Chambermaid's Day

Washington was seething with sightseers left over from the Easter holidays. At the same time that 53,000 egg-rolling youngsters were trampling down the fine green turf of the White House lawn, 4,000 of their elders were exploring the marble corridors of the new Supreme Courthouse. Little did many of them know beforehand of the momentous things that might happen during their visit. Little did they know when something did happen, for the courtroom was too small to admit more than a fraction of their number. But the connoisseurs knew and were present. Stanley Reed, Robert H. Jackson and James W. Morris, top-flight attorneys of the Department of Justice, all had pre-empted front seats. Present also were Senator Robert Wagner of New York, Chinese Ambassador Sao-ke Alfred Sze and many another who expected interesting developments. Prime event they hoped for was a decision on Mr. Wagner's Labor Relations Act. In that they were disappointed, but their time was well spent, for they witnessed a red-letter decision day.

Elsie Parrish. Off & on from 1933 to 1935, the Cascadian Hotel of Wenatchee, Wash, employed Mrs. Elsie Parrish as chambermaid for $12 a week. Under Washington's Minimum Wage Law for women she should have got $14.50 for her 48-hour week. She demanded what the law said was coming to her. The hotel offered $17 in settlement. Elsie Parrish spurned it. She sued for $216.19.

Any lawyer could have told her that she did not have a Chinawoman's chance of getting it. Washington's Minimum Wage Law was no New Deal upstart. It was passed in 1913. About the same time Oregon passed a similar law. Oregon's law ' was tested in the Courts. The Supreme Court approved it in 1917 by a 4-4 vote, Justice Louis Brandeis (who had helped prepare briefs in the case before his appointment to the Court) not voting. Six years later another minimum wage law passed by Congress for the District of Columbia came before the Supreme Court. Again Justice Brandeis did not vote, presumably because his daughter had been agitating for such laws. By this time, however, the complexion of the Court had changed. Instead of tying 4-4, thereby giving the Law the benefit of Constitutional doubt, the Court voted 5-3 against it. In 1925 a minimum wage law of Arizona, in 1927 a similar law of Arkansas, last year a similar law of New York--all were invalidated on the District of Columbia precedent. What chance did Elsie Parrish have? Washington's Minimum Wage Law had been regarded for years as a dead letter.

But the wiseacres reckoned without one of nine old men. His name was Owen J. Roberts. Justice Roberts is the key man of the Court to those who argue liberal v. conservative cases. For he has voted on both sides. He voted that New York's Minimum Vage Law was unconstitutional. It was incredible that he should reverse himself on so similar a case. Yet he did.*

What Justice Roberts' reasons may have been, could perhaps be inferred from the words of Chief Justice Hughes who, sounding amazingly like a New Dealer, wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision upholding Chambermaid Parrish. Said the Chief Justice:

"The economic conditions which have supervened [since the District of Columbia law was invalidated in 1923] . . . make it not only appropriate but we think imperative that in deciding the present case the subject should receive fresh consideration. . . . What can be closer to the public interest than the health of women and their protection from unscrupulous and overreaching employers?

"In each [prior] case, the violation alleged by those attacking minimum wage regulation for women is deprivation of freedom of contract. What is this freedom? "The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law.

"In prohibiting that deprivation the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. . . .

"But the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. . . . The exploitation of a class of workers who are in an unequal position with respect to bargaining power and are thus relatively defenseless against the denial of a living wage is not only detrimental to their health and well-being but casts a direct burden for their support upon the community. What these workers lose in wages the taxpayers are called upon to pay. The bare cost of living must be met."

His blunt conclusion: "The case of Adkins v. Children's Hospital [District of Columbia case] should be, and it is, overruled. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Washington is affirmed."

Railway Labor. Though it failed to rule on the National Labor Relations Act, the Court did uphold, unanimously, the model from which it was drawn--the Railway Labor Act passed in 1926 and amended in 1934. Like the Wagner Act, it compels collective bargaining, empowers a majority of employers to elect their sole bargaining agency, provides machinery for mediation and adjustment. Accepted by most railroaders without legal quibble, it has helped make the railway industry a national model of pacific labor relations. But the same reason that it has rarely been challenged in court--the fact that railways are indisputably engaged in interstate commerce and hence subject to Congressional regulation--kept Supreme Court endorsement of it from being more than a shadowy clue to the Court's forthcoming decision on the Wagner Act. Well hedged by its qualifying clause was Mr. Justice Stone's remark: "The peaceable settlement of labor controversies, especially where they may seriously impair the ability of an interstate rail carrier to perform its service to the public, is a matter of public concern."

The company which had balked at the Act was Virginian Railway, which wanted to bargain with a company union of its shop employes despite the fact that a majority of them had voted for representation by a unit of the American Federation of Labor. Claiming itself deprived of liberty of contract as guaranteed by the Constitution's "due process" clause, the company based its plea on the ground that machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, electricians and sheetmetal workers are engaged only in intrastate, not interstate, commerce. Ruled Mr. Justice Stone, his colleagues unanimously assenting: "The activities in which these employers are engaged have such a relation to the other confessedly interstate activities of the petitioner that they are to be regarded as part of them."

Frazier-Lemke. In May 1935 a Kentucky farmer named Radford lost his farm when Mr. Justice Brandeis read a unanimous Court opinion nullifying the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act. That act permitted a farmer to declare himself bankrupt and keep his farm by having it appraised at its current value, paying this sum to his creditors within five years. This week a Virginia farmer named Wright kept his farm when Mr. Justice Brandeis read a unanimous Court opinion upholding the amended Frazier-Lemke Act, passed after the first was declared unconstitutional, which permits a bankrupt farmer to keep his property only three years, meantime paying his mortgagee a "reasonable rent." Difference between the two laws, held the Court, was that the first deprived the mortgagee of his property rights, while the second does not.

Grocer Norris. Writing the last chapter in a famed story of political skulduggery, the Court unanimously reversed a circuit court decision granting a new trial to Grocer George W. Norris of Broken Bow, Neb. In 1930, Grocer Norris was hired to enter the Republican primaries against Senator George W. Norris, later told a Senate investigating committee that he had been paid nothing for the trick, was convicted of perjury, sentenced to three months in jail and $100 fine which he must now serve and pay.

*Senator Ashurst of Arizona, who delivered a eulogy on the virtue of inconsistency to justify his own flip-flop in favor of the President's Court enlargement proposal (TIME, March 1), could hardly contain his courtly glee when the news was brought to the Senate. The Supreme Court, he said, must have overheard his remarks and acted on them.

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