Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes recalled a sharp contrast of temper in his parents, the father warm and impetuous, the mother prudent and reserved. Together they imposed the discipline of a striving Christian household on their son. A precocious lad with a quick, retentive mind, Hughes favored the close stimulus of his parents' teaching over the ordinary schoolroom. He studied at home until he was nine, surrounded by his father's books and his mother's concern. He emerged from childhood sober, purposeful, and filled with the belief that happiness lay in the performance of duty. After three years in the Newark public schools and another at Public School No. 35 in Manhattan (a city he was fond of exploring as a boy), he was ready to leave for college.

In the fall of 1876 he entered Madison (now Colgate) University, a tiny Baptist school in upstate New York. Freedom from hovering parental oversight proved refreshing, but the academic fare at Madison left him restless. In 1878 he transferred to Brown University. There he matured socially and intellectually, savoring the pleasures of fraternity life, discovering European fiction, editing the campus paper, and testing the convictions of his parents against his academic studies. Under the training of President Ezekiel G. Robinson in philosophy and Professor J. Lewis Diman in political economy, his outlook broadened without serious damage to his inherited beliefs. "I am intent on reforming many of your opinions," he told his father (Pusey, p. 57), but his own moral framework remained grounded in reason, obligation, and faith in the friendly auspices of Divine Providence. A half-century later he would reflect on his college experience, "first, that there was so much that we did not learn, and, second, that we learned so many things that were not so" (Frankfurter, p. 148). He graduated third in a class of forty-three.

Hughes taught school for a year at Delaware Academy in Delhi, N.Y., reading law on the side under a local lawyer. In 1882 he entered Columbia Law School. The training he received was deductive in method and conservative in tone, rooted in pre-Holmesian principles of legal certitude. Precise and thorough, Hughes was an able student. Upon graduation in 1884, he passed the bar exam with an extraordinary score of 99.5. In the fall of 1884 he entered a New York law firm under the wing of Walter S. Carter, for whom he had clerked in previous summers. Three years later he became a partner in the firm, and on Dec. 5, 1888, he married his partner's daughter, Antoinette Carter. The marriage was happy and durable. Four children were born over the next nineteen years: Charles, Jr., Helen, Catherine, and Elizabeth.

Hughes attacked his work with skill and awesome devotion, and his practice, commercial law, brought him swift prominence in the New York legal community. But the strain of singleminded perfectionism began to show on his health. In 1891 he left the city for two years to teach at the Cornell Law School. Restored, he took up practice again at his usual pace. Solitary mountain-climbing vacations in Switzerland and elsewhere offered relief in succeeding years but his normal regimen remained austere. He grew his famous beard in 1890 to save trips to the barber and later gave up smoking to improve his personal efficiency. Aside from infrequent forays into local Republican reform politics, and a stint of Sunday School teaching at John D. Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, his mind focused on the law.

In 1905, on the advice of Henry W. Taft, brother of William Howard Taft, then secretary of war, the chairman of a joint investigative committee of the state legislature asked Hughes to lead an inquiry as committee counsel into the malpractices of the New York City utilities industry. Defining the job as a civic duty and insisting on absolute freedom from political pressure, Hughes proceeded to expose gross overcapitalization in the gas trust, swollen rates charged to the city for gas and electricity, and poisonous adulteration of the gas. His suggested remedies, stressing public regulation of the giant utilities rather than enforced competition, were promptly adopted in Albany. He next applied his powers of lucid analysis to the scandal-stained complexities of the New York life insurance business. As counsel for the Armstrong Committee of the state legislature, in fifty-seven public hearings, Hughes grilled a long line of political and financial titans about the web of manipulation and profiteering that governed the insurance field. The findings were sensational and chastening. Once more a cool, implacable investigation triggered corrective legislation. Both inquiries revealed a need to impose public standards of order on these fast-growing, oligopolistic sectors of American business.

Progressive reform had a new hero. In 1906, to blunt the drive of William Randolph Hearst to become Democratic governor of New York, influential Republicans led by Theodore Roosevent urged Hughes to run for the office. Hughes accepted the nomination and waged a strenuous campaign, aware that the enthusiasm of lesser party bosses for him was well under control. He enjoyed support on Wall Street and in the press, especially Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and was the only Republican that year to win statewide office, defeating Hearst by 57,897 votes out of a total of 1,452,467 cast.

Hughes brought a somewhat frosty version of progressivism to the state. Assertive, disinterested, alert to public opinion, he styled the governor's role as a tribune of the citizenry. The office was superbly administered, in line with current canons of centralized executive authority. Hughes placed New York in the vanguard of states experimenting with government by commission. He persuaded the legislature to create two new regulatory commissions, one for the utilities serving the metropolis, one for the rest of the state, each equipped with fact-finding powers, rate-setting initiative, and freedom from arbitrary judicial interference. He also gained important advances in labor law, including a workmen's compensation act, which created the first significant social insurance plan in the nation.

