Show lere here Is president 1 Roosevel ts own story tells fells of fight F I 1 for supreme co L reform 4 I 1 21 1 0 1 I 1 A I 1 i X I 1 I 1 k 1 4 1 A I 1 I 1 1 1 1 I tl t w V i t I 1 1 4 dav i Q VI q i jre i I 1 I 1 r 1 4 er X e ia I 1 i 1 I 1 i i 9 r i I 1 Y 0 O 1 f I 1 i I 1 1 N I 1 1 I 1 I 1 I 1 i I 1 1 ay 1 k I 1 I 1 7 I 1 0 0 A 1 1 N 1 I 1 v I 1 0 A s 1 I 1 11 i i I 1 i aw 11 1 3 i I 1 1 f 7 I 1 t I 1 1 V 4 1 0 A i 1 1 I 1 i i j C j 1 e 11 I 1 A w i 1 I 1 I 1 ct t I 1 I 1 i 1 T i i I 1 I 1 1 1 4 1 I 1 i 11 1 i I 1 1 t i i A j 4 iv I 1 X 7 1 I M 1 i i yi A i i 0 V 17 I 1 t A I 1 01 N j 1 N q 4 A A i i 14 r I 1 Z aai I 1 1 i I 1 11 t i st t 7 M n 1 I 1 I 1 i 1 1 I 1 r k j g k i w L 1 r t i ii I 1 f 11 g 1 I 1 I 1 I 1 A j V 1 1 i I 1 N i i 1 i v 1 11 0 N I 1 i y i 1 11 1 1 11 jett 1 o 0 V 1 q I 1 i 4 ii jt I 1 0 1 I 1 I 1 0 I 1 i r 14 t 1 4 1 A r I 1 rv 11 0 j I 1 2 L C 6 F i r 0 tile the nine justices that constituted consil tho the supreme court atthe time lime feb 5 1937 president roosevelt first made mn brandel brandeis his proposals propos ala for tha changing ngIng the high tribunals organization are left to right fight front row louis D back ba sutherland willis ills van devanter chief justice charles evans evana hughes james 0 MORCY n old 9 a and nd george row v left laft to tn kweit J 1 Roli erts pierce plern butler ti V stone and benjamin N cardozo by special arrangement with Co colliers Illers weekly and western newspaper union this newspaper presents in condensed form a series of at four articles by president roosevelt currently appearing in that magazine tho no articles aro are taken from tho the presidents newly written introductions to forthcoming volumes of his state papers tho the first condensed below contains tho the presidents own story of the tight fight for supreme court reform THE FIGHT GOES ON tile the constitution prevails I 1 by Frank franklin iiii D roosevelt C copyright ht by frankin D loosevelt noo sevelt ind n yb by rig the crowell r owell collier publishing company rj HIS nis was tho the year of the fa supreme court fight 1 I 1037 this was the year which marked a definite turning point in the histo history ry of the united states for this was the year which was to determine tor mirte whether the kind of government which the people of the united states had voted for in 1932 1934 and 1936 1036 was to be permitted by the supreme court to function 4 if it i had not been permitted to function as a democracy it ft Is my reasoned opinion that there would have been great danger that it might have been ultimately compelled to give way to some alien type of government in the vain hope that the new form of government might be able to give the average men and women tho the protection and operative cooperative co assistance si which they had the right to expect for that reason I 1 regard the effort initiated by the message on the federal judiciary of february 8 5 1937 and the immediate results of it as among the most important domestic achievements of my first two terms in homce for two decades the supreme court of cf the united states had been successfully thwarting the common will of the overwhelming majority of the american people and had been dive diverting rUng the functions and philosophy of government into channels which ran counter to the thought and objectives of progressive opinions throughout the modern modem civilized world the big choice before the american people in 1932 had been to determine whether they should continue the old type of administration or install a new one definitely committed to the proposition that the federal government had not only the power but the duty 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 1038 1930 however it had become clear that this now new concept of government and of its relation to economic and social problems was in danger of complete frustration and the road ahead for further or even different effective action to meet these problems seemed to be completely blocked for a deab dead hand was being laid upon this whole program of progress to stay it all it was the hand of the supreme court of the united states 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 been destroyed by judicial flat but the whole question of 91 the power of the federal government to handle these problems in an effective decisive way vay had been placed not jonir 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 inthe generation preceding the spring of 1937 1037 seemed almost invariably to lean toward the latter and the judicial process was being more and more frequently exercised by pie he court to lay low the ellorda of government to meet the pressing needs of the times in which it was functioning in the first 70 years of our constitutional history tho the court invalidated only two acts of the congress in fit the next 70 years it nullified 58 between 1920 1020 and 1930 it declared ID 19 federal statutes unconstitutional to climax this growth the court in the three years beginning in october 1033 1933 set aside 12 statutes alve of which occurred in a single court year october 1935 I 1 have already discussed in the introduction to the 1935 vo volume lurne the more