“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong . . . somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . .
And an enormous debt to boot.”
—Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in 1939
Roosevelt ran to the right of Herbert Hoover in 1932, attacking Hoover as a big spender and promising to balance the federal budget
FDR argued that government employees should not be allowed to engage in collective bargaining
Neither the New Deal nor World War II was actually responsible for ending the Great Depression
As our only four-term president, a chief executive who served through two great national crises—the Great Depression and World War II—it is inevitable that Franklin Roosevelt looms large in the history and development of the modern presidency. While Woodrow Wilson was the intellectual architect of the expansive modern presidency, FDR perfected it and gave it its style, building on and completing the work Wilson had begun, to expand the role of the president and weaken constitutional restraints on government. He also finished Wilson’s work of making the Democratic Party a wholly liberal party. He inflated the role of charisma and personality pioneered by his cousin Theodore Roosevelt. He was our first mass media president, making extensive use of radio. Despite his sunny disposition, Roosevelt was also deeply cynical and manipulative about politics. Indeed, it might be said that he regarded the Great Depression as the ultimate crisis that was too good to waste. Whittaker Chambers called FDR “an artful and experienced ringmaster whose techniques may be studied again and again and again.”
“I think that many people forget Roosevelt ran for president on a platform dedicated to reducing waste and fat in government. He called for cutting federal spending by twenty-five percent, eliminating useless boards and commissions and returning to states and communities powers that had been wrongfully seized by the federal government. If he had not been distracted by war, I think he would have resisted the relentless expansion of the federal government that followed him. One of his sons, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., often told me that his father had said many times his welfare and relief programs during the Depression were meant only as emergency, stopgap measures to cope with a crisis, not the seeds of what others tried to turn into a permanent welfare state. Government giveaway programs, FDR said, ‘destroy the human spirit,’ and he was right. As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own.”
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Ronald Reagan
There was a certain compelling magnificence about Roosevelt’s style that attracted the admiration and emulation of Ronald Reagan among others. It is easy to see how Reagan modeled the style of his own presidency in some ways after FDR’s, as Reagan himself suggested in his memoirs: “During his Fireside Chats, his strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem. I will never forget him for that.” FDR’s great contemporary Winston Churchill wrote, “Meeting Roosevelt was like taking your first sip of champagne.” But like Reagan, Churchill also expressed serious reservations about FDR’s domestic and foreign policies.
Much of what is commonly believed about FDR and his time is wrong, but a revisionist picture of him is slowly emerging, after decades of liberal hagiography that made him out to be the rescuer of the economy and the savior of American democracy. With the passage of time, the weight of scholarship is shifting decisively to the conclusion that FDR’s New Deal deepened and prolonged the Great Depression, and that far from warding off the specter of socialist revolution, FDR did more than any other president to undermine the Constitution and create the sharply polarized atmosphere of partisan politics that liberals today deplore. Ronald Reagan was absolutely right when he made the controversial remark in 1976 that “Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal.”
“The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. . . . It is in violation of the traditions of America.”
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Congress in 1935
But there are a few conservative aspects of FDR’s legacy that belie modern liberals’ picture of him. Looking more closely at some of FDR’s internal contradictions is a good way of recognizing how much further to the left the Democratic Party has moved since FDR’s time. For example, although FDR was the architect of some of the first government entitlement programs such as Social Security, he was a critic of dependency, and suggested that public welfare programs should be sharply limited. Liberals were not happy when Republicans quoted these words back to them in the debates on welfare reform in the 1980s and 1990s.
FDR was the architect of an alphabet soup of government regulatory agencies, though he made it quite clear that while he was in favor of administration, he was opposed to bureaucracy. This may be a distinction without a difference, but there is some reason to think that the Leviathan government his New Deal set in motion might not meet with his approval if he were alive today. As with welfare, his words on this subject, and the subtle distinctions underlying them, are nearly forgotten by his would-be liberal heirs today.
“We need disinterested, as well as broad-gauged, public officials. This part of our problem we have not yet solved, but it can be solved and it can be accomplished without the creation of a national bureaucracy which would dominate the national life of our governmental system” [emphasis added].
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
While Roosevelt thought that many of the agencies set in motion to cope with the emergency of the Depression would be temporary expedients, there isn’t a single bureaucracy that today’s liberals won’t defend and, if possible, enlarge.
