Congress in such a matter unless the
relation of the subject to interstate commerce and its effect upon it
are clearly nonexistent."[438] And it was in reliance on the doctrine of
these cases that Congress first set to work to combat the Depression in
1933 and the years immediately following. But in fact, much of its
legislation at this time marked a wide advance upon the measures just
passed in review. They did not stop with regulating traffic among the
States and the instrumentalities thereof; they also essayed to govern
production and industrial relations in the field of production.
Confronted with this revolutionary claim to power on Congress' part, the
Court again deemed itself called upon to define a limit to the commerce
power that would save to the States their historical sphere, and
especially their customary monopoly of legislative power in relation to
industry and labor management.

THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Not all antidepression legislation, however, was of this revolutionary
type. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934[439] and the Public Utility
Company Act ("Wheeler-Rayburn Act") of 1935[440] were not. The former
creates the Securities and Exchange Commission, and authorizes it to lay
down regulations designed to keep dealing in securities honest and
above-board and closes the channels of interstate commerce and the mails
to dealers refusing to register under the act. The latter requires, by
sections 4 (a) and 5, the companies which are governed by it to register
with the Securities and Exchange Commission and to inform it concerning
their business, organization and financial structure, all on pain of
being prohibited use of the facilities of interstate commerce and the
mails; while by section 11, the so-called "death sentence" clause, the
same act closes after a certain date the channels of interstate
communication to certain types of public utility companies whose
operations, Congress found, were calculated chiefly to exploit the
investing and consuming public. All these provisions have been
sustained,[441] Gibbons _v._ Ogden, furnishing the Court its principal
reliance.[442]

Congressional Regulation of Production and Industrial Relations

ANTIDEPRESSION LEGISLATION

In the following words of Chief Justice Hughes, spoken in a case which
was decided a few days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first
inauguration, the problem which confronted the new Administration was
clear