JUDICIARY: The Court and Prestige

The U.S. press had a field day lambasting a favorite whipping boy of the 1930s—the Supreme Court. To editorialists and cartoonists it seemed that strange things were happening in the marble palace where once sat the solemn Nine Old Men. Solemnly, the staid New York Times deplored "the unstable Court . . . with its recent astonishing record of dissents . . . confusion and uncertainty." Sardonic, pink-faced Cartoonist Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch took a slightly merrier view. He pictured the Justices as a bunch of middle-aged gamins, pinking one another's skulls with legal slingshots.

The...