Today’s word of the day, thanks to Words Coach, is harbinger (https://www.wordscoach.com/dictionary).  Merriam-Webster says that harbinger is a noun that means “something that foreshadows a future event : something that gives an anticipatory sign of what is to come,” or “one that initiates a major change : a person or thing that originates or helps open up a new activity, method, or technology” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harbinger). It then lists as a second definition, “archaic : a person sent ahead to provide lodgings,” meaning that we no longer use the word with that definition. M-W also lists a verb, but the verb use is simply an example of what linguists calls denominalization, or verbing or verbification, or conversion, or zero derivation or null derivation, the change of a word from one part of speech to another (as when we add –ment to a verb to change it to a noun) without changing anything or adding anything.

M-W then provides this lovely explanation of the archaic meaning of harbinger: “In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, four hobbits—pursued by riders in black—seek safe harbor in the village of Bree. Unbeknownst to the hobbits, the innkeeper of The Prancing Pony, Butterbur, was made aware of their potential arrival by the wizard Gandalf some months prior (‘… I was asked to look out for hobbits of the Shire …’). When you consider the oldest, now-obsolete definitions of harbinger, there are multiple harbingers in this section of the tale. The first is Butterbur himself: coming from the Anglo-French herberge, meaning ‘lodgings,’ harbinger was used as long ago as the 12th century to mean ‘one who provides lodgings.’ Later on, harbinger was also used for a person sent ahead of a main party to seek lodgings. Those sent ahead would announce the approach of those following behind (the hobbits did not send Gandalf to Bree, but he did still herald their eventual arrival—making him a harbinger of sorts), which is how our modern sense of harbinger came to be used for someone or something which foretells a future event—such as how the hobbits’ arrival is a harbinger of the evil pursuing them and threatening all of Middle Earth” (ibid.). The correct pronunciation, by the way, is / ˈhɑr bɪn dʒər / ( https://www.dictionary.com/browse/harbinger), with a soft g at the beginning of the last syllable. I have seen some dictionaries that want to replace the ɪ of the second syllable (the vowel sound of the English word pit or bin) with a schwa (ə), and there is a general rule that, in English, vowels in unstressed syllables tend toward schwa, but I believe that in this word the ɪ is much more common.

On this date 90 years ago the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional.

The NIRA was passed and signed in 1933, in the first 100 days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in office as the president. The act authorized “the president to regulate industry for fair wages and prices that would stimulate economic recovery. It also established a national public works program known as the Public Works Administration (PWA)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Industrial_Recovery_Act_of_1933). The purpose was, supposedly, to help the country recover from the Great Depression, which began in 1929. “The Act had two main titles (sections). Title I was devoted to industrial recovery, authorizing the promulgation of industrial codes of fair competition, guaranteed trade union rights, permitted the regulation of working standards, and regulated the price of certain refined petroleum products and their transportation. Title II established the Public Works Administration, outlined the projects and funding opportunities it could engage in” (ibid.).

Then came the Schechter brothers. These two Jewish immigrants ran two kosher butcher shops in Brooklyn, NY. “Running a kosher butcher shop is a complicated affair, as the Laws of Kashrut are far more than a “dietary” code. Normally, keeping Kosher is thought of as just a set of rules about what food observant Jews cannot eat (e.g., pork, shellfish, scavengers, etc and no mixing milk with meat), but it is at least as much an ethical code. And that ethical code involves both how humans are to treat the animals they kill (humanely, as kosher butchers must follow specific rules about how animals are killed) as well as how they must treat their customers. For observant Jews such as the Schechters, the Laws of Kashrut were both a matter of religious observance and good business” (https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/blog/57574).

The NIRA had some very specific rules, including very specific rules for very specific industries in very specific locales. One of these locales was New York City. “The Schechters fell under the ‘Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and About the City of New York’…. Among the things the code prohibited was ‘straight killing’ which meant that customers could buy a whole or half coop of chickens, but did not have the right to make any selection of particular birds (such individual selection was ‘straight killing’). This last rule was in direct conflict with Kashrut laws, which also served as an informal health code in the Jewish community” (ibid.). The Schechters’ butcher shops “were inspected repeatedly during the summer of 1934, which forced them to violate their own Kashrut practices, telling customers that they could not reject individual birds as keeping Kosher allowed. Not surprisingly, their deeply religious customer base began to dwindle. The constant inspection turned up a variety of violations, including allegations that they had, in fact, sold sick chickens (not surprising, if true, given that part of their own internal inspection process was negated by the NRA code itself!). They were also accused of ‘competing too hard’ and keeping prices ‘too low’” (ibid.).

The Schechters were accused of over 60 crimes, and they were convicted of 19, leading to the appeals process, which eventually took them to the Supreme Court. And the Court sided with the Schechters. Part of the decision was based upon the fact that the Schechters’ business was exclusively and completely inside New York City, so the Court ruled that the federal government had no power to regulate the business since it did not comprise “interstate commerce.” Another part of the rejection of the NIRA involved the fact that Congress had delegated to the executive branch powers which properly were the realm of Congress. The ruling overturned one of FDR’s key components to his New Deal.

It did not help that by the time of the ruling business leaders, who had supported the NIRA initially, were now opposed to it, on average. The NIRA was coming up for a vote to keep it from sunsetting, a vote which the Act eventually lost.

But there were other deleterious effects of the ruling by the Court (along with some other rulings by the Court around the same time). The biggest one was that, after winning a landslide in his re-election campaign in 1936, Roosevelt decided to go after the Court. He proposed a bill that would have given him the opportunity to pack the court: “He asked Congress to empower him to appoint an additional justice for any member of the court over age 70 who did not retire. He sought to name as many as six additional Supreme Court justices, as well as up to 44 judges to the lower federal courts. He justified his request not by contending that the court’s majority was reactionary, but by maintaining that a shortage of judges had resulted in delays to litigants because federal court dockets had become overburdened” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-franklin-roosevelt-clashed-with-the-supreme-court-and-lost-78497994/). Roosevelt was trying to take advantage of the public’s perception that the Court was old; the average age was 71, and six of the justices were over 70. But his real purpose was to remove or at least negate the vote of those justices who voted against his New Deal.

The proposal failed in Congress, but Roosevelt didn’t really lose the battle: “he had staved off the expected invalidation of the Social Security Act and other laws. More significantly, the switch in the court that spring resulted in what historians call “the constitutional revolution of 1937”—the legitimation of a greatly expanded exercise of powers by both the national and state governments that has persisted for decades” (ibid.). The strong-armed Court changed its attitude about issues like interstate commerce so that now just about anything is considered interstate commerce. Overall, the change in the Court’s position allowed for a wide expansion of the federal government’s power of the private sector.

One might say that the Schechter decision was a harbinger of things to come..

Today’s image, thanks to Getty images, is of the Kramer Kosher Poultry Market In New York City c. 1940 (https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/kramers-kosher-poultry-market-in-new-york-city-usa-circa-news-photo/170402631).