When the people spoke, what did they say? the election of 1936 and the Ackerman thesis.

• Author: Leuchtenburg, William E.
• Position: Bruce Ackerman - Moments of Change: Transformation in American Constitutionalism

1. THE CRITIQUE OF ACKERMAN'S THESIS

   Scholars have dealt harshly with Bruce Ackerman's audacious reconfiguring of American constitutional history.(1) Suzanna Sherry, who calls the Yale Law School professor "one of our best constitutional theorists," nonetheless concluded that "Ackerman's tale fails to inspire, because it is mired in a fictional past and envisions a utopian future" and because his "historical analysis is simplistic."(2) G. Edward White, viewing Ackerman as "clearly one of the important figures of his generation, all the more visible because of the vivid combination of fluency and chutzpah which has enabled him to write on anything he pleases and to annoy anyone he chooses along the way," voiced skepticism about "a jurisprudential strategy unlikely to work and a bid for influence unlikely to be successful."(3) Don Herzog, after questioning whether "poor Clio can shoulder the burdens he assigns her," derided Ackerman's rhetoric as "debased or vulgar,"(4) while Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, found Ackerman's argument "unpersuasive" and his style "cheeky."(5)

   Much of the dispute has been aroused by one particular element of Ackerman's claim: that ours is a "dualist" system that has experienced, over the course of more than two centuries, three "constitutional moments" when a mobilized citizenry has awakened from its quotidian concerns to create new "constitutional regimes." Though scholars have raised questions about Ackerman's account of the first two constitutional moments--the Founding and Reconstruction--they have found considerably more troublesome his contention that heightened popular involvement in 1936 succeeded in amending the Constitution in a manner just as legitimate as if the country had followed Article V procedures. "Most Presidents do not come into office with a mandate for fundamental change of the kind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt plausibly claimed in the aftermath of the elections of 1936," Ackerman has written. "If the American people were ever endorsing a break with their constitutional past, they were doing so in the 1930's."(6)

   A good many scholars, though often admiring Ackerman's adventurousness, have questioned that bold assertion. "How could he present the 1936 election as a referendum on the Court's interpretation of New Deal legislation?" Laura Kalman has inquired.(7) Kent Greenawalt has disputed the conceit that "New Deal activists self-consciously conceived themselves as amending the Constitution by something other than ordinary formal means, and further conceived themselves as establishing techniques of higher lawmaking different from the classic mode of amendment."(8) Terrance Sandalow has concluded that "it is doubtful that the People made, or can be shown to have made, the decisions he attributes to them."(9) Larry Kramer has protested that

   the engaged public--the "We the People" Ackerman celebrates--was never asked to adopt the broad principles that come to define its new constitutional regime.... [T]he people themselves, in the midst of the political upheavals that qualify under Ackerman's theory as genuine constitutional moments, did not think they were fundamentally restructuring their entire constitutional order.(10) Similarly, Jennifer Nedelsky has pointed to the "formidable problems of determining that `we the people' were the authors of any major political change in the United States--from the elite gathering of the constitutional convention in 1787 to the embrace of the regulatory state by much of the corporate elite in the New Deal era."(11) Furthermore, as Lawrence Lessig has noted, the first two moments--the Founding and Reconstruction--at least provided visible texts in the U.S. Constitution and in the three post-Civil War amendments, but these were conspicuously absent in the New Deal decade.(12)

   It is my intention in this piece to assess how Ackerman's paradigm fares under this barrage of objections by scrutinizing the evidence on developments in 1936. In particular, I shall ask: Did Roosevelt raise the Supreme Court issue in the 1936 campaign--in the Democratic platform or in his speeches? If he did not, did anyone else do so? Did "the People" conceive of the 1936 election as centering on their attitude toward the Supreme Court? Did "the People" see any significant difference between Roosevelt and his Republican opponent on the constitutional question? And, finally, when all of these questions are answered, what does one conclude about the Ackerman thesis?

