CHIEF JUSTICE HUGHES -- A RECOLLECTION

William T. Gossett

Editor's Note

The fiftieth anniversary of the appointment of Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice occurred during 1980 and so did the seventy-fifth anniversary of his appointment as Associate Justice. The Yearbook of the Supreme Court Historical Society commemorates these milestones in the life of an extraordinary public servant with a special section in this issue.

In this section, Frederick Bernays Wiener's article tenders some additional evidence relevant to Hughes' appointment as Chief Justice. In a note about the literature of the Hughes' appointment, Jim Buchanan attempts to set Wiener's article in context. As an historic document, and especially for those who may not be able to attend, we are reprinting the catalogue of the exhibition devoted to Hughes' life which opened at the Supreme Court on October 3, 1980. We have added photographs of some of the items displayed in the exhibition and are pleased to reprint as well William Gossett's eloquent tribute.

For the last twenty years of the long and productive life of Charles Evans Hughes, I was privileged to be closely associated with him--first as law clerk and later as son-in-law. I came to know him as a singular human being as well as an imposing public figure. He was sensitive in his relations with others without being sentimental, witty without being frivolous, purposeful without being stubborn. He reasoned closely without being closed-mined, was tolerant without being lax, and calm without being indifferent. Above all, he was of rock-ribbed integrity without monolithic righteousness.

Charles Evans Hughes saw the law and the administration of justice not as tangential but as the very heart of our conduct as a people and our course as a nation, radiating out and bearing fatefully on all the apparatus and machinery of society and human relationships. He was far more than a superb legal technician. Indeed, of the fifty-seven years from his admission to the bar until his retirement, he spent fewer than half in the private practice of law and the rest in teaching, in the state and federal executive positions, and in the judiciary. The law to him was the very breath of humanity and of human affairs.

Hughes was born on April 11, 1862, in Glens Falls, New York, to David Charles and Mary Connelly Hughes. His father was a Welsh immigrant Baptist minister and his mother a former school teacher. Reading at three-and-a-half years old and familiar with the New Testament and the Psalms at five, he was able at six to persuade his parents to permit him to exchange formal schooling for a self-designed plan of home study under the guidance of his parents. This and a few years of more formal education at Public School No. 35 in New York City prepared him for college at the age of fourteen.

He attended two years at Madison College, now Colgate University. In 1878 he transferred to Brown University, from which he graduated in 1881. He made Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, was an editor of the Brunonian, participated in college politics, and was graduated third in the class at barely nineteen, the youngest member of the class.

The following year young Hughes taught Latin, Greek, algebra, and plane geometry at Delaware Academy in Delhi, New York, and studied law in a local lawyer's office. That experience confirmed his decision to pursue law as a career. He entered Columbia Law School in 1882, was graduated at the top of his class in 1884, and was admitted to the bar that year after scoring ninety-nine and a half on his bar examination.

Having worked without salary during the previous summer at Chamberlain, Carter, and Hornblower, Hughes entered that office as an associate in the fall of 1884 at a salary of $30 a month, with an increase of $5 every second month. This was the launching of his career which was to include the roles of public investigator, governor, Associate Justice, presidential candidate, international jurist and statesman, and Chief Justice of the United States.

We who were associated with Hughes as an active practicing lawyer between 1925 and 1930 had profound respect for his towering intellect. During that period most of his law business came from other lawyers--from private practitioners or from legal advisers of large corporations, although he also represented such noncorporate clients as the United Mine Workers --for example, in United Mine Workers v. Coronado Coal Co., 259 U.S. 344 (1922). He delivered many written opinions to clients and argued appeals involving difficult and complex questions of law. He argued as many cases in the Supreme Court as anyone outside the solicitor general's office, sometimes as many as four cases in a single week in that court. His practice embraced a broad range of clients and legal issues. And Judge Augustus N. Hand said of him: "He was a man whose equal I have never seen at the bar."

Although in the preparation of briefs and opinions he was supported by partners and members of the office staff, the final documents, especially the opinions, were invariably prepared by him. It was his custom to use two or three stenographers; one would be typing her notes while another was taking dictation. Within a few minutes of the completion of dictation, a transcribed draft would be available. Normally the draft of an opinion would be revised but once, although a brief might go through several revisions.

