Dear Mr. President

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In previous episodes of BackStory, you may have heard a segment called “Footnotes,” where one of us would bring something from the archives that we want to share with you. Well now, historian William Blake tells us about the documents he keeps coming back to, which tell a story about a president’s bold plan to change the Supreme Court and the wave of public reaction it generated.

WILLIAM BLAKE: My name is William Blake. I’m an assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. And the documents I keep coming back to are a number of letters that ordinary Americans sent to FDR expressing their opinions on his proposal to add six new seats to the US Supreme Court.

In FDR’s first term, the Supreme Court struck down most, not all, but most of his New Deal agenda. And he entered his second term after receiving a landslide victory. And he was frustrated because none of the existing nine justices had either died or retired.

But FDR also noticed a loophole in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t specify the number of justices that are supposed to be on the Supreme Court. It just says that there shall be a Supreme Court headed by a Chief Justice.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: Is it a dangerous precedent for the Congress to change the number of the justices? The Congress has always had, and will have, that power. The number of justices has been changed several times before– in the administration of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of them signers of the Declaration of Independence, in the administrations of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.

WILLIAM BLAKE: There are accounts that show that members of Congress were saying at the time that they had never received the volume of letters sent to their offices that they were over the six months that Congress was debating the court packing bill. And the White House received a huge number of letters.

Some of my favorite letters were written by people who opposed court packing. And a lot of these letters were written by people who supported the New Deal, but were horrified by the notion that adding six new seats to the Supreme Court was the appropriate solution to the conflict that FDR was having with the Supreme Court.

February 21st, 1937– Dear President, though I know you will never see this letter, there are two ways of expressing your feelings– through bouquets and brickbats. I am throwing brickbats. I’m against your judiciary reform bill.

You may honestly administer said bill, but in the hands of some future president this bill might be dangerous. A constitutional amendment is safer. And then the will of the people is satisfactorily expressed. If your bill is defeated, kindly consider my suggestion. With best regards, a Republican, Williamsburg, Kentucky.

One thing that I really like about this letter is that this person, who’s only willing to identify as a Republican, is thinking both short-term and long-term about the change and precedent that court packing would set. Whereas, a longer-term solution, that would be more viewed as more legitimate, would be a constitutional amendment.

March 12th, 1937– Mr. President, legally you are right, morally you are wrong, and in the long run, you will accomplish nothing. Perhaps I’m not even qualified to give you my opinion. I’m only 17, expecting to graduate from high school this June. Yet I feel that it is my life that is going to be affected by all this Supreme Court rumpus.

After studying the Constitution, I believe that your court plan is entirely constitutional and legal. Morally, I think the plan is unsound, for it will establish a dangerous precedent. As I said before, I am no connoisseur, but only a 17-year-old American boy, interested in this vital American question of the balance of power. Very sincerely yours, Roger Blake, Rochester, New York.

The thing that really jumps out to me about this letter is at a 17-year-old high school student recognizes the difference between what is written down in the text of the Constitution and what sorts of constitutional norms and traditions are just as important for upholding American democracy.

July 16th, 1937– Dear Sir, I am seriously disturbed by your effort to change the Supreme Court. The American government has never been a government of a quick majority, nor should it be. Our government has been designed to be one that makes it necessary for a majority opinion to continue through a period of time before great changes are made.

This is a valuable and important characteristic of our government and you should not urge its removal. You haven’t time for long letters. I felt it was my duty to advise you of my concern. Sincerely, Paul D. Eschelman, proprietor, Eschelman Supply Company, wholesale seller of radios, parts, and refrigerators, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

So this may be my favorite letter that I’ve come across in my sample. And the reason is that Mr. Eschelman might not have ever read any of James Madison’s writings, but he has honed in on a key argument from Madison’s famous Federalist 10, where Madison describes the danger of faction, of public opinion being whipped up into a frenzy. And in the short-term, causing a major change in our political system that’s disruptive in the long-term.

This letter sort of highlights that if you simply just add seats to the Supreme Court, you are shortcutting that vision. And it was something that Madison would be horrified by. You have to sort of move past the mistakes in grammar, or the mistakes in word usage, but if you really take the arguments that these letters contain seriously, they’re the types of arguments that I hope to stimulate from my college students when I’m teaching them in a Constitutional Law class. That’s how many pearls of wisdom you can find in some of these letters.

And there’s something just really patriotic about this, that someone would spend $0.3 on a stamp, which is no small consideration in 1937– that’s about a third of a gallon of milk, or a third of a loaf of bread– to take the time to write the most powerful person in the world and tell them that they are profoundly wrong.

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JOANNE: William Blake is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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