Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) was Governor of New York (1907-1910), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1910-1916), Republican Presidential candidate (1916), Secretary of State (1921-25), and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1930s. He was a leader of the Progressive movement.

Early career

Hughes was born at Glens Falls, New York on Apr. 11, 1862. The son of a poor Baptist minister he was intensely religious all his life. He attended Madison (now Colgate) and Brown universities. He then taught Latin and Greek while studying law. In 1882 Hughes went to New York City, where he studied law in the office of General Stewart L. Woodford and at Columbia University. Hughes received his LL.B. degree in 1884 and was admitted to the bar. He became a member of the eminent law firm of Carter, Hughes, and Cravath in 1887, continuing with the firm until 1891, when he was appointed professor of law at Cornell University. In 1893 he returned to practice with his old firm until 1905, when he was appointed counsel for the Stevens Gas Commission, a committee appointed by the New York state legislature to investigate the Consolidated Gas Company and the price of gas in New York City. Hughes framed the bills, which later became law, regulating service prices. Later in the same year he became attorney for the Armstrong Committee, drawing up laws for regulation of insurance. In 1906 Hughes was appointed special assistant to U.S. Attorney General William Henry Moody in the investigation of the coal trust.

Politics

In 1906 Hughes was elected governor of New York as a Republican champion of progressive causes. He was the only Republican to be elected, defeating the Democratic candidate, newspaper magnate and liberal leader William Randolph Hearst. Hughes was reelected in 1908. In 1910 President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; as a justice he avoided the intense political battles between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt for control of the GOP. That made him acceptable to both sides in 1916, so he resigned from the court and accepted the GOP nomination. He was narrowly defeated by Woodrow Wilson, and returned to his law practice. In 1907 the newly organized Northern Baptist Convention elected Hughes, a prominent Baptist layman, as its first president.

Diplomacy

In March 1921 Republican President Warren G. Harding appointed Hughes secretary of state, and he remained in office under President Calvin Coolidge until March 1925.

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From 1926 until 1930 Hughes was a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, and from 1928 to 1930 he was a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice.

Chief Justice

With the retirement of Chief Justice Taft in 1930, Hughes was appointed Chief Justice by President Herbert Hoover in 1930; he retired in 1941.

Hughes's jurisprudence during both court tenures reveals that the resolution of the constitutional crisis of 1937 represented an important break not only from laissez-faire constitutionalism but also from Progressive-era liberalism. There was a parallel but more rapid ideological transition in Britain, where pre-World War I New Liberalism was eclipsed by rise of the Labour Party and its program of national economic planning and social welfare. The author also offers a perspective on the recent rich constitutional scholarship on the 1930's and on Hughes's career. Raised as a good-government mugwump, the advocate in his mature years of a "regulatory" American version of British New Liberalism, Hughes ended his public life reluctantly supporting the "statist, social welfare" liberalism of the New Deal, a system that for many leading Progressives represented the antithesis of the liberal ideal.

In reaction to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposed court-packing attempt in 1937, Hughes wrote a letter to Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in opposition to the plan. Hughes based his opposition on the simple premise that there would be more judges to hear, confer, discuss, and decide, thus making sound decisions by the court extremely difficult. Although dramatic and forceful, the letter had little impact on the final decision to abandon the packing plan. It failed because Democrats feared Roosevelt weas seizing too much power.

While Hughes supported many of the social advances suggested by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was strongly opposed to the creation of government agencies which appeared to be usurping the functions of the courts. He was one of the greatest jurists of his time, and his written decisions in many cases have become legal classics. Among the books he wrote are Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government (1909), The Pathway of Peace, and Other Addresses (1925), The Supreme Court of the United States (1927), and Pan-American Peace Plans (1929).

Bibliography

• Goldstein, Erik. The Washington Conference, 1921-22: Naval Rivalry, East Asian Stability and the Road to Pearl Harbor (1994)
• Henretta, James A. "Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America." Law and History Review 2006 24(1): 115-171. Issn: 0738-2480 Fulltext: [History Cooperative]
• Leuchtenburg, William E. The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995).
• Parrish, Michael E. The Hughes Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (2002).
• Perkins, Dexter. Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (1956).
• Pusey, Merlo J. Charles Evans Hughes (2 vol 1951)
• Ross, William G. Ross. The Chief Justiceship of Charles Evans Hughes, 1930-1941 (2007) excerpt and text search
• Wesser, Robert. Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905–1910 (1967).
• White, G. Edward. The Constitution and the New Deal (2000)

Primary sources

• Danelski, David J., and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds. The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes (1973)

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