In the preparation of speeches, the same practice would be followed. Using a research assistant's memorandum, Hughes would prepare in longhand a sketchy outline of the speech, usually not more than forty-eight hours before it was to be delivered. From that outline he would dictate rapidly a draft of the speech, which normally would be revised only once. Later he would read the text aloud two or three times. Thus prepared, he would deliver the speech from memory without using the text or notes.

Similarly, in the argument of cases in appellate courts, Hughes' performance was consummate. Not only did he remember the names of the principal cases cited in his and the opposing briefs, he often startled opposing counsel and the judges by remembering the volume and page numbers of many of the cases.

Everyone who knew Hughes was immensely impressed, moreover, with the incredible speed at which he worked. He could absorb an entire paragraph almost at a glance and could read a treatise in an evening and a roomful of papers in a week; and when reading a book or document, he seemed literally to read down the middle of the page. Yet his professional burdens or public obligations were such as to require him to work long hours. When he was Chief Justice (a position he assumed at almost sixty-eight years of age) he arose at 6:45 A.M., had breakfast at 7:30, followed by a brisk walk, and was at his desk at 8:30. When the Court was in session, it was his custom to work until 10:00 P.M. He then would visit Mrs. Hughes and other members of the family who might be in Washington and would do some light reading before retiring at 11:00.

But in spite of the speed at which he worked, he did not give the impression of frenetic or hurried effort. Calmness was, indeed, one of his most consistent characteristics. He always appeared to be composed and in control of his emotions. The only exceptions known to members of the family were when his oldest daughter, Helen, died at the age of twenty-eight and when his wife died shortly after their fifty-seventh wedding anniversary. Although he had been prepared intellectually for his wife's death, when the reality of it came and he realized that it was about to occur, he was overcome.

When Hughes ran for governor of New York for the first time in 1906, the public learned what those who had been close to him already knew: that he was, in the words of one of the great journalists of the period, Ida M. Tarbell, "a buoyant and joyful person, fond of books . . . music, golf, mountain climbing, friends, family, college and church." Justice Frankfurter saw the full dimensions of Hughes when the latter was Chief Justice, conceding that the public image of the man was inclined to that of an Olympic presence incapable of the light moment or the eye that wandered occasionally from the perception of the duty that history and his countrymen had imposed on him.

About that image, Frankfurter wrote: although in public office "he may have acted on the realization that aloofness [was] indispensable to the effective discharge of [his] functions. What a caricature! He was genial though not promiscuous, full of fun and whimsy, a delightful tease and sparking storyteller, a responsive listener and stimulating talker, drawing without show or pedantry on the culture of a man of wide interests and catholic reading. . . . He was self-critical rather than self-righteous, extremely tolerant toward views he did not share and even deemed mischievous. . . ."

The tolerance that Frankfurter noticed was an integral part of the Hughes character, as was his disdain for pettiness. Everyone who knew Hughes--associates, opponents, colleagues, and rivals in the public service --attributed to him a strong and rugged character and strict adherence to his own inflexible code of ethics. Although he represented clients with complete fidelity, his sense of public responsibility always prevailed over the interests, however important, of any private client. "It is hard for some persons to understand," he said, "that when a lawyer of the right sort takes a public place, he brings to the public the same loyalty and singleness of purpose that he displayed in relation to his private clients."

It is difficult--perhaps impossible--to measure with any precision the effect of the lives of great men and women on their times and on history, for they not only shape events but are shaped by them. But the sources of the power of example exercised by great men and women can be measured--by the strength of their characters, by the integrity of their actions, by the brilliance of their intellects, and by the grace and tolerance of their bearing.

By these criteria Charles Evans Hughes stands before the bar of history as a truly great man. And in the slow but certain processes by which the verdict of posterity is reached, his name and his memory will live only in part because of his legal, administrative, diplomatic, and judicial talents and achievements--however exceptional they were. His name will endure largely because he epitomized what the democratic proposition is all about: that those human qualities that make for excellence in an individual will surface in the awareness of his countrymen and attach to their possessor the only nobility created and prized by democratic institutions.

Charles Evans Hughes was such a nobleman.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Excerpts from American Bar Association Journal, December 1973, Vol. 59. In addition to my own recollections and sources, some facts and quotations are taken from the two-volume biography by Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (Macmillan, 1951), and The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes, edited by David J. Danielski and Joseph S. Tulchin (Harvard, 1973).

Copyright 1981 by the Supreme Court Historical Society