Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 2:02 pm Post subject: The Schechter Brothers Reply with quote
A remarkable, if long forgotten true life story.
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080207.wreynolds0208/GIStory/
Breaking News from The Globe and Mail
Four brothers set New Deal feathers flying
Neil Reynolds
Friday, February 08, 2008
Speaking of author Naomi Klein's inexplicable call for a return to “disaster populism,” as exemplified by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, we now summon as witnesses – for the defence of free markets – the four immigrant brothers from Poland who saved the United States “from going the way of Hitler and Mussolini.” It's an amazing story, exquisitely told by Amity Shlaes in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, one of the most instructive books of 2007. More a biography of the Depression than a history of it, Forgotten Man demonstrates that Roosevelt's “disaster populism” didn't end the Depression – but rather, year after year, kept it going.
Here, much abbreviated, is the story.
Roosevelt established the National Recovery Agency by executive decree in 1933 “to drive up prices and get people back to work.” He authorized a huge bureaucracy with thousands of employees and with power to control production and prices. Once up and running, the agency was determined to make an example of someone to demonstrate that its vast powers were legal. It finally found what it regarded as the perfect case and laid 60 felony charges against the Schechter brothers – Joseph, Martin, Alex and Aaron – who made a meagre livelihood selling kosher chickens in New York City. ( Schechter means “ritual butcher” in Yiddish and denotes a person qualified to sell meat that conforms to Jewish law.) In prosecuting the Schechters, as Ms. Shlaes describes it, the NRA selected four brothers who had no corporate money behind them, no formal education, no social status. They could scarcely speak English and when they did, as Ms. Shlaes puts it, they sounded like Jewish comedians in the Catskills. They weren't rich. They paid themselves $35 a week, less than NRA inspectors earned. They took pride in their work, which was as important to them for religious as for commercial reasons. It took a special kind of vigilance to run a kosher butchery.
With authority over more than 20 million workers, the NRA had published a specific “code of conduct” for “the live poultry industry in New York City.”
On the basis of this code, the agency charged the Schechters with the crime of permitting customers to select the chickens they wanted; NRA regulations permitted them – as “middlemen” – only to sell chickens “by the full coop,” that is, in quantities of 30 or 40. (The NRA had identified middlemen as enemies of the people and had given itself the authority to put them out of business.) The NRA also charged the Schechters with selling diseased chickens – which would have been a serious violation of Jewish law, let alone New Deal law. To save their reputations as well as their business, the brothers felt they had no choice but to take on the New Deal in court.
When the trial opened in Brooklyn, prosecutors said the Schechters had sold 10 sick chickens, confirmed by autopsy. As the trial proceeded, they reduced this number first to three, then to one. The defence showed that the illness detected in this single chicken could not have been detected by anyone without a full autopsy.
On Nov. 1, 1934 (unemployment rate: 23.2 per cent), the Brooklyn court convicted the Schechters, fined them $7,425 and ordered them jailed for periods between one month and three months. The front-page New York Times headline trumpeted: “First felony case won by NRA.” The prosecutors called the judgment “a sweeping victory of immense importance.”
In May, 1935, the case reached the Supreme Court. The government argued that the NRA's extraordinary powers were justified by the “national emergency” of the Depression. The defence argued that the government was free to go “the way of Hitler and Mussolini” – but would first need to rewrite the Constitution.
In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court found that the NRA was unconstitutional, “a coercive exercise in law making” – regardless of the nature of the “national emergency.” Justice Louis Brandeis, celebrated progressive and first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, sent Roosevelt a private message: “We're not going to let you centralize everything. It's come to an end.”
The decision was a big international story. The headline in the London Express read: “America stunned. Roosevelt's work killed in 20 minutes.”
Simply put, the Schechter brothers compelled Roosevelt to disband the quasi-fascist NRA, which had indeed been modelled, in part, on Mussolini's totalitarian regime. Thousands of people lost their government jobs but the employment rate headed upward and the Dow staged its biggest rally since the days of Herbert Hoover. The Schechter brothers once again sold kosher chickens the way they wanted – letting their customers choose chickens they wanted, one by one.
