Minton, Sherman

Minton, Sherman (b. Georgetown, Ind., 20 Oct. 1890; d. New Albany, Ind., 9 Apr. 1965; interred Holy Trinity Cemetery, New Albany), associate justice, 1949–1956. President Harry S. Truman on 15 September 1949 nominated Minton to be associate justice to replace Wiley B. Rutledge, who had died. Truman and Minton had become friends in the Senate. The Senate Judiciary Committee asked Minton to testify before it at his nomination hearings, but he refused, citing the impropriety of asking a sitting judge—he was then serving on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals—to testify. The committee acceded to Minton's objections and reported his nomination favorably (9 to 2) without his testimony. After prominent Republicans failed on the Senate floor to have Minton's nomination recommitted, Minton was easily confirmed on 4 October 1949 by a 48‐to‐16 vote.

Minton was the son of John Evan Minton and Emma Lyvers. After graduating at the top of his law class at Indiana University, Minton took a year of graduate study at Yale Law School. He entered public life as an Indiana public counselor in 1933, nominated for the position by his former law school classmate, Governor Paul V. McNutt. A strong supporter of the New Deal, Minton successfully ran for the Senate in 1934. Minton's career in the Senate (1935–1941) ended when another former law school classmate and Indianian, Republican Wendell L. Willkie, swept the state in his 1940 presidential bid and carried Minton's Republican rival into the Senate. In 1941, after Minton's defeat, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Minton an adviser in charge of coordinating military agencies. Later that year the president appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

During his term in the Senate, Minton had loyally supported all of President Franklin Roosevelt's legislative initiatives to halt the effects of the Great Depression, including an endorsement of Roosevelt's plan to “pack” the Supreme Court (see Court‐Packing Plan). Minton's views about the role of the Supreme Court were shaped in the New Deal: he firmly believed that the judiciary should allow the executive and legislative branches the greatest freedom to create policy and programs with the minimum of interference from the judiciary. In the New Deal era, when the president and Congress were trying to establish administrative agencies and social welfare programs to assist the unemployed against conservative opposition from the Court, Minton appeared a liberal. In the post–World War II “cold war” context, in which anticommunist hysteria inspired governmental repression of free speech and association, Minton's continued, unwavering support of governmental policies made him a conservative (see Communism and Cold War). Actually, Minton was totally consistent in his views of the relationship between the judiciary and the other branches of government, only the context had changed. In 1952 Minton wrote the majority opinion in Adler v. Board of Education upholding New York's Feinberg Law that barred members of subversive organizations from teaching in public schools and voted with the majority in Carlson v. Landon to allow alien communists to be held without bail if the attorney general thought them a danger to national security. In the same year, he was the lone dissenter in the *Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which his colleagues invalidated President Truman's seizure of the steel industry (see Presidential Emergency Powers).

Justice Minton, who had long suffered from pernicious anemia and had circulatory troubles in his legs, retired from the Supreme Court on 15 October 1956 owing to ill health.

Bibliography

Catherine A. Barnes , Men of the Supreme Court: Profiles of the Justices (1978), pp. 111–113.

N.E.H. Hull