Letters: Democracy (April 2003)

To the Editor:
In reading Tal Ben-Shahar and Roger Donway's article "Two Jeers for Democracy" (Navigator, November/December 2002), I came across a reference to America's constitutional republic ending in 1937. I have several guesses as to what the authors consider to be the death note of the republic, but I am not sure. Will the authors please tell me what happened in 1937 that they believe signaled the end of the republic?

Sincerely,
Duff Dyer
Columbus, Ohio

Roger Donway responds:

"As votaries of freedom," Martin Diamond once said, "individual liberty was to the Founders the comprehensive, unproblematic good; and they were determined to secure that good by an experiment in democracy." In 1787, the Founders drafted a constitution that began the experiment.

By the late nineteenth century, democracy—in the form of increasingly leftist state legislatures—undertook to assault liberty through laws that regulated the economy in ways violating individuals' freedom of contract. The courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular, defended this constitutionally protected liberty by striking down the laws. With the coming of the New Deal, the Court also had to strike down, on the same grounds, more and more federal laws that attempted to regulate the economy.

Therefore, on February 5, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt sent a message to Congress proposing a scheme to place additional, presumably leftist justices on the Court. On March 9, he addressed the nation on his plan to pack the Court and said ominously that the American people expected the third branch of government "to fall in unison with the other two." On March 29, in the case West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Court upheld a state minimum wage. On April 12, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And on May 24, it upheld the Social Security Act.

Because of the new trend in these decisions, opponents of the Court-packing scheme were able to have it defeated, and people said, "A switch in time saves nine." But the cost of saving the Court was to throw constitutionally secured liberties to the wolves of democracy. The Founders' experiment had come to an end, one hundred and fifty years after it began.