The History You Need to Know – Part I

Note: This is a long post, but we think you’ll find the information more than worthwhile, as well as being an entertaining read. We hope you’ll agree. Much of the information is taken from the websites of Frances Perkins, as well as public sources of information on FDR and the Supreme Court. It’s material that few people are currently aware of, information that we think is vitally important in the light of current events. Enjoy!

A quote from Harry S. Truman: “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.”

(Pop quiz: What does the “S” in Harry S. Truman stand for? Scroll to the end for the answer.)

In a similar vein, Maya Angelou also said: “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”

Truer words have not been spoken. Gore Vidal wrote a book reflecting on “the United States of Amnesia” and sadly, in the 20 years since, America is more disconnected from its own story than it’s ever been.

You would think that with the 24/7 political coverage over the last two years that somebody would have gone into the history of America’s hard-right wing, who they are, what they’re trying to do and why… but I haven’t been able to find instances of anyone putting all the pieces together. To me, this is incomprehensible, because knowing the history explains everything.

So here goes. Make yourself a cup of coffee and get ready for a ripping yarn that’ll not just keep you on the edge of your seat, it’ll also explain where we are, how we got here, some of what’s about to happen and why. Spoiler alert: This does not end well. At least not yet. But read on…

Megabucks

We pick things up at the end of the Civil War. Advances in technology have now made it possible for certain people to amass staggering amounts of wealth. With no income tax, no labor laws and few (if any) regulations, entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie made fortunes that would make most of today’s billionaires look like paupers; it’s estimated that Rockefeller’s worth at the height of his success would be as much as $400 billion in today’s dollars. That’s three times the worth of Jeff Bezos.

Now, it might surprise you to discover that these barons of big business were not known for treating their workers particularly well. Hours were long, conditions were dangerous and pay was meager at best. And if you were injured or unable to work for some reason, well, that’s just the breaks.

Unions fought for better wages and working conditions, but having no protection under the law, there was only so much a union could do. As far as owners were concerned, unions were the devil incarnate and some employers even went so far as to use hired goons to intimidate workers and foment violence, often in collusion with local police.

Labor unrest would continue for the next 50 years in a period later known as the “Labor Wars,” an era that ended only when things started to settle down somewhat after passage of pro-union legislation in 1932-33. But in the 1920’s, as the American economy was exploding, there was no “safety net” whatsoever – if you lost your job, you were on your own and that was that.

The Business of America

“The Business of America is business” is a quote attributed to Republican President Calvin Coolidge. In truth, the catchy phrase is actually a condensation of lengthier remarks Coolidge made in 1925. But, that being said, the quote accurately reflects the Republican attitude towards business. Both Coolidge and Republican successor Herbert Hoover adopted a “hands-off” policy when it came to business regulation, something that would have major repercussions just four years after Coolidge made his remarks.

But for now, the party was on. And oh, what a party it was! This was the Jazz Age – an unprecedented explosion of “new.” Women whose husbands had been away at war now had jobs and their own money to spend, the US economy was ascendant (much of Europe had been bombed to smithereens), people were flocking to see new-fangled talkies at their local cinema, alcohol flowed freely at the speakeasies and you could get near-endless amounts of news and entertainment from this amazing quasi-magical technology called radio.

The freewheeling spirit of the age extended well beyond the nightclubs, though; on Wall Street, the banking community was off on a bender of its own. Free of any restrictions, bankers lent money to people to buy stocks, stocks that the bankers themselves would sell, making a commission on the sale. This was easy money all around; as long as a stock kept appreciating in value, the banker could be assured that the value of the stock would cover the money they’d loaned the buyer to buy it. Everybody wins! As long as the market keeps going up, that is.

And so it did…

Until October 1929.

You already know what happened next. We’ll get there, but for now, let’s turn the clock back 18 years to a street corner in New York City on March 25, 1911, where a crowd had been gathering.

Frances Perkins

When, as a young girl, Frances asked her parents how nice people could be poor, her parents gave her the stock answer of the day: that poverty was the result of alcohol and laziness. Oh, and by the way, little girls shouldn’t be concerned about such things, they told her. The year was 1898, a time when it was exceedingly rare for girls to attend college. But when it came to Frances, an avid reader with a passionate interest in history, there was little doubt that Frances would be going down the academic road.

