Quotes on the effect of the Horsemen on government   I have two quotes for now From the article New Deal in The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States edited by Kermit L Hall Oxford University Press  Article written by Carol E Jenson identified in the Directory of Contributorfs as Professor of History University of Wisconsin La Crosse internal references ommited Despite the presence of a conservative bloc dubbed by journalists the Four Horsemen from Revelation  the Court at first accepted some New Deal initiatives as well as important state regulatory legislation But the conservative bloc with the accession of Justice Owen Roberts and joined sometimes by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes struck powerful blows at the New Deal program in Schechter v United States  voiding the NIRA National Industrial Recovery Act of  and United States v Butler  voiding the AAA Agricultural Adjustment Act of  Carter v Carter Coal Co  exhumed the discredited United States v EC Knight Co  to strike down an exercise of the commerce power Together with decisions negating state regulatory effots eg Morehead v New York ex rel Tipaldo  these decisions justified reasonable observers in concluding that the Court was likely to be blindly obstructive to all efforts to cope with the depression and to be wedded to the obsolete and regressive precedents of the Lochner era emphasis added I was curious about the cases mentioned in the part ommitted after the first sentence I provided it for context so I looked them up in case the Horsemen or some of them had originally upheld New Deal policies earlier in the Depression This turned out not to be the case The cases cited were Home Building and Loan Association v Blasdell  Nebbia v New York  the three Gold Clause Cases of  and Ashwander v TVA  all were decided  with the Horsemen in dissent in each of the six cases   The second is from Closed Chambers The Rise Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court by Edward Lazarus Penguin Books  pp  Lazarus seems to be a secondary source giving as his two main sources Alpheus T Mason Harlan Fiske Stone Pillar of the Law New York Viking  for a detailed view of this period in the Courts history and Arthur M Schlesinger The Politics of Upheaval Boston Houghton  Mifflin  After describing the opposing camps and their philosophical positions and the goings on and personal attitudes Lazarus writes p  The result of these dinamics was a steady drift into the Courts most serious crisis since Dred Scott As the Justices finished up the  term  deemed by Stone one of the most disastrous in its history  popular and political outcry against what New Dealers of every stripe viewed as the Courts economic dictatorship moved toward crescendo Some communities responded to the Courts paralyzing jurisprudence by hanging the Justices in effigy Even sober academics concluded that the Courts aversion to regulated capitalism confronted the country with the question not how governmental functions shall be shared but whether in substance we shall govern at all emphasis added After the quotation marks there is a footnote referencing Schlesinger pp