Stone, Harlan Fiske (b. Chesterfield, N.H., 11 Oct. 1872; d. Washington, D.C., 22 Apr. 1946; interred Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C.), associate justice, 1925–1941, chief justice, 1941–1946. Republican Harlan Fiske Stone was the single university professor ever to serve as chief justice and, like Democrat Edward Douglass White (chief justice, 1910–1921), one of only two chief justices appointed by a president from a different political party. Stone is one of three promoted directly from an associate justiceship (White again, and William Rehnquist, chief justice, 1986–). The only other chief justice with any prior Supreme Court service was his predecessor, Charles Evans Hughes (associate justice, 1910–1916, and chief justice, 1930–1941), with whom he worked closely for eleven years.

Stone, like White, was promoted in part because of support from fellow justices, including Hughes. Of the five Republican justices during Franklin D. Roosevelt's early presidency, Stone most frequently voted to uphold New Deal legislation against constitutional challenge—more frequently indeed than two of the Court's four Democrats (Justices Pierce Butler and James McReynolds). Like Hughes, Stone first experienced being the runner‐up choice. Hughes quite happily remained secretary of state after President Harding appointed William Howard Taft to the chief justiceship. Stone, having served five years under Taft, continued under Hughes. Stone became on his 1941 promotion by Roosevelt the only chief justice potentially to profit from experiencing the leadership styles of two predecessors.

Stone's leadership little resembled either predecessor's. Where Taft used the illusion of amiable bumbling and much politicking to secure prevalence of his constitutional views and Hughes was said to play his colleagues adroitly like stops on a cathedral organ, Stone favored reasoning cases out at length (see Chief Justice, Office of the). The unintended accompaniment was an upsurge of strident dissents and public backbiting among the associate justices. Scholarly appraisals have debated the relative causal importance to two factors: an unusual number of very bright but very prickly personalities among the associate justices; and Stone's reluctance to alleviate conflict. However, some rise in antagonism among the justices was probably inevitable as the Court during the early 1940s moved away from issues of federalism and economic regulation and toward civil liberties and civil rights. Later chief justices have experienced at least as much intra‐Court disagreement.

Born in rural New Hampshire in 1872, Stone was the son of Frederick Lawson Stone, a farmer, and Ann Sophia Butler. Later Stone identified New England's hard‐to‐work granite soil as a prime source of the Yankee virtues of diligence, civic responsibility, and independence, which he both prized and exemplified. However, it was the burly teenaged Stone's specific dislike of work on the family's farm in Amherst, Massachusetts, that led him to attend college. Expelled from Massachusetts Agricultural College for accidentally assaulting the college chaplain during a freshman‐sophomore chapel melee, Stone went through Amherst College playing varsity football, editing the college newspaper, being thrice elected class president, and graduating in 1894. He financed his Columbia Law School education by teaching high school and received his law degree in 1898. A few months later, he accepted a Columbia law faculty position. In 1899 he married Agnes Harvey, whom he had known from childhood summer visits to his New Hampshire birthplace. Very close through almost forty‐seven years of marriage, they had two sons, one a prominent New York lawyer and the other a Harvard mathematics professor elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Enthusiastically encouraged by Stone, Agnes Harvey Stone reached sufficient excellence as a painter for the Corcoran Gallery twice to exhibit her landscapes.

Stone's legal career developed along two paths—the primary one in academia, which climaxed with his deanship of Columbia Law School (1910–1923), and a secondary one in corporate practice that peaked with his appointment as head of the Sullivan and Cromwell litigation department in 1923. His writings—especially “reformist” law review articles on rights of trust beneficiaries, bankers' duties, and specific performance of contracts—widely influenced judges. His activities in building a research‐oriented faculty and defending free speech rights of professors and socialists became known throughout the legal community. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge named Stone attorney general to clear the Justice Department of scandals inherited from the Harding administration.

Although some western senators feared that Stone's Wall Street links would make him excessively probusiness, corruption‐investigating activism dominated his short term as attorney general. Nonetheless, there was Senate opposition when Coolidge in January 1925 nominated Stone to the Supreme Court. Always the straight‐forward rationalist, Stone proposed what was then a novelty, that he answer questions in person before the Senate Judiciary Committee—thus inventing the current practice. So disarmingly intelligent was his testimony that the final Senate vote for confirmation was 71 to 6.

