 Charles
Evans Hughes was born in New York state on April 11, 1862. His father
was a minister who moved to the United States from England. His mother's
family had lived in America from the colonial period. Hughes was a
precocious and intelligent child who was educated at home until he
attended college at Madison University (now Colgate University) and at
Brown University. Hughes then attended Columbia Law School, where he
excelled. He went to work with Walter S. Carter, whose ability to find
and hone talented lawyers made his law firm the well-spring of many
well-known New York law firms. Hughes married Carter's daughter
Antoinette. The work of newly developing corporate law firms in the last
years of the 19th century in New York brought both wealth and stress.
Stress caused Hughes to leave the practice of law in the early 1890s to
teach law at Cornell, but he returned after two years for monetary
reasons and because of his loyalty to his father-in-law. Hughes became a
well-known lawyer to the public through his efforts in 1905 in
investigating the pricing by companies of gas utility rates, and later
that year, in investigating self-dealing and corrupt financial practices
in the insurance industry (the Armstrong Committee). Hughes's reputation
as an honest, thorough and fair-minded lawyer led to his nomination in
1906 as the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York. He was
elected Governor, and was in office from 1907-10, when he was appointed
to the Supreme Court as an associate justice. Hughes wrote the Court's
opinion in Bailey v. Alabama (1910), which held unconstitutional an
Alabama statute that permitted peonage. He dissented in Coppage v.
Kansas, in which the Court held unconstitutional a law prohibiting an
employer from conditioning employment on an employee's promise not to
join a union (the yellow-dog contract). In 1916, Hughes resigned from
the Court to accept the Republican nomination as its presidential
candidate. The incumbent, Woodrow Wilson, defeated Hughes by an
electoral count of 277-254. (Wilson earned over half a million more
popular votes than Hughes, 9,127,695-8,533,507.) Hughes returned to the
private practice of law. In 1921, he was appointed Secretary of State by
Warren G. Harding, where he remained until 1925. Later that decade, he
was a judged of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the Permanent
Court of International Justice. In 1930, after the death of Chief
Justice
William Howard Taft (who, as President, had nominated Hughes to the
Court in 1910), President Herbert Hoover nominated Hughes to the Court
as Chief Justice. Hughes was Chief Justice of a fractious, controversial
Court. Hughes was a progressive on issues of race, and during the Great
Depression, was often supportive of New Deal and state New Deal-type
legislation. But he and the other members of the Court enraged FDR when
the Court unanimously held that several New Deal acts were
unconstitutional on "Black Monday," May 27, 1935. In several other
cases, Hughes found himself in a minority of four, with the so-called
"Four Horsemen" (Pierce
Butler,
James McReynolds,
George Sutherland, and
Willis Van Devanter) and
Owen
J. Roberts in the majority. After FDR was re-elected in 1936, he
turned to "solving" the problem of a recalcitrant Court by urging
Congress to "reorganize" the Supreme Court by adding one justice for
every justice who had reached the age of 70 and who had not resigned.
This plan, which FDR's opponents dubbed a "court-packing" plan, was
suggested disingenuously by FDR as necessary for the Court to keep up
with its work. During the debate concerning the plan, Hughes sent a
letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee signed by Hughes, Justice
Brandeis and Justice Van Devanter, stating that the Court was
up-to-date on its work. During this constitutional crisis of 1937,
Hughes wrote the Court's opinions in
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish and
NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, both of which strongly suggested New
Deal measures would no longer be held unconstitutional. (In both cases,
Justice Roberts silently joined the five-man majority, and in each case,
it appeared that the decision contradicted views either stated by or
acquiesced to by Roberts. This is the famous "switch in time that saved
nine.") Hughes remained on the Court until summer 1941. He died seven
years later, on August 27, 1948. |
