Magna Carta, and Other AddressesGuthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
History
Magna Carta, and Other Addresses
Guthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
Constitutional law -- United States
Another judicial decision denounced by Mr. Roosevelt a few days before
the last election is the Knisley case discussed above. Speaking of
this case, he told his audience, and through the press told the whole
country, that "the Court of Appeals threw out the case and declared
the law unconstitutional on this ground: that the legislature could
not interfere with the liberty of that girl in losing her arm.... The
trouble was that they knew law but didn't know right, and still more,
as I have stated, that they had arrogated to themselves the right that
the people should have--the right to decide what the common sense and
justice of the people demand." Yet there was not one word anywhere in
the record or in the opinion of the Court of Appeals which suggested
that the act was unconstitutional or that the legislature did not
have full power to change the common law rule in such cases and make
the employer liable to his injured workmen or workwomen if he failed
to comply with a statute prescribing guards or other protection for
employees. The most superficial investigation would have disclosed
the fact that the Court of Appeals has never intimated in any case
that such a statute would be unconstitutional, and that in the Knisley
case it neither had before it nor decided any question concerning the
constitutionality of an act of the legislature.
Shortly before the election, Mr. Roosevelt caused to be published in
the "Saturday Evening Post" of Philadelphia, under the title of "The
Deceitful Red Herring," the following statement: "Our platform demands
an eight-hour law for women in industries.... But the Court of Appeals
of New York has said that the ten millions of people of my state have
not got that right if they wish to exercise it. In New York the people
did not ask for an eight-hour day--asked for only a ten-hour day for
women. Then the Court of Appeals said that under their interpretation
of the Constitution the small sweat-shop keeper or the big factory
owner may work haggard women twelve, fourteen or sixteen hours a day,
if he chooses, and we cannot stop it."
As a matter of fact, however, as the slightest investigation would have
disclosed, the New York Court of Appeals had never decided anything of
the kind. Moreover, there was in our state when Mr. Roosevelt published
this statement a statute limiting the hours of labor for women to nine
hours per day and fifty-four hours per week,[58] and for thirteen
years prior to the recent amendment there had been a statute limiting
the hours of labor of women to ten hours per day and sixty hours per
week. These statutes had been regularly enforced for years, and their
constitutionality had never been even questioned, so far as I have been
able to ascertain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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