John Hessin Clarke was an American lawyer and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1916 to 1922. Mr. Clarke was one of three justices nominated to the Supreme Court by President Wilson. He served during The White Court and The Taft Court.
Background
Mr. Clarke was born on September 18, 1857, in New Lisbon, Ohio, United States. He was the son of John Clarke and Melissa Hessin Clarke. His father was an immigrant who settled in New Lisbon, and established a prosperous career as a lawyer and later a county court judge.
Education
John Clarke attended high school in New Lisbon and later enrolled in Case Western Reserve University, from which he graduated in 1877, a member of Phi Delta Phi. He spent the following year studying law with his father, and he was admitted to the bar in the fall of 1878.
Career
John Clarke began his legal career practicing law with his father in New Lisbon but decided to relocate to Youngstown in 1880, where he set up his own legal practice and purchased an interest in a local Democratic newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator. Through Clarke’s influence the paper became a leading progressive voice. His legal practice, however, found its clientele chiefly among railroads and other corporate interests, for whom he proved himself to be an able advocate in court. This tension between Mr. Clarke’s own political commitments and those of his generally conservative business clients became a feature of his professional life; it followed him when he moved to Cleveland in 1897 to join the firm of Williamson and Cushing where, once again, he represented a variety of business interests, including the Nickle Plate Railroad.
Active early in political affairs, John Clarke initially seemed to have no aspirations for a political office himself. As a "Gold Bug," though, Mr. Clarke vigorously campaigned against William Jennings Bryan’s attempt to abolish the gold standard for currency. Finally, in 1904 he ran as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, but his progressive campaign suffered defeat at the hands of the incumbent, Mark Hanna. He made another bid for the Senate 10 years later but eventually dropped out of the race when President Woodrow Wilson appointed him as a judge on the federal district court for the northern district of Ohio. He served a rather undistinguished two years in this position, his tenure on the district court being chiefly remembered for the elaborate receptions he held for people being naturalized in his court.
When Associate Justice Charles Evans Hughes retired from the U.S. Supreme Court to pursue a presidential bid, President Wilson took the opportunity to nominate Mr. Clarke to fill the vacancy on July 14, 1916. Wilson had already placed one progressive on the high Court, Louis D. Brandeis, and he hoped that Clarke’s additional liberal influence would help to blunt the Court’s overall conservative stance. The Senate confirmed the nomination soon afterward, and John Clarke took the oath of office on October 9, 1916. Once on the Court, Mr. Clarke generally met Wilson’s expectations in his voting patterns. For example, he joined Justices Holmes, McKenna, and Brandeis in dissent when a majority of the Court struck down a federal law that prohibited the interstate transportation of goods made with child labor in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918).
His most famous majority opinion for the Court was one that cast Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a dissenter. In Abrams v. United States (1919), the Court upheld the conviction of certain Russian born socialists for distributing leaflets that castigated President Wilson for sending U.S. troops to Russia and called for a general workers' strike to protest this action. A majority of the Court, in an opinion written by Mr. Clarke, sustained the conviction of the defendants under the Sedition Act of 1918 and rejected the defendants' argument that their right to freedom of speech had been violated. Mr. Holmes, joined by Brandeis in his dissent, scoffed at the supposed threat to the United States being engineered by "the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man."
In the main, John Clarke did not create an altogether favorable impression on his colleagues while on the Court. Holmes complained that Clarke frequently made up his mind about the outcome of cases in advance, though he admitted missing his "affectionate companionship" once Clarke had resigned from the Court. Chief Justice William Howard Taft thought that Clarke imagined - wrongly - that deciding cases was like voting on bills in Congress. Justice McReynolds, notorious for his rudeness, made him the special object of his venom and went so far as to refuse to sign the Court’s farewell letter to Mr. Clarke on his resignation.
Politics
John Clarke was a Democrat. He generally favoured the extension of government regulatory powers over the economy, and his opinions were used later as precedents in some of the antitrust decisions backing the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His position on civil liberties was ambivalent, however, and he relied on a very narrow construction of First Amendment rights in his decisions concerning the suppression of free speech during the Red Scare of 1919-1920. He also welcomed the use of antitrust laws against monopolies and supported labor rights. But his progressivism on economic matters did not always follow into the territory of individual rights.