Executive to go into the federal courts and secure an injunction against
striking railway employees who were interfering with interstate
commerce, although it was conceded that there was no statutory basis for
such action. The opinion of the Court extends the logic of the holding
to any widespread public interest.

The great accession to presidential power in recent decades has been
accompanied by the breakdown dealt with earlier of the two great
structural principles of the American Constitutional System, the
doctrine of Dual Federalism and the doctrine of the Separation of
Powers. The first exponent of "the New Presidency", as some termed it,
was Theodore Roosevelt, who tells us in his _Autobiography_ that the
principle which governed him in his exercise of the presidential office
was that he had not only a right but a duty "to do anything that the
needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the
Constitution or by the laws."[53] In his book, _Our Chief Magistrate and
his Powers_, Ex-President Taft warmly protested against the notion that
the President has any constitutional warrant to attempt the role of a
"Universal Providence."[54] A decade earlier his destined successor,
Woodrow Wilson, had avowed the opinion that "the President is at
liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can".[55]

But it is the second Roosevelt who beyond all twentieth-century
Presidents succeeded in affixing the stamp both of personality and of
crisis upon the Presidency as it exists at this moment. In the solution
of the problems of an economic crisis, "a crisis greater than war", he
claimed for the National Government in general, and for the President in
particular, powers which they had hitherto exercised only on the
justification of war. Then when the greatest crisis in the history of
our international relations arose, he imparted to the President's