The New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt (D, 1933-45) was one of the most popular and influential presidents in U.S. history. Leading the nation through its worst economic crisis, the Great Depression, and through most of its most devastating war, World War II (1939-45), Roosevelt was elected to a record four terms. But in the spring of 1937, while attempting to increase the size of the Supreme Court, Roosevelt faced a severe political backlash, even from some of his closest allies. His court reform plan—derisively called a "court-packing" plan by critics—was widely considered to have been the greatest political blunder of his presidency.

In 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, putting an abrupt end to the massive economic growth that had followed World War I (1914-18) and marking the onset of a decade-long depression in the U.S. The inability of the Republican administration to prevent or reverse that crisis led to the rise of Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1932. In an effort to jump-start the economy and provide a social safety net for those most adversely affected by the depression, Roosevelt and his congressional allies swiftly enacted a series of laws giving the U.S. government unprecedented control over the economic affairs of its citizens.

But that "New Deal" was quickly challenged in the courts by businessmen who claimed that their liberty was infringed upon by federal relief efforts. Many of their cases went to the Supreme Court, whose members were closely divided along ideological lines: Roughly half of them were liberals who believed the Constitution gave the federal government broad powers, while the other half consisted of conservatives who believed that the federal government should have as little role in shaping the economy as possible. Two justices were independents who voted with the liberals or conservatives on a case-by-case basis.

The court was generally split on matters regarding government regulation in the first few years of the depression. But beginning in 1935, the court unanimously struck down several key aspects of the New Deal as being unconstitutional. Overturning federal law because it conflicted with the Constitution—a process known as "judicial review"—was something the Supreme Court had rarely done since it did it for the first time in the case Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Soon after Roosevelt's landslide reelection in November 1936, he presented Congress with a plan to reform the federal judiciary. The most controversial aspect of that proposal was giving the president the ability to appoint an additional member of the Supreme Court for every sitting justice over the age of 70; that plan could potentially have increased the size of the court from nine justices to 15. The majority of those justices would likely have been liberals who agreed with Roosevelt's interpretation of the Constitution as giving the federal government broad powers. Roosevelt insisted that the bill was meant to improve the overall efficiency of the judicial branch, but his opponents charged him with trying to pack the courts with partisans who would dutifully uphold his New Deal.

Roosevelt's plan for judicial reorganization sparked ...