`  == Quotes on the effect of the Horsemen on government. ==  I have two quotes for now. From the article New Deal in The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, edited by Kermit L. Hall; Oxford University Press, 1992. Article written by Carol E. Jenson, identified in the Directory of Contributorfs as Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse (internal references ommited): :Despite the presence of a conservative bloc dubbed by journalists the Four Horsemen (from Revelation 6:2-8), the Court at first accepted some New Deal initiatives as well as important state regulatory legislation.[...] But the conservative bloc, with the accession of Justice Owen Roberts, and joined sometimes by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, struck powerful blows at the New Deal program in Schechter v. United States (1935), voiding the NIRA [National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933], and United States v. Butler (1936) voiding the AAA [Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933]. Carter v. Carter Coal Co. (1936) exhumed the discredited United States v. E.C. Knight Co. (1895) to strike down an exercise of the commerce power. Together with decisions negating state regulatory effots (e.g., Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo 1936), these decisions justified reasonable observers in concluding that the Court was likely to be blindly obstructive to all efforts to cope with the depression and to be wedded to the obsolete and regressive precedents of the Lochner era. [emphasis added] I was curious about the cases mentioned in the part ommitted after the first sentence (I provided it for context), so I looked them up, in case the Horsemen (or some of them) had originally upheld New Deal policies earlier in the Depression. This turned out not to be the case. The cases cited were: Home Building and Loan Association v. Blasdell (1934), Nebbia v. New York (1934), the three Gold Clause Cases of 1935, and Ashwander v. T.V.A. (1936); all were decided 5-4, with the Horsemen in dissent in each of the six cases.   The second is from Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court, by Edward Lazarus, Penguin Books 1999. pp. 282-284. Lazarus seems to be a secondary source, giving as his two main sources Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking 1956) ``for a detailed view of this period in the Court's history``; and Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton  Mifflin, 1960). After describing the opposing camps and their philosophical positions and the goings on and personal attitudes, Lazarus writes (p. 284): :The result of these dinamics was a steady drift into the Court's most serious crisis since Dred Scott. As the Justices finished up the 1935 term - deemed by Stone ``one of the most disastrous in its history`` - popular and political outcry against what New Dealers of every stripe viewed as the Court's ``economic dictatorship`` moved toward crescendo. Some communities responded to the Court's paralyzing jurisprudence by hanging the Justices in effigy. Even sober academics concluded that the Court's aversion to regulated capitalism confronted the country with ``the question not how governmental functions shall be shared, but whether in substance we shall govern at all.`` [emphasis added]. After the quotation marks there is a footnote referencing Schlesinger, pp. 483-88.   `