by the business and financial world almost universally since the enactment of the statute a year and a halt earlier and which was then in process of adaptation to the changing world economy the congressional action was sustained as to private contracts but only by a five to four vote it was mas held invalid as to public obligations but by technical legalistic reasoning the dabas disastrous arous trous results of such a holding were avoided by a conclusion that no actual damage had bad been proved even as to this conclusion four of the nine justices disagreed by the slim margin of one human being this avery very foundation of our recovery had been upheld what a slim thread on which to hang the fate of a nation then came oil all in one day may 27 1935 a unanimous decision that the frazier lemke act designed to help farm mortgagors was unconstitutional a unanimous decision that the president could not remove a federal trade commissioner although in ars an earlier case in 1926 the court had stated that the executive could coul remove ariy any off officer leethe he coul could ap appoint pa 6 t even one oab with q si unanimous powers and a unanimous decision that the national industrial recovery act was unconstitutional this last decision was the most far reaching it again invoked the shadowy doctrine of unlawful delegation of powers to the executive it if the court had stopped here its job would have veen been done and the damage would not have been wholly irreparable but it went farther and held that the statute and the code making power under it were not a valid exercise of the power of the congress to regulate inter state commerce this broad sweeping assertion immediately cast a long shadow of doubt over everything very which we w had been doing and were expecting to defor do for the benefit of V U S citizens through the federal control of interstate commerce this shadow of doubt b became became more definite and certain when th the a cour court I 1 on january 6 1 1938 1936 by a vote of six to three invalidated the agricultural cu adjustment program the statute th thus set at aside had bad been enacted in 1633 and had bad been absolutely esse essential bial to the survival ot of agriculture in the panic of that year the states ilone alone were powerless by themselves 0 to o cope with the reduced farm income with ther the prevailing bankruptcy bricis for farm products with the burdensome surpluses and overproduction of farm comm commodities if one state tried by itself the adjoining state could nullify its efforts only the federal government could helfand hel in 1833 1933 it did al most immediately the widespread beneficial results of our farm program enacted to meet the agricultural crisis of 1933 are well known now its benefits extended no not alone to the farmer they spread to RU all sections and to an all groups throughout the land by furnishing the farmers with purchasing power with which they could ebuy buy industrial products and manufactures of all kinds but au all this effort was destroyed the basi basis s on which it was destroyed was even more disastrous in its implications than the immediate decision itself it was apparently set aside on the ch chief lef ground among I 1 others that overproduction of farm commodities and all the dire results of such overproduction were not matters of genera general welfare but puree purely ly a local condition of purely local concern to the respective states to remedy this condition it was wa held the con congress gresi could not pay farmers for foi voluntary crap crop limitation under the general welfare clause clauie of the constitution which by its terms would seem geem clearly to give the congress power to tax and spend for the ge general eral welfare the three dissenting justices characterized the majority opinion as a tortu tortured Ked construction st of the constitution ano indicated how tar far reaching would be the effects of bf th this is kind of decision a decision which was abnot not based upon legal reasa reasoning ning at ally all but upon political and economic bias |