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The Man On The Flying Trapeze, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

Any history of the controversy over President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Court-packing plan sets out to answer three principal questions. The first is how best to tell what I will call the political story: how to understand the political trajectory of the Plan from its initial conceptualization to its ultimate failure. The second is how best to tell what I will call the legal story: how to understand the constitutional landscape that confronted New Deal reformers, how they negotiated it, and how and in what respects the Supreme Court transformed that body of constitutional law during the Great Depression. The third …

The Long Exception: Rethinking The Place Of The New Deal In American History, Jefferson Cowie, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

"The Long Exception" examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by …

America Reborn? Conservatives, Liberals, And American Political Culture Since 1945, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] From the perspective of the early twenty‑first century, we can chide the good professor for not carefully considering the consequences of what he wished for half a century ago. For it is clear that the force of this conservative movement in America was in fact “stronger than most of us [knew]” or could have imagined in 1950, or, indeed, in 1968. This conservative “impulse”, those “irritable mental gestures”, has largely restructured American political thinking with a force and popular approval that remains stunning to consider. The growth of the conservative movement since 1945 was also accompanied by the slow …

New Deal Cowboy: Gene Autry And Public Diplomacy, Michael Dean Duchemin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation explains how Gene Autry used his mastery of multiplatform entertainment and the techniques of transmedia storytelling to make the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the 32nd President of the United States, more attractive to the American public. Making a case for cultural significance, the work shows how Autry developed a singing cowboy persona to exploit the western genre as his modus operandi, because it appealed to rural, small town and newly-urban Americans in the Midwest, South and Southwest. Examining Autry's oeuvre within a context created by Roosevelt administration policies, the dissertation exposes a process of public diplomacy …

How Blacks Became Blue: The 1936 African American Voting Shift From The Party Of Lincoln To The New Deal Coalition, Daphney Daniel

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Despite the vast research done on the African American influence in the Democratic Party, comparably little has been done on what led them to become part of the Democratic Party in the first place. This study offers an overview of the rich political history of the African American experience from the 15th Amendment’s ratification in 1870 to the 1936 presidential election. My research will reveal how Republican apathy, depression era desperation and Roosevelt’s charismatic message of relief and hope played a vital role to the historical shift of the African American voting bloc from the Republican to the Democratic Party.

Portia's Deal, Karen M. Tani

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The New Deal, one of the greatest expansions of government in U.S. history, was a "lawyers' deal": it relied heavily on lawyers' skills and reflected lawyers' values. Was it exclusively a "male lawyers' deal"? This Essay argues that the New Deal offered important opportunities to women lawyers at a time when they were just beginning to graduate from law school in significant numbers. Agencies associated with social welfare policy, a traditionally "maternalist" enterprise, seem to have been particularly hospitable. Through these agencies, women lawyers helped to administer, interpret, and create the law of a new era. Using government records and …

The Limits Of The New Deal Analogy, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

The past three years of the Obama Administration inevitably have elicited comparisons between the present day and the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. While frequently illuminating, such comparisons often overlook an important point that many may have forgotten: compared with the major reform initiatives undertaken during President Obama’s tenure, a review of the roll call votes reveals that the measures enacted by the New Deal Congresses enjoyed a remarkable degree of bipartisan support. In addition, the Democrats enjoyed large majorities in the House of Representatives from 1933 forward, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate after 1934. …

The Place Of Law In Ivan Illich's Vision Of Social Transformation, Bruce K. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses Ivan Illich’s direction for social reform that led to his book, "Tools for Conviviality", where Illich targeted development, technology, and the exploitation of nature. Illich identified three key cultural institutions that needed to be reclaimed in order to bring about an inversion of industrial society: science, language, and law. This Article focuses on the rule of law and its central institutional invention—formal adjudication.

The Author suggests that Illich’s idealism can still be found in the law reform litigation effort and identifies the diminished stature of the ideal of disinterested adjudication as a significant threat to Illich’s hopes …

New Deal Versus Yankee Independence: The Failure Of Comprehensive Development On The Connecticut River, And Its Long-Term Consequences, Eve Vogel, Alexandra Lacey

Eve Vogel

In the 1930s, comprehensive development of the Connecticut River basin – coordinated dam-building and operations from tributaries to tidewater – was advanced by multiple people and agencies. However, they fought for twenty years over the specifics. President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal supporters and heirs envisioned a federal valley authority that could provide regional economic development, resource conservation, pollution abatement, and, most important, cheap, widely available public electric power. The New England business establishment touted Yankee independence, but most of all, wanted hydropower allotted to states and private power companies. Upriver rural and farming advocates, led by Vermont’s George …

The Place Of Law In Ivan Illich’S Vision Of Social Transformation, Bruce K. Miller

Western New England Law Review

This Article discusses Ivan Illich’s direction for social reform that led to his book, Tools for Conviviality, where Illich targeted development, technology, and the exploitation of nature. Illich identified three key cultural institutions that needed to be reclaimed in order to bring about an inversion of industrial society: science, language, and law. This Article focuses on the rule of law and its central institutional invention—formal adjudication.

The Author suggests that Illich’s idealism can still be found in the law reform litigation effort and identifies the diminished stature of the ideal of disinterested adjudication as a significant threat to Illich’s hopes …

The Hughes-Roberts Visit, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

In the 1936 case of Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, Justice Owen Roberts voted to invalidate New York’s minimum wage law for women. The following spring, Roberts joined the majority in upholding Washington State’s minimum wage statute. How best to account for this “switch” is a central preoccupation of New Deal constitutional history. In recent years, a number of scholars have called attention to a visit that Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and his wife made to Roberts’ Pennsylvania farm in the summer of 1936, in the wake of the public firestorm following the announcement of the Tipaldo …

Welfare And Rights Before The Movement: Rights As A Language Of The State, Karen M. Tani

All Faculty Scholarship

In conversations about government assistance, rights language often emerges as a danger: when benefits become “rights,” policymakers lose flexibility, taxpayers suffer, and the poor lose their incentive to work. Absent from the discussion is an understanding of how, when, and why Americans began to talk about public benefits in rights terms. This Article addresses that lacuna by examining the rise of a vibrant language of rights within the federal social welfare bureaucracy during the 1930s and 1940s. This language is barely visible in judicial and legislative records, the traditional source base for legal-historical inquiry, but amply evidenced by previously unmined …

Fdr And Chief Justice Hughes: The President, The Supreme Court, And The Epic Battle Over The New Deal, James F. Simon

Books

By the author of acclaimed books on the bitter clashes between Jefferson and Chief Justice Marshall on the shaping of the nation’s constitutional future, and between Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney over slavery, secession, and the presidential war powers. Roosevelt and Chief Justice Hughes's fight over the New Deal was the most critical struggle between an American president and a chief justice in the twentieth century.

The confrontation threatened the New Deal in the middle of the nation’s worst depression. The activist president bombarded the Democratic Congress with a fusillade of legislative remedies that shut down insolvent banks, regulated stocks, …

Judicial Engagement Through The Lens Of Lee Optical, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Keynote remarks at the symposium on "Judicial Engagement and the Role of Judges in Enforcing the Constitution", delivered on March 22, 2012 at the George Mason University School of Law.