Charles Evans Hughes - Chief Justice

Chief Justice

Herbert Hoover, who had appointed Hughes's son as Solicitor General in 1929, appointed Hughes Chief Justice of the United States on February 3, 1930. Hughes was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 13, 1930, and received commission the same day, serving in this capacity until 1941. Hughes replaced former President William Howard Taft, a fellow Republican who had also lost a presidential election to Woodrow Wilson (in 1912) and who, in 1910, had appointed Hughes to his first tenure on the Supreme Court.

Hughes' appointment was opposed by progressive elements in both parties who felt that he was too friendly to big business. Idaho Republican William E. Borah said on the United States Senate floor that confirming Hughes would constitute "placing upon the Court as Chief Justice one whose views are known upon these vital and important questions and whose views, in my opinion, however sincerely entertained, are not which ought to be incorporated in and made a permanent part of our legal and economic system." Nonetheless Hughes was confirmed as Chief Justice with a vote of 52 to 26.

Hughes as Chief Justice swore in President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, 1937 and 1941.

Upon his return to the court, more progressives had joined the bench and Hughes seemed determined to once again vote progressive and soon bring an end the longstanding pro-business Lochner era. During his early years as Chief Justice, however, the fear he had developed for an overblown bureaucracy during World War I undermined his optimism. Showing his old progressive image, he upheld legislation protecting civil rights and civil liberties and wrote the opinion for the Court in Near v. Minnesota 283 U.S. 697 (1931), which held prior restraint against the press is unconstitutional. Concerning economic regulation, however, he was still willing to uphold legislation which supported "freedom of opportunity" for individuals on the one hand and the "police power" of the state on the other but did not personally favor legislation that linked national economic planning and bureaucratic social welfare together. At first resisting Roosevelt's New Deal and building a consensus of centrist members of the court, Hughes used his influence to limit the liberal scope of Roosevelt's changes and would often strike down New Deal legislation he felt was poorly drafted and did not clearly specify how they were constitutional. By 1935, however, Hughes felt the court's four conservative Justices had disregarded common law and sought to curb their power.

Hughes was often aligned with the court's three liberal Justices Louis Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Benjamin Cardozo in finding some New Deal measures Constitutional, On one occasion, Hughes would side with the conservatives in striking down the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act in the 1936 case United States v. Butler, which held that the law was unconstitutional because its so-called tax policy was a coercive regulation rather than a tax measure and the federal government lacked authority to regulate agriculture, but surprisingly did not assign the majority opinion, a practice usually required for court's most senior justice who agrees with the majority opinion, and allowed Associate Justice Owen Roberts to speak for entire majority in his own words. It was accepted that he did not agree with the argument that the federal government lacked authority over agriculture and was going to write a separate opinion upholding the act's regulation policy while striking down the act's taxation policy on the grounds that it was a coercive regulation rather than a tax measure. However, Roberts convinced Hughes that he would side with him and the three liberal justices in future cases pertaining to the nation's agriculture which involved the Constitution's General Welfare Clause if he agreed to join his opinion.

By 1936, Hughes sensed the growing hostility in the court and could do little about it. In the 1936 case Carter v. Carter Coal Company, Hughes took a middle ground for both doctrinal and court-management reasons. Writing his own opinion, he joined the three liberal justices in upholding the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act's marketing provision but sided with Roberts and the four conservatives in striking down the act's provision which regulated local labor. By 1937, as the court leaned more in his favor, Hughes would renounce the position he took in the Carter case regarding local labor and ruled that the procedural methods which governed the Wagner Act's labor regulation provisions bore resemblance to the procedural methods which governed the railroad rates that the Interstate Commerce Commission was allowed to maintain in the 1914 Shreveport decision and thus demonstrated that Congress could use its commerce power to regulate local industrial labor as well.

In 1937, when Roosevelt attempted to pack the Court with six additional justices, Hughes worked behind the scenes to defeat the effort, which failed in the Senate. by rushing important New Deal legislation- such as Wagner Act and the Social Security Act- through the court and ensuring that the court's majority would uphold their constitutionality. The month after Roosevelt's court-packing announcement, Roberts, who had joined the four conservative Justices in successfully striking down important New Deal legislation, shocked the American public by siding with Hughes and the court's three liberal justices in striking down the court's previous ruling in the 1923 Adkins v. Children's Hospital case-which held that laws requiring minimum wage violated the Fifth Amendment's due process clause- and upholding the constitutionality of Washington state's minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. Because Roberts had previously sided with the four conservative justices and used the Adkins decision as the basis for striking down a similar minimum wage law the state of New York enforced in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo it was widely perceived that he only agreed to uphold the constitutionality of minimum wage as a result of the pressure that was put on the Supreme Court by the court-packing plan. However, both Hughes and Roberts acknowledged that the Chief Justice, in fact, had already convinced Roberts to change his method of voting months before Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan and that the effort he put into defeating the plan played only a small significance in determining how the court's majority made their decisions in future cases pertaining to New Deal legislation.

Following the overwhelming support that had been shown for the New Deal through Roosevelt's overwhelming re-election in November 1936, Hughes was able to persuade Roberts to no longer base his votes on political maneuvering and side with him in future cases regarding New Deal related policies. Roberts had voted to grant certiorari to hear the Parrish case before the election of 1936. Oral arguments occurred on December 16 and 17, 1936, with counsel for Parrish specifically asking the court to reconsider its decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, which had been the basis for striking down a New York minimum wage law in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo in the late spring of 1936.

Roberts indicated his desire to overturn Adkins immediately after oral arguments ended for the Parrish case on Dec. 17, 1936. The initial conference vote on Dec. 19, 1936 was split 4-4; with this even division on the Court, the holding of the Washington Supreme Court, finding the minimum wage statute constitutional, would stand. The eight voting justices anticipated Justice Stone—absent due to illness—would be the fifth vote necessary for a majority opinion affirming the constitutionality of the minimum wage law. As Hughes desired a clear and strong 5-4 affirmation of the Washington Supreme Court's judgment, rather than a 4-4 default affirmation, he convinced the other justices to wait until Stone's return before both deciding and announcing the case. In one of his notes from 1936, Hughes wrote that Roosevelt's re-election forced the court to depart from its "fortress in public opinion" and severely weakened its capability to base its rulings on either personal or political beliefs.

President Roosevelt announced his court reform bill on February 5, 1937, the day of the first conference vote after Stone's February 1, 1937 return to the bench. Roosevelt later made his justifications for the bill to the public on March 9, 1937 during his 9th Fireside Chat. The Court's opinion in Parrish was not published until March 29, 1937, after Roosevelt's radio address. Hughes wrote in his autobiographical notes that Roosevelt's court reform proposal "had not the slightest effect on our decision," but due to the delayed announcement of its decision the Court was characterized as retreating under fire.

Although Hughes wrote the opinion invalidating the National Recovery Administration in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States- though the decision was also a unanimous one upheld by all of the court's nine Justices-, he also wrote the opinions for the Court in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., NLRB v. Friedman-Harry Marks Clothing Co., and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish which approved some New Deal measures. Hughes supervised the move of the Court from its former quarters at the U.S. Capitol to the newly constructed Supreme Court building.

Hughes wrote twice as many constitutional opinions as any of his court's other members. "His opinions, in the view of one commentator, were concise and admirable, placing Hughes in the pantheon of great justices." His "remarkable intellectual and social gifts...made him a superb leader and administrator. He had a photographic memory that few, if any, of his colleagues could match. Yet he was generous, kind, and forebearing in an institution where egos generally come in only one size: extra large!"