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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2009
Readers of the New York Times were not accustomed to encountering in its pages a Cabinet official picking a fight with the Supreme Court, but that is what they did on May 8, 1938. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, had recently ruled that Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace had used the wrong procedures to set the rates that “commission men” charged farmers for marketing cattle, pigs, and sheep at Kansas City's stockyards. It was the second time the case had come before the Court. On the previous occasion, the justices had sent the case back to the lower courts to determine whether the secretary had personally studied the factual record before issuing the rates. In fact, Wallace had given the matter “more personal attention than any previous Secretary of Agriculture had ever given to any case under the Packers and Stockyards Act or for that matter any half dozen cases,” so when the case returned to the Court, the justices had to shift their ground. Now they objected that the Department of Agriculture had not revealed its case to the commission men, leaving them with no way of addressing the government's arguments. Wallace fumed that Hughes had implied that “the present Administration” was to blame for the procedures he followed, when in fact earlier, Republican administrations had established them. Besides, the procedures had already been revised in light of the Supreme Court's first decision in the case.
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