Impervious to the normal expediencies of professional politics, he often sacrificed partisan support to gain his ends. His hard fight to maintain the state's constitutional prohibition of racetrack gambling alienated many party regulars. In the course of a long and wounding effort to remove his superintendent of insurance from office, he rebuffed friendly intervention from the White House. This permanently chilled relations with Roosevelt, who concluded that Hughes "has a nature which resents the necessity of feeling gratitude" (Roosevelt, VI, p. 1240). Still, Hughes's record had moved him to the front rank of nationally eminent Republicans. Roosevelt shunned him as a presidential successor in 1908 but insisted on his renomination for governor. Hughes was reelected, though he ran well behind the ticket. His efforts thereafter to rouse public opinion behind proposals for ballot reform and a state system of direct primaries were rebuffed by the legislature. His shortcomings in the craft of party leadership stalled further reform.

When William Howard Taft offered him a seat on the Supreme Court, in 1910, Hughes accepted with alacrity. The youngest member of the Court, he contributed energy, practicality, and impressive analytical force to its work. Of the 151 opinions he wrote over the next six years, he dissented in only thirty-two cases, and in only nine cases was there dissent from his decisions. His most far-reaching decisions untangled complex issues raised by expanding federal regulation of rail transportation. In both the Minnesota Rate cases (230 U.S. 352 [1913]) and the Shreveport case (234 U.S. 342 [1914]) he asserted in his majority opinion the supreme and plenary power of Congress over interstate commerce, even when used to control intrastate traffic that was commingled with interstate operations. These decisions were vital in fostering the practical achievement of a mature and integrated national rail system. Hughes also defined more generously than any colleague the regulatory power of states and cities to curb the scope of privileged contracts, and in several cases he spoke for a unanimous court in upholding state labor laws against the claim that such laws denied freedom of contract without due process of law. He showed a bent for humanitarian realism in cases affecting the treatment of contract laborers, alien workers, Negro rail passengers, and other disadvantaged groups. In the subtle context of those years, his judicial influence was activist and liberating.

Hughes rejected feelers about a presidential nomination in 1912, declaring that "no man is as essential to his country's well being as is the unstained integrity of the courts" (New York Times, June 21, 1912). Four years later, in the new climate of world war, with his party out of power, he answered a fresh call by leaving the Court to run against Woodrow Wilson. His campaign was a sequence of miscalculations--badly managed, captious, and unconvincing. Responding to bellicose advice from Theodore Roosevelt, who privately called him a "bearded iceberg" (Roosevelt, VIII, p. 1078), Hughes demanded bolder policies against both Germany and Mexico and sterner measures of war preparation. He searched in vain for domestic issues with which to challenge Wilson's progressive record, and ended with a high-tariff, antilabor, probusiness image that obscured his own reform credentials. His failure to enlist the support of Hiram Johnson and California Progressives was the climactic error of an unhappy race. Hughes lost not only California but the Midwestern farm vote. His inability to mobilize the traditional Republican majority against Wilson ended his career in elective politics.

Returning to private practice in New York, he soon worked up an impressive practice in corporate law. His libertarian scruples were abused by postwar antiradical hysteria, and in 1920 he made an angry, futile protest against the eviction of five Socialists from the New York legislature. With little prior experience in international affairs, he emerged as a moderate critic of Wilson's plans for collective security through the League of Nations. He mistrusted the abstract universalism of Wilson's rhetoric and feared that unqualified commitment to Article X of the league covenant might bind the United States in a congealing structure of postwar obligations. He favored joining the league on terms calculated to mollify domestic sentiment, with leeway for the exercise of normal American interests. During the campaign of 1920 he joined thirty other distinguished Republicans in an appeal for Republican victory to insure American membership in an amended league.

Shortly after Warren Harding made him secretary of state in 1921, Hughes bowed to congressional intransigence and presidential inertia, dropped his advocacy of league membership, and negotiated a separate peace with Germany. Prophecy and martyrdom did not attract him; he was greatly interested in contemporary success as a manager of foreign policy. Sensitive to nationalistic public opinion and expanding boundaries of congressional assertion in the field, he tried to establish American relations with the world on narrow, legalistic, but amicable grounds. While shunning political involvement in league affairs, he favored cooperation on matters of international adjudication. Here he stood in the mainstream of historic American faith and sympathy. Nevertheless, stubborn senatorial tactics blocked his efforts to secure United States membership in the World Court.

