James Francis Byrnes was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 2, 1879, the son of James F. Byrnes who died of tuberculosis six weeks before his birth and Elizabeth Mc- Sweeney Byrnes. Jimmy Byrnes’s grandparents were Irish Catholic immigrants.
Financial hardship forced Byrnes from school by the time he was 14, and he went to work in the office of Benjamin H. Rutledge, Jr., who traced his lineage back to one of the Supreme Court’s first justices, John Rutledge. Rutledge guided Byrnes’s attempt to further his education by after-hours reading and also aided him in obtaining a position as a court reporter. Byrnes supplemented his work in this position by reading law with Judge James A. Aldrich, eventually earning admission to the South Carolina bar in 1903.
Byrnes began his political career in 1908 when he was elected as a solicitor (district attorney). After a two-year term of service in this position, he made the leap to national politics by winning election to Congress, where he served as a South Carolina representative for the next 14 years. In the course of committee work in die House of Representatives, Byrnes made the acquaintance of the young assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1924 Byrnes made a run for the U.S. Senate and narrowly lost to Coleman L. Blease. Thereafter he returned to South Carolina and practiced law with tire firm of Nichols, Wyche, and Byrnes in Spartanburg. Six years later he threw himself into a rematch against Blease for a seat in the Senate, and this time it was Byrnes who was sent to Washington as a senator from South Carolina by a narrow margin.
In 1932 Senator Byrnes supported the presidential candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as an informal adviser to the future president. After Roosevelt’s election, the relationship between the two men deepened, and Byrnes established a reputation as the senator closest to the president. In the early years of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Byrnes was a dependable ally for the president’s programs, but his enthusiasm for die president’s domestic agenda diminished during Roosevelt’s second term of office. Toward the end of the 1930s, however, Roosevelt’s attention began to turn toward foreign affairs and the rising threat of Nazism. On diis issue, Byrnes’s moderate conservativism and its harmony with the president’s foreign policy cast him again into the role of presidential ally. By the end of the decade, Byrnes’s service to the Roosevelt administration had earned him regular mention as a possible Supreme Court appointee. Finally, in February 1941, Justice James Clark McReynolds retired, and on June 12 the president named Byrnes to fill the resulting vacancy on the Court. The Senate confirmed the appointment the same day. A little less than a month later, Byrnes resigned Ms seat in the Senate and took the oath of office as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. He spent one fruitful term in tffs august judicial seat.
For a time, Byrnes seemed poised to earn a place on the 1944 Democratic ticket as President Roosevelt’s vice-presidential running mate, but the president eventually supported Harry S. Truman for this spot. Byrnes labored on as “assistant president” until the spring of 1945, when he resigned shortly before Roosevelt’s death. Upon Truman’s inauguration as president, he quickly offered Byrnes a seat in his cabinet as secretary of state, which Byrnes accepted. He served in this capacity from 1945 to 1947, when he retired from public life and— nearing the age of 70—resumed a long-dor mant law practice. His political energy had not yet been depicted, however. In 1950 he ran for governor of South Carolina and was elected to his last political post. He served as governor until 1955, presiding over that state during the turbulent years that saw the Court on which he had formerly sat declare segregation unconstitutional. Though generally moderate on racial issues for a southern politician of his time, Byrnes was no friend of the Court’s desegregation decisions. In 1956 he published an article in U.S. News and World Report titled “The Supreme Court Must Be Curbed.” He receded from national prominence after this, but lived on until April 9, 1972, when he died of a heart attack in Columbia, South Carolina.
During his career, Byrnes served as a U. S. Representative (1911–1925), a U. S. Senator (1931–1941), a Justice of the Supreme Court (1941–1942), Secretary of State (1945–1947), and 104th governor of South Carolina (1951–1955). He is one of very few politicians to serve in all three branches of the American federal government while also being active in state government. He was a confidant of U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was one of the most powerful men in American domestic and foreign policy in the mid-1940s.
Justice Byrnes took advantage of a Supreme Court tradition giving new members to the Court die right to choose the first case for which they write an opinion, and for Ms own he chose the case of Edwards v. California (1941). The case involved a CaliforMa law-often referred to as an “anti-Okie” law-that prohibited anyone from bringing indigents into the state. Though the justices were united in their belief that the law was unconstitutional, they splintered into two camps when called on to explain this result. Byrnes represented the clear majority of justices, who found the law an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce. Justices Robert Jackson and William O. Douglas, however, would have recognized a right to travel as among those “privileges and immunities” guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment.
President Roosevelt had no sooner appointed James Byrnes to the Supreme Court dian he returned to his old political ally for advice and assistance on a variety of political matters. Along the way Byrnes managed to write 16 opinions for the Court during his one term, but a significant portion of his time was consumed with president’s business. Finally, on October 3, 1942, Byrnes relinquished his seat on the Court to serve the president full-time. He labored under the title of Director of Economic Stabilization for a time, and later as Director of War Mobilization, though Washington insiders dubbed him the “assistant president.”
He was Democratic before 1960s and Republican in 1960s–1972.
Physical Characteristics: James Francis Byrnes was short, thin, very energetic, and had sharp eyes.
James Francis Byrnes was married to Maude Perkins Busch. The couple had no children.
