The Lincoln Plawg

Friday, October 25, 2002 12:47 p.m.

Roosevelt's Realpolitik: Court-Packing and the Primary Purge

Having started on the tack of 1930s US politics, I'm reminded of a point that has puzzled me for some time.

After a stunning victory in November 1936 (As Maine goes, so goes Vermont), more or less immediately, Franklin Roosevelt appears to lose his political marbles. With 25 years of political experience, he enterprises the court-packing plan - controversial enough in itself - but managed in a way that seems calculated to pretty much unite both Houses of Congress against it.

In the full knowledge that the proposal is a bombshell, he sent it over to the Hill without the preliminary barrage of ego-massaging consultations that senior members would expect. A study of polling evidence signals a couple of points that were new on me:

apparently, FDR maintained several weeks of silence on the plan whilst opponents were pounding the airwaves;
the number of extra justices - six - was a killer: supposedly, FDR could have had two, but refused to budge,

This distinctly anti-FDR piece suggests that two of the Horsemen were ready to go, but couldn't afford to on the half-pay pension. FDR supposedly rejected a proposal for retirement on full pay, which could have passed (it says), in favour of his own crackpot plan.

More evidence (if it checks out) that FDR's purpose was to alienate Congress (the Senate, in particular), rather than get the plan passed in some version.

The proposal was also bound to get up the noses of the Nine Old Men - not just the Four Horsemen, but also FDR's bankers on the Court, Brandeis (80 - and therefore ten years over the proposed 'retirement age') and Cardozo (66, with (he would have thought) plenty of good opinion-writing years left in him!), who united with the Horsemen to reject the proposal.

The fact that the court-packing plan was modelled on an idea McReynolds (one of the Horsemen) suggested when Woodrow Wilson's Attorney-General [1] was just adding insult to injury.

If FDR had gone to a class of high school seniors and put the plan and MO to them, they would surely have predicted the result.

Which invites the question, Was it deliberate?

The hypothesis is that, while things were better than in March 1933, mass unemployment continued; and whilst (in baseball terms) the depression triggered in 1929 was charged to Hoover, the recession of 1937 was bound to hurt FDR's stats [2]. He needed a fall guy - someone to blame for his inability to tackle the crisis.

And a president's easiest and best 'alibi'is a hostile Congress. The 75th Congress wasn't hostile to start off with; so he had to make it so.

The brutal fight over the bill (S 1392) resulted in the death of Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson and ultimate rejection by the Senate 70-20. But was it a candidate that ran to lose?

The primary purge provides further evidence in favour of the proposition. If the court-packing bill was supposedly intended to cripple judicial opposition to the (now not so) New Deal, the purge was aimed at conservative forces in Congress.

FDR went round the country, onto the home turf of the likes of Senators Pat McCarran of Nevada and Walter George of Georgia and anointed the men he was (in effect) running against them in their primaries. It seemed like a virtual contempt of Congress, and, as with the court-packing bill, riled even liberal members who would, in principle, have been delighted to see FDR's targets kicked out by the voters.

(Tempers would not have been sweetened by his statement in a June 1938 Fireside Chat that

Never before have we had so many Copperheads among us

A coded expression for traitor, in fact.)

The purge was almost completely ineffective (Rep John O'Connor of New York has the honour of being its only victim), as it was bound - or is that, intended? - to be.

Opinion generally seems to be that both these moves were acts of folly on FDR's part. But, in this case, surely, once might be accounted carelessness - twice within a year looks like cold, hard calculation.

That's the hypothesis at least, and the circumstantial evidence I have seems to support it. Is there any direct evidence available, I wonder?

(A similar thought occurs about Hillary Clinton's health care plan - that it ran to lose. From memory, this, like the court-packing bill, was an intensely controversial plan dropped on Congress's desk without preparatory shmoozing, and thus alienated those persuadable on a more modest version of the same plan.)

William Manchester The Glory and the Dream p151
Since, it seems, FDR did not consider breaking convention and running for a third term till 1939, it would be the Verdict of History, rather than his re-election chances, that he was worried about.