FDR - Jean Edward Smith [467]
112. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937). This was the most important of five companion cases relating to the Wagner Act that the Court decided on April 12, 1937. “We are asked to shut our eyes to the plainest facts of national life and to deal with the question of direct and indirect effects in an intellectual vacuum,” said Hughes. “When industries organize themselves on a national scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the dominant factor in their activities, how can it be maintained that their industrial labor relations constitute a forbidden field into which Congress may not enter when it is necessary to protect interstate commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial war?” (at page 41).
113. Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheaton (22 U.S.) 1 (1824). “Commerce,” said Marshall, “is undoubtedly traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse. It describes the commercial intercourse between nations, and parts of nations, in all its branches, and is regulated by prescribing rules for carrying on that intercourse.… Commerce among the States cannot stop at the boundary line of each State, but may be introduced into the interior.”
114. 301 U.S. 1, 41.
115. Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548 (1937), Cardozo for the Court.
116. Quoted in Wheeler, Yankee from the West 334.
117. Alfred Steinberg, Sam Rayburn: A Biography 144–145 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975).
118. McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War 505 ff.
119. Quoted in Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 222–223 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
120. The vote was taken on the question to recommit the bill to the Judiciary Committee, effectively killing it.
121. Justice Van Devanter was replaced by Hugo Black in August 1937. George Sutherland was replaced by Stanley Reed in January 1938. Cardozo resigned in July 1938 and was replaced by Felix Frankfurter. William O. Douglas replaced Brandeis in 1939. Frank Murphy succeeded Pierce Butler in 1940. James Byrnes replaced McReynolds in 1941. As FDR predicted, McReynolds was the last of the so-called Four Horsemen to step down. Robert Jackson replaced Stone when Stone succeeded Hughes as chief justice in 1941. When Byrnes left the Court in 1942 to become director of war mobilization, he was replaced by Wiley Rutledge.
EIGHTEEN | Low Tide
The epigraph is from James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 375 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1938).
1. Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR 106 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). For Harrison generally, see Martha H. Swain’s excellent biography, Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years 33–167 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978).
2. James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 91 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948); Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 223–224 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
3. FDR to Senator Alben Barkley, July 15, 1937, 6 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 306–308, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
4. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 92; David McCullough, Truman 228 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). “To say No to Tom was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” said Truman afterward.
5. Quoted in Swain, Pat Harrison 159–160. Also see Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, The 168 Days 282–283 (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938).
6. Quoted in Timmons, Garner of Texas 224.
7. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race 95 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
8. Dingell to FDR, June 26, 1937, quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 253 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
9. “Washington Notes,” 91 The New Republic 313 (1937). In length of service, Hatton Sumners was the fourth-ranking member of the House, having been elected in 1912.
10.