West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937)
Introduction
The year 1937 was unlike any other in American law and politics. The Supreme Court decision in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo in 1936 striking down a New York minimum wage law as violative of the right of contract concluded an extraordinary stretch that saw the Court void the two main pillars of FDR’s New Deal recovery program, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as well as a number of other New Deal and state-level acts. The New Deal had advanced legislative authority at the federal level far beyond what the country had ever seen. The Supreme Court responded in kind, aggressively and repeatedly striking down major legislation at a pace never before witnessed. A major political showdown between the two branches seemed inevitable. But few would have anticipated that the catalyst for settling that conflict would be a humble, out-of-work chambermaid’s two hundred dollar claim for back pay.
The Context
The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed led to economic woes the depths of which the country had not experienced before. The stock market lost 90% of its value. Industrial production was cut in half, and GDP collapsed. Unemployment peaked at 25% and persisted for years, with wages for employed workers falling some 60%. A third of the country’s banks failed. Farm income was reduced to a sliver of what it had been. In the face of such severe financial circumstances, Congress responded to newly elected President Roosevelt’s call for “a New Deal for the American People” and his emphasis on the “first hundred days” dramatically and with force, pushing through legislation that was unparalleled both in its reach and in the authority wielded by the federal government.
The legislation passed included a "banking holiday" to end the runs on the banks; it created innovative and far-reaching new federal programs administered by newly formed agencies. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration propped up farm prices. The Civilian Conservation Corps created jobs for unemployed youth. The Tennessee Valley Authority did likewise for rural America, bringing them electricity in the process. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration generated thousands of jobs in construction projects across the country. The National Recovery Administration sought to stabilize consumer goods prices through a series of codes. These and a host of other bills undoubtedly stood on questionable constitutional footing, with the federal government exercising a role in commerce, industry, and labor at levels that would have been unimaginable prior to the economic collapse. State governments were simultaneously acting in kind, passing their own “Little New Deal” laws. All of this put the Supreme Court in the crosshairs, as dozens of lawsuits quickly arose challenging the validity of New Deal legislation.
The Court that would ultimately decide the fate of the New Deal was itself badly divided. On one side sat a trio of liberal justices (Cardozo, Stone, and Brandeis) who were known as “The Three Musketeers”; they were strongly in support of progressive era legislation and consistently voted to uphold FDR’s New Deal. On the other side were the “Four Horsemen of Reaction” – Justices DeVanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler. They had served together on the Court since 1922, voting in lockstep to reject any regulatory act that conflicted with their deeply held laissez-faire convictions. This meant the resolution of these cases ultimately came down to the votes of two Hoover appointees, Chief Justice Hughes and Justice Roberts. Staunch Republicans who had worked as corporate lawyers before being elevated to the Court, neither had a strong ideological bent to their judicial approach. Nevertheless, they sided with the Four Horsemen often enough in the early years of the New Deal for the Court to represent a serious and obstinate obstacle to FDR’s realization of his New Deal.
Elsie Parrish and Minimum Wage Laws Head to Court
The case that would bring things to a head in the Supreme Court began in 1933, when Elsie Lee (soon to be Parrish) took on work as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington. She worked on and off for the next couple of years, scrubbing toilets and cleaning hotel rooms at an hourly wage of $.22. When she was let go in 1935, she discovered that she had not been paid at the weekly wage rate of $14.30 that had been established for her occupation under the Washington state minimum wage law. Foregoing an offer by the hotel to settle for $17, Parrish filed a lawsuit claiming $216.19 in back pay.
The Washington law had been enacted in 1913 amidst the growing fervor of the progressive reforms around working conditions for women and children. The statute made it “unlawful to employ women . . . under conditions of labor detrimental to their health” or at wages which “are not adequate for their maintenance. . .” The law set up a commission to determine wage standards for various types of work, hence the weekly minimum wage of $14.30 for chambermaids. At first glance, Parrish appeared to have a strong claim, since the state’s highest court had upheld the act several times. But the wage law was unlikely to survive several U.S. Supreme Court precedents directly on point.