© The Globe and Mail
PostPosted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 2:02 pm Post subject: The Schechter Brothers Reply with quote
A remarkable, if long forgotten true life story.
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080207.wreynolds0208/GIStory/
Breaking News from The Globe and Mail
Four brothers set New Deal feathers flying
Neil Reynolds
Friday, February 08, 2008
Speaking of author Naomi Klein's inexplicable call for a return to “disaster populism,” as exemplified by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, we now summon as witnesses – for the defence of free markets – the four immigrant brothers from Poland who saved the United States “from going the way of Hitler and Mussolini.” It's an amazing story, exquisitely told by Amity Shlaes in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, one of the most instructive books of 2007. More a biography of the Depression than a history of it, Forgotten Man demonstrates that Roosevelt's “disaster populism” didn't end the Depression – but rather, year after year, kept it going.
Here, much abbreviated, is the story.
Roosevelt established the National Recovery Agency by executive decree in 1933 “to drive up prices and get people back to work.” He authorized a huge bureaucracy with thousands of employees and with power to control production and prices. Once up and running, the agency was determined to make an example of someone to demonstrate that its vast powers were legal. It finally found what it regarded as the perfect case and laid 60 felony charges against the Schechter brothers – Joseph, Martin, Alex and Aaron – who made a meagre livelihood selling kosher chickens in New York City. ( Schechter means “ritual butcher” in Yiddish and denotes a person qualified to sell meat that conforms to Jewish law.) In prosecuting the Schechters, as Ms. Shlaes describes it, the NRA selected four brothers who had no corporate money behind them, no formal education, no social status. They could scarcely speak English and when they did, as Ms. Shlaes puts it, they sounded like Jewish comedians in the Catskills. They weren't rich. They paid themselves $35 a week, less than NRA inspectors earned. They took pride in their work, which was as important to them for religious as for commercial reasons. It took a special kind of vigilance to run a kosher butchery.
With authority over more than 20 million workers, the NRA had published a specific “code of conduct” for “the live poultry industry in New York City.”
On the basis of this code, the agency charged the Schechters with the crime of permitting customers to select the chickens they wanted; NRA regulations permitted them – as “middlemen” – only to sell chickens “by the full coop,” that is, in quantities of 30 or 40. (The NRA had identified middlemen as enemies of the people and had given itself the authority to put them out of business.) The NRA also charged the Schechters with selling diseased chickens – which would have been a serious violation of Jewish law, let alone New Deal law. To save their reputations as well as their business, the brothers felt they had no choice but to take on the New Deal in court.
When the trial opened in Brooklyn, prosecutors said the Schechters had sold 10 sick chickens, confirmed by autopsy. As the trial proceeded, they reduced this number first to three, then to one. The defence showed that the illness detected in this single chicken could not have been detected by anyone without a full autopsy.
On Nov. 1, 1934 (unemployment rate: 23.2 per cent), the Brooklyn court convicted the Schechters, fined them $7,425 and ordered them jailed for periods between one month and three months. The front-page New York Times headline trumpeted: “First felony case won by NRA.” The prosecutors called the judgment “a sweeping victory of immense importance.”
In May, 1935, the case reached the Supreme Court. The government argued that the NRA's extraordinary powers were justified by the “national emergency” of the Depression. The defence argued that the government was free to go “the way of Hitler and Mussolini” – but would first need to rewrite the Constitution.
In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court found that the NRA was unconstitutional, “a coercive exercise in law making” – regardless of the nature of the “national emergency.” Justice Louis Brandeis, celebrated progressive and first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, sent Roosevelt a private message: “We're not going to let you centralize everything. It's come to an end.”
The decision was a big international story. The headline in the London Express read: “America stunned. Roosevelt's work killed in 20 minutes.”
Simply put, the Schechter brothers compelled Roosevelt to disband the quasi-fascist NRA, which had indeed been modelled, in part, on Mussolini's totalitarian regime. Thousands of people lost their government jobs but the employment rate headed upward and the Dow staged its biggest rally since the days of Herbert Hoover. The Schechter brothers once again sold kosher chickens the way they wanted – letting their customers choose chickens they wanted, one by one.
© The Globe and Mail
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