Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes , 1862-1948, American statesman and jurist, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1910-16), U.S. Secretary of State (1921-25), and eleventh Chief Justice of the United States (1930-41), b. Glens Falls, N.Y.

Political and Diplomatic Career

A graduate of Columbia law school, he was admitted to the bar in 1884 and practiced law in New York City, where he advanced rapidly in his profession. He served (1905) as counsel for a committee of the New York state legislature investigating gas companies and, as counsel (1905-6) for another state investigating committee, achieved national prominence for his exposure of corrupt practices of insurance companies in New York. This led to his election (1906) as Republican governor of New York. In this post (1907-10), Hughes brought about the establishment of the public service commission, the passage of various insurance-law reforms, and the enactment of much labor legislation. He resigned the governorship after President Taft appointed him (1910) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, but left the Court in 1916 to run for President on the Republican ticket.

The election was one of the closest presidential contests in American history, Woodrow Wilson defeating Hughes by an electoral vote of 277 to 254 and a popular vote of 9,129,606 to 8,538,221. The vote of California, which went to Wilson by less than 4,000 votes largely because of the disaffection of Hiram Johnson , decided the election. Hughes again devoted himself to his law practice. In 1921, President Warren Harding appointed him Secretary of State. He continued in this office under President Coolidge. Hughes prepared plans for the limitation of naval armaments at the Washington Conference (see naval conferences ), directed negotiations for several important foreign treaties, and vastly increased the prestige of the U.S. Dept. of State. He was a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1926-30) and a judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice (1928-30).

Supreme Court Chief Justice

In 1930, Hughes was appointed Chief Justice of the United States by President Hoover; he retired in 1941. As Chief Justice, Hughes generally held a moderately conservative position, and was often a swing vote on a court divided between conservative and liberal factions. The Hughes court helped develop the modern notion of freedom of speech through such decisions as Near v. Minnesota (1931), which largely voided all laws permitting prior restraint of press publication. More often than not, he voted to uphold controversial legislation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, though in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), he wrote the opinion that found the act that created the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional. He vigorously opposed Roosevelt's unsuccessful effort to reorganize the Supreme Court in 1937.

Bibliography

Many of Hughes's addresses were published in The Pathway to Peace (1925), The Supreme Court of the United States (1928), Our Relations to the Nations of the Western Hemisphere (1928), Pan-American Peace Plans (1929), and Nations United for Peace (1945). See his autobiographical notes, ed. by D. J. Danelski and J. S. Tulchin (1973); biographies by B. Glad (1966) and R. F. Wesser (1967).

Hughes, Charles Evans (1862–1948), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.Born in Glens Falls, New York, the son of a Welsh immigrant and Baptist preacher, Charles Evans Hughes received a Christian education mostly at home, attended Madison (later renamed Colgate) University, and graduated from Brown University. In 1884, Columbia University awarded him a law degree. During the next twenty years, he mainly practiced corporate law.

As counsel to a New York state legislative committee investigating the utility industry, his hard‐hitting attacks on corporate corruption won widespread acclaim. President Theodore Roosevelt engineered his nomination as a Republican for governor of New York in 1906. Serving two terms, he promoted the progressive goals of administrative efficiency and public service reform. In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. He resigned in 1916 after receiving the Republican party's nomination for president. He narrowly lost to incumbent Woodrow Wilson.

Hughes's support until 1918 for Wilson's foreign policy established him as a leading Republican proponent of internationalism. In 1921, he became President Warren Harding's secretary of state. Committed to the principles of antimilitarism and the rule of law, he proposed a series of agreements at the Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1921–1922, including the Five‐Power Naval Treaty that mandated capital‐ship ratios and reductions. The treaty may ironically have strengthened Japan in the Pacific, the opposite of what Hughes had intended. He also spearheaded U.S. efforts to stabilize the European economy by extending loans to Germany and scaling back Germany's World War I reparations payments. He supported the Dawes Plan of 1924, formulated by a commission headed by banker Charles G. Dawes (1865–1951), as a step toward this goal. Although he avoided diplomatic commitments in Europe, Hughes did initiate some informal cooperation with the League of Nations.

Returning to private law practice in 1925, Hughes soon accepted appointment to the Permanent Court of Arbitration and, in 1928, to the World Court. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover named him chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. A moderate conservative, Hughes in his written opinions reflected an unimaginative but deep commitment to constitutional procedures. Serving until 1941, he often, but not always, questioned the expansion of federal economic regulation. His religious principles, which contributed to his libertarian sentiments and his sympathy for racial equality, distanced him from the narrow partisanship of many New Deal opponents.
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Foreign Relations; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Merlo J. Pusey , Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols., 1951.
Betty Glad , Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence, 1966.
Robert F. Wesser , Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905–1910, 1967.
David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes, 1973.

Gary B. Ostrower

Hughes, Charles Evans (b. 11 Apr. 1862, d. 27 Aug. 1948). Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court 1930–41 Born in Glenn Falls, New York State, Hughes studied for an LLB at Columbia in 1884, became a successful member of a New York City law firm, and in 1906 was elected state Governor. From 1910 until 1916 he served as a member of the federal Supreme Court, but resigned to run in 1916 as the Republican candidate for President. Defeated by Wilson, he became Secretary of State (1921–5) under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, when he supported US cooperation with the League of Nations, negotiated a separate peace treaty with Germany, and hosted the Washington Conference of 1921–2, which achieved some restrictions on naval expansion. His career was crowned by his years as Chief Justice, during which he enhanced the efficiency of the federal court system, and gave firm support to the freedom against state actions guaranteed to the citizen under the First Amendment. He was largely responsible for defeating a plan of President Roosevelt in 1937 to ‘pack’ the court by adding to it extra liberal justices to counter sitting members over 70 years of age who refused to retire. At the same time his court supported a number of New Deal proposals, such as the Social Security Act.