Between 1925 and 1936 Stone's most significant role was dissenting (often with Louis Brandeis, and Oliver W. Holmes or Benjamin Cardozo) against Taft and his strongest allies, Democrats Butler and McReynolds and Republicans George Sutherland and Willis Van Devanter. Continuing past Taft's retirement, they became known as “the four horsemen” (of the Apocalypse) opposing New Deal economic legislation. Even before the New Deal, Stone thought they were advancing outlandish positions that made the laissez faire of their turn‐of‐the‐century predecessors seem moderate. For example, Di Santo v. Pennsylvania (1927) involved a Pennsylvania fraud statute based on a 1910 New York statute signed by Charles Evans Hughes, then New York governor. To protect semiliterate immigrant men from swindlers selling fake cheap tickets for transporting families left behind, both states required licenses and bonds of steamship ticket sellers. Hughes had seen no constitutional barrier. Yet Taft and the “horsemen” found an unconstitutional “direct burden” on Congress's Commerce Clause power, despite congressional silence on the matter (see Commerce Power). As Brandeis pointed out, Pennsylvania's statute affected the flow of commerce far less than many state regulations that earlier Courts had sustained—for example, compelling a railroad to eliminate grade crossings even if the expense threatened its solvency. In Stone's view, the majority was applying a test “too mechanical, too … remote from actualities, to be of value” (p. 44).

Three years into the New Deal, the “four horsemen,” often joined by Owen Roberts (1930–1945), and occasionally by Hughes, having told the states they could not regulate much because of Congress's commerce power, were telling Congress it could not regulate much either because of the states' police power. Thus in Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton R.R. Co. (1935) a 5‐to‐4 majority barred Congress from requiring interstate railroads to provide pensions for railway workers. Though not convinced New Deal legislation was wise, Stone ridiculed the 6‐to‐3 majority reasoning of Owen Roberts's opinion in U.S. v. Butler (1936) as having absurd consequences. “The government may give seeds to farmers, but may not condition the gift upon their being planted … may give money to the unemployed, but may not ask … those who get it … to support their families” (p. 85).

In Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo (1936) the “four horsemen” and Owen Roberts not merely rejected Hughes's centrist Republican constitutionalism. They underlined that they were to the right even of Taft by reiterating the doctrine of a 1923 women's minimum wage case, Adkins v. Children's Hospital; in Adkins the D.C. regulation forbade employers paying women below what the cost of living required for health. Though Taft had seen nothing wrong with that, the “four horsemen” and one other justice had asserted that the *Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause required striking it down. The employer could be prosecuted even if the “health standard” required him to pay more than the value of the services rendered. The New York statute sought to cure that defect by forbidding only wages both below the health standard and below the value of the services rendered. Hughes vainly argued for upholding the New York law by distinguishing Adkins; Stone vainly urged overruling Adkins.

Stone's dissents proceeded from three basic principles he thought should control constitutional interpretation respecting government regulation of the economy. First, the Constitution gives the appropriate level of government the power to govern. Second, as he observed in Morehead, the power to govern changes to meet changing conditions: “problems of poverty, subsistence, health … a generation ago … were for the individual to solve; today they are the burden of the nation” (p. 635). Third, “It is not for the courts to resolve doubts whether the remedy … is … efficacious … or is better even than the blind operation of uncontrolled economic forces” (p. 635). Less than a year later, in the aftermath of Roosevelt's court‐packing threat, changed voting behavior (chiefly by Roberts), and retirements, Stone's dissenting constitutional views were fast becoming the law of the land.

Most scholarly appraisals of Stone, written in the mid‐twentieth century, lauded his jurisprudence in other areas—particularly executive power and civil liberties. To a later generation, witness to the growth both of an imperial presidency and of civil rights, two qualifications may be in order. First, Stone's occasional qualms about the Court's expansions of presidential power were of little consequence. He later regretted having said nothing when Sutherland, in U.S. v. Curtiss‐Wright (1936), allowed the president almost unconfined foreign policy powers. In 1942 Stone carried only the other remaining pre‐Roosevelt justice (Roberts) with him when dissenting from U.S. v. Pink, which permitted the president to override state law and circumvent the Senate treaty‐making power in order to make executive agreements with other countries (see Treaties and Treaty Power).

