Talk of “packing the Court” is in the air. Of course, this is not the first time that Americans have contemplated expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Republicans during the Civil War added a tenth justice. FDR famously sought to protect New Deal legislation by adding to up to six new justices to the Court in 1937.

But for a long tradition of American radicals, especially those associated with the early twentieth-century Socialist Party, simply packing the court or adding new justices woefully misunderstood the nature of the problem. As the Socialist Norman Thomas wrote of union leadership’s willingness in the 1930s to limit their structural critiques largely to a matter of Supreme Court size, “It is amazing . . . to find organized Labor, with its traditional distrust of government by courts, waxing so enthusiastic for fifteen judges instead of nine.”

Instead, Thomas and others characterized the central problem as the extent to which control over the US constitution was largely removed from mass politics. Federal judges, and the party and corporate bosses that they were responsive to, decided which topics to debate and which arguments were worthy of consideration.