The Sick Chicken Case
Schechter Poultry and the Fall of the New Deal's Industrial Codes

About this book:

In the steam and sawdust of a 1930s Brooklyn poultry market, four immigrant brothers built a livelihood on grit, family loyalty, and the strict rituals of kosher slaughter. They never expected to make constitutional history. But when FDR’s New Deal reached into their crates—dictating how they bought, sold, and even inspected their chickens—the Schechters refused to comply. What followed was a collision between the raw energy of the American street and the sweeping ambition of the federal state, culminating in a unanimous Supreme Court decision that shattered the National Recovery Administration and forced a president to rethink the limits of his power.

*The Sick Chicken Case* pulls you from the damp floor of the East New York market to the marble bench of the Nine, introducing a cast of unforgettable characters: the fierce, practical Schechter brothers; the charismatic, volatile General Hugh Johnson, architect of the Blue Eagle; the brilliant lawyer Donald Richberg, gambling the New Deal’s survival on a single case; and the justices—Hughes, Cardozo, Brandeis—grappling with the very architecture of American governance. With novelistic detail and legal precision, this book reveals how a single "unfit" bird became the catalyst for "Black Monday," the collapse of the First New Deal, and the birth of the modern administrative state.

More than a legal thriller, this is a story about the promise and peril of the American dream. It asks the questions that still define us: How much power can Washington claim over Main Street? Where does regulation end and tyranny begin? And what happens when the government tries to standardize a world that refuses to be standardized? Meticulously researched and vividly told, *The Sick Chicken Case* is the definitive account of the landmark decision that reshaped the Constitution—and the ordinary men who, simply by doing their jobs, changed the course of history.