Colgate University.
Brown University.
Charles Evans Hughes and wife, 1922.
Portrait of Hughes as Chief Justice.
Hughes in Winona, Minnesota, during the 1916 presidential campaign campaigning on the Olympian.
Brown University.
Colgate University.
Charles Evans Hughes and wife, 1922.
Charles Evans Hughes, age 16.
Portrait of Hughes as Chief Justice.
Hughes in Winona, Minnesota, during the 1916 presidential campaign campaigning on the Olympian.
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1924
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(The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and Intern...)
The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926, brings together foreign, comparative, and international titles in a single resource. Its International Law component features works of some of the great legal theorists, including Gentili, Grotius, Selden, Zouche, Pufendorf, Bijnkershoek, Wolff, Vattel, Martens, Mackintosh, Wheaton, among others. The materials in this archive are drawn from three world-class American law libraries: the Yale Law Library, the George Washington University Law Library, and the Columbia Law Library.
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Ethnicity:
Charles Hughes was a descendant of Welsh immigrants.
Mr. Hughes was born on April 11, 1862, in Glen Falls, New York, United States. His parents, whose character would form the foundation of his own, were hardworking and religiously devout. His father, David Charles Hughes, was a Baptist minister, and his mother, Mary Catherine Connelly Hughes, was a former school teacher.
Charles Hughes, an only child, was precocious from an early age, reading English by the time he was three, Greek and German beginning when he was eight. When his parents tried to send their six-year-old son off to school, he suffered boredom and persuaded them to teach him at home by presenting them with the Charles E. Hughes Plan of Study. The appeal worked, and his parents directed his early education until the family moved to New York City, where his father became secretary of the American Bible Union and Hughes was enrolled in public school.
By the time he was 14, Charles Hughes had been admitted to Madison College (later to become Colgate University). His parents had sent him to college, hoping that he would become a minister, but his college years saw him fix his aspirations instead on a career in law. In 1878 he transferred to Brown University, where he excelled, gaining admittance to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his junior year, winning election as an editor of the student newspaper, and graduating third in his class.
By the fall of 1882, his father was able to support his entrance into Columbia Law School, from which he graduated with highest honors in 1884. Thereafter, he passed the bar examination with a score of 99.
Early in career Mr. Hughes settled instead for a teaching position with the Delaware Academy in Delhi, New York, where he supplemented his teaching responsibilities by reading law in the office of William M. Gleason. In 1884 he began work with the prestigious New York firm of Chamberlin, Carter, and Hornblower. Five years later Mr. Hughes became a partner in a reorganized version of the firm. Within a few years of his marriage, however, Mr. Hughes left the practice of law to teach at Cornell University Law School after suffering from the effects of ill health and overwork. His firm managed to lure him back after two years, but even then, Hughes supplemented his legal practice by teaching at Cornell and at New York Law School.
In the years that followed, Charles Hughes gradually acquired a reputation as one of New York’s brightest lawyers. In 1905 he gained statewide prominence after being designated counsel for a legislative committee investigating utility rates. Hughes ferreted out systematic abuses that had resulted in utility overcharges. That same year, another legislative committee drafted him to lead its investigation of insurance companies. Again, he sifted through the details and machinations of a complex industry to reveal the practices that padded the pockets of insurance executives and their cronies at the expense of the public. The following year, on the heels of these widely publicized and successful legislative crusades, Charles Evans Hughes was nominated as the Republican candidate for New York governor and won the general election handily. In this office, he championed a host of progressive measures, including workers compensation laws and public commissions to oversee utilities.
His reputation as a Republican reformer attracted the attention of President William Howard Taft, who appointed him on April 25, 1910, to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court when Justice David Brewer died. Hughes was easily confirmed by the Senate on May, 2 and took his seat at the beginning of the Court’s next term, on October 10, 1910. Mr. Taft had suggested to Charles Hughes the possibility of his being advanced to the Court’s chief seat should the position become open during the president’s term of office. But William Taft thought better of this when Chief Justice Melville Fuller died in the summer of 1910, for he aspired to sit in the seat of chief justice himself after leaving the presidency. "It seems strange," Mr. Taft declared, "that the one place in the government which I would have liked to fill myself I am forced to give to another." If he made the 48- year-old Charles Hughes chief justice, then that seat on the Court might never become vacant during his own lifetime. Accordingly, President Taft appointed Associate Justice Edward White - 65 years old and likely to retire within a decade or so - to the position of chief justice.
Charles Evans Hughes served six years on the Court as an associate justice, carving a reputation for himself as a progressive justice in the area of civil rights and on the issue of whether federal and state governments should have power to regulate economic matters. Mr. Hughes left the Court, however, when on June 7,1916, the Republican party nominated him as its candidate for president against the Democratic incumbent, President Woodrow Wilson. Hughes came close to the presidency, losing to Mr. Wilson by a narrow margin of 277 to 254 electoral votes and a popular vote of 9,126,300 to 8,546,789. With this defeat, Hughes returned to the private practice of law in New York City as the senior partner of Hughes, Rounds, Schurman, and Dwight, representing mainly corporate clients and appearing several times on their behalf before the Supreme Court on which he had previously sat.
