Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes was born April 11, 1862, in Glens Falls, New York, the only child of a Welsh immigrant Baptist preacher and a schoolteacher who taught him at home. He could reportedly read by four, and his parents saw no reason to slow him down: he enrolled at Madison University, now Colgate, at 14, transferred to Brown two years later, and graduated third in his class at 19. Columbia Law School came next, and in 1884 he passed the New York bar with the highest score the examiners had ever recorded. He spent his twenties billing hours at a Wall Street firm and teaching part time at Cornell, a quiet decade that gave no sign of the investigator and reformer about to emerge.

Hughes spent four decades moving between law and government without ever quite settling in either. As governor of New York from 1907 to 1910 he broke up utility monopolies and capped child labor, work Theodore Roosevelt had recruited him for. President Taft put him on the Supreme Court in 1910, and Roosevelt, unimpressed by his reserve, nicknamed him the bearded iceberg. Hughes resigned his seat in 1916 to run for president as a Republican and lost to Woodrow Wilson by fewer than 4,000 California votes. As secretary of state under Harding he negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty, limiting the world's largest fleets by agreement rather than war. Named chief justice in 1930, he steered the Court through the New Deal, joining the 1937 majority that upheld minimum-wage laws and ended the era of striking down labor regulation as unconstitutional.

Hughes spent his career arguing that the Court stood above politics, and then acted otherwise when it mattered most. In February 1937, Franklin Roosevelt proposed adding up to six new justices to the Supreme Court, a maneuver aimed squarely at breaking the conservative majority that kept invalidating New Deal laws. Hughes wrote a public letter to Senator Burton Wheeler, read aloud on the Senate floor, arguing point by point that the Court was fully current on its docket and needed no expansion. The letter helped kill the plan within months. It was also, by any plain reading, a sitting chief justice intervening directly in a fight over how much power his own branch should have, exactly the kind of politics he spent forty years insisting the robe put him above.

Hughes died August 27, 1948, at his home in Osterville, Massachusetts, seven years after leaving the bench. A 1971 survey of law professors, published in Life magazine, later named him one of twelve great justices in the Court's history, the only one in the group whose politics the surveyors could not classify. The 1937 letter to Wheeler is remembered now as institutional statesmanship, not the political act it plainly was. His Washington residence became a National Historic Landmark, and law schools still teach West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, his 1937 opinion junking the constitutional doctrine of pure freedom of contract, as the moment the old order gave way.

Charles Evans Hughes's life against the full span of the corpus.

• New York Public Service Commissions Law law
  Broke utility monopolies' rate-setting power as governor 1907
• Washington Naval Treaty law
  Limited US, UK and Japanese battleship tonnage by agreement, not war 1922
• Letter to Senator Burton Wheeler other
  Public letter that helped defeat Roosevelt's court-packing plan 1937
• West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish case
  Ended the constitutional doctrine of pure freedom of contract 1937
• Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada case
  Required states to provide equal, in-state legal education 1938

• April 11, 1862 aged 0 Born in Glens Falls, New York
• 1884 aged ~22 Graduates Columbia Law School and passes the New York bar with its highest-ever score
• November 1906 aged 44 Elected governor of New York
• 1910 aged ~48 Appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court by President Taft
• 1916 aged ~54 Resigns from the Court to run for president, loses to Wilson by under 4,000 California votes
• 1921 aged ~59 Named secretary of state, negotiates the Washington Naval Treaty
• 1930 aged ~68 Named chief justice by President Hoover
• 1937 aged ~75 Writes the Wheeler letter and joins the majority in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish
• August 27, 1948 aged 86 Dies in Osterville, Massachusetts

• Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924
  28th President who led the nation through World War I and championed the League of Nations. defeated by
• Warren G. Harding 1865–1923
  Twenty-ninth president whose administration was marked by postwar retrenchment and the Teapot Dome scandal. appointed by
• Herbert Hoover 1874–1964
  Engineer and relief administrator whose presidency was consumed by the onset of the Great Depression. appointed by
• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. served with
• Hugo Black 1886–1971
  Justice who championed strong First Amendment protections and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. served with