ved for the legislature.
An insight into the workings of the Court in the 1930s is provided by the memoirs of John Knox, a clerk to conservative Justice James McReynolds. Supreme Court clerks at that time had much less prestige than they have acquired in recent years. McReynolds himself, though he had initial come to Washington as a reformer, was a
Notoriously disagreeable, bigoted and imperious personality and an unreconstructed son of the Old South. He had first come to Washington as a trustbuster for President Theodore Roosevelt and later was President Wilson's attorney general until his appointment to the Court in 1924.
The conflict between the Roosevelt Administration and the Supreme Court broke out into the open in May of 1935, when the Court struck down two major pieces of New Deal legislation. First was the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934, which had established pensions for railroad workers. This was followed on "Black Monday," May 27 by an even more serious blow, when the Court struck down the National Recovery Act (NRA), a cornerstone of the New Deal.
Because the case, Schechter v US, was brought by a chicken merchant, it came to be known as the "dead chicken" decision. Roosevelt protested that "we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce." In January of 1936, the Court also threw out the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.
In response to these judicial setbacks, FDR devised a plan to reorganize the Supreme Court, in a way that would effectively undermine his conservative opponents on the Court. This measure, which came to be called the Court-packing plan, "was submitted to Congress by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 5, 1937, shortly after his landslide reelection." The p
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