ABSTRACT
The evidence is overwhelming that, when one spoke of commerce in 1787 and for three or four decades thereafter, he certainly included something then called traffic. The commission men and dealers, in this suit, did not deny that interstate commerce was going on about them; they argued that their operations were at an interlude in Interstate commerce and that the federal statute was therefore invalid if applied to them. Franklin Roosevelt and his supporters ground for hope, a decade later, that they could use the language of the commerce clause to justify a vast program of legislation designed to restore the vigor of American business which had been lost in the Depression. The statutes relating to impure food and drags, immoral use of women, and stolen goods had come before the Supreme Court prior to the child labor statute, and all had been found to be lawful exclusions from interstate commerce.
