AHC + WI 'Warren Court' in 1870s and 80s

Your challenge is to create a court more sympathtic to less well off people especially former slaves and less willing to give rights to commercial corporations.

Could such a court have been enough to change events in the South?

Could the 'Gilded age' have been less obscenely unequal (I am not impartial)
 
Yeah, the people were there. You just need to get them in power. Maybe we can replace Johnson with someone more radical?


Only two vacancies arose during Johnson's administration. OTL they weren't filled until after Grant took office. So even if a more radical POTUS does get to fill them, it only affects close votes.
 
Radical Republicans were actually quite 'sympathetic to corporations.' You're imposing a modern progressive mindset on a past progressive mindset. The past is *different.*
 
You could have Lincoln deal with his conflicts with the Supreme Court (particularly Chief Justice Taney) by packing the Court, a la FDR
 
Not sure how ASB this is, but what if more Supreme Court Justices resign like John Campbell, so Lincoln, or Grant, could pack the court with however many men they wanted.
 
Not sure how ASB this is, but what if more Supreme Court Justices resign like John Campbell, so Lincoln, or Grant, could pack the court with however many men they wanted.

Add to that, Benjamin Butler accepts First Offer of the Vice-Presidency instead of Second Offer Andrew Johnson. Butler was as Radical as any War Democrat could possibly be.

Grant offers Radicals first choice of Supreme Court choices, to get their support on other issues.

The Grant Administration isn't as scandal ridden, allowing for Rutherford B. Hayes to win more decisively in 1876. Meaning Reconstruction is not short-circuited, and the US Army and a Radical Supreme Court are able to deal with the KKK more effectively.:mad:

James A. Garfield isn't assassinated.

Grover Cleveland loses.:confused:

By this time, the KKK has been under the US Army's thumb for over two decades, and you'd have to wonder how long they could keep up an active resistance with federal authority still dropping the hammer on them.

Assuming no other butterflies to POTUS elections (HUGE ASSUMPTION!), no Democrats in the White House until Wilson. But if he gets in, after 52 years of uninterrupted Republican rule, watch out.:(
 
Get the Supreme Court to overrule the General Federal Common Law sooner. The General Federal Common Law was immensely pro big business and was only ruled unconstitutional in the 1900s.
 
Have the Supreme Court grant collective bargaining rights. Pre-Warren, but it makes for a much less gilded Gilded Age.
 

katchen

Banned
You would have to watch those Progressive Supreme Court rulings during the 1870s. It would be easy to create what that era would call Dred Scott decisions and what we would call Roe v Wade or Bush v Gore decsions. Supreme Court decisions that deviate far from what the public will tolerate have two problems:
1. They create a lot of resentment against the "activist" Supreme Court.
and more importantly
2. As we saw in both Roe v Wade (which Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently commented on to this effect) and Bush v Gore (which Sandra Day O'Connor just commented on in I believe Salon, it does the country no favors when the Supreme Court "rescues" the country from traveling the "hard yards" of the political debate that actually changes people's minds. The country would have been better served to fight it's abortion battles state by state during the 1970s and CREATE a consensus around abortion then to have Justice Blackmun write an opinion that was crafted essentially to protect doctors and refused even to attempt to answer the question of when during the course of pregnancy independent human life begins. Actually read the text of Roe v Wade sometime.
In doing so, the Supreme Court, Dred Scott style, left plenty of room for absolutists on both sides to carve out political space and polarize the country on the issue, making it a hot button issue that could blind working class Americans to their own rational class interests. On one hand, many Americans were driven to support conservative candidates they might not have otherwise with images of aborted fetuses in bottles indistinguishable from babies being saved on prenatal units. On the other hand, women voters found themselves overlooking "New Democrat" Senators, Congresspeople and Presidents and presidential candidates who took contributions from big business and made concessions that took away hard won gains in areas from collective bargaining to bankruptcy protection for medical and credit card and student loan debtors to welfare "reform" --as long as the candidate in question upheld the Roe v Wade formula for women's abortion rights. All because the Supreme Court stepped in and legislated from the bench.
So no, I do not see a Supreme Court changing anything, just creating insurgency if they try. The only way to force the South to change would have been to decide from the outset that the former Confederacy was going to be administered as US Territories with no Congressional Representation for the next 99 years --until the last slaveowners were dead and long in their graves. After reading Katzelson's work "Fear Itself", I am convinced that only that way could the New Deal have truly run it's course to bring the US to the democratic rights Europeans take for granted.
 
You could have Lincoln deal with his conflicts with the Supreme Court (particularly Chief Justice Taney) by packing the Court, a la FDR

Unlike FDR, who failed to pack the Supreme Court, the Republicans in the 1860s did pack the court, by shrinking it under Johnson and then growing it again.

President Butler could theoretically expand it (I always thought the Supreme Court should have 13 members for the 13 original colonies).

Such a Warren Court could've happened as late as, say, Harrison's term. The 1890s is when Jim Crow really started, and between Harrison's term and Cleveland's second, pretty much the whole court was up for grabs.
 

katchen

Banned
Yes, and a Democratic President, Grover Cleveland, dependent on the Solid South for Congressional and Electoral votes, appointed some of the Supreme Court justices who upheld it.
 
Not sure how ASB this is, but what if more Supreme Court Justices resign like John Campbell, so Lincoln, or Grant, could pack the court with however many men they wanted.


They scarcely needed to. There was one seat vacant when Lincoln took office, another Justice resigned to go south in 1861, a tenth seat was created by Congress, and two further deaths meant that by 1865 five Justices, including the CJ, were Lincoln appointees.

Since Congress moved the goalposts to prevent Andrew Johnson appointing anyone, further deaths meant that by 1873 there was only one Democratic appointee (Nathan Clifford) left on the court, and for several years thereafter none at all.
 
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Japhy

Banned
Chief Justice Conkling 1873-1888 would do a hell of a lot as far as making the Court more liberal on Civil Rights issues. All you have to do is have him not refuse the post and it would be his. But as noted Progressive on Civil Rights =/= Progressive on Economics.
 
Yeah remember that the Republicans were then the Party of North-Eastern Industrialists and were generally classical Liberals. The proto-trade Unionists in the North were generally Democrats. Radical Republicans are not going to Trust bust or bring in Collective Bargaining.
 
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