Frances attended Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she ended up earning degrees in both chemistry and physics. But it was a course in American economic history she took in her final year that was to have the greatest impact on her. Tasked by her teacher to visit the mills along the Connecticut River to observe working conditions, Frances was shocked at what she found:

“From the time I was in college I was horrified at the work that many women and children had to do in factories. There were absolutely no effective laws that regulated the number of hours they were permitted to work. There were no provisions which guarded their health nor adequately looked after their compensation in case of injury. Those things seemed very wrong. I was young and was inspired with the idea of reforming, or at least doing what I could, to help change those abuses.”

After college, Frances sought a position where she could help those in need; when a job failed to materialize, she began reading whatever she could on social work, including “How the Other Half Lives,” Jacob Riis’ ground-breaking pictorial description of the grinding poverty in New York City’s slums.

Frances’ passion for social work would eventually bring her to the heart of the beast, where in 1910 she became Executive Secretary of the New York City Consumers League, working directly with Florence Kelley, the woman whose speech at Mount Holyoke had set the course of her career. As part of her job, Perkins spent much of her time in Albany, where, under the counsel and guidance of Assemblyman Al Smith, she learned the ins and outs of politics, always working towards the goal of becoming an effective force for reform.

So that’s how Frances Perkins found herself in Washington Square on March 25, 1911, having tea with friends. When the relative quiet was disturbed by the sound of fire engines, they all raced to see what the commotion was about… and ran straight into a horror they could not possibly ever have imagined.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

What is a shirtwaist? In short, it’s a woman’s blouse, but there’s a lot more to the story.

From PBS American Experience:

“At the turn of the 20th century, production of the shirtwaist was a competitive industry. Although sold across the country, the majority of shirtwaist blouses were created in Philadelphia and New York City. In Manhattan alone, there were over 450 textile factories, employing approximately 40,000 garment workers, many of them immigrants. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located in the top floors of the Asch building in Greenwich Village, was one of many shirtwaist factories operating in Manhattan at the time.”

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fit the classic definition of a sweatshop. The employees were almost exclusively young immigrant women aged 14 to 23 who were required to work 9 hours a day on weekdays plus an additional 7 hours on Saturdays. For their efforts they received between $7 and $12 a week. Exit doors from the factory floors were locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to prevent theft, so when fire broke out and the elevator stopped working, workers found themselves trapped with no means of escape. Firemen tried valiantly to do what they could, but their ladders could only reach the 7th floor, not high enough to save workers on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors that were, by now, engulfed in flames.

The crowd watched in horror as young girl after young girl jumped out of windows to the sidewalk below. Many were kneeling with their hands folded in prayer as they fell to their deaths. The sickening sound of bodies hitting the sidewalk one after another was something that would stay with witnesses for the rest of their lives.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire ended up being the largest industrial disaster in the history of New York City and one of the largest ever in the US. The final death toll was 146 people, 123 women and girls and 23 men. And the only thing that Frances Perkins and her friends could do was watch it all unfold before their eyes.

That was when Frances resolved to dedicate the rest of her life to doing what she could to ensure that such a tragedy could never, ever happen again.

That was the day, she said years later, that “the New Deal was born.”

From the Sweatshops to the White House

Perkins made good on her pledge to dedicate her life to improving conditions for workers. When a citizens’ Committee on Safety was formed in the aftermath of the fire, no less a figure than ex-President Teddy Roosevelt called for Perkins to act as Executive Secretary. One of the Committee’s first actions was to seek a state commission to investigate and make legislative recommendations; the resulting Factory Investigating Commission’s work resulted in the most comprehensive set of laws governing workplace health and safety in the nation.

The driving force behind it all was Frances Perkins, who by now, had already been nationally recognized as an expert in her chosen field, a field she had virtually invented for herself.

But as it turns out, Perkins was only just getting started. When Al Smith won the governorship of New York State in 1918, he took Frances with him to Albany, appointing her to a vacant seat on the New York State Industrial Commission. Perkins was tasked with weeding out incompetence and corruption in the state labor department so that she and her fellow commissioners could implement the laws she herself had formulated on the Factory Investigating Commission. For the next ten years, Frances Perkins served as Governor Smith’s closest labor advisor, working with him to build on the legislative accomplishments of the prior decade. 

Frances and FDR

In the election of 1928, Al Smith ran for president and lost. The New York governor’s race was narrowly won by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, former NY State Senator, assistant Secretary of the Navy and losing Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1920.

