The Court
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
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Supreme Court-Packing
FDR Looked Back on his Plan for the Court
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)
The attached article was written by FDR himself, and in it he explains the ‘court crises’ (as he called it) quite clearly. On page five, he eloquently lays out his plan for the Supreme Court.
Justice Willis Van Devanter
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
When FDR sat down and planned whose voice on the Supreme Court he would most like to nullify, it wasn’t always that of Justice Van Devanter. Although Willis Van Devanter was a conservative, he was a thoughtful jurist who was known to, from time-to-time, vote in support of some of the New Deal legislation.
Justice Pierce Butler
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Justice Pierce Butler “was born in a log hut near Northfield, Minn., on St. Patrick’s Day, 1866… Butler believes in few laws and little regulation because he himself grew up under a system of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
Justice James Clark McReynolds
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Bingo! Justice James Clark McReynolds was the stick-in-the-mud FDR wished to have disappeared from the court. This journalist observed that McReynolds “seemed to regard himself as the last Bulwark of a social order which Woodrow Wilson deemed too antiquated in 1914”. Indeed, he was cranky and crusty and disliked Jews and black people equally and didn’t seem to care who knew it.
Justice George Sutherland
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Attached is a three-and-a-half-page summation of Associate Justice George Sutherland and the various cases he heard while sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
FDR, Congress and the Plan to Pack the Supreme Court
(Collier’s Magazine, 1947)
Attached is an article by James A. Farley (1888 – 1976), who in 1933 was appointed by F.D.R. to serve as both the Postmaster General as well as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. During the Thirties, Farley was also FDR’s go-to-guy in all matters involving politics on Capitol Hill, and he wrote the attached article two years after Roosevelt’s death in order to explain how the Court-packing scheme was received in Congress and how his relationship with FDR soon soured.
Boss, I asked him, why didn’t you advise the senators in advance that you were sending them the Court bill?
Jim, I just couldn’t, he answered earnestly. I didn’t want to have it get to the press prematurely…