FDR - Jean Edward Smith [237]
Across the Capitol grounds to the east, the Supreme Court reflected similar continuity. The Court’s membership had not changed since Oliver Wendell Holmes had stepped down five years earlier. Willis Van Devanter, the senior justice, had been appointed by William Howard Taft in 1910. Two justices, James McReynolds and Louis Brandeis, had been appointed by Wilson. Harding had appointed two, Coolidge one, and Hoover three.† Brandeis, the oldest, was eighty. Five were in their seventies, and Owen Roberts, the youngest, was sixty-one. FDR was the first president since James Monroe (1817–21) to serve four years without making a single appointment to the Court.
Roosevelt was inaugurated on January 20, 1937—the first president to take office under the Twentieth Amendment. The weather was abysmal. An unforgiving January rain pummeled the stands and parade route. Capitol Plaza appeared roofed with umbrellas as more than 40,000 people gathered to watch the ceremony. The inaugural platform was fully open to the storm. Rain swept across the plaza, splattered against the president’s winged collar, trickled down his bare head, and blotted his speech. Twice FDR paused during his address to brush water from his face.
With an unprecedented popular mandate, Roosevelt was on the offensive from the beginning. His inaugural address was a call to battle on behalf of those still denied the fruits of the American dream:
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.
I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.
I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.61
When the ceremony concluded, Roosevelt ordered an open car. Eleanor joined him, and the two rode slowly back to the White House, waving to the rain-soaked spectators who lined the route. Mrs. Roosevelt’s inaugural dress and hat were ruined, her fur coat sopping wet. FDR looked as though he had fallen into a swimming pool with his clothes on. At the end of the fifteen-minute ride the Roosevelts changed clothes hastily to watch the inaugural parade, again from a replica of Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. That too, at FDR’s insistence, was open to the weather.62
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ROOSEVELT DID NOT mention the Supreme Court in his inaugural address. But with Congress cooperative and Democrats or independents in control of forty-two of the nation’s governor’s mansions, he now took on the Court.63 As a lawyer he should have known better; as a politician he should have been more cautious; as president he should have had a firmer grasp of the constitutional separation of powers.
Since 1933 the Supreme Court had declared six pieces of New Deal legislation unconstitutional.* It had denied the president the authority to remove members of independent regulatory commissions64 and in June 1936 had struck down New York State’s minimum-wage law for women and children.65 Four of these decisions had been unanimous or almost so.66
At the same time the Court had upheld emergency legislation in Minnesota declaring a mortgage moratorium and had validated similar Depression-based legislation in New York fixing the price of milk.67 It upheld Congress’s authority to abrogate the gold clauses in private contracts,68 sustained the Tennessee Valley Authority’s right to sell electric power,69 and on December 21, 1936, a month before FDR’s inaugural, upheld the broad power of the president to conduct foreign relations: “In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the President alone