Charles Evans Hughes

Supreme Court Justice

• Born: April 11, 1862
• Birthplace: Glens Falls, New York
• Died: August 27, 1948
• Place of death: Osterville, Massachusetts

Chief justice of the United States (1930-1941)

As chief justice of the United States, Hughes supported legal decisions that provided constitutional protection for suffrage (voting rights), the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, and the right to political dissent. As secretary of state he focused on four areas: disarmament, reparations and war debts, and U.S. relationships with the Soviets and with Latin America.

Areas of achievement Law, government and politics, diplomacy

Early Life

Charles Evans Hughes was the only child of David Charles Hughes, an evangelical Baptist minister, and Mary Catherine Connelly, a woman who combined intelligence with pious discipline. When Charles was six years old, he convinced his parents that he should be educated at home because he was impatient with his slower classmates at school. By the time he was ten, however, he was back in public school, and in 1876 he entered Madison University (Colgate). Two years later, finding Madison too provincial for his interests, he transferred to Brown University, from which he was graduated at the top of the class in 1881. In 1884, he was graduated from Columbia University Law School. He married Antoinette Carter in 1888. She was the daughter of one of the partners in a New York law firm for which Hughes worked after leaving Columbia. The couple had four children; the eldest was the only boy.

After graduation from law school, Hughes devoted himself to the practice of law for twenty years. He became a law partner by the time he was twenty-five, and within a few years he had made himself financially secure. During this period he gave no thought to public life, but in 1905 he came to the public’s attention when he accepted a position as special counsel to the New York legislature investigating the unfair rates of gas and electricity and insurance fraud. Hughes’s investigative reports brought him almost unanimous praise from New York City newspapers. Indeed, he became so popular that, in an attempt to shore up the popularity of the Republican Party, President Theodore Roosevelt pushed party members to nominate Hughes for mayor of New York City. Hughes declined the nomination, thereby causing a rift between himself and Roosevelt that would last the rest of Roosevelt’s life. However, as a result he was established as a prominent, albeit reluctant, public figure. In his early forties, Hughes was launched on a career of public service that would occupy the rest of his life.

Life’s Work

In 1906, the Republican Party desperately needed a popular figure to run for governor of New York against the powerful, ambitious journalist William Randolph Hearst. The Republicans sought a candidate who, in contrast to the ruthless Hearst, would be perceived as committed to principled government. They chose Hughes, and this time he accepted and by the narrowest of margins defeated Hearst. He proved to be an effective, popular governor. He was responsible for reform legislation that was to have a long-term effect on the state of New York. He established, for example, public service commissions that regulated utilities and railroads. As a result, service became better and more impartial and rates fairer, while employees for the first time were able to secure safety provisions in their contracts. The eight-hour workday gained acceptance, and the first workers’ compensation laws were established.

Again, with this progressive record as governor, Hughes had attracted the attention of the national Republicans, particularly that of the Republican president, William Howard Taft. Taft nominated Hughes for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, and Hughes accepted and was confirmed as a justice on the Court in 1910.

He came to the bench when the country was struggling with the issue of constitutional centralization, and he was to play a significant role in settling that issue. Centralization meant placing more power in the hands of the federal government while taking it from the states. Among other factors, the increased complexity of commerce made centralization a necessity, and Hughes’s legal decisions were decisive in establishing the limits of state and federal control. Ostensibly, he used the federal authority of interstate commerce to defend decisions that produced Progressive policies. He wrote and supported opinions that regulated working hours, equal accommodations on railroads for black citizens, nonwhite representation on trial juries, equal access to employment for nonnative citizens, trials in locations free from community passions, and numerous other liberal opinions.

Hughes remained on the Court for six years. While on small matters he might render a conservative opinion, on large issues he supported the expansion of federal powers in defense of individual liberties. He did not hesitate in striking down state statutes that he perceived to be in conflict with the Bill of Rights. By 1916, Hughes’s brilliant reputation on the Supreme Court had become so distinguished that the Republican Party once again prevailed on him to run for office, this time for president of the United States. He resigned from the bench and ran against the popular incumbent, Woodrow Wilson. Hughes lost. It is fair to say that this was the least satisfactory episode in a distinguished career; Hughes was not a good campaigner, lacking the intense partisanship necessary to run for the presidency. He had no success in moving masses of people to follow him. He had a weak and internally feuding political organization. Most important, the Progressive wing of the Republican Party under Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership was only lukewarm in its support.

