Felix Frankfurter Quotes
Save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.
The Roosevelt administration had stemmed the tide of Hoover’s Great Depression but the nation had not yet recovered. The New Deal measures, most of which would be considered fundamental to good government 50 years later was being constantly thwarted by a Supreme Court with a strong arch conservative majority headed by James McReynolds, a virulent, overt, anti-Semitic racist, who hated FDR—see {616652} and {585241}. The situation was to many like that which existed before the Civil War when the Court rendered the Dred Scott decision that so harmed the nation. Frankfurter, not then a Supreme Court Justice, urged Roosevelt to do something lest the American Public lose all respect for the Court and our Constitutional system and have the nation harmed by not allowing reforms like child labor laws to go through. The court actually ruled by a narrow majority that the government could not pass laws making it illegal for 11 year old children to work in coal mines or factories. FDR attempted to add more justices turning the majority into a majority—“packing the Supreme Court”, but that politically backfired. Some of the reforms never went through while others needed Constitutional Amendments like the end to Prohibition.
Felix Frankfurter, 1882-1965, U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, February 7, 1937
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McReynolds vehemently dissented with the majority view in Perry v. United States that the government's action was wrong but that the plaintiff was not entitled to relief. His remarks were so vituperative that this, and other, comments, did not appear in the formal record of the court. See {616652} for an even worse private insult of FDR. McReynolds was a virulent ant-Semite and believed that all Backs were inferior to whites and Separate but Equal was fine policy for the nation and he was not sure the “equal” was necessary.
The justice so hated the President, that he not only made intemperate insulting remarks in private as this one but he even made intemperate insults in Supreme Court proceedings. See {585241}. McReynolds was an extreme racist and detested every thing that FDR and the New Deal stood for. Although an elderly man when FDR came into office, he lived long enough so that Roosevelt was never able to appoint his replacement. McReynolds was one of the reasons that FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court.
Felix Frankfurter was an American lawyer, professor, and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962 and was a noted advocate of judicial restraint in the judgments of the Court.
