Background
Frederick Moore Vinson was born on January 22, 1890, in Louisa, Kentucky, the second son of James Vinson and Virginia Ferguson Vinson. His father was a jailer in the small town of Louisa, located in Lawrence County.
Frederick Moore Vinson was born on January 22, 1890, in Louisa, Kentucky, the second son of James Vinson and Virginia Ferguson Vinson. His father was a jailer in the small town of Louisa, located in Lawrence County.
Vinson graduated from Kentucky Normal College in 1908 and earned a B.A. the following year from Centre College in Danville. He then earned his law degree from Centre College in 1911. Being a talented baseball player, he almost surrendered his prospective legal career to the hope of becoming a major-league ballplayer. Akhough he played baseball semiprofessionally, he never managed to win a spot in the majors, and so he returned home to Louisa and took up legal practice. By 1913 he had become city attorney.
Drafted during World War I, Vinson never made it overseas and was in officer training school in Arkansas when the war ended. After leaving the armed services he returned to Louisa, and within a few years he won his first political office as commonwealth attorney for the 32nd Judicial District of Kentucky' in 1921. Two years later he married Roberta Dixson. This union eventually produced two sons: Fred, Jr., and James Robert.
In 1924 local voters sent Vinson to Congress. He served front 1924 through 1929 before losing in a landslide year for Republicans. He was back in Congress by 1931, however, and he remained there until 1939. Vinson’s later congressional career coincided with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal era, and during these years the Kentucky congressman became nationally known as a leading member of die House Ways and Means Committee and as a tax expert. Though conservative by nature, Vinson generally supported Roosevelt, including the president’s failed “court-packing plan of 1937. In December of that year, Roosevelt appointed Vinson to the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and in the spring of 1938 he began a five-year term of serv-ice on the court. Toward the end of this period, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, appointed Vinson to serve as chief judge on the Emergency Court of Appeals, created during World War II to deal with war-related cases. By 1943, though, President Roosevelt had devised other uses for Fred Vinson’s political talents. He appointed Vinson director of die Office of Economic Stabilization in May 1943, followed by a brief assignment as head of the Federal Loan Agency in March 1945, and then director of the Office of War Mobilization.
After Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in 1945, the new president found a prominent place for Fred Vinson in his own administration by appointing him secretary of the treasury in July of that year. But 1 ruman became so impressed with his secretary’s management and personal skills that he soon designated Vinson for an even more prestigious post. The Supreme Court in the mid-1940s was a fractious collection of superior intellects and strong personalities deeply divided on fundamental issues of constitutional law. A decisive shift had occurred at the end of the previous decade, when conservative judicial opposition to President Roosevelt’s New Deal—era economic legislation finally collapsed and the Court abandoned any attempt to scrutinize regulations of the economy. But the Court almost immediately began to wrestle with its role in the area of civil liberties. Prominent liberals on the Court, such as Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, were anxious to flex the Court’s constitutional muscles to protect individual liberties from the intrusion of government. More conservative justices, however, such as Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson, believed that the lesson of judicial restraint learned by the Court in the late 1930s should be applied to issues relating to civil liberties as well. Two justices from these opposing camps, Black and Jackson, were especially at odds over Jackson’s belief that Black had improperly participated in a case from which he should have— in Jackson’s opinion—recused himself.
When Chief Justice Stone died suddenly in the spring of 1946, there was widespread spcculation that Jackson might be appointed to replace him. Jackson was on temporary leave from the Court at the time, serving as the chief American prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg. President Roosevelt had apparently held out to Jackson the promise of being chief justice after Stone, and many observers speculated that Truman would honor Roosevelt’s promise to Jackson. But Jackson was already at odds with Black, and promotion of a candidate from within the Court to the chief’s seat threatened further feuding and, perhaps, resignations from justices already on the Court. Fred Vinson had judicial experience, not to mention Iris experience in die legislative and executive branches; but more important, he seemed to possess the kind of temperament and management skills that might succeed in piloting the Court into less turbulent waters. Thus, on June 6, 1946, President Truman nominated Vinson to become the Court’s new chief justice.
President Truman never lost confidence in Fred Vinson’s abilities and, in fact, wished the Kentuckian to succeed him as president. But Vinson himself declined to make a presidential bid in 1952. It was just as well. Chief Justice Vinson died suddenly of a heart attack on September 8, 1953, in Washington, D.C., after just seven years on the Court.
Chief Justice Vinson did not come to the Court with a settled philosophy that he sought to impose on the structure of the law. He was more pragmatic than this, focusing more on each individual case than its place within some overarching pattern of results, and he had settled predispositions that displayed themselves unerringly in these decisions. More important, his long service in public life—especially his career as a legislator and as a member of the executive branch—inspired him with a copious trust in the capacities of these branches to do good. The judiciary, he thought, must exercise restraint so that federal and state governments could set about wrestling with the problems of post -World War II America. In the area of the First Amendment, Vinson was prepared to practice the same kind of defense toward laws restricting speech as the Court had learned to exercise with respect to laws that restricted or regulated economic activities in the late 1930s. Thus, he authored the Court’s opinion in Dennis v. United States (1951), which upheld the conviction of twelve Communist Party members under the Smith Act, which made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. Similarly, deference toward executive authority pressed Vinson into dissent in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), in which the Court’s majority held unconstitutional President Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills during the Korean War to assure the steady production of steel. For Vinson, Truman’s extraordinary assertion of power was justified by the “extraordinary times.” He believed that the framers feared “executive weakness” as much as executive over-reaching.
In one area, though, Chief Justice Vinson led his colleagues to challenge the power of government to discriminate on the grounds of race between its citizens. During his tenure as chief justice, the Court began its assault on the citadel of segregation that would finally reach its climax just after Vinson’s death. Vinson himself wrote the opinion for the Court in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which declared unconstitutional a state’s enforcement of racially restrictive covenants—that is, private real estate agreements that prevented owners of property from selling to members of a racial minority. He also spoke for the Court in two important cases that rejected segregated arrangements in higher education alleged to be “separate but equal” but Fred Moore Vinson 339 which were, in fact, anything but this. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), the Court held that segregation in classrooms, libraries, and university cafeterias violated the equal protection clause because they did not provide African-American students with an equal educational opportunity. Similarly, in Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the Court held that a black student prevented from attending the University of Texas Law School in favor of an obviously inferior substitute had not been accorded equal protection of the law.
In 1923 he married Roberta Dixson. This union eventually produced two sons: Fred, Jr., and James Robert.