Four years later, the nation elected Republican Warren G. Harding as president. Hughes became Harding’s secretary of state. The stolid, provincial Harding had no coherent foreign policy of his own; as a result, responsibility for such decisions fell squarely on Hughes. Clearly, he was up to the task. Few secretaries of state in the history of the United States can be called his equal. None was more intelligent. Few possessed his imagination, his administrative skills, or his genuine idealism. Indeed, many diplomatic scholars consider Hughes to be one of the three top secretaries of state the nation has ever had. His influence was indelible, even though lesser individuals were left to implement his goals.

Hughes’s long-term influence was most noteworthy in four areas: disarmament, reparations and war debts, and the United States’ relationships with the Soviets and with Latin America. In November of 1921, Hughes invited representatives of the world’s nations to Washington, D.C., to consider ways of reducing national tension in the Western Pacific. The conference became known as the Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament. It was Hughes’s plan to reduce tensions around the world, particularly in the Western Pacific, by getting the governments of Great Britain, Japan, and the United States to reduce the size of their naval forces. In an opening speech that both astonished and pleased the delegates to the conference, the secretary of state presented a specific plan for this reduction. In addition to setting limits on tonnage levels for the navies of the world (the French proved the most reluctant to concede on this score), Hughes sought to reduce the militarization of various islands in the Pacific controlled by the national powers. He also pushed for the sovereignty and integrity of China, its right to commercial equity, and Japan’s abandonment of expansionism on the Asian mainland. Within fifteen years, all the treaties that resulted from the Washington Conference were either being ignored or abrogated, but for a brief moment in history Hughes’s “noble experiment” had influenced international relations.

The matter of reparations and war debts, which was closely related to disarmament in Hughes’s mind, also required his attention. After the close of World War I, the victorious Allies (and in particular the French) were seeking huge financial reparations from Germany for losses suffered in the war. Hughes convinced the European Allies that they neither would, nor could, get Germany to pay such reparations, and that continued insistence on these payments would only exacerbate the volatile and unstable condition of postwar Europe. To balance the various claims against the German government, Hughes proposed a more realistic payment schedule and the acquisition of an international loan for Germany that would enable it to stabilize its currency and generate the money necessary to meet reparation payments. At the same time, he convinced Congress that it was necessary to extend the payment schedule and reduce the interest requirements on debts owed the United States by its allies. These reparation and refunding policies lasted for only a few years between World War I and World War II, but they did bring a more rational, tranquil policy to an otherwise chaotic situation.

In Russia, the Communists came to power in 1917, but the United States refused to recognize the Soviet government as a legitimate regime. Many in the United States Senate, however, argued that it was in the United States’ interest to resume diplomatic relations with Moscow. It was, they argued, the de facto regime, and as such should be recognized; moreover, recognition would encourage the resumption of trade and promote the United States’ commercial interests. Hughes held fast against recognition, arguing that the Soviet revolution was on prima facie grounds both illegal and immoral, because its coming to power abrogated international bona fide agreements between legally established governments. What is more, he held, any assumed economic advantage is problematic, and at best hazardous. As long as the Communists make and encourage worldwide revolution among legally constituted governments, he argued, the United States has a responsibility not to participate in policies that could legitimate the revolution. As long as Bolsheviks refused to recognize international legal obligation, recognition of this regime can only be a disservice to legitimate democratic governments that continue to meet their international responsibilities.

