By Catharine Melin-Moser
In February 1937, a stubborn and independent thinker dared to challenge President Franklin D. Roosevelt over a controversial plan to reconfigure the Supreme Court. The challenger, Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler, was a broad-shouldered, six-foot Democrat typically clad in a rumpled suit and a weathered Stetson. He cast himself as principled and progressive-minded, always his own man, and one who would stray from his party without misgivings.
Roosevelt, a Democrat, ascended to the presidency in March 1933. Due to the urgency created by the Great Depression, he wasted no time proposing revolutionary concepts of government stewardship. Early New Deal legislation was often hastily and poorly drafted, broad in scope, and gave little consideration to constitutional precedent. Roosevelt fumed when the Supreme Court began dismantling New Deal measures.
The president wisely averted a direct assault on the Court. He knew that most Americans regarded it as sacrosanct, yet they expressed concern over the justices’ ages. Averaging seventy- one years old, the nine men comprised the oldest Court in the nation’s history.
With Attorney General Homer Cummings, Roosevelt secretly drafted a Bill to Reorganize the Judicial Branch of Government for the purpose of admitting judges likely to uphold New Deal legislation. If this court-packing legislation passed, he would have the luxury of appointing an additional justice for any member of the Court over age seventy, and conceivably add six more justices.
Burton K. Wheeler’s adopted state of Montana benefited handsomely from the New Deal, including the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA). That program would pump more than $40 million into state crop-adjustment payments and significantly shored up the recovery of devastated farming regions. In northeast Montana, the massive Fort Peck Dam project employing thousands was underway on the Missouri River. While Wheeler was an avid New Dealer, his lack of support for some of the measures strained his relationship with Roosevelt.
On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt’s bill was unveiled, and innocently, nothing more than a beneficial reform to relieve a static Supreme Court impeded by “aged or infirm judges.” Wheeler was flabbergasted, later saying, “Here was an unsubtle and anti-Constitutional grab for power, which would destroy the Court as an institution. I felt I would have to do everything I could to fight the plan.” Roosevelt’s underhanded attempt to pack the Court split the Senate into hostile camps. The opposition selected Wheeler as the man best to take on the president.
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings commenced in March 1937. In front of a capacity audience in the Senate Caucus Room, Wheeler read a letter written by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.
Hughes’ factual and unemotional statements about the Court refuted the argument advanced by Roosevelt and Cummings of a Court unable to meet its obligations because of aging justices.
According to Wheeler, who had met privately with Hughes, the justice had said, “I am not interested in who are to be the members of the Court. I am interested in the Court as an institution. And this proposed bill would destroy the Court as an institution.”
Ironically, as the battle raged on Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court upheld a series of important New Deal legislation. With each new ruling, support for Roosevelt’s court-packing bill eroded.
On July 22, 1937, the Senate buried the bill. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, in hand with Chief Justice Hughes, dealt Roosevelt what historians consider the most consequential defeat of his extraordinary twelve-year presidency.