6.4 Critics, the Court Fight, and the New Deal Coalition

The New Deal did not command a consensus. Independent OpenExamPrep review for History of the United States II uses 1934–1938 to test liberalism versus conservatism, party realignment, and the constitutional fight over how far a modern federal government could go. Keep World War II out of this chapter: the story here ends with a coalition that could win elections, a Court that stopped striking down core statutes, and a Congress that, after 1938, was less willing to pass another burst of reform.

Critics from the Populist Left

Huey P. Long, Democratic senator and former governor of Louisiana, built a national following with Share Our Wealth. Under the slogan “Every Man a King,” Long demanded caps on large fortunes and inheritances, a guaranteed family homestead, and a minimum income financed by taxing extreme wealth. He accused Roosevelt of being too friendly to banks and too timid on redistribution. Long’s machine mixed roads, schools, and patronage with authoritarian control in Louisiana. His assassination in September 1935 removed the most plausible populist rival before the 1936 campaign, but Share Our Wealth clubs showed that many voters wanted more leveling, not a return to 1920s normalcy.

Father Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-area Catholic priest, reached millions by radio. He first praised Roosevelt, then denounced the New Deal as a betrayal, demanding monetary inflation, nationalization of key industries and banks, and an end to what he called international finance. By the late 1930s his broadcasts turned openly anti-Semitic and joined a darker right-wing populism. Exam use: Coughlin illustrates mass media demagoguery and the instability of early New Deal support on the urban ethnic right-left border—not a Supreme Court doctrine.

Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician, proposed that the federal government pay every citizen over sixty a monthly pension—famously $200—on condition that the recipient retire and spend the entire sum within thirty days, funded by a national transactions tax. Townsend clubs blanketed the country. Economists mocked the arithmetic; politicians noticed the votes. The Social Security Act of 1935 was in part a more conservative, contributory alternative to Townsend’s universal aged stipend. Do not say Townsend wrote Social Security; do say his movement made inaction on old-age poverty electorally dangerous.

Critics from the Conservative Right

The American Liberty League (1934) gathered conservative Democrats such as Al Smith and John W. Davis with business leaders, including du Pont interests, to defend property, the gold-standard-era Constitution, and limited government. They called NRA codes, TVA, and taxes on wealth class legislation and a step toward dictatorship. Liberty League pamphlets are the cleanest primary-source flavor of anti–New Deal conservatism: the danger was not that relief was too small, but that Washington was too big.

Southern conservative Democrats increasingly split from northern liberals on unions, federal anti-lynching bills, and later wages-and-hours coverage for farm labor. That split would feed the conservative coalition in Congress—Republicans plus Southern Democrats—after the 1938 midterms. Roosevelt’s attempted purge of conservative Democrats in 1938 primaries mostly failed, a sign that the coalition had a right wing he could not command.

The Court Fight, 1937

From 1935 through 1936 the Supreme Court had invalidated the NIRA (Schechter), the first AAA (Butler), and other statutes, often by 5–4 or 6–3 divisions. The Four Horsemen (Justices Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler) formed a reliable conservative bloc; Brandeis, Stone, and Cardozo were more receptive to regulation; Chief Justice Hughes and Justice Owen Roberts were the swings.

After his 1936 landslide over Alf Landon, Roosevelt on February 5, 1937, proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill: for every justice who did not retire at seventy, the president could add another, up to six new seats. He packaged it as relief for an overworked, aged Court. Opponents named it court-packing. Even many New Deal senators saw a threat to judicial independence. The Senate did not pass the bill. Politically, the fight spent Roosevelt’s post-1936 capital and frightened moderates who still liked Social Security and the TVA.

The Switch in Time That Saved Nine

While the packing bill stalled, the Court changed course. In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (March 1937) it upheld a Washington State minimum wage for women, effectively burying Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) and the late Lochner-era habit of striking down wage laws as violations of “liberty of contract.” Elsie Parrish, a hotel chambermaid, had sued for back pay. Justice Roberts joined the majority—the vote contemporaries tagged the “switch in time that saved nine.” Historians still debate timing: some evidence suggests Roberts’s position in Parrish was taking shape before the packing message. For exam purposes, know the phrase, the case name, and the political sequence (packing threat, then upholding of regulation), and note that causation is contested.

Weeks later, NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (April 1937) upheld the Wagner Act, holding that a giant steelmaker’s labor relations could be reached under the commerce power because manufacturing sat in a stream of commerce. In the same period the Court upheld Social Security’s unemployment and old-age structures (Steward Machine Co. v. Davis; Helvering v. Davis). Together these decisions meant the Second New Deal’s labor and insurance core would stand. Vacancies soon followed (including Van Devanter’s retirement); Roosevelt populated the Court with New Dealers such as Hugo Black without needing extra seats.

The New Deal Coalition and Party Realignment

The 1932 and especially 1936 elections realigned national politics around Roosevelt’s party. The New Deal coalition was not a single ideology; it was an electoral machine:

• Urban ethnic voters in the North—Catholics, Jews, recent immigrant stock—who received relief, recognized their machines in the Democratic Party, and heard Roosevelt on the radio
• Organized labor, increasingly CIO as well as AFL, delivering votes and money after Wagner and Flint
• The white Solid South, still Democratic from Reconstruction-era loyalties, essential in Congress, and determined to protect Jim Crow from federal interference
• African American voters in northern cities, who had long favored the party of Lincoln and who shifted, especially by 1936, toward Democrats because New Deal relief, however discriminatory in administration, reached Black households Republican laissez-faire had not
• Many farmers who took AAA checks, plus intellectuals and urban liberals who defined liberalism as using the federal government to check corporate power, insure old age, and support unions

Conservatism in this new language meant skepticism of spending, regulation, unions, and “socialism”—the Liberty League position, increasingly the Republican brand, and the Southern Democratic brake. African American realignment was incomplete and geographically uneven: the South remained a disfranchising one-party system. New Deal agencies were often segregated (CCC camps, public housing). The Black Cabinet, including Mary McLeod Bethune, advised on minority affairs but could not desegregate the coalition’s Southern pillar. Still, the partisan direction of change is the exam point: Black voters in the urban North became a Democratic constituency, tying civil-rights conflict inside the party to a later generation.

The 1937–38 recession—after Roosevelt cut spending and as new Social Security taxes withdrew purchasing power—raised unemployment again and strengthened the conservative coalition. By 1939 the burst of domestic legislation had largely ended. War in Europe would soon dominate politics; that is the next chapter’s problem, not this one’s.

Exam traps: calling Long a Liberty Leaguer; dating court-packing to 1933; treating the “switch in time” as a constitutional amendment; saying African Americans never voted Republican after Lincoln; and dragging Pearl Harbor into a 1937 Court question.