1930 The Battle Over the Supreme Court

Charles Evans Hughes, a major player in the fight over the Supreme Court between Franklin Roosevelt and conservatives, had been a liberal justice on the Supreme Court before stepping down in 1916 to run against Woodrow Wilson. Fourteen years later, President Hoover nominated Hughes to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. By this time, however, Hughes had grown into a conservative. As Time magazine put it: “the pure white flame of Liberalism had burned out in him to a sultry ash of Conservatism. … His mind had captured his heart.”

It was during his confirmation hearing in the Senate that these nomination fights lost their innocence and took on the color of ideological warfare. As Felix Frankfurter argued, “Let us face the fact that Justices of the Supreme Court are molders of policy, rather than impersonal vehicles of revealed truth.” Burton Wheeler, a Montana Democrat, said, “The Supreme Court is not only determining legal questions but it is likewise determining the great economic questions.”

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As radical and reform movements sprang up to combat the injustices of the industrial era, conservative judges saw themselves as fighting a holy war against what the historian Charles Beard called the “oncoming hosts of communism and anarchy.” The liberties they defended were, in the admiring words of the English jurist Henry Maine, a “bulwark of American individualism against democratic impatience and socialistic fantasy.”

-- Jeff Shesol, “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court”

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