FDR - Jean Edward Smith [211]
* In a scene reminiscent of Shays’ Rebellion in 1787, U.S. District Court judge Charles C. Bradley was dragged from the bench in Le Mars, Iowa, by angry farmers, beaten, thrown into a truck, and driven out of town, where he was nearly lynched for refusing to suspend mortgage foreclosures. Six counties in Iowa were placed under martial law, and Governor Clyde L. Herring called out the National Guard to maintain order. The unrest in Iowa was the tip of the iceberg.
* The legislation was challenged repeatedly and came before the Supreme Court in the “gold clause cases” of 1935: Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 294 U.S. 240; Nortz v. United States 294 U.S. 317; and Perry v. United States 294 U.S. 330. Speaking for a sharply divided Court (5–4), Chief Justice Hughes upheld the power of Congress to regulate the monetary system, including the power to override private contracts if they conflicted with that authority. “This is Nero at his worst,” chided Justice James McReynolds in dissent.
* Unaccompanied forays such as the one to Fort Hunt drove the Secret Service to despair. After the visit to the veterans, the White House detail gave Louis Howe two pistols: one for himself and one for ER. Eleanor carried hers dutifully, but Howe couldn’t be bothered, though he enjoyed waving it in the face of startled visitors in his office. Alfred E. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 386–387 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). Eleanor had been taught to shoot during the Albany years by Sergeant Earl Miller. For ER’s refusal to accept Secret Service or police protection, see Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 367–368 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
* In 1918 the Supreme Court had overturned the Keating-Owen Federal Child Labor Act, which forbade the interstate shipment of the products of factories, mines, and quarries that employed children under the age of fourteen or where children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen worked more than eight hours a day. “If Congress can thus regulate matters … by prohibition of the movement of commodities in interstate commerce, all freedom of commerce will be at an end,” said Justice William Day, speaking for the Court. Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918). FDR believed that Justice Day’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the Black bill.
* The Emergency Banking Act was passed March 9, 1933; revision of the Volstead Act, March 16; the Economy Act, March 20; Civilian Conservation Corps, March 31; Federal Emergency Relief Act, May 12; Agricultural Adjustment Act, May 12; Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, May 12; Tennessee Valley Authority, May 18; Truth-in-Securities Act, May 27; abrogation of gold clauses in public and private contracts, June 5; Home Owners’ Loan Act, June 13; Glass-Steagall Banking Act, June 15; Farm Credit Act, June 15; Railroad Coordination Act, June 15; National Industrial Recovery Act, June 16, 1933.
SIXTEEN
NEW DEAL ASCENDANT
No president … has had a sharper sense of personal power, a sense of what it is and where it comes from; none has had more hunger for it, few have had more use for it, and only one or two could match his faith in his own competence to use it.
—RICHARD E. NEUSTADT, PRESIDENTIAL POWER
UNDER FDR THE WHITE HOUSE, like the governor’s mansion in Albany, resembled the Grand Hotel. There were overnight accommodations for twenty-one, and there was never a vacancy. Franklin and Eleanor continued to move in separate circles. “The White House had two kinds of visitors,” Chief Usher J. B. West said. “There were the President’s people, and then there were Mrs.