Second, when executive powers collided with civil liberties during World War II, Stone was sometimes but not always a stout defender of the latter. Least satisfactory today seems his upholding punishment of Americans of Japanese ancestry for disobeying curfew laws (Hirabayashi v. U.S., 1943) and sending them to concentration camps (*Korematsu v. U.S., 1944) without prior inquiry as to their individual loyalty. Irony, at least, attaches to one of his justifications: “[S]ocial, economic and political conditions since the close of the last century … have intensified their solidarity and in large measure prevented their assimilation as an integral part of the white population” (Hirabayashi, p. 96).

However, much of the Court's history since Stone's death in 1946, which ended the briefest chief justiceship since 1801, is the history of working out affirmatively the implications of one of the Court's most quoted passages. That is footnote four of Stone's opinion in U.S. v. Carolene Products (1938).

Stone was important in beginning the history of drawing out the implications of civil rights. More than any other justice he was responsible for maneuvering the Court over nine years from holding the so‐called white primary constitutional (Grovey v. Townsend, 1935), through declaring that having one's vote in a primary counted fairly was a federally enforceable right (U.S. v. Classic, 1941), to ruling the white primary unconstitutional (Smith v. Allwright, 1944). Stone's views prevailed in the First Amendment free exercise of religion issue concerning whether Jehovah's Witness schoolchildren could constitutionally be forced to salute the flag. In 1940 he had lost 8 to 1 to Frankfurter who thought in Minersville v. Gobitis they could; in 1943, Stone won 6 to 3, assigning (as he frequently did when his earlier minority position came to prevail) another justice (Robert Jackson) to write the court's opinion in *West Virginia v. Barnette.

Few who came to maturity steeped in the mores of nineteenth‐century America did as much as Stone to adapt Court and Constitution to the problems of the twentieth century. Among the most important sources of his achievements was a deep‐running psychological trait of anticipatory prudence. It was most evident doctrinally in adjudicating New Deal legislative efforts to cope with the aftermath of the great October 1929 stock market crash. But it operated on a practical level too. In spring 1929 Stone decided that the market was getting dangerously high. He converted his considerable stock holdings into cash. While the “four Horsemen” bucked, Stone rode through Depression and New Deal financially secure as well as jurisprudentially victorious.

Bibliography

Alpheus Thomas Mason , Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (1956).
Charles Herman Pritchett , The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1937–1947 (1948).
Merlo J. Pusey , Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols. (1963).
Herbert Wechsler , Mr. Justice Stone and the Constitution, Columbia Law Review 46 (1946): 764.

A. E. Keir Nash

Harlan Fiske Stone

Harlan Fiske Stone (1872-1946), as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, at first could not be classified either as conservative or liberal but finally stood with the liberal justices.

Harlan Fiske Stone was born in Chesterfield, N.H., on Oct. 11, 1872. The family soon moved to Amherst, Mass. Harlan's father was a farmer, and the sons did the typical farm chores.

Stone attended public school in Amherst and then, after 2 years of high school, enrolled in the Massachusetts Agricultural College. He led his fellow students in a number of pranks; for one of these he was expelled. He was accepted by Amherst College, graduating in 1894. He was bent on a career in medicine. At Amherst he tutored other students and sold typewriters and insurance. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was business manager of the school paper, and played on the football team. Somewhere along the way, he gave up the idea of medicine for a career in law. To earn the money for law school, he taught high school science. In 1896 he entered the Columbia University School of Law, supporting himself by teaching history. In June 1898 he received his law degree and soon passed his bar examinations.

Stone joined the well-known New York City legal firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, later moving to another firm. He married Agnes Harvey in 1899, and the couple had two sons.

Law School Dean and Attorney General

In his early days in practice Stone supplemented his income by lecturing at Columbia School of Law. He became a professor in 1902, resigning in 1905 to give full time to the firm of Satterlee, Canfield and Stone. Stone appeared to be perfectly content making money until, in 1910, he became dean of the Columbia School of Law. The work as dean was most rewarding. Stone managed to continue his law practice, teach, and also advise and counsel students. He was one of the most loved and revered Columbia professors of that day.

This so-called conservative lawyer proved to be most liberal in defending his faculty. When the university decided to dismiss two professors because of their pacifist speeches, he worked out a settlement between the teachers and Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler. Stone was much upset by the U.S. attorney general's "Red raids."

Yet there were too many examples of Stone's conservatism to convince his fellow faculty members that he was in any way liberal. His courses in personal property, mortgages, and equity law were geared conservatively. In 1923 his conservatism seemed confirmed when he resigned as dean to become a partner in the Sullivan and Cromwell firm. During the next year he handled corporation and estate work. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge, who had known Stone in Amherst, named him U.S. attorney general. The appointment was well received by the banking and business community.

