Today, as part of our Closer Look series on famous Supreme Court plaintiffs, we look at the Schechter brothers, the plaintiffs in the case A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States (the “sick chicken case”), in which the justices defied FDR and which is one of just two times in American history that the Supreme Court struck down a federal statute under the non-delegation doctrine.
Joseph, Martin, Aaron, and Alex Schechter were four Jewish brothers who were born in Hungary between the late 1890s and early 1900s. Sometime in the early 20th century, the Schechter brothers immigrated to the United States from Hungary with their parents. As young men, they became notable figures in Brooklyn’s kosher food industry. Joseph ran the Schechter Poultry Corporation in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Martin, Aaron, and Alex owned A.L.A. Schechter Corporation in Farragut, Brooklyn.
As slaughterhouse operators in the poultry industry (their last name, Schechter, means “slaughterer” in Yiddish), the brothers would purchase birds from sellers at West Washington Market in New York City, railroad depots around New York City, and occasionally Philadelphia. The birds would then be trucked to the Schechters’ poultry shops in Brooklyn. Upon purchase by customers, the birds would be immediately slaughtered by a schochtim, a kosher slaughterer employed by the Schechters.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, a part of the New Deal that aimed to reduce competition. Violations could result in criminal charges. The Roosevelt administration believed too much competition was reducing prices, which then lowered wages and consumers’ purchasing power. The National Recovery Administration, created under the NIRA, thus instituted regulations aimed at increasing wages and stabilizing trade practices. Section 3 of the NIRA gave the president broad authority to set “codes of fair competition” and, under this authority, the Roosevelt administration promulgated the Live Poultry Code. One such rule under this code was for “straight killing,” requiring most purchasers to purchase either a coop or half coop of chickens rather than allowing them to pick out individual chickens. The Roosevelt administration believed that this rule would stabilize competition by preventing customers from selecting just the best chickens and leaving sellers with difficult-to-sell birds.
A year after the NIRA was instituted, inspectors found numerous violations of the Live Poultry Code at the Schechters’ poultry shops. (The Roosevelt administration had targeted the poultry field because of alleged corruption in the industry.) The Schechter brothers and their businesses were indicted on more than 60 counts, including “sell[ing] for human consumption unfit poultry” and various violations of rules for selecting chickens.
At trial, the Schechters were convicted on 19 counts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld every one of these but two. The Schechters then took their case to the Supreme Court and challenged the NIRA, particularly Section 3. They argued Congress had given, or “delegated,” too much of its lawmaking power to the president by giving him broad power to create such regulations.
In 1935, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA, including Section 3, as an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the president. Additionally, the court struck down the NIRA on the basis that Congress had no power to pass the statute under the commerce clause since they were regulating businesses that were entirely intrastate.
The Schechter brothers praised the court’s decision, stating through their lawyer that “[o]ur victory indicates that American justice does not permit persecution.”
Roosevelt was not so pleased. He criticized the justices’ “horse-and-buggy” interpretation of the commerce clause. The decision is also believed to have contributed to his proposal to “pack” the court.
Despite winning before the justices, Joseph Schechter ultimately regretted litigating the case given its significant financial cost to him: A 1935 New York Times article reported that Schechter owed $60,000 ($1.4 million in today’s money) in legal fees. (After the article ran in the Times, Schechter received donations from across the country, including from several business groups, but he never fully recovered his legal fees.)
A Times article published on the one-year anniversary of the decision revealed that due to financial difficulties, A.L.A. Schechter Corporation had gone out of business. At the time of the article’s publication, Joseph was unemployed while Aaron and Alex ran a small poultry store and Martin worked at a chicken market. Later, Joseph Schechter was reported to have been working at “Schechter Poultry” into the late 1970s. Located in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the store specialized in selling cooked chickens; by that time live poultry markets were a rarity.