AA v. AAA

Two months ago at Tampa, Fla., Federal Judge Alexander Akerman made national news when he removed a handful of feathers from the Blue Eagle's tail by refusing to enjoin a dry cleaner who had violated NRA's minimum price agreement (TIME, Dec. 11). In Judge Akerman's opinion, the cleaner was not engaged in interstate commerce and therefore Congress, through the Recovery Act, had no power to regulate his business. If Congress claimed such authority, observed Judge Akerman, the Constitution would be voided and anarchy would ensue. NRA's power and prestige saved its face when, fortnight later, the cleaner in question voluntarily agreed to cease his violations.

Last week, 64-year-old Judge Akerman took a second judicial crack at President Roosevelt's recovery program by declaring the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional and thus supplying the long-awaited framework for an appeal to the Supreme Court. Before him was a case in which a group of Florida citrus fruit growers were suing to enjoin Secretary of Agriculture Wallace and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's State control committee from enforcing proration regulations. "In the light of the Constitution, which I read once each week," said Judge Akerman, "the [AAA] act is so full of holes you could drive eight yoke of oxen through it. I would be more than happy if I could avoid deciding the questions presented in this case, but if I did I would be a coward. I cannot allow public clamor to deter my ruling as I see the matter."

Deter him it did not. Having listened to testimony from both sides for two days the bald, keen-eyed judge squared off with a spontaneous oral opinion which lasted five hours. Excerpts: "Now if this agricultural act, this AAA or QYZ or whatever it is--I cannot remember those names--is constitutional, if they are not invading the rights of private citizens, why, of course, they have the right to go on. If it is not constitutional and if it is a usurpation of power, then a citizen has a right . . . to ask the court to tell these gentlemen who are subject to the jurisdiction of the court: 'You let my business alone.'

"Now let us see about this Department of Agriculture. Perhaps it is a good department. I do not know, but it started out with a lot of innocent and perhaps valuable things. . . . But a little further it engaged in . . . instructing the good farmer's wife how to hold-diapers up on the babies and how to cut the little fellow's pants so that he could look after himself without the aid of his mother, and that has spread and spread until the Secretary of Agriculture has at his command an army bigger than Washington ever had. He has more power than Caesar ever had. He has more power than Napoleon ever had; all without the authority of the Constitution of the United States!"

Since Secretary Wallace was outside his jurisdiction, Judge Akerman dismissed the fruit growers' injunction proceedings against him. But he did grant them an injunction against the AAA State control committee. In Washington. AAA announced that an appeal would be taken to the U. S. Circuit Court "with the least possible delay."

Judge Akerman knows that his is a lifetime job, feels, like many of his abler colleagues, that he should use that independence to uphold to the utmost the strict letter of the Constitution as he interprets it. A native of Elberton, Ga., but a Republican, his opinions are flavored with Yankee pride in the Federal Constitution. His father, Amos Tappan Akerman, emigrated from New Hampshire to Georgia in the 1840's, wore the grey during the Civil War but returned to the Republican Party after Appomattox. As a Republican he was a member of the Georgia Constitutional convention (1868), helped save the State from carpetbaggers. President Grant made him his Attorney General, dismissed him with regrets when Akerman would not countenance the Pacific railroad companies' land grab.

Alexander Akerman inherits his father's stubborn honesty. In addition to his weekly constitutional reading, he devours detective stories, "the trashier the better."

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