The last, and in many ways the most important, policy in Hughes’s tenure as secretary of state was initiated when he first entered office and lasted throughout his term as secretary. Working together with Sumner Welles, he forged an American policy toward Latin America that was much less interventionist than the policies of administrations that had preceded him. This policy was the beginning of what was later to be called the Good Neighbor Policy. Essentially, the Good Neighbor Policy meant fewer American marines controlling United States interests in Latin America. “I utterly disclaim as unwarranted,” he declared, “[superintending] the affairs of our sister republics, to assert an overlordship, to consider the spread of our authority beyond our domain as the aim of our policy and to make our power the test of right in this hemisphere. . . . [Such assertions] belie our sincere friendship, . . . they stimulate a distrust . . . [and] have no sanction whatever in the Monroe Doctrine.” In reality, however, such nonintervention was only partially implemented under Hughes’s leadership. The marines were withdrawn from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, but not from Haiti and Panama, where the secretary argued that in the latter two countries it was premature and contrary to the United States’ “special interests.”

Hughes stepped down from his position as secretary of state in 1925; three years later he was a judge on the Court of International Justice, and in 1930 he accepted his last important public position as chief justice of the United States under Herbert Hoover’s presidency.

Constitutional scholars are almost unanimous in assessing Hughes as one of the greatest chief justices in Supreme Court history. He served for eleven years, and during that time his legal leadership was dynamic and progressive, never static and protective. Some of his opinions on economic matters were conservative, but on matters of citizens’ welfare his positions represented progressive activism. He argued in support of the government’s right to determine an equitable balance between the interests of business and the interests of labor. Expressly, he defended the right of Congress to regulate collective bargaining agreements in interstate commerce. The benchmark decision on this issue was the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which paved the way for supporting legislation on the matter of minimum wages and the hours of work required per day. In addition, Hughes led a unanimous court in declaring President Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act of 1933 (NRA) unconstitutional (the Court argued that the act allowed code-fixing; that is, it allowed independent nongovernmental agencies to set wages, prices, and working hours). In other words, Roosevelt’s NRA appointments from business and industry were prevented from setting codes of competitive commerce between the states, and Congress could not turn over its legislative responsibility to the executive branch of government in this area, Hughes argued.

As a general rule, Hughes supported the expansion of federal power as an instrument for the protection of personal liberty. He upheld, for example, the right of states to fix prices (Nebbia v. New York, 1934), the right of the federal government to regulate radio frequencies (Federal Radio Commission v. Nelson Bros., 1933), the right of women to the same minimum wage afforded men (Morehead v. Tipaldo, 1936), and the right of citizens to set aside private contracts under certain hardship constraints.

In the arena of civil liberties, the chief justice was no less supportive of the government’s constitutional right to intrude where it can be shown that the Bill of Rights has been abrogated. He argued that the state of Alabama had denied due process to a black man because he had been denied an attorney (Powell v. Alabama, 1932). He supported the reversal of the notorious Scottsboro decision (a case of rape against a group of young black men) by declaring that blacks cannot be excluded from jury service merely by virtue of their color (Norris v. Alabama, 1935, and Patterson v. Alabama, 1935). He maintained that such exclusion denied “equal protection of the laws” as provided in the Fourteenth Amendment. In a case anticipating by sixteen years the famous Brown v. Board of Education (1954) school desegregation case, he held that qualified black students must be granted admission to an all-white law school (Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 1938). As in Brown, the Hughes Court declared that separate facilities for blacks was not equal; that is, separate is not equal, and the plaintiff Gaines had not received “equal protection of the laws.”

Over the course of Chief Justice Hughes’s term on the bench, he supported legal decisions that provided constitutional protection for suffrage (voting rights), the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, and the right to political dissent. Hughes’s record on civil liberties can only lead one to agree with Samuel Hendel’s observation that he had a “greater fondness for the Bill of Rights than any other Chief Justice.”

Significance

The magnitude of Hughes’s service to the country was so widespread and pervasive that it is difficult to know just where the emphasis should be placed. In fact, the wise course is to avoid placing undue emphasis on any specific aspect of his numerous accomplishments, but rather to review the traits of character that he brought to every public position he held. His strong sense of social interest led him throughout his life to fight institutional dishonesty in all of its forms. He was never reluctant to employ the legal leverage of the judiciary against what he perceived to be the injustices of institutional forms of government, business, and industry. On the bench he was always reluctant to impede social reform with a “judicial veto.” His conception of a justice’s role was as a principled libertarian; in particular, a member of the judiciary must be prepared to employ the law in defense of the citizen’s individual rights against the inevitably unfair advantages of powerful national institutions. Understandably, corporations, industry, and government will exercise the initiative necessary to make their efforts worthwhile and successful. In return, individual citizens have the right, through their legislative representatives, to see to it that they do not fall victim to the aspirations of these powerful organizations. It is the role of the judiciary to establish a balanced fairness between collective interests and public liberties.