As U.S. attorney general, Stone moved quickly to rid the department of those involved in the "Red scare" regime. He also made an appointment that years later would remain controversial when he made J. Edgar Hoover head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigations (later the Federal Bureau of Investigation). Stone also moved against the Aluminum Corporation of America as a violator of the antitrust laws. This corporation was under control of the family of Andrew Mellon, who was then secretary of the treasury. Before this case could be readied for court, President Coolidge named Stone an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Justice

Stone's new appointment ran into some difficulties. Some people suggested that he was pushed onto the Court to get him out of the attorney general's office. However, the appointment was confirmed. On the bench Stone moved slowly. Justice Louis Brandeis, a liberal, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, tried to give Stone a much broader view of the Constitution. In time the liberals on the Court were considered to be Brandeis, Holmes, Stone, and later Benjamin Cardozo.

The question of the constitutionality of many of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal laws eventually confronted the Supreme Court. Stone met these challenges and remained liberal in his thinking. He concurred in the Court's decision on the unconstitutionality of the National Recovery Administration. He supported the majority in the famous NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation (1937), which preserved the National Labor Relations law.

With Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes's resignation in 1941, President Roosevelt named Stone to the position. However, Stone is remembered for his work as an associate justice rather than for his achievements as chief justice because, as presiding officer, he was unable to head the Court as efficiently as had his predecessor. Stone looked upon the Constitution as a broad charter of government. He summed up his philosophy by stating: "I have nothing personally against the world in which I grew up. That world has always made me very comfortable. But I don't see why I should let my social predilections interfere with experimental legislation that is not prohibited in the Constitution."

One of the most important pieces of New Deal legislation was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. It was inevitable that the Supreme Court would be asked to rule on its constitutionality. In U.S. v. Butler (1936) a majority of the Court declared the AAA constitutional. Justice Stone wrote a strong dissenting opinion. He revealed his conception of judicial functions when he declared: "The power of courts to declare a statute unconstitutional is subject to two guiding principles of decision which ought never to be absent from judicial consciousness. One is that courts are concerned only with the power to enact statutes, not with their wisdom. The other is that while unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint."

Stone was not a colorful figure, but he was a human one. He died in Washington on April 22, 1946. If one was to seek among Stone's utterances for a phrase that would summarize his contributions, it might be: "… the Constitution has not adopted any particular set of social and economic ideas, to the exclusion of others, which however wrong they seemed to me, fair-minded men might yet hold."

Further Reading

The best general study of Stone is Alpheus Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (1956). An excellent survey of Stone as chief justice is in Alpheus Mason, The Supreme Court from Taft to Warren (1958). A complete discussion of Stone's dissent in U.S. v. Butler is in Walter F. Murphy, Congress and the Courts: A Case Study in the American Political Process (1962). Kenneth Urmbreit brings the man into focus in Our Eleven Chief Justices: A History of the Supreme Court in Terms of Their Personalities (1942). □

STONE, HARLAN FISKE

Harlan Fiske Stone served as associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and as chief justice from 1941 to 1946. A believer in judicial restraint, he was also a defender of civil rights and civil liberties. Stone was often a lone dissenter in the 1920s and 1930s when conservatives, who dominated the Court, struck down state and federal legislation that sought to regulate business and working conditions.

Stone was born on October 11, 1872, in Chesterfield, New Hampshire. He graduated

from Amherst College in 1894 and Columbia Law School in 1898. Admitted to the New York bar the year of his graduation, Stone became a member of a prominent New York City law firm. He was also a part-time instructor at Columbia Law School from 1899 to 1902. In 1902 Stone left his law firm to become a professor of law at Columbia. From 1910 to 1923 he was dean of the law school. He resigned in 1924 to join Sullivan and Cromwell, the most prestigious law firm in New York City.

In 1924 President calvin coolidge appointed Stone attorney general. The justice department had been tarnished by the teapot dome scandal during the administration of

Coolidge's predecessor, President warren g. harding. In addition, the Bureau of Investigation (BI), the forerunner of the federal bureau of investigation (FBI), had become a home to political cronyism and corruption. Stone appointed j. edgar hoover to head the BI and institute wide-ranging reforms. Stone's administration of the Department of Justice drew praise from Congress and President Coolidge.