Smith had asked Roosevelt to run for governor, but when Roosevelt chose not to retain key Smith appointees, relations between the two soured. One of the few Smith-appointed people that Roosevelt chose to keep, though, was Frances Perkins, asking her to become the state’s Industrial Commissioner, with oversight responsibilities for the entire labor department. This made Perkins, in effect, the most prominent labor official in the nation.

Thus began a partnership for the ages. The work Perkins and FDR would do together would end up transforming not just New York, nor the entire country, but the very meaning of government itself.

(Note: On December 16, 2024, the Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine was established as part of the National Park System.)

Wall Street Lays an Egg

It’s hard for a modern audience to fully appreciate the scope of the Great Depression. From the FDR Presidential Library:

At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the nation’s total work force, 12,830,000 people, were unemployed. Wage income for workers who were lucky enough to have kept their jobs fell 42.5% between 1929 and 1933.

It was the worst economic disaster in American history.

When Roosevelt assumed the NY State governorship in 1929, rising unemployment was already a major issue; after the stock market crash, it became a five-alarm fire. FDR and Perkins moved to implement some of the reforms in New York State that Perkins had been working on for years.

By 1932, the Depression had cast a pall across the entire nation. It was clear that President Herbert Hoover’s “hands-off” policy when it came to business had failed catastrophically, so in the 1932 presidential election, voters swept FDR into office by a whopping 57.4% to 39.6%. (In Congress, Democrats gained 97 House seats and picked up 12 Senate seats.)

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.  It is common sense to take a method and try it:  If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.  But above all, try something. – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, May 22, 1932

Thus armed with overwhelming support from the voters, FDR had a true mandate for the “bold, persistent experimentation” he felt the situation called for. And not a minute too soon.

When Roosevelt took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, farm prices had fallen by 60%, industrial production had fallen by more than half since 1929 and two million people were homeless. By the evening of March 4, 32 of the 48 states—as well as the District of Columbia—had closed their banks.

The US economy was on the verge of total collapse.

From Wikipedia:

On his second day in office, Roosevelt declared a four-day national “bank holiday”, to end the run by depositors seeking to withdraw funds. He called for a special session of Congress on March 9, when Congress passed, almost sight unseen, the Emergency Banking Act…

The “first 100 Days” of the 73rd United States Congress saw an unprecedented amount of legislation and set a benchmark against which future presidents have been compared. When the banks reopened on Monday, March 15, stock prices rose by 15 percent and in the following weeks over $1 billion was returned to bank vaults, ending the bank panic.

There is no doubt that FDR saved capitalism – a salvation that was made necessary by the excesses of capitalism itself.

A banking crisis averted for the moment, FDR directed his attention to the labor situation. Before his inauguration, Roosevelt had already offered Perkins the cabinet-level post of Secretary of Labor. Perkins said she would accept, but only under certain conditions:

From the Frances Perkins Center:

When, in February, 1933, President-elect Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to serve in his cabinet as Secretary of Labor, she outlined for him a set of policy priorities she would pursue: a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; unemployment compensation; worker’s compensation; abolition of child labor; direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief; Social Security; a revitalized federal employment service; and universal health insurance. She made it clear to Roosevelt that his agreement with these priorities was a condition of her joining his cabinet. Roosevelt said he endorsed them all, and Frances Perkins became the first woman in the nation to serve in a Presidential cabinet.

With the nation in dire straits and with Roosevelt having just received a mandate from the voters with his landslide victory, the new administration was in a position to take unprecedented action. And so Roosevelt went full-force to implement his New Deal. Perkins was tireless in pursuing the agenda she had mapped out for the president, and between FDR’s popularity and overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses, FDR and Perkins were largely successful in achieving their shared goals for most of FDR’s first term.

But this was not to last. A New York City laundry owner and a Seattle hotel chambermaid were soon to become players in a judicial showdown that would not only shake FDR’s presidency to the core, it would also determine whether or not America was truly government “by the people, for the people and of the people.” The case had huge ramifications then. But it also has huge potential ramifications now, as we shall see.

A Laundry Grows in Brooklyn

Before minimum wage laws, it was every man (or woman) for themselves; when it came to trying to make a living, it really was the Wild West. Employers paid as little as they could get away with and what little negotiating power that unions might have didn’t amount to much for most workers.

