tunity to order business affairs. In other words, the right of making contracts without government interference was given the same standing as the individual's right to refuse government interference in the matter of testifying against himself. In the words of the majority opinion striking down a statute that called for establishment of a minimum wage for working women:
The statute now under consideration is attacked upon the ground that it authorizes an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract included within the guaranties of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. The right to contract about one's affairs is a part of the liberty of the individual protected by this clause, is settled by the decisions of this Court and is no longer open to question . . . Within this liberty are contracts of employment of labor. In making such contracts, generally speaking, the parties have an equal right to obtain from each other the best terms they can as the result of private bargaining (Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525, 1923).
The presumption embedded in such reasoning is that employer and employee are equal parties to a contract, which is to say possessed of equal power to make such a contract. Private bargaining was the rule of the day, not anything like collective bargaining, such as came to be later permitted by the Wagner Act. In commenting on Adkins, William 0. Douglas notes that the decision (originating in the District of Columbia) "was applied to the states, under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendent, in Morehead v. New York, 298 U.S. 58711 (Douglas, 1956, p. 277).
These decisions had not prevented one Elsie Parrish, a hotel maid in the state of Washington, from deciding that she and other women were entitled to a minimum wage that was instituted by Washington. The hotel company, West Coast Hotel, did not want to pay the minimum wage to Elsie Parrish, and when Elsie sued a...