"Control"

At Baltimore last week Governor Roosevelt declared: "After March 4, 1929 the Republican party was in complete control of all branches of the Federal Government--the Executive, the Senate and the House of Representatives--and I might add for good measure, the Supreme Court as well."

On March 4, 1929 the Supreme Court was composed of six Republicans (Taft, Holmes, Van Devanter, Sutherland, Sanford, Stone) and three Democrats (McReynolds, Brandeis, Butler).* At utterance of the word "control" in connection with the exalted, non-partisan Supreme Court, Republican lawyers throughout the land raised a loud and angry cry against him. To G. 0. Partisans, it looked like the long-awaited "break" by ambitious young Mr. Roosevelt. He was indignantly accused of "slurring" the Court's high character. Two Republican ex-Governors of New York (Whitman and Miller) were publicly amazed and shocked. Paul Drennan Cravath, whose person might have been the model for Cartoonist Rollin Kirby's personification of the G. O. P., was sure all decent lawyers would "resent" the statement. President Hoover at Indianapolis thundered:

"The charge that the Supreme Court has been controlled by any political party is an atrocious one. Does it disclose the Democratic candidate's conception of the functions of the Supreme Court? Does he expect the Supreme Court to be subservient to him and his party? Does that statement express his intention to attempt to reduce that tribunal to an instrument of party policy?"

Though such prominent Democratic lawyers as John William Davis, Newton Diehl Baker and Frank Lyon Polk were not publicly outraged. Governor Roosevelt's use of "control'' was undoubtedly ill-chosen. The Supreme Court is properly divided not as Republicans and Democrats but as Conservatives and Liberals. Roosevelt apologists tried to explain that what he meant was that the conservative majority was Republican, thus "controlling" the court's decisions. Partisan politics has often washed the sacred doorstep of the Supreme Court, if it did not leak inside. Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 quit the august bench to run for President as a Republican. In 1930 President Hoover, anxious to repay his political debt to the South for its vote in 1928, appointed John Johnston Parker, a North Carolina Republican, to the Supreme Court only to have the Senate reject him (TIME, May 19, 1930 et ante). No less sainted a Republican than the late great Theodore Roosevelt (fifth cousin) believed that the Supreme Court should reflect the political conviction of the President.

*Today's lineup: five Republicans (Hushes, Van Devanter, Sutherland, Stone, Roberts) and four Democrats (McReynolds, Brandeis, Butler, Cardozo).

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