The Battle
for the Court

Ever since the Supreme Court shot-down FDR’s pet project, the NRA, in 1935, he had his eyes on those “nine old men”(in actuality, there were only four he wanted to go away: McReynolds, Sutherland, Van Devanter and Butler). He schemed-up a way to force them into retirement:

“Modern complexities call… for a constant infusion of new blood in courts… Little by little, new facts become blurred through new glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or inquire into the present or the future.”