2. THE MUTED CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE, 1935-36

   The constitutional controversy of 1936 that looms so large in Ackerman's work originated not in that campaign year but some months earlier, though President Roosevelt downplayed the issue almost immediately after raising it. At an extraordinary press conference on June 2, 1935, in the wake of the Supreme Court's invalidation of the National Industrial Recovery Act(13) in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States,(14) Roosevelt told White House correspondents, "We are facing a very, very great national non-partisan issue," and charged that "[w]e have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce."(15) Yet far from insisting that the forthcoming 1936 campaign be treated as a referendum on the Constitution and the Court, he stated that the question of whether the federal government would have adequate power would not be decided soon: "I don't mean this summer or winter or next fall, but over a period, perhaps, of five years or ten years."(16) Moreover, when, near the end of the conference, a reporter asked him if he had "any suggestion" for a solution, he replied: "No, we haven't got to that yet."(17)

   Circumspect though Roosevelt was about precipitating an immediate confrontation, his "horse-and-buggy" remarks produced cries of outrage. Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan likened his attitude to that of Hitler and Stalin;(18) the Baltimore Sun rejected his "lugubrious lamentation" as "undergraduate pessimism";(19) and an editor for William Randoph Hearst's newspaper chain said that FDR had "made a holy show of himself."(20) Roosevelt's fellow patrician, Henry Stimson, who had served in two cabinets, wrote the President that his harangue "was a wrong statement, an unfair statement and, if it had not been so extreme as to be recognizable as hyperbole, a rather dangerous and inflammatory statement."(21)

   The horse-and-buggy conference inspirited right-wing ideologues and gave new life to the Republicans, who had been in despair since being badly beaten in the 1934 elections, by permitting them to go to the country not as opponents of beneficial social legislation but as staunch defenders of the Constitution. Kansas Governor Alf Landon wrote John Hamilton, who was to manage Landon's 1936 presidential campaign, that Roosevelt had "cracked up" at his meeting with the press, and that the GOP could make hay by pursuing a "line of criticism ... that it is a terrible thing for the President to gamble with the social and economic welfare of a hundred and thirty million people because he is peeved at the Supreme Court's decision."(22) Similarly, the publisher Frank Knox, who was to be Landon's running mate in 1936, expressed satisfaction that "the President's attack upon the Constitution has proved a disastrous boomerang,"(23) while the editor of the North American Review called FDR "one of the greater Benefactors of our Nation" because he had "converted millions of people to the conservative point of view. His famous press conference attack on the Supreme Court did more to re-popularize the Constitution than one hundred years of political and educational oratory."(24)

   At a "Grass-Roots" conclave of Midwestern Republicans in Springfield, Illinois, ten days after FDR's meeting with the press, party leaders exploited that approach to the fullest. Delegates to the gathering, billed as "the largest and perhaps the liveliest sectional political convention of this generation," walked down hotel corridors under banners displaying the slogan "Save the Constitution."(25) When Harrison Spangler, Republican National Committeeman from Iowa, asserted: "The issue today is individualism against regimentation; liberty against autocracy; abundance against a planned scarcity; the philosophies of Lincoln against those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," the audience rose to its feet singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.(26) The keynoter declared that "no crisis so grave as the present" had arisen since the Civil War.(27) Just as Republicans had once fought the secessionists to maintain the union, they must now fight in a no-less-important struggle to safeguard the "indestructible states."(28) The galleries and coliseum floor greeted these words with shouts of "Yes, yes, we will fight as then."(29)

   The ferocity of the instant condemnation of his horse-and-buggy innuendo persuaded Roosevelt to retrench. "The comments of the papers were so severe this morning that by noon the White House seemed to be taking back some of the remarks of the day before," noted a Hearst editor.(30) Indeed, the British Ambassador at Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, informed the Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, that the "unfavorable reaction" was so pronounced that the President "allowed his trial balloon to float away into the empyrean."(31)

   At the beginning of summer, reported a New York Times correspondent, a fog hung low over Washington from the White House to Capitol Hill as that "sprawling, infinitely busy village" tried to orient itself in the void created by Schechter.(32) "It is difficult to believe that any past decision of a court could have so profoundly affected an entire nation, and more specifically every individual at the seat of government," he observed.(33) Though the Roosevelt administration had a plethora of important alphabet agencies, there could be "no denying that the NRA [National...