In 1921 newly elected president Warren G. Harding immediately tapped Charles Hughes to be his secretary of state; he held this post for the next five years, into the administration of Calvin Coolidge. As secretary of state, Mr. Hughes spearheaded disarmament efforts after World War I and secured an international agreement guaranteeing Japan’s security in the Western Pacific and recognizing the Open Door principle with respect to China. After five years of diplomatic service, however, he returned once again to the private practice of law to shore up his personal finances.
During the years after Charles Hughes had resigned from the Court, President William Howard Taft had managed to achieve his ambition of being named chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In February 1930, though, after just nine years, ill health forced William Taft to resign; he died barely a month later. Twenty years earlier, Mr. Taft had declined to appoint Charles Hughes as chief justice, but now another president, Herbert Hoover, awarded Mr. Hughes with the appointment that President Taft had denied him. On the day Taft resigned, President Hoover announced his appointment of Charles Evans Hughes to fill the now vacant seat of chief justice. But the warm acclaim that had greeted his appointment as an associate justice of the Court in 1910 was absent in 1930. The New York lawyer’s frequent professional service on behalf of American corporate interests had made him suspect to many Democrats, and the Senate debated his nomination at length before finally confirming him as chief justice by a vote of 52-26 on February 24, 1930.
As the 1940s began, Chief Justice Hughes was nearly 80 years old. The nation had weathered its economic crisis and, through Mr. Hughes's leadership, the Court had weathered its showdown with a determined president. Above all, the chief justice was anxious to depart from the Court before his mental faculties departed him. Thus, on July 1, 1941, he resigned from the Court.
Charles Evans Hughes was a prominent attorney and academic. He became known as a progressive reformer and an admirer of Britain's New Liberalism, enacting legislation such as the Moreland Act.
To commemorate his achievements, on the 100th anniversary of Mr. Hughes's birth, the U.S. Post Office issued a commemorative stamp in his honor, on April 11, 1962, in Washington, District of Columbia. A number of schools, such as Charles Evans Hughes Junior High School (of Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, now closed), Charles Evans Hughes High School of New York City (later High School for the Humanities), Charles Evans Hughes Middle School in Long Beach, California, were named in his honor.
The New York City Bar Association has a room named after Charles Evans Hughes. Two portraits of him are hung in this room as well as one of his son, Charles Evans Hughes Jr. The Union League Club of New York, of which Mr. Hughes was once president, dedicated the Hughes Room in his honor featuring a portrait of him.
Hughes Court, an area of the Wriston Quadrangle at Brown University, is named for him. A boulder with a plaque dedicated to Charles Hughes's memory is located near the bandstand of City Park in Glens Falls, New York, near Crandall Public Library; it was dedicated in 1960 by the Chepontuc (now Jane Mc Crea) Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
(The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and Intern...)
Mr. Hughes belonged to the Baptist Church.
Hughes often voted with the Court’s conservatives on issues relating to government regulation of the economy. But his record in the area of civil rights and civil liberties was generally more progressive. Mr. Hughes served with a profound sense of responsibility, endorsing reform measures, and he was skeptical and terse with regard to politically motivated and populist policies, even in the form of legislation. He had preference for merit over favouritism in the appointments process and his rejection of certain popular policy proposals (e.g., equal pay for women).
Ideologically moderate, he supported federal governmental responsibility in regulating commerce and favoured First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Concerning foreign policy, he insisted that the United States refrain from recognizing the government of the Soviet Union until it recognized property rights and other elements central to capitalism. Charles Hughes played a leading role in defeating Roosevelt's plan, where the president proposed to “pack” the Supreme Court by appointing a new (and presumably liberal) justice to offset each sitting justice over the age of 70 who refused to retire.
Quotations:
"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."
"A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company."
"War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals."
"The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully."
"Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry."
"Dissents are appeals to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of another day."
"While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty."
"Publicity is a great purifier because it sets in action the forces of public opinion, and in this country public opinion controls the courses of the nation."
"The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known."
"Whatever I do, wherever I go, when the question of right or wrong comes up, it is decided by what Pa or Ma will say if I did it."
For many years, Charles Hughes was a member of the Union League Club of New York and served as its president from 1917 to 1919. In 1907, Mr. Hughes was elected to honorary membership in the Empire State Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. He was assigned national membership number 18,977. The same year Governor Charles Hughes became the first president of the newly formed Northern Baptist Convention - based at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, District of Columbia, of which he was a member. He also served as President of the New York State Bar Association.
Charles Hughes married one of his partner’s daughters, Antoinette Carter, on December 5, 1888, with whom he would have four children: a son, who would later serve as solicitor general of the United States, and three daughters.
