Roosevelt’s second inaugural address was the first to be delivered on January 20. In order to lessen a newly elected president’s wait before taking office, the recently ratified Twentieth Amendment had moved inauguration day from March 4. FDR called on the nation to redouble its efforts to aid those “who have too little.” The Depression, he admitted, had not been conquered: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.” Emboldened by his electoral triumph, Roosevelt now made what many considered a serious political miscalculation. On the pretense that several members of the Supreme Court were too old to perform their functions, he proposed that the president be allowed to appoint a new justice for each one who remained on the Court past age seventy (an age that six of the nine had already surpassed). FDR’s aim, of course, was to change the balance of power on a Court that, he feared, might well invalidate Social Security, the Wagner Act, and other measures of the Second New Deal.
The plan aroused cries that the president was an aspiring dictator. Congress rejected it. But Roosevelt accomplished his underlying purpose. The Supreme Court, it is sometimes said, follows the election returns. Coming soon after Roosevelt’s landslide victory of 1936, the threat of “court packing” inspired an astonishing about-face on the part of key justices. Beginning in March 1937, the Court suddenly revealed a new willingness to support economic regulation by both the federal government and the states. It upheld a minimum wage law of the state of Washington similar to the New York measure it had declared unconstitutional a year earlier. It turned aside challenges to Social Security and the Wagner Act. In subsequent cases, the Court affirmed federal power to regulate wages, hours, child labor, agricultural production, and numerous other aspects of economic life.
Fall In!, a cartoon commenting on Roosevelt’s proposal to “pack” the Supreme Court, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 8,1917.
Figure 21.2 UNEMPLOYMENT, 1925-1945
The New Deal did not really solve the problem of unemployment, which fell below 10 percent only in 1941, as the United States prepared to enter World War ll.
Announcing a new judicial definition of freedom, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes pointed out that the words “freedom of contract” did not appear in the Constitution. “Liberty,” however, did, and this, Hughes continued, required “the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people.” The Court’s new willingness to accept the New Deal marked a permanent change in judicial policy. Having declared dozens of economic laws unconstitutional in the decades leading up to 1937, the justices have rarely done so since.