Coolidge nominated Stone to the Supreme Court in 1925. Some senators were fearful that Stone's Wall Street connections would cause him to favor business interests. Responding to these concerns, Stone proposed that he appear before the senate judiciary committee to answer questions. The committee accepted, thereby creating the now-traditional confirmation process used for federal court appointments. Stone was easily confirmed.

In the 1920s the Court was dominated by conservative justices who struck down many state and federal laws that sought to regulate labor, business, commerce, and working conditions. Stone dissented from these decisions, arguing that the Court should exercise judicial restraint and allow Congress and state legislatures to craft laws that address pressing social and economic problems.

With the election of President franklin d. roosevelt in 1932, the Supreme Court's hostility to government regulation drew even greater attention as it declared unconstitutional a host of new deal economic reforms. Stone wrote a biting dissent in the case of United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 56 S. Ct. 312, 80 L. Ed. 477 (1936), which involved a processing tax paid by farmers to fund subsidies paid to eligible farmers under Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act. The act was declared unconstitutional because all farmers were taxed but only specific farmers received benefits. Stone argued that the subsidies were valid.

Although Stone was a Republican and President Roosevelt a Democrat, Roosevelt appointed Stone chief justice in 1941. Stone's tenure as chief justice was marked by bitter fighting among the justices, which has been blamed partly on Stone's inability to negotiate and build a consensus.

Stone's commitment to civil liberties was demonstrated in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, 60 S. Ct. 1010, 84 L. Ed. 1375 (1940). He was the lone dissenter when the Court upheld a state law that required Jehovah's Witnesses to salute the flag, even though this conflicted with their religious beliefs. Stone argued that the law infringed on the first amendment right to the free exercise of religion. Three years later his view was endorsed by the Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 63 S. Ct. 1178, 87 L. Ed. 1628 (1943), when it overruled Gobitis.

In the area of civil rights, Stone helped move the Court from tacit acceptance of the racially discriminatory status quo in the southern states to a more aggressive stance. In United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299, 61 S. Ct. 1031, 85 L. Ed. 1368 (1941), the Court ruled that the federal government could regulate party primaries to prevent election fraud that resulted in the failure to count African American votes. Three years later the Court struck down the white primary, which excluded African Americans from southern Democratic parties and Democratic primary elections (Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 64 S. Ct. 757, 88 L. Ed. 987 [1944]). Stone played a pivotal role in deciding these cases.

Stone contributed to modern constitutional analysis in a famous footnote to his opinion in United States v. Carolene Products Company, 304 U.S. 144, 58 S. Ct. 778, 82 L. Ed. 1234 (1938). Known as footnote four, it stated that "prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities and which may call for a more searching judicial scrutiny." This footnote became the basis for the "strict scrutiny" test, which the Court applies to assess the constitutionality of legislation concerning the rights of racial minorities, religious sects, aliens, prisoners, and other "discrete and insular minorities." Under strict scrutiny the government must demonstrate more than just a rational basis for legislation. It must show a compelling state interest and prove that the legislation is narrowly tailored to meet that interest.

"The law [should not be seen as] a hermetically sealed compartment of social science, to be explored and its principles formulated without reference to those social and economic forces which call law into existence."
—Harlan Fiske Stone

Stone's tenure, however, was not unblemished. In korematsu v. united states, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S. Ct. 193, 89 L. Ed. 194 (1944), he upheld the forced relocation of Japanese Americans to detention camps during world war ii. The decision was based on the wartime powers of the president to take emergency actions for national security reasons.

Stone died on April 22, 1946, in Washington, D.C.

further readings

Galston, Miriam. 1995. "Activism and Restraint: The Evolution of Harlan Fiske Stone's Judicial Philosophy." Tulane Law Review 70 (November).

Konefsky, Samuel Joseph. 1945. Chief Justice Stone and the Supreme Court. Reprint, 1971. New York: Hafner.

Stone, Harlan Fiske. 2001. Law and Its Administration. Union, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange.

Urofsky, Melvin I. 1997. Division and Discord: The Supreme Court Under Stone and Vinson, 1941–1953. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press.

cross-references

Footnote 4; Japanese American Evacuation Cases.

