JUDICIARY: Marble v. Velvet

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Those who dwell in marble halls are not uniformly blessed. Last week in Boston Victor L. Chrisler of the National Bureau of Standards revealed that the nine Justices of the Supreme Court of the U. S. are homesick for the good hearing that they enjoyed in their little vestibule of a courtroom in the Capitol. In their vast new marble chamber, in their vast new marble building, the acoustics are so poor that when Mr. Justice Roberts at one end of the bench leans forward to ask a question, Mr. Justice Cardozo at the other end can hardly hear him. Even when a stentorian counsel stands nearly opposite the centre of the bench, his words sound jumbled to all the Justices, his voice all false and hollow. The fault, so far as the Bureau of Standards can discover, is too much marble. The remedy: more velvet curtains.

Acoustics was only one of the Court's troubles this week as it began to hear arguments in the first of a series of cases in which it must weigh the velvet provided by the New Deal for farmers against the cold marble of the Constitution. Seldom, however, has the Court had so many friends as went to its aid. Friends of the Court included the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Mountain States Beet Growers' Marketing Association, the National Beet Growers' Association offering briefs in defense of AAA. Hygrade Food Products, National Biscuit, P. Lorillard turned up as "friends'' in the person of John W. Davis (and associates) who offered a brief against AAA. These briefs were concerned with two tests of the AAAct which taxes processors to raise money to pay farmers to reduce output.* One of these, brought by eight Louisiana rice millers who claim processing taxes are illegal, will be argued next week. The other is that of the Hoosac Mills Corp. of New Bedford, Mass, which was argued this week. The receivers of Hoosac Mills, one of whom is the late Calvin Coolidge's great & good friend William Morgan Butler, appealed to a Federal Court to be excused from paying $81,694 of processing and floor taxes on the ground that AAA is unconstitutional. Hoosac Mills lost its plea in the lower court but won in the Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston last July (TIME, July 29).