FDR was famous for his fierce attacks on big business and “economic royalists.” But those who pose as his liberal heirs forget, if they ever knew in the first place, his equal concern for middle class opportunity and his endorsement of individual enterprise. “Let me emphasize,” Roosevelt said on this point, “that serious as have been the errors of unrestrained individualism, I do not believe in abandoning the system of individual enterprise.” But perhaps the most notable difference between FDR’s liberalism and today’s is on public employee unions, nowadays the lifeblood of the Democratic Party. In a 1937 letter to a public employees association, FDR wrote: “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. . . . Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.”
FDR, an Episcopalian, made the kind of remarks about religion that send the American Civil Liberties Union into paroxysms of rage. Democracy and Christianity, Roosevelt said, were “two phases of the same civilization.” “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation,” he said, “without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.” During World War II FDR wrote a preface for an edition of the New Testament that was distributed to American troops. On the eve of the 1940 election, FDR said in a radio address, “Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.” On June 6, 1944, FDR led the nation in prayer for our armed forces on live radio, and in his final inaugural address in 1945, he said, “So we pray to Him for the vision to see our way clearly . . . to the achievement of His will.” Today’s liberals would regard these statements and acts as grounds for impeachment if they came from President George W. Bush or Sarah Palin.
“As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.”
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
How can these contradictions be explained? Amity Shlaes, author of one of the best accounts of FDR and the Great Depression, notes that “FDR was not an ideologue or a radical.” Rather, he was something more troubling in some ways: he was entirely inconsistent in his thought process, bordering on intellectual instability. One of Roosevelt’s top aides compared him to a kaleidoscope: “The bits of brightly colored glass remain the same, but, with every shift, the brilliant and complex pattern falls into new arrangements.” FDR changed his mind frequently and gave conflicting directions to those working for him—which, according to biographer James MacGregor Burns, “produced hurt and bewilderment among his subordinates.” His decisions were often arbitrary or even whimsical, such as when he changed the government-fixed price of gold according to his theory of lucky numbers, after confiscating the private holdings of the American people. He surrounded himself with a menagerie of advisers and political operatives—his famous “brains trust”—that included both hard-bitten pols out for partisan advantage and dreamy ideologues, some of whom openly admired fascist and Communist economic planning. Several of FDR’s top aides, such as Rexford Tugwell, had toured the Soviet Union and met for hours with Stalin. And several of Roosevelt’s advisers and appointees were later revealed to have been Soviet spies; they may have influenced FDR in his dealings with Stalin during World War II.
“FDR is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”
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Liberal columnist Walter Lippmann appraising Roosevelt in 1932, before the New Deal
The pro-Roosevelt histories have always made a virtue of FDR’s “pragmatism,” often quoting one famous remark: “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” But FDR’s “bold, persistent experimentation,” as he called it, undermined business and consumer confidence; his punitive taxes and reckless attacks on the rich and prosperous businesses discouraged capital investment; his pro-union policies retarded hiring. His regulatory schemes to manipulate markets, such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) backfired badly and were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. (In the case of the NRA, the Supreme Court was unanimous, which means that FDR had gone too far even for the liberal justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Brandeis told an FDR aide, “I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.”) These and other New Deal measures represented the expansion of government by nearly a full order of magnitude. Amity Shlaes notes that the National Recovery Act generated 10,000 new pages of law in the U.S. statute books, which had been only 2,735 pages long before FDR took office. “In twelve months,” Shlaes points out, “the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.” Whenever a measure failed to work, instead of abandoning it or changing course, FDR always doubled down, seeking more political control over the economy and still higher taxes. When business investment froze under the weight of the uncertainty FDR’s policies caused, he responded by proposing an “undistributed profits tax,” hoping to either force businesses to invest or confiscate their meager profits.
FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell (Crown Forum, 2003).
Some of Roosevelt’s own senior advisers and political supporters came to see the failure of the New Deal. The most lacerating criticism came from Raymond Moley, one of FDR’s closest aides in his first seven years in office. Disillusioned, Moley wrote bitterly of the shortcomings of both FDR and the New Deal,
If this aggregation of policies springing from circumstances, motives, purposes, and situations so various gave the observer the sense of a certain rugged grandeur, it arose chiefly from the wonder that one man could have been so flexible as to permit himself to believe so many things in so short a time. But to look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.
New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton W. Folsom, Jr. (Threshold, 2008).
It is often said that it was World War II that finally ended the Great Depression—with some liberals such as Paul Krugman pointing to high wartime spending as the key to reviving the economy. In fact the war required ending the New Deal’s war on business and commerce; this explains why the grip of the Depression was finally broken. But FDR didn’t give up on class warfare easily. As late as 1942, Roosevelt proposed in his annual message to Congress, “No American citizen ought to have a maximum income, after he had paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year,” and the Treasury Department proposed a 100 percent income tax rate on incomes above $25,000 (equivalent to about $275,000 today). FDR did not give up his radical egalitarian ways without a fight.
