ABSTRACT
Like President Wilson two decades earlier, President Franklin Roosevelt in his second term was overwhelmed by foreign affairs. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 ended the controversy. That attack also meant war with Germany and Italy due to a German-Italian-Japanese treaty of alliance. Thus, this time the United States faced war on two oceans, with its Pacific fleet severely damaged. Roosevelt's expectation that his appointees would vote together as New Dealers had quickly shattered on the shoals of dispute over First Amendment issues. A quartet of cases on the Court's docket in 1943 illustrated the doctrinal chasm that separated the two factions. All four cases involved challenges by members of the Jehovah's Witnesses sect to state and local laws that restricted the First Amendment rights of this evangelical group. Justice Hugo Black's statement at the outset of the May 17 conference forecast the outcome of the Hirabayashi case.
