FDR's court packing plan

THE COVER of last week's Ideas section (''Supreme switch?")contained an interesting analysis by Christopher Shea of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to achieve judicial reform in the federal courts of the United States, not just the Supreme Court, as the article implies.

Unfortunately, the Globe ran a photograph to accompany the article on page D-1 depicting a later Supreme Court that included a member chosen by Roosevelt himself after his battle with the Supreme Court rather than the original nine members of the court who served during FDR's entire first term.

The photo shows, to the right of a circled Justice Owen J. Roberts (the key figure in Shea's analysis), FDR's first addition to the court: Justice Hugo L. Black.

Shea's analysis centers upon the historical debate whether Justice Owen J. Roberts's position changes as a member of the Supreme Court resulted from FDR's attempts to pack the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, the so-called ''switch in time that saved nine." Challenges to this conventional wisdom are described as ''revisionist" in the Globe article. However, historical analyses of the New Deal as well as established biographies of Roosevelt have consistently noted the fact that Roberts' apparent position changes were not occasioned by FDR's 1937 court reform initiative, but rather by the times in which Roberts lived.

It is certainly arguable that the main impact of FDR's court packing plan may have been to nudge Justice van Devanter into early retirement in 1937, paving the way for the first of nine Supreme Court appointments by Roosevelt from 1937 to 1943. All the more unfortunate, then, that the Globe left Justice van Devanter out of its Supreme Court photograph.

JOSEPH J. PLAUD
Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum
Worcester