Hughes not only had the role of jurist; he also represented the most powerful of all institutions, the government itself. In this role, however, he acted with restraint and with an eye to the common good. Because he was an individual with a scrupulous moral sense, an unshakable commitment to fidelity and honor, and the intellectual powers to match, he was never willing to sacrifice long-term ideals for short-term expediencies. Thus, it seems proper to argue that Hughes was a “futurist” and as such endures as one of America’s most gifted and distinguished secretaries of state.

Bibliography

Friedman, Richard D. “Switching Time and Other Thought Experiments: The Hughes Court and Constitutional Transformation.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 142, no. 6 (June, 1994): 1891-1984. A comprehensive scholarly examination of the Hughes court.

Glad, Betty. Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence: A Study in American Diplomacy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. In this study of U.S. diplomacy between the two world wars, Hughes is the centerpiece. Schooled in mainstream nineteenth century American culture, Hughes formulated U.S. foreign policy throughout the era. It is Glad’s contention that Hughes’s moral puritanism often led to optimistic illusions. Glad’s ideological generalizations are not always convincing.

Hendel, Samuel. Charles Evans Hughes and the Supreme Court. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951. This is a case-by-case study of Hughes’s judicial career, a careful, detailed assessment and evaluation that has become a source book for much legal scholarship on Hughes’s Supreme Court opinions.

Hughes, Charles Evans. The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes. Edited by David J. Danelske and Joseph S. Tulchin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. It is difficult for writers not to sketch Hughes as larger than life. Reading his own notes affords an opportunity to assess his own words; this work reveals the man both directly and indirectly.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Our Relations to the Nations of the Western Hemisphere. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1928. Hughes’s analysis of the United States’ relationship to Canada and Latin America: his assessment of the Monroe Doctrine, the recognition of governments, and the United States’ role in honoring Central American treaties and supplying military arms and financial loans to foreign powers. Particularly interesting is the section in which he sets forth the conditions that he believes justify intervention in Latin American affairs.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. A historical account of the role of the Supreme Court. Ostensibly, the Court’s task as the “supreme tribunal” is to interpret the intentions of the nation’s legislatures. Hughes argues that it is the Court’s role to balance state and national priorities and to determine the rights of citizens against common social interests.

Louria, Margot. Triumph and Downfall: America’s Pursuit of Peace and Prosperity, 1921-1933. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Examines the activities of the three secretaries of state during the presidential administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, describing their efforts to preserve world peace and security. The second part of the book focuses on Hughes.

Perkins, Dexter. Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956. A smoothly written account of Hughes’s political and legal career from his start in New York City to his retirement from the post of chief justice of the United States. Throughout, Perkins attempts to portray Hughes as a brilliant, principled individual striving to balance the ideals of liberalism and conservatism in the art of statesmanship.

Pusey, Merlo J. Charles Evans Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1951. One of the best and most exhaustive works on Hughes. Beginning with his childhood in Glens Falls, New York, and ending with his fight against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to “pack the Supreme Court” in 1938, it is a standard text on Hughes. Especially valuable for its interviews with Hughes at the end of his illustrious career: Pusey had the good fortune to interview him many hours a week over a two-and-a-half-year period.

Ross, William G. The Chief Justiceship of Charles Evans Hughes, 1930-1941. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Describes the political, economic, and cultural forces that transformed American society and the Supreme Court during Hughes’s tenure as chief justice.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: August-December, 1905: Armstrong Committee Examines the Insurance Industry; November 12, 1921-February 6, 1922: Washington Disarmament Conference; May 26, 1924: Immigration Act of 1924; May 28, 1924: U.S. Congress Establishes the Border Patrol; September 1, 1924: Dawes Plan; October 21, 1924: Halibut Treaty; May 27, 1935: Black Monday; July 5, 1935: Wagner Act; February 5-July 22, 1937: Supreme Court-Packing Fight.