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Roosevelt's Court-Packing Gambit: The Constitutional Crisis of 1937
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Roosevelt's New Deal had survived the Great Depression's worst — but in 1937, the Supreme Court threatened to dismantle it entirely. This is the story of the most audacious constitutional gamble in American political history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
March fourth, nineteen thirty-three. Franklin Roosevelt stood at the Capitol steps in driving rain and delivered an inaugural address that forty million Americans heard on the radio.
Roosevelt's opening move was the Emergency Banking Act, signed within days of taking office. He declared a national bank holiday, halted the panic, and then systematically reopened banks that federal examiners deemed solvent.
The Supreme Court in the mid-nineteen thirties was not friendly territory for Roosevelt. The court had nine justices.
Here's what made Roosevelt's response extraordinary, and genuinely dangerous, as a constitutional matter. In February of nineteen thirty-seven, flush from his landslide re-election in nineteen thirty-six, he announced a plan to reorganize the federal judiciary.
And then something strange happened. In March of nineteen thirty-seven, before the Senate had voted on the court bill, Justice Owen Roberts switched sides.
It's worth pausing here to understand what this fight was actually about, beneath the legal arguments. The nineteen thirties in America did not exist in a vacuum.
While the court battle dominated the political headlines, the deeper structural work of the New Deal was happening in the legislation that survived. Glass-Steagall, passed in nineteen thirty-three, drew a hard line between commercial banking and investment banking.
The debate over whether the New Deal worked is one that has never fully closed. On the relief side, it's hard to dispute the scale.
The financial crisis of two thousand and eight arrived carrying the ghost of nineteen twenty-nine. The mechanisms were different.
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