WEINBERG: By the early '30s, the Court, the nine old men, found itself sitting at the top of a situation in which an unregulated economy lay in ruins at its feet.

POWE: When Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated, there's 25 percent unemployment in the United States. In his inaugural address, the chief applause line is when he says he may be forced to assume powers ordinarily taken only in time of war.

SIMON: He envisioned a much more muscular federal government and legislation that would practically grab the economy by its ears and pull it out of the depression.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: This nation is asking for action, and action now.

NARRATOR: From the beginning of his first term, Franklin Roosevelt rolled up his sleeves and stuck his hands where no president ever had: in the whirring mechanisms of the national economy. With the help of Congress, the Roosevelt administration undertook to increase farm income and wages, to push down prices, and to create jobs. Nobody would argue that things were great, but the federal government had put its shoulder to the wheel.

KLEIN: Citizens saw what the federal government could do in the early years in the New Deal. And so people's expectations about what government could do began to rise.

POWE: The Court had to know that the New Deal had extraordinarily popular support. Congress would do anything Roosevelt wanted. He's got the presidency. He's got the support of the people. And the government was exercising powers that had never been exercised in American history. And the justices can see Hitler has taken over in Germany and centralizing things. Mussolini is running Italy and centralizing things. Stalin is running Russia and centralizing things, and now we have a government where the president has suggested that maybe the Constitution isn't all that it should be. And I want to have wartime powers. And the justices were worried about this. Are we seeing a constitutional revolution without a change in the Constitution? The only conceivable check on Roosevelt is the judiciary. In 1935 and 1936, the Supreme Court invalidates 10 recent federal statutes. They have never done that before. They have never done that since in a two-year period.

NARRATOR: At the end of that run, in 1936, the Court narrowly struck down a New York State minimum wage law. The Supreme Court, led by the Four Horsemen, held that neither the federal government nor state legislatures had the right to meddle in the free market economy, emergency or no.

LAW: The rest of the county is widely being affected, feeling the effects of the Great Depression, and the Four Horsemen are hanging on for dear life to this liberty of contract idea.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: I defy anyone to read the opinions concerning the Triple A, the Railroad Retirement Act, the National Recovery Act, the Guffey Coal Act, and the New York minimum wage law and tell us exactly what, if anything, we can do for the industrial worker in this session of the Congress with any reasonable certainty that what we do will not be nullified as unconstitutional.

NARRATOR: Franklin Roosevelt had big new things to try. And five votes on the Court could put a stop to any of them. So after the president was reelected in a landslide in 1936, he went after the conservative old justices. He threatened to create six new seats on the bench, fill them with his own men, and thereby give himself a certain majority.

POWE: What Roosevelt was indicating to the Court was, if you stand in the way I'm simply going to finish you as an institution. And I think the justices understood that.

NARRATOR: By 1937, when the case of a hotel maid from Wenatchee, Washington made it to the splendid new courthouse, Roosevelt's assault had focused the nation's attention on nine men in black robes.

The chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, wasn't asking for the moon. She just wanted the Court to award her back pay of $216.19 -- the difference between the wage the hotel had paid her and the state-mandated minimum.

The West Coast Hotels attorneys were unapologetic. Of course the corporation had been paying the maid less than the minimum of $14.50 a week. It had the right to do so under the "liberty of contract" doctrine. The Four Horsemen all but nodded in agreement.

But when the West Coast decision came down on March 29, 1937, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes's preamble caught the attention of everyone listening in. "The economic conditions," he said, "make it not only appropriate, but we think imperative, that in deciding the present case the subject should receive fresh consideration."

Hughes announced that the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, was upholding the Washington state minimum wage law. The working woman, Elsie Parrish, would get her due.

POWE: West Coast Hotel versus Parrish was the Court's surrender to the New Deal. Chief Justice Hughes, in that opinion, says people have to live. They have to have the necessities of life. And the public doesn't have to subsidize an unscrupulous employer who is exploiting his employees.

GILLMAN: That case has sometimes been referred to as ushering in what is known as the Constitutional Revolution of 1937. The Court was acknowledging the legitimate role that government would play in helping people who were not competing successfully in the market.

KOBYLKA: When the Court switches in 1937, they basically say, we will get out of the way and let the train come through. Government can regulate as it chooses.

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