What was court packing during the great depression

When Hugo Black joins the Court in , he displays no such qualms -- and, because the justices' chambers have remained unoccupied, even though he is the Court's most junior justice he is able to move into an especially large and luxurious corner suite, which he will keep for the next 34 years.

Townsend, the Court finds that white-only political primaries -- held, at the time, by the Democratic Party in several Southern states -- are constitutional. The decision states that political parties are private actors composed of voluntary members, and are therefore free to exclude non-whites.

February President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announces his court-packing plan, proposing that Congress allow him to add one new justice to the Supreme Court for every sitting justice older than 70 up to 15 justices. Roosevelt's proposal comes in the wake of several Court decisions overturning legislation -- including the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act -- central to Roosevelt's popular New Deal agenda.

The proposal is never adopted, but over his next three terms Roosevelt will have the opportunity to appoint all nine members of the Court. Roosevelt had high expectations, too, for the House of Representatives, where Democrats held a 4 to 1 advantage.

That prospect drove opponents of the plan to a fury of activity: protest meetings, bar association resolutions and thousands upon thousands of letters to editors. That argument, however, was more subtle and harder to explain to the public. They saw it as a ruse to conceal his real, and in their eyes, nefarious objective, and as a display of gross disrespect for the elderly.

Can you calculate the loss to the world if such as these had been compelled to retire at 70? One is to take them out and shoot them, as they are reported to do in at least one other country.

The other way is more genteel, but no less effective. They are kept on the public payroll but their votes are canceled. In a letter read by the Montana Democratic senator Burton K. The court, however, would spring some surprises of its own. Parrish, it validated a minimum wage law from the state of Washington, a statute essentially no different from the New York state act it had struck down only months before.

As a result, a hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, would be required to pay back wages to Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid. Two weeks later, in several 5 to 4 rulings, the court sustained the National Labor Relations Act.

A tribunal that in had held that coal mining, although conducted in many states, did not constitute interstate commerce, now gave so broad a reading to the Constitution that it accepted intervention by the federal government in the labor practices of a single Virginia clothing factory. On May 24, the court that in had declared that Congress, in enacting a pension law, had exceeded its powers, found the Social Security statute constitutional.

This set of decisions came about because one justice, Owen Roberts, switched his vote. Ever since, historians have argued about why he did so. Since there is no archival evidence to account for his abrupt change on the minimum wage cases, scholars have been reduced to speculation. Perhaps he was affected by the biting criticism from within the legal community. It is even harder to account for why Roberts, in his subsequent votes in the Wagner Act and Social Security cases, supported such a vast extension of federal power—but the pressure exerted by the court-packing bill may very likely have been influential.

The president could rejoice that his program might now be safe, as indeed it was. Never again would the court strike down a New Deal law. The victory and subsequent destruction of the city of Carthage marked the end of the Punic Wars and represented Rome's replacement of Carthage as the On February 5, , year-old Josh Powell, who had been in the public eye since police labeled him a person of interest in the disappearance of his year-old wife, Susan, locks out a social worker then kills himself and his two sons, ages 5 and 7, by setting fire to his Williams, a Puritan, worked as a teacher before serving briefly as a colorful pastor at Plymouth and then at Salem.

Within a few After seven years of revolution and civil upheaval, Mexican President Venustiano Carranza proclaims the modern Mexican constitution, which promises the restoration of lands to native peoples, the separation of church and state, and dramatic economic and educational reforms.

Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. The law required a literacy test for immigrants and barred Asiatic laborers, except for those from countries with special treaties or On February 5, , white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith is convicted in the murder of African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers, over 30 years after the crime occurred.

Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home on June 12, , while his Aaron began his professional baseball career in in the Negro League and joined the Milwaukee Braves of the major league in , Griffith joined forces to create their own film studio, which they called the United Artists Corporation.