Buy My Book - Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt and the Supreme Court
by Jeff Shesol
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt and the Supreme Court
by Jeff Shesol
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010
Supreme Power began, as many books do, as a nagging question.
The Court-packing fight is one of those historical events that gets mentioned frequently and yet, despite its significance, is never really explained. For all the continuing fascination with FDR—for all the books on his early years, his illness, his domestic life, and his leadership through depression and war—his conflict with the Court has received scant attention, even in ambitious, full-scale biographies. The Court fight is usually reduced to a neat, pat parable of presidential overreach, of second-term hubris.
That portrayal, for me, raised more questions than it answered. Is it really enough just to say that Roosevelt was feeling arrogant after his landslide re-election in 1936 and lost his head, deciding to strike back at a Court that had been overturning the New Deal? I didn’t think so; but when I began this project five years ago, I was at a loss to explain how Franklin Roosevelt, described at the time as “the greatest politician ever to be placed within a human skin,” did something as apparently radical and self-destructive as proposing to pack the Court. What drove FDR to make the biggest political miscalculation of his life? That was the mystery that drew me in.
There were other enduring questions at the heart of the story. Most significantly, what led the Court to change course—to make the “switch in time that saved nine”—in the middle of the fight and start upholding the New Deal? Was the Court coerced into endorsing FDR’s programs? Did Justice Owen Roberts—the deciding vote—wilt in the heat generated by the Court plan? Or was his evolution self-directed, as some historians suggest? And finally, what led Congress to reject the Court-packing plan and defy FDR—after four years in which Democrats had gone along with virtually everything he had proposed?
Answering these questions, I came to believe, is essential to understanding FDR and his times. In the years before World War II, Roosevelt’s battle with the Court’s conservative justices was the defining conflict of his political life. He and the so-called “Four Horsemen” were the chief combatants in the greatest constitutional crisis since Reconstruction. The nation in 1937 was at a crossroads, poised uncomfortably between past and future, and between conflicting notions of the Constitution: one fixed, the other fluid. The Court majority’s momentous shift from a last-ditch defense of property rights to an embrace of emergent social and economic rights began in this moment—in the crucible of its conflict with Roosevelt.
The answers also tell us something about our own times.
Of course, I didn’t write Supreme Power with any knowledge that President Obama, like President Roosevelt, would rebuke the Court in a State of the Union address, or that the centerpiece of Obama’s legislative agenda, like Roosevelt’s, would face an immediate assault in the nation’s courtrooms. But I did write the book in full awareness that the battlefield of FDR’s Court fight is still—is always—contested ground.
The questions at the core of Roosevelt’s struggle with the Court are always open questions: about the meaning of the Constitution, the limits of presidential and governmental power, and whether democracy can be made to work in times of economic distress. History may not repeat itself, exactly, but it does have a way of echoing itself—sometimes loudly. Today, I think, is one of those times.
Jeff Shesol is the author of Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud that Defined a Decade. He was deputy chief speechwriter to President Bill Clinton and is a founding partner of West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and communications firm.
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