I often feel at something of a loss about what to say after reading non-fiction, especially history. If I knew enough about the period or events covered to have anything insightful to offer, I probably wouldn't be reading the book. So usually I can't really evaluate whether the book is accurate or unbiased. Often, I wait to see other reviews of such books before I pick them up, essentially letting those folks who are experts do the pre-screening for me. And for what it's worth, this one's been very well reviewed.
It's the story of Franklin Roosevelt's mid-1930s attempt to pack the Supreme Court. Midway through his first term, the legal challenges to the various programs and regulatory packages that made up the New Deal began arriving at the Court, which overturned many of them. The decisions were often quite harsh, and left Roosevelt feeling that despite his enormous Congressional majorities and the apparent support of the public (a bit harder to gauge then than now, as polling was in its relative infancy at the time), anything he attempted to do would be overturned by the Court.
In Roosevelt's eyes, this was a Constitutional crisis in the making; if the powers granted to the executive and legislative branches were to be as narrowly defined as the Court's rulings implied, then the federal government had essentially no power to deal with major national crises. He saw this as a problem caused in large part by the age of the Court. The "Nine Old Men," as they were known, were an unusually old Court -- average age above 70 -- and in Roosevelt's eyes, they were relics of an earlier generation who simply could not adapt to the realities of a new era.
And so, midway through his second term, Roosevelt introduced his plan to increase the size of the Court to 15 members. The Constitution doesn't define the size of the Court, and during America's first 100 years, it changed fairly often. But it had been stable at 9 since roughly the Civil War, so a 9-member court was all that most people alive had ever known, and Roosevelt's plan seemed terribly radical to many, an attempt to turn the Court into a rubberstamp for his legislative agenda.
I was often reminded of the recent debate over health care. In both cases, a popular Democratic president with large Congressional majorities (Roosevelt's were even larger than Obama's, and that at a time when the filibuster was still a rarely-used tool instead of the default opposition setting that it is today) fought to accomplish something he believed crucial to the nation's well-being. In the public arena, the conservative opposition seemed far more vocal and better organized than did the Democrats, who were sometimes so divided on the issues at hand as to be there own worst enemy. And in both eras, the president was accused of being a socialist who wanted to rule America as his own personal playground, a tyrant in the making.
Roosevelt's Court-packing plan never made it through Congress, for a variety of reasons -- one of his principal opponents on the Court resigned; another suddenly seemed to switch sides on a host of issues, putting Roosevelt on the winning side of those 5-4 decisions; Congressional Democrats feared that the riled-up voters at home would throw them out of office if they voted for the plan. In an "...and as a result..." afterword, Shesol argues that the ensuing divisions in the Democratic party led to the party's gradual weakening over the next 35 years, and to the increased strength of the Republicans, who had been a very small minority party, culminating in the Republican dominance of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan era.
Supreme Power is entertaining reading, and Shesol brings his characters to vivid life; Roosevelt comes across as an immensely intelligent and profoundly arrogant man, who finds it difficult to believe that his own party might not go along with his ideas. I thought it was an informative look at an important moment in American history.
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