and indirect effects in an
intellectual vacuum. * * * When industries organize themselves on a
national scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the
dominant factor in their activities, how can it be maintained that their
industrial labor relations constitute a forbidden field into which
Congress may not enter when it is necessary to protect interstate
commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial war? We have
often said that interstate commerce itself is a practical conception. It
is equally true that interferences with that commerce must be appraised
by a judgment that does not ignore actual experience."[456]

While the act was thus held to be within the constitutional powers of
Congress in relation to a productive concern, the interruption of whose
business by strike "might be catastrophic," the decision was forthwith
held to apply also to two minor concerns;[457] and in a later case the
Court stated specifically that "the smallness of the volume of commerce
affected in any particular case" is not a material consideration.[458]
Moreover, the doctrine of the Jones-Laughlin Case applies equally to
"natural" products, to coal mined, to stone quarried, to fruit and
vegetables grown.[459]

THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT; THE DARBY CASE

In 1938 Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act.[460] The measure
prohibits not only the shipment in interstate commerce of goods
manufactured by employees whose wages are less than the prescribed
minimum or whose weekly hours of labor are greater than the prescribed
maximum, but also the employment of workmen in the production of goods
for such commerce at other than the prescribed wages and hours.
Interstate commerce is defined by the act to mean "trade, commerce,
transportation, transmission, or communication among the several States
or from any State to any place outside thereof." It was further provided
that "for the purposes of this act an employee shall be deemed to have
been engaged in the production of goods [that is, for interstate
commerce] if such employee was employed * * *, or in any process or
occupation necessary to the production thereof, in any State."
Sustaining an indictment under the act, a unanimous Court, speaking by
Chief Justice Stone, said: "The motive and purpose of the present
regulation are plainly to make effective the congressional conception of
public policy that interstate commerce should not be made the instrument
of competit