The "Sick Chicken" Case: The US Supreme Court and the New Deal (Landmark Law Cases & American Society)

The defining legal history of a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court that gutted a key piece of FDR’s New Deal.

On May 25, 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, the US Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions that dealt mortal blows to New Deal legislation and presidential initiatives—a day known to New Dealers as Black Monday. The most significant of these decisions was A.L.A. Schechter Poultry v. U.S., which members of the press promptly labeled the “sick chicken case.” In this decision, the Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, thus abolishing the National Recovery Administration and the hundreds of codes it had enacted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced the Court’s action, which started him down the road to his ill-fated plan to pack the Court in 1937.

As Williamjames Hull Hoffer shows, however, the sick chicken case is about much more than a single piece of New Deal legislation. It is a window into American society during the Great Depression and the New Deal—a 1930s America before World War II and the Cold War, the age of radio and movie palaces, and a time of experimentation with government that some likened to fascism or communism, or maybe both. More than a landmark law case that threatened the New Deal, but ultimately did not, Schechter Poultry is not just about a sick chicken; it is about a sick nation trying to heal itself.

Williamjames Hull Hoffer is a professor of history at Seton Hall University, the author of Plessy v. Ferguson: Race and Inequality in Jim Crow America, and coauthor of The Supreme Court: An Essential History, both from Kansas.