Nine The Fall of the Original Ninth Amendment and the Rise of New Deal Constitutionalism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lash Kurt T
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Present Discussion ◽  
Ninth Amendment ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter begins with a fairly exhaustive account of the use of the Ninth Amendment in state and federal courts prior to the New Deal. There is nothing new here in terms of theory: one finds the same analysis of the Ninth Amendment already developed in prior chapters repeated over and over again in state and federal courts throughout the Progressive era. There is a purpose, however, to including this history. One of the most durable myths about the Ninth Amendment is that it attracted little attention prior to the modern Supreme Court's discovery of the Ninth in Griswold v. Connecticut. The present discussion puts this myth permanently to rest. The second half of the chapter helps explain how the myth arose in the first place.

The Mandate of the Ninth Amendment: Why Footnote Four Is Wrong

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy E. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Ninth Amendment ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter examines the revival of the presumption of constitutionality and its almost immediate qualification in the form of Footnote Four, which it argues is inconsistent with the Ninth Amendment. The era in which the Supreme Court attempted to scrutinize the necessity and propriety of state and federal restrictions on liberty came to a close as the perceived legitimacy of legislative activism continued to grow. The doctrinal vehicle used by the New Deal Court to overturn the Progressive Era precedents was the adoption of a presumption of constitutionality. The chapter first provides an overview of Footnote Four before discussing the Ninth Amendment, which mandates that unenumerated rights be treated the same as those that are listed. It shows that Footnote Four runs afoul of the text of the Constitution, and more specifically the Ninth Amendment.

The American Narrative: Is There One & What Is It?

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Chafe
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
New Deal ◽  
American History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Great Society ◽  
The Common ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
The New Deal

Nearly four centuries of American history have witnessed the evolving conflict between two competing sets of values: a belief that acting on behalf of the common good should guide social and political behavior, and a belief that unfettered individual freedom should dominate political and social life. Tracing this conflict from Puritanism through the American Revolution, the Civil War, the rise of industrialism, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the conservative revival of the Nixon/Reagan era, the essay reveals this clash of values as pivotal to understanding the narrative of American history, with contemporary political battles crystallizing just how basic this conflict has been.

Working with the New Deal from Colorado, 1933–1934

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Muncy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Rocky Mountain ◽  
Economic Planning ◽  
National Government ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The U.S

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1933 to 1934. Roche's experience at Rocky Mountain Fuel primed her for the New Deal. As Franklin Roosevelt's administration began to grapple in 1933 with the devastation caused by the Great Depression, Roche was asked to serve in several capacities. Early on, the most important was in the National Recovery Administration, an attempt to stabilize the U.S. economy through industry-wide economic planning. Shortly after that, Roche broke through yet another gender barrier by running for governor of Colorado. She took this bold step because the sitting state executive refused to cooperate with the relief programs of the New Deal, and Roche wanted Colorado effectively linked with the national government. She did not succeed, but her gubernatorial bid was nevertheless significant. It demonstrated both the centralizing force that Washington exerted through the New Deal and some of the bases for resistance. It also drew a direct line between progressivism in the early twentieth century and progressivism in the New Deal, highlighting a range of tactics for diminishing inequality that New Dealers brought straight from the Progressive Era into the 1930s.

Living without Labels

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel T. Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Sharp Criticism ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
History Books ◽  
Distinct Idea ◽  
The U.S

Charles Evans Hughes's career ran along the fault lines of most of the major political events of his lifetime. Muckraking catapulted him to fame. He governed New York during four key years of the Progressive era as an effective administrator and earnest reformer. He stayed with the Republican Party when the Progressives bolted in 1912. He ran for the presidency in 1916 but missed the prize, albeit by a narrower electoral college margin than any other contender until the very end of the century. He was instrumental in negotiating the international naval disarmament accords of 1921–22, landmarks of progressive internationalism in their day that fell under sharp criticism a decade later. He presided over the U.S. Supreme Court during the key years of the New Deal, though in most histories of the 1930s Court he comes across as something of an also-ran behind its more memorable shapers: Brandeis, Cardozo, Sutherland, Black, even Roberts. Hard to pin to any achievement or distinct idea, slipping in and out of the dramatic movements of his day, he was the kind of man who makes history but easily falls out of the history books.

Constitutional Conservatives Remember the Progressive Era

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken I. Kersch
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Government ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Intellectual Movement

This chapter maps the contemporary right's nascent obsession with the Progressive era as a developmental phenomenon—as a stage in the trajectory of a political-intellectual movement advancing through time. To that end, it ventures three main claims. First, the recent conservative focus on Progressivism represents a shift on the right of understandings of the historical location or source of contemporary constitutional problems, an understanding informed by the sequence of constitutional conservatism's development through time: whereas (old) “originalist” legal conservatives adopted Progressive thinking in focusing their attention on countermajoritarian “activist judges” and criticized the New Deal for its weightless, substance-free pragmatism, recent conservatives have forged a more global critique of contemporary constitutional practice that moves beyond judges to the entire modern structure and theory of American government, finding its weighty and substantive blueprint in the Progressive era, and its extension and institutionalization in the New Deal. Second, this more foundational and comprehensive constitutional critique was forged outside legal academia in political science, particularly by Straussian political theorists. And third, the overarching character of this critique centered on the Progressive era serves a movement-building function by offering a set of understandings that can win the assent of the movement's diverse factions, including social conservatives and religious traditionalists, on the one hand, and economic conservatives and libertarians on the other.

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