certain doom for the Wagner Act, and the public’s attention, including the attention of those
workers then sitting in protest in their factories, was on the Supreme Court as they mulled the
Jones & Laughlin case. “The people stand before the oracles still waiting for a decision on the
Wagner Act cases,” wrote The Nation.
While Time noted that on the day that West Coast
Hotel was issued the courthouse was packed with many luminaries eagerly awaiting the Wagner
Act decisions. The magazine pointed out that it was time well spent, despite the disappointment,
because they had witnessed a “red-letter decision day.”
While West Coast Hotel was a
welcome decision, it had not been as eagerly anticipated by the public or the government as the
decision that followed two weeks later.
The Jones & Laughlin decision was handed down on April 12, 1937, and it was filled
with references to lived experience. The sit-down strikers had made their point. The Court
wrote of the old standard for the commerce clause:
We are asked to shut our eyes to the plainest facts of our industrial life and to deal with
the question of direct and indirect effects in an intellectual vacuum. … When industries
organize themselves on a national scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the
dominant factor in their activities, how can it be maintained that their industrial labor
relations constitute a forbidden field into which Congress may not enter when it is
necessary to protect interstate commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial
war? We have often said that interstate commerce itself is not a practical conception. It
is equally true that interferences with that commerce must be appraised by a judgment
that does not ignore actual experience. … Experience has abundantly demonstrated that
the recognition of the right of employees to self-organization and to have representatives
of their own choosing for the purpose of collective bargaining is often an essential
condition of industrial peace. Refusal to confer and negotiate has been one of the most
prolific causes of strife. This is such an outstanding fact in the history of labor
disturbances that it is a proper subject of judicial notice and requires no citation of
instances.
The Court had embraced a new perspective that was consonant with changing times. The nature
of society was now such that old baselines for state neutrality could no longer hold, and neither
could prior understandings of the proper locus of government responsibility and public policy.
101
"The Shape of Things," Nation 1937.
102
"Judiciary: Chambermaid's Day," Time, April 5, 1937 1937.
103
301 U.S. 1, 41-2.
39
Convention