Background
He was born in Louisa, Kentucky on January 22, 1890. His father, then the jailer, also farmed, operated several businesses, and served as a town marshal. Young Fred was raised in a rather disciplinarian household.
He was born in Louisa, Kentucky on January 22, 1890. His father, then the jailer, also farmed, operated several businesses, and served as a town marshal. Young Fred was raised in a rather disciplinarian household.
After receiving primary and secondary schooling in Louisa and nearby Cattlesburg, he matriculated at the Kentucky Normal School, from which he graduated in 1908. Vinson then attended Centre College, earning both a B. A. and a law degree from that institution and compiling the highest average in the history of its law school. From 1911 to 1923 he practiced law in Louisa, also serving briefly as city attorney and commonwealth attorney.
In 1923 Vinson won a special election to fill a vacant seat in the U. S. House of Representatives. Except for two years following the election of 1928, which he lost because of his support of Al Smith's presidential candidacy, he remained in the House until 1938. At first his committee assignments were poor, but after working his way up through Military Affairs and Appropriations, he became a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee in 1931. There Vinson earned a reputation as a tax expert, and during the New Deal he played a major role in drafting such crucial legislation as the Social Security Act. Although basically conservative, he loyally supported the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, even backing the president's attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court.
Loyalty and service earned him a nomination to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1938. Although remaining there for five years, Vinson found the life too quiet and cloistered. In 1942 he agreed to serve as chief judge of the Emergency Court of Appeals, and when Roosevelt offered to make him director of economic stabilization in May 1943 he accepted enthusiastically.
During his 21 months in that position Vinson was remarkably successful in checking inflation. In August 1945 he left to become federal loan administrator, and a month later he took over the Office of War Mobilization and Re-conversion. There Vinson managed to reorient the economy from war production to peace production while minimizing disputes between civilian agencies and the military. President Truman rewarded him with appointment as secretary of the treasury. Vinson's achievements during his 11 months in that position included inauguration of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund.
When death claimed Chief Justice Harlan Stone in 1946 Harry Truman, greatly impressed with Vinson's record and abilities, asked him to take charge of a faction-ridden Supreme Court. Vinson failed to unite it. Although public quarreling among the justices ceased, deep intellectual divisions persisted, and the excess of dissenting and concurring opinions which had damaged the Stone Court's reputation continued. Vinson provided no intellectual leadership. Indeed, his most notable achievement was cutting the Court's workload back to mid-19th-century levels through vigorous use of its power to decide what cases it would hear.
Vinson wrote fewer than a half dozen majority opinions of profound public consequence. The common characteristic of his judicial expositions was support for governmental authority against claims of individual right. Probably because of his experiences in Congress during the Depression and in the executive branch during World War II, he considered strong government essential to the survival of any political society and a strong national government vital to the United States. Vinson almost always resolved state-federal conflicts in Washington's favor. He also championed presidential power, especially in times of national emergency. Thus, when the Court ruled that Truman could not seize the nation's steel mills during the Korean War, the chief justice dissented strongly. He was intensely patriotic, and for him the essence of patriotism was giving priority to the interests of the government, especially during a crisis.
Viewing postwar America as in almost perpetual crisis, Vinson seldom decided a difficult civil liberties issue in favor of the individual. Believing his country was in a de facto state of war with international Communism, he modified First Amendment doctrine in a restrictive direction in order to accommodate the conviction of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act and to sustain the anti-Communist affidavit provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. Vinson also endorsed loyalty oaths, the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, and harsh treatment of aliens. In criminal procedure cases, too, he assigned far greater weight to the interests of society than to the rights of the individual. He voted to increase the permissible breadth of searches and seizures, decrease safeguards against the use of forced confessions, and maintain limitations on the right to counsel. In terms of support for civil liberties claims, Vinson ranked next to last among the 11 justices who served between 1946 and 1952.
Contrasting starkly but deceptively with this dismal record are his opinions in three major civil rights cases. Vinson spoke for the Court when it forbade judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants. He was also its spokesman when it held that neither a separate law school for African Americans in Texas nor an internally segregated education graduate program in Oklahoma satisfied the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment. These decisions are often viewed as precursors of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held separation of the races in public schools unconstitutional. But Vinson's opinions tended to minimize their legal impact. He probably went along with these unanimous rulings less out of conviction than because of a desire to support policy positions of the Truman administration, to which he remained intensely loyal, and a determination to deprive the Communists of a propaganda issue. It is notable that Vinson was the only member of his Court to vote against African American claims in all four of the non-unanimous civil rights cases it decided and that before his death on September 8, 1953, he voted against the position the Court eventually took in Brown. Even in the area of civil rights, Fred Vinson was far from a great chief justice.
A portrait of Vinson hangs in the hallway of the chapter house of the Kentucky Alpha-Delta chapter of Phi Delta Theta international fraternity, at Centre College. Vinson was a member of the chapter in his years at Centre. Affectionately known as "Dead Fred", the portrait is taken by fraternity members to Centre football and basketball games and other events.
Quotations:
"The problems we face are human problems and therefore are capable of human solutions. "
"Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change. "
"There is a vast difference - a constitutional difference-between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar. "
While at Centre College, he was a member of the Kentucky Alpha Delta chapter of Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
Vinson married Julia Roberta Dixon on January 24, 1924 in Ashland, Kentucky. They had two sons.
He married the former Nell Morrison and had two children.
He married the former Margaret Russell and had four children.