If FDR’s admirers—including even Ronald Reagan—are correct in believing that he wasn’t a socialist, how can his egalitarian class warfare be understood? Historians who reach for some kind of intellectual synthesis have overlooked Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is that it was FDR’s self-regard and will to power that led him to attack his opponents, and any source of private wealth provided a base from which to oppose his desire to exert complete control over the economy. In his second inaugural address in 1937, FDR asked for “unimagined power to subordinate private interest to the public good.”
Roosevelt wanted more and more political power, and he had decided to blame business for the continuing failure of the New Deal to fix the economy. And when the Supreme Court, a co-equal branch of government, exercising its constitutional prerogative to render judgment on Roosevelt’s actions, obstructed his designs, he turned on them with equal viciousness and determination to bring them to heel. In the process, he did great harm to the Constitution; the effects of that damage continue to this day.
Despite his intellectual incoherence, it is not the case that there was no theory underlying FDR’s actions. He did express a political theory, a deeply pernicious one that built in subtle ways upon Woodrow Wilson’s attack on the American Founding. Two episodes display FDR’s radical break with America’s constitutional traditions. The first is his Commonwealth Club speech, given late in the 1932 campaign. The second is the infamous “court packing” initiative of 1937, which is usually and incorrectly understood as a stinging political defeat for FDR.
“Roosevelt, himself, familiar though he was with the superficies of American history, had never evidenced, in the years of my association with him, any appreciation of the basic philosophical distinctions in the history of American political thought.”
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former Roosevelt aide Raymond Moley
Historians have tended to overlook FDR’s Commonwealth Club speech, in part because historians tend not to take speeches seriously enough as public teachings, and in part because one of FDR’s aides who helped write the speech, Rex Tugwell, later wrote that FDR “never saw that speech until he opened it on the lectern.” This seems the doubtful boast of a preening speechwriter (and few New Dealers were more preening than Tugwell), but even if accurate, the fact is that the Commonwealth Club speech represents most clearly the bold new liberal public philosophy of New Deal liberalism, and deserves to be taken very seriously as the highest expression of FDR’s political philosophy—the philosophy of the welfare state.
“I believe it is my sworn duty, as President, to take all steps necessary to insure the continuance of liberalism in our government. I believe, at the same time, that it is my duty as head of the Democratic Party to see to it that my party remains the truly liberal party in the political life of America.”
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1941
Unlike Woodrow Wilson’s open rejection of the principles of the American founding, FDR’s approach to the Constitution was more clever: Roosevelt appeared to embrace the American founding, but was in fact reinterpreting it in radical ways. The rise of the machine age, he said, called for “a reappraisal of values.” Referring specifically to Thomas Jefferson’s conception of individual rights as bulwarks against government power, FDR said, “The task of statesmanship has always been the re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.” The era of Jeffersonian individualism was over, he explained:
A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists. . . . Our task now is not discovery, or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand . . . of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. The day of enlightened administration has come.
The remedy for the new problems FDR saw would be “an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” that required “new terms of the old social contract.” Although FDR did not come right out and say so, he clearly implied that individual property rights must give way to the power of the State to control economic activity.
“Thirty-six years ago, I began a more or less intensive study of economics and economists. The course has continued with growing intensity, especially during the last four years. As a result, I am compelled to admit—or boast—whichever way you care to put it—that I know nothing of economics and that nobody else does either!”
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President Roosevelt, in a 1936 letter to Joseph Schumpeter, one of the world’s most famous economists
It was but a short step from this “re-defining” of individual rights to FDR’s later idea of, essentially, welfare state rights, whereby the government would provide for you instead of you providing for yourself. In his 1944 State of the Union speech, while the nation was still fighting Germany and Japan, Roosevelt extended the philosophy of the Commonwealth Club address. He talked again about how the Founders’ conception of individual rights—the guarantees against government power over the individual—were obsolete, and called for “a second Bill of Rights”—“an economic Bill of Rights” in which the government would guarantee “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” along with the right to food, housing, health care, and even recreation: “All these rights spell security.”
During his first re-election campaign in 1936, FDR demonized the Republican Party, suggesting that Republicans were anti-American and comparing them to the Tories who left the country at the time of the American Revolution. Clearly FDR was trying to read his political opposition out of the mainstream of American political life. In his 1944 speech outlining the positive “rights” he wanted government to provide for everyone, Roosevelt wasn’t satisfied merely to set out his “new principles” of government. He went on to imply that Republican opposition to his novel political philosophy was the equivalent of the Fascism we were fighting against overseas. But he used the clever tactic of attributing this thought to someone other than himself:
“We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis—recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home. [emphasis added]
In other words, even during wartime, when the country was supposedly united behind the war effort, Roosevelt exploited the war for partisan purposes. Speeches like this are worth remembering when contemporary liberals claim that “divisive” conservatives are “questioning their patriotism.”