Hughes was more successful in arranging for American participation, without congressional interference, in the work of the league's Reparations Commission. In 1923 his suggestion that the commission invite American experts to help untangle Germany's postwar fiscal problems led to the adoption of the Dawes Plan, which--backed by Wall Street loans solicited by Hughes--brought momentary relief to the German economy. Remarkably, he remained untroubled by the contradiction between his own reparations and war debt policy, on the one hand, and the Republican party's high tariff policy, on the other.

His most visible feats as secretary of state occurred at the Washington Conference (19211922), called mainly at his initiative to deal with naval arms competition and to stabilize relations among Pacific powers. Responding to congressional support for disarmament, anxiety over tension between the United States and Great Britain and Japan, and a vague American desire to compensate for Versailles, Hughes strove to fix the construction of capital ships at current levels by international agreement. His opening speech to the conference, stunning in its concrete formulas for stability, was the most dramatic public moment of his career. In subsequent negotiations Hughes won consent to his 5-5-3 ratio, which froze the naval arms race for a decade. A Four-Power Pact, promising security for Japan in the western Pacific, and a Nine-Power Treaty, securing multilateral observance of the Open Door in China, also emerged from the conference. The latter treaty, lacking machinery and sanctions, seemed in retrospect a paper barricade against aggression, and a 1924 congressional decision to exclude Japanese immigration to the United States went far to wipe out the ameliorating influence of the Washington Conference on Japanese-American relations, as Hughes foresaw.

In Latin America, Hughes moved American policy gradually away from Wilson's interventionism and the Roosevelt "Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine toward the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930's. On his advice, the United States pulled marines out of the Dominican Republic in 1924 and began withdrawal from Nicaragua, but left troops in place in Haiti. He used the weapon of diplomatic non-recognition to protect American property rights in Mexico and later supplied the Mexican government with arms for use against revolutionary dissidents. Wrapping interventionism in the soft phrase "non-belligerent interposition," he carefully preserved the substance of unilateral American power in the Western Hemisphere, insisting in effect that the Monroe Doctrine was what the United States said it was.

His achievements at the State Department, while winning wide praise, diminished in consequence with passing time. The ultimate collapse of reparations agreements, the Washington Conference treaties, and his rationales for Latin American intervention all stamped his policies as dated transitions of the interwar era. Hughes was not an adventurous or boldly creative secretary. Serving in years of narrowed national vision under two lethargic presidents, he worked with practical conservative intelligence to shore American interests in a world of radical disorder.

Hughes left office in 1925 to rebuild his fortune in Wall Street law practice. He was the acknowledged leader of the American bar when Herbert Hoover chose him to replace Taft as chief justice in 1930. Resentment among Progressives and Southern Democrats over his partisan decision to leave the Court in 1916, as well as his corporate associations as a private lawyer, resulted in a 52-26 Senate division on his confirmation. This vote, surprising and painful to Hughes, anticipated larger troubles awaiting his tenure on the high bench. He took office, at the age of sixty-eight, at the outset of the worst and longest economic crisis in American history, one that would try the nation's governing institutions, including the Court, with a severity unmatched since the Civil War. To the task of leading a divided Court through this crisis, Hughes brought not only administrative poise and clarity of intellect, but a background of experience more varied and extensive than that of any predecessor. The stability of the Court across the 1930's owed much to his radiant personal authority.

Somewhat more conservative than in his earlier service on the Court, he responded to the legislative tumult of the New Deal years with doctrinal calm and a practiced eye for the Court's reputation. Concerned to maintain an appearance of legal continuity, he often yielded logic in a search for fine distinctions to avoid abandoning precedents outright. His liberal colleague Harlan Fiske Stone found him overly sinuous in this regard. Hughes was prepared to adapt the language of the Constitution flexibly to the harsher exigencies of the Great Depression, despite grave reservations over the technical performance of legislators and anxiety about overcentralization within the federal system. In dealing with questions of legal principle, he commented in 1936, "we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty" (American Bar Association Journal, 22 [1936], p. 375). In this attitude he differed more often than not with the Court's conservative wing and maneuvered skillfully through the judicial revolution of the decade.

