When the People Spoke, What Did They Say?: The Election of 1936 and the Ackerman Thesis

This paper assesses how Bruce Ackerman's paradigm fares under the barrage of objections by scrutinizing the evidence on developments resulting from the election of 1936. In particular, it asks: Did Roosevelt raise the Supreme Court issue in the 1936 campaign - in the Democratic platform or in his speeches? If he did not, did anyone else do so? Did "the People" conceive of the 1936 election as centering on their attitude toward the Roosevelt and his Republican opponent on the constitutional question? And, finally, when all of these questions are answered, what does one conclude about Ackerman's thesis that ours is a duelist system that has experienced 3 constitutional moments when a mobilized citizenry has awakened from its quotidian concerns to create new constitutional regimes?