THE PRESIDENCY: Forest v. Trees

One evening last week Senator Joseph T. Robinson emerged from the White House. He was met by reporters who asked him about the President’s bill for enlarging the Supreme Court. In his capacity as leader of the Senate Majority who had just spent two hours with the head of his Party, he made answer:

“The measure will be proceeded with and it is expected that action will be taken on it during the present session. Aside from the provisions that relate to the Supreme Court, other features of the bill are to be regarded as of vital importance. It is felt that during the last few months some changes have occurred which modify the situation, but there still exists the necessity for the injection of new blood into the Court.”

In this oblique fashion was announced the biggest news emanating from Washington in many a week. It meant that Franklin Roosevelt, after four months’ stubborn insistence on his original plan for enlarging the Court, was at last willing to compromise.

At press conference next morning, the President put on a vigorous act, a stern lecture on the need for judiciary reform. He was severe with the Supreme Court. It had left important New Deal cases undecided. It had refused to prevent the suit of 19 utilities against TVA from going to trial in the lower courts. It had granted appeals on two suits against PWA power loans to municipalities, thereby keeping $50,000,000 of such loans tied up. It had refused the Government’s request to allow Electric Bond & Share’s challenge of the Public Utility Holding Company Act to be appealed directly to the Supreme Court without going through a Circuit Court of Appeals. It had done nothing when a judge in Pennsylvania had enjoined Government attorneys from bringing suit in New York against the Aluminum Company of America. It had refused to decide six cases on which it had heard argument and ordered them reargued in the autumn. Yet in spite of all these things, the Court had adjourned for four months because eight old men needed rest.* Of course he was still intent on judicial reform.

What specific amendments to his Court bill was he prepared to accept? That, said the President smiling, was asking about the trees. He was interested only in the forest.

With this backhanded admission, the key log was removed from the jam that had kept Congress tied up since February. Several weeks ago, Congressional leaders recognized that it would be impossible to pass the bill for six new Supreme Court Justices, but the President refused to believe them. They gave out hints of compromise; Franklin Roosevelt refused to bat an eye. They deliberately delayed action on the bill hoping he would see his mistake. Finally, giving up hope of changing him, they began to plan on letting the Court bill die without action. When this was reported in the press last week, Franklin Roosevelt changed front barely in time to save face. It remained to be seen what else he could save. A two-judge compromise, which would easily have won in April, in June after a long, embittering fight was no longer certain of acceptance.

Result was that Franklin Roosevelt, when he gave in, was not able to dictate a compromise. Instead he had to put the whole matter into the hands of Senator Robinson, trusting him to obtain the best terms available. This was a new relationship, not seen in more than four years, between White House and Capitol. Just as an expectant mother commands a certain ethereal prestige above other women, so Joe Robinson, as an expectant Justice of the Supreme Court, has become since Justice Van Devanter’s retirement a sort of Super-Senator with a prestige all his own among his colleagues. With this and his new authority as the President’s plenipotentiary, he went forth last week to see how many chestnut-Judges he could pull out of the fire-Senate.

¶ To the Cuban Government, which had nominated him for the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize, Franklin Roosevelt sent a modest request that his nomination be withdrawn, suggested that Secretary of State Cordell Hull was more deserving of it. Since Mr. Hull, with equal modesty, had already told the Cubans that he thought the President deserved the Prize, eight Latin American republics who were preparing to line up for a costless compliment to their big Good Neighbor were left in a quandary.

¶ Franklin Roosevelt sent Congress a message which, he indicated, rounded out his program for 1937. It called for the creation of regional agencies similar to TVA, which would become one of seven dividing the whole U. S.: one for the Atlantic Seaboard, one for the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, one for the deep South (TVA), one for the Missouri Basin, one for the Arkansas Valley and Texas, one for the Columbia River Valley (already in formation), one for California and the Colorado River Basin. These would undertake national planning in their respective spheres, cope with flood control, soil erosion and the other conservation problems. Although the President hardly mentioned electric power in his message, the bills introduced into each House of Congress to carry out the program provided that the regional agencies could create corporations for that purpose. They also provided that “No person shall be appointed a regional planning director unless he professes a belief in the feasibility and wisdom of this act.”

¶ James M. Landis, Chairman of SEC who next autumn is to become Dean of Harvard Law School, was renominated for his present job by the President—so that he should not be lost till school begins.

¶ With State Department officials all atwitter over the possibility of Germany and Italy plunging into the Spanish civil war and over the advisability of including them, under the Neutrality Act’s arms embargo and other prohibitions, as “belligerents,” the President had Secretary Hull, Under Secretary Sumner Welles and Ambassador-at-Large Norman Davis to a luncheon conference. They decided to do nothing now.

¶ To Vice President Garner and Speaker Bankhead, President Roosevelt sent a letter with an enclosure from the Civil Service Commission. The Commission deplored that 70 bills creating new government jobs whose holders would be outside the Civil Service, had been introduced in this Congress and three or four of them already passed. The President urged Congress to give heed.

¶ With the Supreme Court log jam crumbling, the President conferred with Speaker Bankhead, who then gave out the legislative program for the remainder of this session, terming them “ought” not “must” bills: 1) Judicial reform, 2) Government reorganization, 3) re-enactment of expiring nuisance taxes and plugging of income tax leaks, 4) creation of six new regional planning authorities, 5) a farm tenancy bill providing $10,000,000 for a beginning next year. $25,000,000 for the year after, $50,000,000 for successive years, 6) the wages & hours bill, 7) a low-cost housing bill whose terms and cost had yet to be agreed on between its sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner, and the Treasury.

¶ When the President received an appeal from steel strikers in the Chicago area to intervene in the strike against three big independent steel companies, he referred it quietly to Madam Secretary Perkins and the National Labor Relations Board.

*Defenders of the Court next day hastened to insist that there were good reasons for all these omissions and commissions, that little if any delay would come of the Court’s recess, that the Justices would not spend the whole summer fishing, for in every recess they have many hundreds of cases presented to them which they have to consider and decide whether or not to review. And why, asked the Court’s defenders, should the President throw stones? Had not he, a man in his fifties, been absent from Washington 672 days, or 42 % of the time, since he took office?