Stone, Harlan Fiske (1872–1946), legal educator, lawyer, associate justice (1925–1941) and chief justice (1941–1946) of the Supreme Court. To date, Stone remains the sole university professor ever to serve as chief justice and, along with Democrat Edward White, one of only two chief justices appointed by a president from a different party. A Republican and a professor at Columbia Law School, Stone was appointed an associate justice by President Warren Harding, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt elevated him to the chief justiceship. As an associate justice, Stone dissented vigorously against the so‐called Four Horsemen, a bloc of justices that routinely objected to Roosevelt's New Deal measures. Stone insisted that the judiciary should exercise restraint and recognize the need for the legislative and executive branches to respond to the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, with new appointees on the court, this had become the majority view.

During his brief service as chief justice (the shortest since that of Oliver Ellsworth, 1796–1800), Stone moved his colleagues away from issues of economic regulation and toward matters of civil rights. Stone began the process of developing the implications of footnote four of his most famous opinion, U.S. v. Carolene Products (1938). This celebrated footnote, while upholding the position that courts should generally defer to legislative bodies on economic matters, suggested that laws restricting the rights of racial or other minorities “may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry.” Stone also led the effort to abolish the all‐white primary (Smith v. Alwright, 1944).

Stone urged the justices to reason cases out at length, a technique markedly different from that of his predecessors. Greater discussion, however, produced more dissent and increased judicial backbiting, neither of which Stone was able to alleviate. Indeed, high levels of dissent on the modern Court date from Stone's tenure as chief justice.
See also Civil Rights Movement; Fourteenth Amendment; Economic Regulation; Laissez‐faire; Segregation, Racial; South, The; Suffrage.

Bibliography

Alpheus T. Mason , Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law, 1956.
Public Control of Business: Selected Opinions of Harlan Fiske Stone, ed. Alfred Lief, 1996.

Kermit L. Hall

STONE, HARLAN FISKE 1872-1946

Attorney general of the united states, 1924

Associate justice of the us. supreme court. 1925-1941

Chief justice of the us. supreme court. 1941-1946

Background

After graduating from the Columbia University Law School in 1898, Harlan Fiske Stone joined the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Sullivan, Dulles, and Cromwell, remaining with the firm until 1918, when he returned to Columbia to become dean of the law school.

Attorney General

On 28 March 1924 President Calvin Coolidge dismissed U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty for his alleged involvement in the corruption scandals that had rocked the Harding administration and appointed Stone to fill the vacancy. Known for his personal integrity, Stone promised Coolidge that he would review his predecessor's actions and discharge all departmental subordinates who were suspected of criminal wrongdoing. This "cleanup" campaign was in progress in December 1924 when Coolidge nominated Stone to replace Associate Justice Mahlon Pitney on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Justice

At that time the Senate Judiciary Committee customarily conducted the confirmation process by sending written questions to a Supreme Court nominee, who replied in writing. This time, however, Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, demanded that Stone personally testify before the panel because they wanted to interrogate him about his efforts to "sanitize" the Department of Justice. Conducted in executive session on 28 January 1925, this interview—the first hearing of its type in American history—established a precedent for later public confirmation hearings. Stone answered all the senators* questions in a satisfactory manner, and on 2 February he was confirmed by the full Senate in an overwhelming vote of 71-6. On the court Stone generally sided with the conservative bloc led by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, but he sometimes joined Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis in dissenting from the majority, usually in support of civil liberties. Stone became chief justice in 1941 and remained on the Supreme Court until his death in 1946.

Sources:

Samuel J. Konefsky, Chief Justice Stone and the Supreme Court (New York: Macmillan, 1945);

Alpheus Thomas Mann, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pittar of the Law (New York: Viking, 1956).

Harlan Fiske Stone 1872–1946, American jurist, 12th chief justice of the United States (1941–46), b. Chesterfield, N.H. A graduate (1898) of Columbia Univ. law school, he was admitted (1899) to the bar, practiced law in New York City, and lectured at the Columbia law school, where he became professor (1902) and dean (1910). He resigned his deanship in 1923 and, as U.S. Attorney General (1924–25) under President Coolidge, helped to restore faith in the Dept. of Justice after the Teapot Dome scandals. Appointed (1925) associate justice of the Supreme Court, he established a reputation for his vigorous minority opinions, especially those in which he defended the social and economic welfare legislation of the New Deal against the conservative majority. Stone saw many of his minority opinions later accepted as majority decisions. He succeeded Charles Evans Hughes as chief justice. Public Control of Business (1940) is a selection of Stone's opinions as associate justice.

Bibliography: See biography by A. T. Mason (1956, repr. 1968) and study by S. J. Konefsky (1946, repr. 1971).