important supreme court cases involving new deal legislation recapitulation win will show how hopeless it looked by the time I 1 started arted t the so called supreme court fight on february 5 1937 that any really effective legislative program could withstand 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 the third largest industry in the country petroleum were struck down the oil producing states 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 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 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 a ground but unfortunately it was not to be the last this S now doctrine nowhere specifically mentioned in the constitution added much doubt and perplexity to framing all future legiel legislation some delegation is of course necessary it if government Is to function at all but neither from the words of the constitution nor from the mouth of the court came cagne any standards to fix the amount of delegation permissible the next decisions were on the question of the governments power to abrogate gold 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 sliver silver policy of the duly elected government this policy was toa to a great extent the basis of the lecove recovery ry program the means used to bring order out of chaos in foreign exchange and domestic currency and to remake the tha enfa unfair ir debt structure then in ili existence it can well be said that in these decisions the court was passing on the validity ot of the whole american economy been accepted by the business and financial world almost universally since the enactment of the statute a year and a half earlier and which was then I 1 in n 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 held invalid as to public obligations but by reasoning the disastrous results of such a holding were avoided by a conclusion that no actual damage had been proved even as to this conclusion four of the nine justices i i disagreed by the slim margin of one human being this very foundation of our recovery had been upheld what a 6 slim th thread read on which to hang the fate of a national then came all in one day may 27 1935 a unanimous decision that the tha frahler lemko net act designed to help farm mortgagors was unconstitutional a unanimous decision that the president could not remove a federal trade commissioner although in an earlier case in 1926 the court had stated that the executive could remove any officer he could appoint even one with powers and a unanimous decision that tho the national industrial recovery act was unconstitutional this last decision was the most tar far reaching it again invoked the shadowy doctrine of unlawful delegation of powers to the executive if the court had stopped here its iob job would have been done and the damage would not have been wholly irreparable but it went farther and he held ld 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 averyt thing which we had been doing and were expecting to do for the benefit of U S citizens through the federal control of interstate commerce this shadow of doubt became more definite and certain when the court on january 6 1838 1930 by a vote of six to three invalidated the agricultural adjustment program the statute thus set aside had been enacted in 1933 and had been absolutely essential to the survival of agriculture in the panic of that year the states alone were powerless by themselves to cope with the reduced farm income with the prevailing bankruptcy prices for farm products with the burdensome e surpluses and overproduction of farm com commodities it one state tried by itself the adjoining state could nullify its efforts only the federal government could help and in 1933 it did al most immediately the wl widespread de spread beneficial results of our farm program 9 ram enacted to meet the agri agrical cul tural crisis of 1933 ore are well known now its benefits extended not alone to tho the farmer they spread to all sections and to all groups throughout theland the land by furnishing the farmers with purchasing power with which ill they ey could buy industrial products and manufactures of all kinds but all this effort was destroyed the basis on which it was destroyed was even more disastrous in its implications than the immediate decision ilon itself it was apparently set aside on the chief ground among others that overproduction of form farm commodities and nil all the dire results of such overproduction were not matters of general welfare but purely a local condition of purely local concern to the respective states to remedy this condition it was held the congress could not pay farmers tarr ners tor for voluntary crop limitation under the tha general welfare clause of the constitution which by Us terms would seem clearly to give the congress power to tax and spend tor for the gen general cral welfare the three dissenting justices characterized the majority opinion as a tortured construction st of the constitution and anoll indicated ca t e d how far reaching would be the effects of this kind ot of de decision cislon a decision which was not based upon legal reasoning at all but upon political and economic bias I 1 I 1 |