The Supreme Court of the 1950s

American Decades

THE SUPREME COURT OF THE 1950s

A Change in Philosophy

Looking at the ideological change in the United States Supreme Court during the 1950s, one would think that it underwent a drastic change in personnel. However, changes in three seats on the Court, between 1953 and 1956, made the difference: with this turnover in justices came a turnover in the way the Court saw its role in government.

One Vote in Nine

The most visible and significant change in the Court occurred when Earl Warren became chief justice in 1953, replacing Fred M. Vinson, who had led the conservative Court since 1946. Warren has been celebrated as the force behind the Court's active drive toward establishing human and civil rights. (Certainly the John Birch Society thought so: they waged a campaign to impeach him.) Nevertheless, a chief justice has just one of nine votes, and no chief justice can command the beliefs and decisions of his associates.

The Liberal Voice

The seeds of change were planted when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Alabama native Hugo Lafayette Black to the Court in 1937. Black was recognized as the leader of the Court's liberal wing, and in many ways it was his philosophy of judicial activism that the Warren court adopted. He envisioned the Court's role as that of a protector of civil liberties, especially those written into the Bill of Rights. If Congress or the president had not specifically written those rights into law, Black felt it was up to the courts to affirm them. He also considered the Bill of Rights binding on state governments through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This conviction increasingly influenced the Warren court's decisions during the 1950s and 1960s.

A Strong Ally

Black had a close ally in another Roosevelt appointee, Justice William O. Douglas. Douglas was a brilliant man: a Columbia law school graduate, an eminent law professor, and chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission before his appointment to the Supreme Court at the age of forty. His tenure on the Court spanned thirty-six years, from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was well known as a maverick: as one law clerk wrote, the justice "was just as happy signing a one-man dissent as picking up four more votes." As did Black, Douglas believed that it was the Court's duty to enforce actively the provisions of the Bill of Rights, especially in the face of state and federal legislative attempts to curb the freedoms it guaranteed.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

One crime story of the 1950s suggested that the underworld was a small world after all. It began in 1950, when armed robber's held up the Manufacturer's Trust Company in the Queens section of New York City. Two of the robbers were identified as Willie (" the Actor") Sutton and Thomas Kling, both career criminals. Subsequently, each was added to the FBI's "Most Wanted" list, Sutton in March and Kling in July 1950.

Both remained free for almost two years. Sutton was recognized in New York by a subway passenger named Arnold Schuster, who reported the fugitive to the police. Kling, coincidentally, was captured by authorities two days later. Kling and Sutton were tried together for the robbery in Queens, and both received stiff prison sentences.

Unfortunately for Arnold Schuster, he became something of a celebrity for his role in capturing Willie Sutton. When Mafia chieftain Albert Anastasia saw Schuster on television, he flew into a rage and ordered that the "squealer" be killed. The task fell to Frederick J. Tenuto, a mob hit man who was also a "Top Tenner." Less than a month after Sutton's capture, Schuster was murdered near his Brooklyn home. Realizing that the hit on Schuster had probably been unwise, Anastasia covered his tracks by having Tenuto assassinated as well.

Source:

Michael and Judy Ann Newton, The FRI Most Wanted: An Encyclopedia (New York & London: Garland, 1989).

Judicial Restraint. Opposed to the liberal viewpoints of Black and Douglas were the conservative justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson. Both of the latter were exceptional justices. Frankfurter had arrived in America from his native Austria when he was twelve years old. By the time of his appointment as associate justice to the Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1939, he had distinguished himself as a public servant and legal scholar. Through the 1920s and 1930s he was a strong supporter of liberal social causes, but as a justice he was the Court's spokesman for the conservative approach of judicial restraint. Justice Frankfurter viewed the Court, essentially, as an undemocratic leg of government, one that should interpret the words of the Constitution strictly and defer to the decisions of the other two representative branches on most occasions.

Bitter Feuds

Justice Black regarded this approach as a rejection of the judiciary's role under the Constitution. Justice Frankfurter, never a reticent figure, saw Black's and Douglas's activist approach as "self-righteous, self-deluded, part fanatic, part demagogue." Justice Jackson, another Roosevelt appointee, had originally taken up the activist cause with Black and Douglas. By 1946, however, after a two-year absence from the Court to serve as the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg war-crime trials of Nazis, his sympathies had shifted, and he became Frankfurter's close ally. Books have been written of the intense internal feuds that took place within the Court: at times the rift between the two liberals and the two conservatives became so emotional that the groups hardly spoke with one another.

Middle Ground

Between the two factions was a moderate gray area comprising Justices Stanley Reed, Sherman Minton, Harold Burton, and Tom Clark. All were fairly conservative, especially in relation to Black and Douglas, but all could be swayed in their opinions. In-deed, Clark slowly came under the influence of the activist Warren court and, by the 1960s, became a crucial Warren supporter. Reed and Burton departed from the Court in the late 1950s, solidifying the shift in the Court's philosophy under Warren. But when Warren took the role of chief justice, the Court consisted of four justices evenly split into two opposing groups and four moderate justices who could be swayed either way by the forceful personalities of the others.

A Dynamic Choice

Warren was not known for his legal scholarship abilities, yet his dynamic personality and prominence in the Republican party made President Eisenhower sure he would make a fine, conservative chief justice. In the beginning Warren did follow Frankfurter's philosophy of judicial restraint. Of course, many in the nation doubted this when, during his first term on the Court, Warren rounded all the justices together to join in the celebrated decision of Brown v. Board of Education. (See the section in this chapter on the Brown case.)

A Conservative Choice

Justice Jackson died in 1954. Annoyed at the rift in the nation over the Brown decision and determined to keep the Court conservative, President Eisenhower appointed court of appeals justice John Marshall Harlan to fill Jackson's vacancy. Educated at Princeton University, Harlan had been a Rhodes scholar and a successful Wall Street attorney before being appointed to federal court. Harlan was a learned and conscientious justice who believed in judicial restraint. Frankfurter took an immediate liking to him, as did the public.

Reviving the Constitution

However, Harlan's appointment failed to keep the Court conservative. By the middle of the decade Warren's adherence to Frankfurter's stance began to waver. This was near the height of McCarthyism: the Court regularly heard cases in which accused Communists claimed that their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and their Sixth Amendment right to confront an accusing witness had been violated. People were losing their careers and reputations in front of congressional "red-hunting" committees, which argued that these rights did not apply to their investigations. Warren was interested in what was just and felt, as did many people at the time, that the anticommunists were trampling the Constitution in their hunt for subversivcs. By the "Red Monday" decisions Warren had steered himself and the Court down the road of protecting and enlarging the constitutional definitions of human and civil rights.

Triumph of Activism

In 1956 Justice Minton resigned, and President Eisenhower appointed William J. Brennan, Jr., to the Court. Justice Brennan was a well-respected New Jersey Supreme Court judge. The chief justice immediately took a liking to Brennan's affable style, which was much like his own. To Eisenhower's dismay, Warren's influence on the new justice had him siding with the Black-Douglas philosophy from the beginning. With four strong activists on the Court and three moderates, Frankfurter's position lost ground. By the close of the decade, positions of moderates Burton and Reed were filled by Charles Whittaker and Potter Stewart, the latter also liberal minded. The activist ideology that began with Roosevelt's appointments of Justices Black and Douglas in the 1930s had firm hold of the Court under Earl Warren and was to continue until the 1970s.

Sources:

Robert Mayer, The Court and the American Crises, 1930-1952 (Mill-wood, Ñ.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1987);

Arnold S. Rice, The Warren Court, 1953-1969 (Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1987).

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