FDR lashed out at the Supreme Court for refusing to rubber stamp his unprecedented New Deal controls on the private sector during his first term. (Though it should be noted that the Court did not invalidate all of FDR’s measures. It upheld some of the most dubious of them, including the confiscation and arbitrary revaluation of the price of gold, and the cancellation of mortgage debt—both of which involve a plain violation of the Constitution’s Contracts Clause.) After the 9–0 decision that invalidated the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt complained that the Court was stuck in the “horse-and-buggy” era.
After his landslide re-election victory in 1936, some of Roosevelt’s aides proposed that FDR back a series of constitutional amendments to provide Congress and the executive branch with the explicit power to regulate the economy more fully—in other words, that the Constitution should be changed through the mechanism the Founders had provided for just such new circumstances as Roosevelt had claimed now existed. In fact, the Democratic National Platform for the 1936 election had contemplated the possibility of amendments: “If these problems cannot be effectively solved within the Constitution, we shall seek such clarifying amendment as will assure the power to enact those laws, adequately to regulate commerce, protect public health and safety, and safeguard economic security.” Roosevelt rejected this idea after the election on the excuse that the amendment process was too “time-consuming”—even though many previous constitutional amendments had passed Congress and been ratified by the states very quickly. There was something insincere about FDR’s claim that the American political system could not react quickly in a genuine national emergency.
“Fully convinced that he knew best what was needed, Franklin D. Roosevelt conceived it as the function of democracy in times of crisis to give unlimited powers to the man it trusted, even if this meant that it thereby ‘forged new instruments of power which in some hands would be dangerous.’”
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Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek
Instead, FDR decided to try to outflank the Supreme Court politically. He made an unprecedented public attack on the Supreme Court, an institution whose traditions of restraint and aloofness from politics kept the justices from defending themselves. No other president in history had ever attacked the Supreme Court as FDR did. With no prior indication of his plan during the 1936 campaign, and no discussion with or advance warning to his own party members in Congress, FDR sprang his infamous “court packing” plan in the spring of 1937, its stated intention “to infuse new blood into all our courts” and to correct the current “ill-balanced” Supreme Court. FDR wanted Congress to pass a law stipulating that for every federal judge or Supreme Court justice over the age of seventy, the president could appoint an additional judge or justice. As of 1938, six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were over seventy; had FDR’s plan been enacted, he would have immediately been able to command a Court majority for anything he wanted passed. Raymond Moley said it was “a plan to enable Roosevelt to control the Court” and suborn its independence, plain and simple; it was “a half-baked scheme which commended itself chiefly because of its disingenuousness.”
The idea was so unpopular that even FDR’s own party rebuked him. The lopsided Democratic majority in Congress not only rejected the proposal handily, but the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report that harshly rebuked FDR’s reasoning and defended the Court from FDR’s attack, which it called a “dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.” Seldom has any presidential initiative been so categorically rejected by a president’s own party. Preserving our constitutional system intact, the Committee pointed out, is “immeasurably more important . . . than the immediate adoption of any legislation however beneficial.” The report continued,
If the Court of last resort is to be made to respond to a prevalent sentiment of a current hour, politically imposed, that Court must ultimately become subservient to the pressure of public opinion of the hour, which might at the moment embrace mob passion abhorrent to a more calm, lasting consideration. . . . No finer or more durable philosophy of free government is to be found in all the writings and practices of great statesmen than may be found in the decisions of the Supreme Court when dealing with great problems of free government touching human rights. . . . It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.
Roosevelt responded to this defeat with one of the worst temper tantrums in presidential history: he set out to purge the Democratic Party of senators and congressmen who had opposed court packing and other New Deal measures in the 1938 election. For the first and only time in history, a president openly campaigned against incumbent members of his own party, even as the nation’s economy began to slump again, with unemployment increasing dramatically. FDR’s attempted purge was a total failure and humiliation. Of the Democrats FDR targeted for defeat in primary elections or party caucuses, only one lost. In the November election, Republicans gained eighty-one seats in the House; in the Senate, eight seats, along with a dozen governorships. But for the specter of war, Roosevelt would probably have been defeated in the 1940 election.
“Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay.”
