Butler, Pierce (b. Pine Bend, Minn., 17 Mar. 1866; d. Washington, D.C., 16 Nov. 1939; interred Calvary Cemetery, St. Paul, Minn.), associate justice, 1923–1939. Butler came to the Supreme Court after an active career. Raised in rural Minnesota and educated in a one‐room school, Butler went on to graduate from Carleton College and gain admission to the Minnesota bar in 1888. He briefly served as state's attorney for Ramsey County before establishing a thriving St. Paul law firm that specialized in representing railroads, including those of local magnate James J. Hill. Although Butler served as a special prosecutor in several
antitrust cases, most of his work involved defending railway interests against governmental regulation. He also played an active role in educational issues, gaining a reputation as a staunch opponent of “radical” professors at the University of Minnesota.
Butler's ascension to the Supreme Court in 1923 was marked by political maneuvering and controversy (see
Selection of Justices). A Democrat and a Roman Catholic, Butler's legal conservativism also attracted powerful Republicans, especially Chief Justice William Howard
Taft and Justice Willis
Van Devanter, a former railroad lawyer himself. After President Warren G. Harding, another Republican, selected Butler for the Court, the nominee attracted close scrutiny. Minnesota's senator Hendrik Shipstead charged that Butler's stance toward the
academic freedom of university professors showed that he was “not judicial in mind or attitude”; the nominee's hometown paper, the
St. Paul Dispatch, countered, “Why should any but a 100 per cent American sit on the bench of the highest court?” Roman Catholic and business groups backed Butler, while labor and progressive organizations opposed him with equal conviction. Yet, despite the lengthy debates, only eight senators ultimately voted against his confirmation.
Controversy followed Butler onto the Court. Taft considered him a reliable supporter of basic constitutional values, and Butler spoke eloquently of the need to protect individual liberties. “Abhorrence, however, great, of persistent and menacing crime will not excuse transgression in the courts of the legal rights of the worst offenders,” he wrote. And in
Olmstead v. United States (1928), in a memorable dissent, he condemned the use of wiretaps. But in
First Amendment cases, Butler's concern for liberty seemed to pale before his animus against dissenters. In another of his famous opinions, dissenting in
Near v. Minnesota (1931), he supported the constitutionality of a
prior‐restraint law from his native Minnesota (see
Speech and the Press).
More typically, Butler attracted criticism, both from contemporaries and later constitutional scholars, for his opposition to welfare‐state measures (see
Administrative State). In most cases involving railroads and utilities, for example, Butler invariably lined up against state regulations. During the 1930s, political foes dismissed him as simply one of the “Four Horsemen,” the reactionary quartet who fought a rearguard judicial action against President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal. Butler voted against the constitutionality of every New Deal measure that came before the Court in the 1930s. Opposing Roosevelt to the end, Pierce Butler died, at the age of seventy‐three, while still a member of the Court.
Bibliography
David J. Danelski , A Supreme Court Justice Is Appointed (1964).
Norman L. Rosenberg