As families found themselves destitute, often through no fault of their own, the burden fell on the rest of society in the form of family, friends, neighbors, church groups or religious charities like The Salvation Army. The unfairness of situations where society at large ended up having to foot the bill for employers who were making money hand over fist was not lost on the general population, and many states tried to institute minimum wage laws to address the issue.

Almost without exception, their efforts failed. The reason? The so-called principle of “freedom of contract,” as embodied in what would be called the “Lochner era” (after a 1905 Supreme Court case.) In Lochner, the Supreme Court held that workers had the absolute freedom to negotiate whatever they wanted to, without outside interference.

Time after time, minimum wage laws were passed, violated and employers found guilty. And time after time, cases were challenged in court and verdicts were thrown out on the basis of “freedom of contract,” the courts ruling that minimum wage laws were unconstitutional.

Such was the case with Joseph Tipaldo, who owned a laundry in Brooklyn, New York.

New York State had passed a minimum wage law in 1933. From the court brief:

The case began when Joseph Tipaldo, manager of the Spotlight Laundry of Brooklyn, was indicted by a Kings County Grand Jury on November 2, 1934, and charged with “altering books and records for the purpose of concealing the failure to pay female employees the minimum fair wage prescribed in a mandatory order of the Industrial Commissioner of New York State.” Tipaldo claimed the minimum wage law operated to deprive him of his liberty and property without due process of law and compelled him to be a witness against himself in a criminal case. The law required him to keep a record of the wages paid to and hours worked by his women employees. 

Tipaldo was jailed pending trial. He was convicted and his conviction was upheld by New York’s Supreme Court. But the verdict was reversed by the New York State Court of Appeals, a ruling that went all the way up to the US Supreme Court. In Morehead v. New York Ex Rel. Tipaldo, the US Supreme Court upheld the reversal, declaring New York’s minimum wage law unconstitutional and thereby letting Tipaldo go free.

Reaction was explosive. From the Princeton University Department of History:

The decision in Morehead, in addition to all the other judicial decisions that had struck down New Deal policies, “brought about a barrage of denunciation of the Supreme Court by all hands, including some of the more sober, but progressive, newspapers of the United States, like the New York Times.” The media was not exaggerating the public animosity towards the Supreme Court due to its dismissal of New Deal policies because the public confirmed its desire to see New Deal policies survive judicial scrutiny by reelecting Roosevelt in the fall of 1936. President Roosevelt’s renewed desire to establish a national minimum wage in the wake of Morehead was an integral part of his 1936 presidential campaign. Roosevelt won the 1936 election by the greatest electoral margin since the two-party system had been established 80 years prior; he won all but eight electoral votes. In his second Inaugural Address on January 20, 1937, Roosevelt declared, “I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.” He vowed to establish a national minimum wage, and his campaign clearly appealed to the American public.

Additionally, there was strong bipartisan criticism of the decision in Morehead. Many members of Congress on both sides believed that it was time to support minimum wage laws because the economic hardships of the Great Depression still persisted, and minimum wage laws were a reasonable way to help millions of struggling Americans. The decision in Morehead immediately sparked outrage, as both Democrats and Republicans in Congress “explicitly called for its repudiation” because “the decision was so at odds with current thinking.” The American public, the executive branch, and the legislative branch were all against the trajectory of the Supreme Court in regards to minimum wage.

For Roosevelt, the Tipaldo ruling was the breaking point. The Supreme Court had torpedoed numerous New Deal programs and with soon-expected rulings on the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act (The Wagner Act) on the horizon, the Tipaldo ruling was a clear indication that these and future programs were almost certain to be struck down by the court.

From Smithsonian Magazine:

The Tipaldo ruling persuaded Roosevelt that he had to act, and act quickly, to curb the court. As he told the press, the court had created a “ ‘no-man’s-land’ where no Government— State or Federal—can function.” [bolding ours]. He had been waiting patiently for popular dissatisfaction with the court to mount; now anger at the Tipaldo decision surged. That ruling, the historian Alpheus T. Mason later wrote, “convinced even the most reverent that five stubborn old men had planted themselves squarely in the path of progress.” The president recognized, however, that he must tread carefully, for despite widespread disgruntlement, most Americans believed the Supreme Court sacrosanct.