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The final irony is that the Supreme Court buckled under Roosevelt’s attacks, dramatically reversing course in 1937 without any changes in the composition of the Court. The justices suddenly started upholding New Deal measures that were nearly identical to those they had struck down just a few years before. It was called “the switch in time that saved nine.” In other words, FDR’s court packing initiative actually succeeded in its main aim, which was to intimidate the Supreme Court into ceasing to act as a guardian of economic liberty and a limit on the extension of federal government power. Ever since, the Supreme Court has been on a mostly downhill slide, allowing more and more scope to government power, with only limited exceptions. The Supreme Court’s abandonment of its role as guardian of constitutional limits to government power and as protector of, especially, economic rights has been called “the revolution of 1937” with good reason.
But the court packing scheme also revealed another flaw in FDR’s character—his impatience. The scheme was soon shown to have been utterly unnecessary. Within three years he had been able to reshape the Supreme Court exactly as he wanted it through the conventional appointment process. Between deaths and retirements from the Court, FDR had appointed eight of the nine justices sitting on the Court by the time he died in 1945—the most of any president in American history. They were all liberals who seldom saw an extension of government power they did not approve, or an exercise of executive power they restrained.
FDR’s first appointment in 1937 was Hugo Black, who served on the Court for thirty-four years. Black had been a senator from Alabama, and also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He has a reputation as a liberal justice, though he wrote the majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States, the decision that upheld FDR’s authority to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II. In a 1967 newspaper interview, Black defended the Korematsu decision, saying, “They all look alike to a person not a Jap.” Black was a judicial positivist; he upheld government power over economic rights, but not over some individual rights such as free speech. Black was the perfect justice for FDR, as he was totally compliant with liberal aims to extend government control over the economy.
FDR’s second appointment was Stanley Forman Reed, in 1938. Reed had served in Roosevelt’s administration, first in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and then in the Justice Department, where he argued on behalf of several New Deal measures before the Supreme Court during FDR’s first term. Like Black, Reed was known as a liberal on economics, and he deferred to Congress and the executive branch on all matters of economic regulation.
Felix Frankfurter was FDR’s third Court appointment in 1939. A former Harvard Law School professor (where he had been a mentor to Louis Brandeis), Frankfurter was one of the Court’s legendary liberals and champions of the idea of the “living Constitution.” He served on the Court for twenty-three years.
FDR’s appointee furthest to the left was William O. Douglas in 1939, who served longer (thirty-six years) than any other justice in history. Douglas was the justice who “discovered” a sweeping right to privacy in the “emanations of the penumbras” of the Constitution in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the precursor case to Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion on demand. He ruled the death penalty unconstitutional (even though it is specified in the Constitution), and stayed the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953. Republicans attempted to impeach Douglas in the early 1970s.
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (Harper, 2007).
FDR’s appointment of Frank Murphy, the former governor of Michigan, in 1940 gave him what he had sought with his court packing scheme just three years before—a majority on the Court. Murphy served only nine years on the Court, but was pulled into the New Deal slipstream, acquiescing (with few exceptions) in the expansion of government power over the private economy.
FDR appointed James F. Byrnes to the Court in 1941, but he served only one year before FDR tapped him to head the War Mobilization Board during World War II. Byrnes later served as secretary of state for Harry Truman, and still later became governor of South Carolina, where he supported segregation.
Robert H. Jackson was FDR’s seventh appointment, in 1941. Jackson had been a long-time political aide to FDR and worked in the Justice Department as solicitor general. Jackson had a reputation as a moderate, but he was the author of the majority opinion in one of the Supreme Court’s most absurd rulings, the Wickard v. Filburn case in 1942 that upheld the federal government’s power to prohibit farmers from growing food on their own land for their own personal use. Wickard v. Filburn kicked over the last restraint on the ever-expanding Commerce Clause and ratified the liberal view that the government can regulate any private economic activity it wishes to. If Obamacare is not struck down by the Supreme Court, the Wickard case may be the precedent for upholding the individual health care mandate.
FDR’s last appointment was Wiley Rutledge in 1943. Rutledge had been highly and publicly critical of the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions striking down New Deal legislation, and had supported FDR’s court packing scheme, so it was not surprising that FDR rewarded him with a Supreme Court appointment when a seat came open—though he had to pass over several more eminent jurists, including Learned Hand, to do so.
Between FDR’s radical Progressive views about the principles of the American founding, his court packing scheme, and his left-leaning Supreme Court appointments, it is a shame that he can’t be awarded a constitutional grade lower than F. His counterproductive economic policies and hyper-partisanship are just extra credit.