Twelve years before Parrish filed her claim, the High Court had ruled on a virtually identical case, in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923). The Court in Adkins held by a 5-4 vote that wage requirements unconstitutionally impinged on the freedom of contract under the due process clause of the 5th amendment. Adkins seemed to seal Parrish’s fate. While her claim entailed a state law rather than a federal one, the principle was the same. The 14th Amendment due process clause, as applied to the states, was analogous to the 5th in its application to the federal government. As one commentator intoned, the ruling would “render impossible all other legislation . . . involving the regulation of wages.” It was unsurprising, then, when the trial court rejected Parrish’s claim.
However, the Washington state Supreme Court took a different view; to the shock of many observers, it overturned the lower court decision, noting that the Supreme Court had never overturned a state minimum wage statute. While the ruling provided a momentary ray of hope, few believed it would withstand review at the U.S. Supreme Court level, in light of Adkins and the open enmity the Four Horsemen held for such economic regulatory provisions.
Parrish’s appeal looked even more hopeless when the High Court issued another minimum wage ruling even as Parrish’s case was working its way up the appellate ladder. Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo (1936) arose from a New York minimum wage law that pertained to women and minors, and was based upon “the value of services rendered” by the workers. Joseph Tipaldo, a Brooklyn laundry owner, was indicted and jailed for ignoring the mandatory wage law; the case’s applicability to Parrish’s claim grew when the hotel industry stepped up to finance Tipaldo’s defense.
In June of 1936, the Court delivered its ruling in Tipaldo, striking down the New York minimum wage law. In a 5-4 decision, the Court found no meaningful distinction between the New York statute and the D.C. act voided in Adkins. In a sweeping opinion, the Court found that “The right to make contracts about one’s affairs is part of the liberty protected by the due process clause . . .” The Court definitively announced that “the state is without power by any form of legislation to prohibit, change or nullify contracts between employers and adult women workers as to the amount of wages to be paid.” Things looked bleak indeed for Elsie Parrish.
Yet the margin of the Tipaldo decision was narrow, by a single vote. It provoked severe backlash, on the Court and off. Chief Justice Hughes, in his dissent pled for the majority to acknowledge the state’s power “to protect women from being exploited by overreaching employers.” In a separate dissent, Justice Stone accused the majority of falling back on its own “economic predilections” by embedding in the Constitution its “preference for some particular set of economic beliefs . . . in the name of liberty . . .” The opinion was deeply unpopular, with near universal condemnation across the partisan spectrum.
The Majority Opinion
Just nine months after Tipaldo, the Court ruled in West Coast Hotel. In an illustration of judicial whiplash, the Court explicitly overruled the Adkins case and sided with Elsie Parrish, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice Hughes and joined by the flip-flopping Justice Roberts. Hughes took the Adkins precedent head-on. He first determined that a revisiting of the Adkins holding was compelled for several reasons. First was “the importance of the question” at hand; the matter was one of genuine significance, in light of the sizeable number of states which had passed minimum wage laws. Moreover, the closeness of the divide among the justices who decided Adkins rendered it less secure. Finally, “the economic conditions which ha[d] supervened” since Adkins supported its reconsideration. Hughes emphasized the “unparalleled demands for relief which arose during the recent period of depression and still continue to an alarming extent . . .”
Hughes attacked the rigid reliance in Adkins on the freedom of contract and the laissez-faire doctrine upon which it rested. Liberty of contract was not explicitly mentioned in the constitutional text, nor was the liberty interest absolute. Rather the “liberty safeguarded is [that] . . . which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals and welfare of the people.” Regulations that were reasonable and adopted in the interests of the community satisfied the demands of due process. Hughes pointed to Muller v. Oregon (1908) and other precedents in which the Court had earlier recognized the power of the state to circumscribe the right of contract for women for their well-being and that of the public more broadly.