So Roosevelt formulated an audacious plan: If the Supreme Court was going to stand in his way, Roosevelt would simply remake the Supreme Court.

The Court-Packing Plan

Roosevelt proposed to appoint an additional justice for each justice over 70; this would have meant six additional judges for a total of 15. Having won reelection in 1936 by a landslide, Roosevelt thought he had amassed the political capital necessary to make such a risky move. But despite his popularity and despite the fact that Congress had altered the number of seats on the Supreme Court six times throughout history, Roosevelt’s proposal ran into intense opposition on Day One – from both sides of the aisle.

The press, also, turned on Roosevelt. Generally wildly supportive of FDR in his first term, the newspapers by and large saw the court-packing effort as a major overreach and most were vehemently opposed, seeing Roosevelt’s gambit as a power-grab. It also didn’t help when the chief backer of FDR’s bill in the Senate had a heart attack while debating it on the Senate floor and died two days later.

Roosevelt had taken a gamble… and lost. He would never again achieve the popularity (and amass the political capital) he had attained in his first term. Meanwhile, the nation waited on tenterhooks for Supreme Court decisions on a variety of cases that could determine the future of the New Deal.

One of the cases that got virtually no attention was that of a Wenatchee, WA chambermaid who was suing her employer for the difference between her paycheck and the minimum wage. The amount in dispute was $250… and few people thought the case was worth paying any attention to.

The Chambermaid’s Tale

From PBS “Capitalism and Conflict“:

In 1932, Washington State passed a law entitled “Minimum Wages for Women.” It called for minimum wages for women and children as a means to combat “pernicious effects on their health and morals” and provided for a special commission, with input from industry and the public, to determine appropriate minimum wage levels. Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid at the West Coast Hotel, later sued the hotel in a state court claiming that it had not paid her the law’s minimum wages.

Parrish sought the balance of her income between what she was actually paid and the minimum wage (set at $14.50 per week of 48 hours). West Coast Hotel defended by arguing that the law was unconstitutional. The state court agreed and ruled for the hotel. Parrish appealed to the Washington Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court’s ruling and directed that damages be paid to Parrish. West Coast Hotel appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in 1936.

West Coast Hotels v. Parrish really wasn’t on anybody’s radar; with the recent ruling in Tipaldo declaring minimum wage laws to be unconstitutional as a violation of “freedom of contract,” the writing seemed to be on the wall when it came to how the Supreme Court was likely to rule. In any event, this was just one of several New Deal cases that had come before the court in 1936 for which America anxiously awaited decisions. (Note: there’s a great profile on Elsie Parrish here.)

And so America waited. And waited. And waited. Meanwhile, Roosevelt officially unveiled his Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 (a/k/a the “court-packing plan”) in February and made it the subject of his fireside chat on March 9th, a chat to which Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes took strong exception.

So things were not looking good for the New Deal. Not at all.

And then, finally, on March 29th 1937, a stunner:

By a 5-4 margin, the court had ruled against West Coast Hotels… and in favor of Elsie Parrish.

The ruling officially gave government the power to regulate business for the first time, meaning that the priorities of business owners could now and henceforth be considered to be deemed secondary to the interests of society at large. Thus, government could be empowered to enforce laws crafted to “promote the general welfare,” as stated in the Constitution.

Most of the language of the ruling of the court centers around “freedom of contract,” stating that insofar as unfair contracts can have potential negative impact on society at large, such “freedom” cannot be absolute.

But the decision actually says much more:

The exploitation of a class of workers who are in an unequal position with respect to bargaining power, and are thus relatively defenceless against the denial of a living wage, is not only detrimental to their health and wellbeing, 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.

In the simplest possible terms, the ruling in West Coast Hotels v. Parrish means this:

People are more important than profits.

The ruling states that America is, in effect, a shared experience, where taking unfair advantage of a particular group potentially has negative consequences for the rest of us. And in situations where the people and profit conflict, government has the regulatory power to ensure that the people prevail.

This is a big deal. By any and all accounts, this is a landmark ruling.

It’s also a ruling that today’s right wing is trying to destroy.

And it could happen at any time.

Aftermath

Justice Owen Roberts had previously voted against the minimum wage in Morehead (Tipaldo). In Parrish, he switched sides, but it did not end there. Roberts had also now switched his position on other New Deal cases that had come before the court, thus delivering a spate of 5-4 victories to the administration. Roberts’ change of heart was called the “stitch in time that saved nine,” meaning the nine seats on the Supreme Court, but the evidence behind that assertion is questionable.