His opinion in the Minnesota mortgage moratorium case, Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell (290 U.S. 398 [1934]), indicated the distance Hughes seemed ready to travel in sanctioning public action to meet economic emergency, in this case the problem of widespread farm foreclosures and the attendant threat of social upheaval. In upholding the Minnesota moratorium despite a constitutional bar against such legislation, he asserted the overriding need for "a government which retains adequate authority to secure the peace and good order of society." The sweep of this language may have been misleading. A year later a unanimous Court struck down the Frazier-Lemke Act, a congressional measure to protect farm mortgage debtors, and in the celebrated "sick chicken" case, Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. (295 U.S. 495 [1935]), the Court unanimously found the National Industrial Recovery Act--the New Deal's most ambitious antidepression remedy--unconstitutional on the ground that Congress had stretched the NRA's code-making power beyond the limits of the commerce clause and had delegated legislative authority over the codes to the executive branch. In Hughes's opinion the NRA pressed administrative centralization too far. New Deal efforts to stabilize farm prices sustained a hard blow in U.S. v. Butler (297 U.S. 1 [1936]), in which Hughes joined a 6-3 majority that found the Agricultural Adjustment Act invalid in its misuse of the tax power to benefit one group at the expense of others. The same year, in Carter v. Carter Coal Co. (298 U.S. 238 [1936]), the Court invalidated federal legislation to bring order to the soft coal industry; in a separate concurring opinion, Hughes resorted to a distinction between mining and commerce as support for his view that parts of the law in question overreached congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. Hughes retained, however, a generous attitude toward the police power of the states, as indicated by his dissent from the decision in Morehead v. Tipaldo (298 U.S. 587 [1936]) to strike down a New York state minimum wage law for women.

When Franklin Roosevelt, out of concern for the fate of major New Deal measures still before the Court, proposed his famous court-packing plan in February 1937, he discovered in Hughes a skilled rival in the art of timing and maneuver. At the request of Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, Hughes prepared a powerful letter of reply to Roosevelt's critique of the Court's efficiency, and thereby undercut the president's public rationale for Court reform. A week later, he triumphantly spoke for the Court in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (300 U.S. 379 [1937]), which reversed the Morehead decision of the year before. (When Justice Owen J. Roberts, who held the swing vote in this case as in several others, told Hughes of his changed position earlier that winter, the chief justice "almost hugged" him, according to Roberts.) And on Apr. 12, 1937, speaking for a 5-4 majority in one of the most important decisions he ever wrote, National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. (391 U.S. 1 [1937]), Hughes found the Wagner Labor Relations Act constitutional. In this case, his steady concern for industrial peace and meaningful liberty in a corporate society won his assent to a crucial New Deal initiative.

Hughes denied that the Court had shifted under pressure, and later noted that his opinion in Jones and Laughlin was consistent with the ground he had taken twenty-four years earlier in the Minnesota Rate cases. Nevertheless, the 1937 decisions triggered a momentous change of judicial attitude toward the commerce power and due process. Hughes's performance in the crisis was more masterful than he acknowledged. Believing with his old friend and former colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes that the Constitution was a structure in process, responsive to felt needs, he not only maintained the integrity of the high bench under duress but, in helping to adjust the limits of public intervention in the economy, he joined the master builders of the American federal system.

As chief justice, Hughes presided with grace over the changing makeup and orientation of the Court after 1937. Throughout the decade he held positions on issues of civil liberties and civil rights that anticipated the Court's later thrust in that realm. The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment prospered from his strong stance in favor of free speech and press and equal protection of the laws. Against a background of national and international tension over these values, he repeatedly expressed a conviction that the safety of the republic lay in "the opportunity for free political discussion to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes may be obtained by peaceful means" (Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 [1931] and DeJonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353 [1937]).

After his retirement from the Court in 1941, Hughes continued to live in Washington, dictating his autobiographical notes and preparing his record for the bar of history. Always protective of his public reputation, reserving for close companions those flashes of humor and humility that revealed the stresses in the private man, he had accepted eminence as the award of a sane society to virtuous citizens who did their best. When Hughes left the Court in 1916 in the name of duty to try for his country's highest prize, Justice Holmes wrote--"I shall miss him consumedly, for he is not only a good fellow, experienced and wise, but funny, and with doubts that open vistas through the wall of a non-conformist conscience" (Holmes-Pollock, p. 237). Hughes died of congestive heart failure at the age of eighty-six in Washington, D.C., and was buried beside his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York.

text by Geoffrey Blodgett, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 4: 1946-1950. American Council of Learned Societies, 1974.

Sources:

The Charles Evans Hughes Papers are in the Lib. of Cong. David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes (1973), records Hughes's estimate of his career. Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (2 vols., 1951), is an authorized biography, thorough and sympathetic. Dexter Perkins, Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (1956), is a briefer friendly interpretation. Aspects of the career are treated in Robert F. Wesser, Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 19051910 (1967), Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence: A Study in American Diplomacy (1966), and Samuel Hendel, Charles Evans Hughes and the Supreme Court (1951). Differing perspectives on the chief justice are found in Alpheus T. Mason, The Supreme Court from Taft to Warren (1958), Ch. 3; Paul A. Freund, "Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice," Harvard Law Rev., 81 (1967), 4-43; and Hendel, "Charles Evans Hughes," in Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, eds., The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 17891969, III, 18931915 (1969). Also of use were Felix Frankfurter, Of Law and Men (1956); Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, VI (1952) and VIII (1954); "Address of Chief Justice Hughes," Am. Bar Assoc. Jour., June 1936; and Holmes-Pollock Letters, I (1941).