Hughes characterized Adkins as “a departure from the true application of the principles governing the regulation by the state of the relation of employer and employee.” He relied upon several relatively recent Supreme Court decisions (O’Gorman & Young v. Hartford Fire Insurance Company (1931); Nebbia v. New York (1934)) that established a presumption of constitutionality for economic regulations. Finding that Adkins could not be squared with those cases, Hughes explicitly overruled it. He then had little trouble upholding the Washington minimum wage law. Finding that “the protection of women is a legitimate end of the exercise of state power,” Hughes affirmed “the requirement of the payment of a minimum wage fairly fixed in order to meet the very necessities of existence [as] . . . an admissible means to that end . . .” Legislation that was adopted “in the interests of the community is due process.” The state legislature’s judgment might well be debatable, but it was entitled to its judgment, especially given the “unparalleled demands for relief which arose during the . . . depression.”
The Dissent
Justice Sutherland wrote a dissent on behalf of the Four Horsemen. While it was clear that they had suffered an irreversible judicial defeat, Sutherland felt compelled to make their argument one final time. He took issue with any presumption of constitutionality, asserting the justice’s independent duty to make up his own mind and adjudge accordingly. To extend such deference as the majority called for was “to surrender [one’s] deliberate judgment.” Nor was it proper to take into account the economic consequences from the Great Depression. Sutherland lectured the majority, writing that “The meaning of the Constitution does not change with the ebb and flow of economic events. . . the words of the Constitution [must] mean today what they . . . mean[t] when written.” To do otherwise would “rob that instrument of the essential element which continues it in force.” He found it beyond dispute that the Constitution’s due process clause included the freedom of contract. There was no power that he could find in the Constitution that would protect exploited workers against unscrupulous employers. Moreover, Sutherland found the law objectionable on the grounds that it advanced a minimum wage for women but not men. Having supported women’s suffrage as a senator, Sutherland now argued that women had achieved legal and political equality with men, and there was no reasonable ground for wage requirements “applicable to the wage contracts of all working women” but not to those of all working men. Women were on an equal plane with men, and to deny them the right to contract for lower-paying jobs was discriminatory.
Justice Roberts’ Vote: Politics on the Court?
The Court’s reversal in West Coast Hotel from the Tipaldo decision just months earlier left it open to charges that it was merely bending to the politics of the moment. Justice Roberts’ swing from one side to the other simply could not be explained in terms of good-faith judicial reasoning. It seemed obvious that political calculation had motivated his change of heart. The conventional wisdom for decades afterwards was that Roberts succumbed to the overt threat to the Court in the form of FDR’s just-announced court packing proposal. Roosevelt’s long-simmering frustration with the recalcitrant wing of the Court reached a boiling point with Tipaldo. Once he was clear of the 1936 elections, Roosevelt came out with a proposal designed to remove the Court as an obstacle to his legislative designs. In one of his fireside chats, FDR argued that measures were needed to “save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.” He sought a “liberal-minded Judiciary” comprised of younger men who were not “fearful of the future” but who could relate to the “modern facts and circumstances under which average men have to live and work.” He proposed to achieve this by adding one justice to the Court for each current member of the court who was at least 70 years old. Since all of the Four Horsemen were over seventy, the plan would give Roosevelt a handful of additional appointments, thus rendering the conservative opposition to the New Deal irrelevant. FDR’s plan to reshape the Court was unveiled on March 9, 1937, just three weeks prior to the Court’s announcement of its West Coast Hotel result. The reason for Roberts’ reversal on the minimum wage law looked obvious; he changed his position to remove the incentive for the President to move forward with his plans to pack the Court. Hence, it would become known as “the switch in time that saved nine.”
