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The company which had balked at the Act was Virginian Railway, which wanted to bargain with a company union of its shop employes despite the fact that a majority of them had voted for representation by a unit of the American Federation of Labor. Claiming itself deprived of liberty of contract as guaranteed by the Constitution's "due process" clause, the company based its plea on the ground that machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, electricians and sheetmetal workers are engaged only in intrastate, not interstate, commerce. Ruled Mr. Justice Stone, his colleagues unanimously assenting: "The activities in which these employers are engaged have such a relation to the other confessedly interstate activities of the petitioner that they are to be regarded as part of them."
Frazier-Lemke. In May 1935 a Kentucky farmer named Radford lost his farm when Mr. Justice Brandeis read a unanimous Court opinion nullifying the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act. That act permitted a farmer to declare himself bankrupt and keep his farm by having it appraised at its current value, paying this sum to his creditors within five years. This week a Virginia farmer named Wright kept his farm when Mr. Justice Brandeis read a unanimous Court opinion upholding the amended Frazier-Lemke Act, passed after the first was declared unconstitutional, which permits a bankrupt farmer to keep his property only three years, meantime paying his mortgagee a "reasonable rent." Difference between the two laws, held the Court, was that the first deprived the mortgagee of his property rights, while the second does not.
Grocer Norris. Writing the last chapter in a famed story of political skulduggery, the Court unanimously reversed a circuit court decision granting a new trial to Grocer George W. Norris of Broken Bow, Neb. In 1930, Grocer Norris was hired to enter the Republican primaries against Senator George W. Norris, later told a Senate investigating committee that he had been paid nothing for the trick, was convicted of perjury, sentenced to three months in jail and $100 fine which he must now serve and pay.
*Senator Ashurst of Arizona, who delivered a eulogy on the virtue of inconsistency to justify his own flip-flop in favor of the President's Court enlargement proposal (TIME, March 1), could hardly contain his courtly glee when the news was brought to the Senate. The Supreme Court, he said, must have overheard his remarks and acted on them.