Some accused the court of having been cowed by the looming threat of FDR’s possible reorganization of the court, an assertion that became less credible when it was revealed that the justices had reached their decisions months before FDR’s announcement of the court-packing plan in February. (The official ruling had been delayed was because one of the justices had been ill.)

But the insinuation that the court was unfairly pressured to change their stance under the threat of losing their jobs has persisted in some right-wing circles and has stubbornly refused to die.

In any event, between Roberts’ switch, the retirement of one of the anti-New Deal justices and the failure of FDR’s court-packing gambit, a Constitutional crisis was averted. FDR was then able to appoint justices of his choosing and the New Deal was allowed to go forward, although Roosevelt had been much weakened politically.

So out of the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and through the heroic dedication of Frances Perkins and FDR, programs like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Workers’ Compensation, Minimum Wage and more were woven into the fabric of American life. They became wildly successful bedrock policy that ended up making The American Dream a reality for millions.

And now, all of it is under threat.

Why? Because a reversal of the ruling (as what’s happened in Dobbs or any number of recent Supreme Court cases) could usher in an authoritarian state where “we the people” are powerless to do anything in the face of vast corporate wealth and power.

This Supreme Court has repeatedly signaled that it’s heading in that direction. All it would take is five votes on a corrupt, authoritarian, illegitimate¹ court that has repeatedly overstepped its bounds, aggressively seeking to assert its supremacy over the democratic will of the people.

¹In an unprecedented and unconstitutional action, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell illegitimately denied Obama his nominations on the two Supreme Court seats vacated during his presidency. Had Obama been granted Senate hearings on his nominees, the current 6-3 Republican-appointed majority would now be 5-4 in favor of Democratic nominees.

If you think that calling this Supreme Court corrupt and authoritarian is an exaggeration, consider that in recent years, this radical Republican-controlled Supreme Court has consistently tipped the scales in favor of rich corporatists and against people who work for a living. Some recent rulings have been so mind-bendingly extreme as to have been previously unimaginable. Cases where the court has intervened to rule against the will of the people are legion; below are just a few.

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court has:

• Nullified the popular vote in Florida in 2000, thus handing the presidency to Bush
• Allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns in Citizens United
• Overturned 50 years of precedent in overruling Roe v. Wade (abortion)
• Crippled the power of federal agencies in its Chevron ruling²
• Limited the power of the government to control pollution³
• Declared “presidential immunity” for Trump, placing him above the law and upending the central premise of the Constitution
• Declared themselves beyond the law in refusing to comply with judicial ethical standards

In most of these cases, the Supreme Court has broached precedent by inserting itself into the proceedings instead of letting well-reasoned lower court rulings stand. These are just a few instances – there are many more.

The 5-4 ruling in favor of Elsie Parrish officially legitimized the power of government to regulate business, thus allowing New Deal programs like Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, and Minimum Wage to stand.

Reverse the ruling and there’s no more Social Security. Reverse the ruling and there’s no more Medicare. Reverse the ruling and there’s no more Minimum Wage. Reverse the ruling and government is powerless to tell businesses what they can or cannot do. A government where the will of big business takes precedence over the will of the people is the very definition of a fascist state.

If you don’t think this Supreme Court would overturn Parrish in a heartbeat, you haven’t been paying attention.

America’s hard-right cabal of billionaire industrialists have been trying to destroy the New Deal for years, as well as generally crippling the power of government to do anything other than protect the wealth and power of those who consider themselves to be the American “ruling class.” These ultra-rich extremists could now achieve their ends with just five votes on the Supreme Court. Republicans in Congress wouldn’t even need to get their hands dirty.

This is a big deal. A very big deal. The ruling in Parrish is Ground Zero when it comes to the collapse of our democratic institutions and America’s slide into becoming an authoritarian state. The transformation is already well underway – whether or not it can be stopped or reversed is very much an open question.

And that’s why the stories of Joseph Tipaldo and Elsie Parrish are so important. They are both part of the History You Need to Know.

Next: Part II – 1937: The birth of America’s organized right wing.

Pop quiz answer: The “S” of Harry S. Truman doesn’t stand for anything. It was a compromise between the names of his two grandfathers, Solomon and Shipp.