Later historical evidence complicated that simple narrative of presidential pressure. The notes of several of the justices from the closed-door conference held in December 1936, just days after the oral arguments, revealed Roberts voting in support of the Washington law. He had changed his vote prior to the judicial reform proposal was made public. This does not necessarily free Roberts of the imputation that he capitulated to Roosevelt’s machinations or the political pressures at the time. He may well have heard word that Roosevelt was considering plans to hit back at the Court. He may simply have been reacting to the public outrage over Tipaldo, and the approbation aimed at the conservative majority. Roberts boarded the Court without any judicial experience and lacking any discernible jurisprudential philosophy or ideological orientation. Nor did his work on the Court suggest that he gradually developed one over time. His unpredictability throughout the time during which the Court faced countless major New Deal cases, and the absence of a perceptible through line for his votes on those cases, revealed him to be unmoored by the need for constitutional coherence. His motives in West Coast Hotel are beyond knowing with certainty. But having observed the intense anger directed at the Court following Tipaldo, it is not a stretch to believe that Roberts may simply have desired to avoid the reputational stigma increasingly associated with the Four Horsemen and their implacable opposition to New Deal efforts to ease the suffering of the American citizenry.
Consequences of the Decision
The decision in West Coast Hotel had the immediate effect of clearing the way for the broad application of minimum wage laws. The seventeen states with wage laws on the books quickly took action to re-activate them. Additionally, Congress was motivated to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established baseline pay and maximum work hours for all workers. The Court had little difficulty finding that the law passed constitutional muster.
On a much broader level, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish was the opening salvo in what has come be known as the “Constitution Revolution” of 1937. West Coast Hotel was followed in short order by several other major cases that solidified the liberal majority on the Court and their posture of deference to New Deal legislation. Just two weeks after West Coast Hotel came down, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937). A few weeks after that, the Court upheld the Social Security Act in Helvering v. Davis (1937). In short, the tide had turned; the conservative, rigidly laissez-faire opposition to regulation of commerce and labor gave way to a Court that would prove highly deferential to government regulation of the economy. West Coast Hotel was the vehicle that ushered the country into the modern era of Supreme Court jurisprudence and the expansive understanding of federal power. It embraced a presumption in favor of governmental economic regulation, which was soon coupled with the Court’s granting virtually unlimited power to Congress under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper clauses.
Wholescale changes on the Court assured that the shift would be long-lasting. By the end of the 1937 term, the disbanding of the Four Horsemen had begun, with Justice Van Devanter’s retirement. Sutherland followed suit in early 1938, and Justice Butler stepped down in 1939. The final holdout, Justice McReynolds, left the Court in early 1941. Thus did the resistance to Roosevelt’s expansive vision of federal power evaporate almost overnight. While Roosevelt may have been stymied in the short term in his Court packing judicial reform proposal, he was able to pack the Court the old-fashioned way. He would end up with nine nominations to the Court, empowering him to remake the Court entirely in his image. Just as his goal in threatening the Court in 1937 had been to fill it with pro-New Deal figures, that same goal would animate all of his selections to the Court. The result was a Court that was wholly in sync with Roosevelt’s dramatic expansion of governmental and congressional power. The Court had been put on a liberal path that would hold for most of the remainder of the 20th Century.
A Postscript
The West Coast Hotel decision made for some strange bedfellows. Justice Sutherland had as a member of the U.S. Senate, had been a supporter of the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s voting rights. When he argued against minimum wage laws on the grounds that they applied only to women, he found surprising allies in some radical feminist activists, among them the National Women’s Party. One of them wrote Sutherland following the decision, lauding him for “doing [her] sex the honor of regarding women as persons and citizens.”
The court-packing plan the President proposed was not original to the administration. An earlier attorney general had, back in 1914, similarly proposed to add one judge to the lower federal courts for every sitting judge who reached the age of seventy. The originator of that plan was no other than James McReynolds, who himself was seventy-two years of age when Roosevelt’s proposal was introduced in the Senate, and who was considered the most intransigent of the Four Horsemen. One can only wonder his inner thoughts when FDR trained his plan on McReynolds and the other conservatives on the Court.
