FDR's Court-Packing Plan: A Study in Irony
The definitive study of Roosevelt and the court-packing
issue is William Leuchtenburg’s The Supreme
Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age
of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford, 1995).
Other useful recent studies are:
Shaw, Stephen K., William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams,
Eds. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Transformation
of the Supreme Court. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004.
McKenna, Marian C. Franklin Roosevelt and the Great
Constitutional War: The Court- Packing Crisis of 1937.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.
Cushman, Barry. Rethinking The New Deal Court:
The Structure Of A Constitutional Revolution. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
If you’d like more background on Roosevelt and
his New Deal, take a look at some of these books:
Lash, Joseph P. Dealers And Dreamers : A New Look
at the New Deal. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Leuchtenburg, William Edward. The FDR Years: On
Roosevelt and his Legacy. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Age of Roosevelt.
3 vols. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957-1960.
I know, it’s three volumes and it isn’t
brand new, but it’s so well written.
Winkler, Allan M. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the
Making of Modern America. New York: Pearson/Longman,
2006.
These books focus on specific players in the court-packing
drama:
Jackson, Robert H. The Struggle For Judicial Supremacy:
A Study of a Crisis in American Power Politics.
New York, Vintage Books, 1941. Contemporary account
by a Roosevelt aide and later Supreme Court Associate
Justice.
_____. The Supreme Court in the American System
of Government. Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
1955.
_____. That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin
D. Roosevelt. New York : Oxford University Press,
2003. Jackson’s memoir, completed shortly before
his death in 1954 and discovered in his archives a half
century later.
McKean, David. Tommy the Cork: Washington's Ultimate
Insider from Roosevelt to Reagan. South Royalton,
VT: Steerforth Press, 2004.
Ross, William G. The Chief Justiceship Of Charles
Evans Hughes, 1930-1941. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2007.
Weller, Cecil Edward. Joe T. Robinson, Always a
Loyal Democrat. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 1998.
You’ll find plenty of help on the Internet, too.
Don’t forget the sources I’ve listed for
“general” purposes for this issue, of course.
For this topic, we’re all blessed with the New
Deal Network site, an educational guide to the Great
Depression of the 1930s sponsored by the Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning
Technologies at Teachers College/Columbia University.
Their “Classroom” segment on Roosevelt and
the Supreme Court is just superb– documents, cartoons,
case files, contemporary comments – and lesson
plans drawing on these materials. Once you get to this
site, you may never leave:
http://newdeal.feri.org/court/index.htm
If you feel like looking at other online sources, you
can begin with Wikipedia. There’s only a brief
“stub” entry on the “Four Horsemen”
of the Court, but it provides links to biographical
sketches of Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, Butler,
Brandeis, Hughes, Owen Roberts, Cardozo, and Stone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_(Supreme_Court)
There are also solid articles on the Nebbia and “Hot
Oil” cases as well as a good entry on the NIRA
that will lead you to more links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebbia_v._New_York
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Refining_Co._v._Ryan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Industrial_Recovery_Act
Answers.com has brief summary of the court-packing controversy,
and the entry gives you links to useful background articles
on the major cases (“Hot Oil, Schechter, Humphrey’s
Executor, Nebbia, West Coast Hotel). Don’t stop
with those links, there are also good entries at this
website for the Gold Clause:
http://www.answers.com/topic/court-packing-plan?cat=biz-fin
