Background
Sherman Minton, known by his friends as “Shay,” was born on October 20, 1890, on a farm near Georgetown, Indiana, the son of John Evans Minton and Emma Livers Minton.
Sherman Minton, known by his friends as “Shay,” was born on October 20, 1890, on a farm near Georgetown, Indiana, the son of John Evans Minton and Emma Livers Minton.
He graduated from New Albany High School in 1910 and then attended Indiana University, first as an undergraduate in a class that included Wendell L. Wilkie, Republican presidential candidate in 1940, and then as a law student. He graduated first in his class from Indiana School of Law in 1915 and then studied law for an additional year at Yale, where he obtained a master’s degree.
Minton returned to New Albanv in the fall of 1916 and began a legal practice. The United States entered World War I the same year, and Minton served as an infantry captain in Europe. When the war ended, he remained with the Army of Occupation, finding time to study law at the Sorbonne in Paris in the spring of 1919 and being finally discharged from the army in August of that year.
Upon returning to New Albany after the war, Minton resumed his legal practice. Over the following years he tried to win a seat in Congress but lost the Democratic primary in 1920 and then again in 1930. In the interim he practiced law, first in New Albany and then briefly in Miami, Florida. By 1928 he had returned to New Albany. One of his classmates from Indiana University, Paul McNutt a man Minton also knew from work together in American Ixgion activities—was elected govenor of Indiana in 1932. Minton’s prospects brightened considerably that year, when McNutt appointed him as public counselor to Indiana’s Public Service Commission. The following year, Minton’s success in lowering utility rates formed the basis for a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. Running as a New Dealer in 1934, Minton had no patience for arguments that the programs launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt violated the Constitution. “You can’t walk up to a hungry man today and say, ‘Here have a Constitution,”’ he insisted. “You can’t hand to the farmer who has been ground into the soil a Constitution and tell him to dig himself out.
Minton arrived in Washington along with other freshmen senators such as Harry S. Truman, and these two men formed a lasting friendship during their Senate days. Minton used his political influence to rail against the conservative justices on the Supreme Court who had declared key aspects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs unconstitutional. “The blight of the cold, dead hand of the Court must not be permitted to contaminate the blood stream of the Nation and destroy the right of the people to live and prosper,” he argued. Minton proposed requiring the concurrence of seven justices on the Court to invalidate a federal law. Shortly thereafter, when President Roosevelt proposed his “court-packing plan” in 1937, Minton, now assistant Democratic whip, was an ardent supporter. Although the president’s plan eventually collapsed and the Court veered away from its conservative activism, Minton’s experiences during these years made a lasting impression on him. Ever afterward he would be a proponent of judicial restraint.
In 1940 he lost a bid for reelection when Wendell L. Wilkie and other Republicans dominated the political contests ol that year in Indiana. But President Roosevelt rewarded Minton’s loyalty in the Senate by making him a presidential assistant. His brief service in this capacity included urging the president to support Senator Harry IYunian’s plan to investigate wartime fraud. As a result, the human Committee, as it became known, conducted high-profile investigations into fraud that made Truman a prominent national figure and paved
the way for his place as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944. In the meantime, Roosevelt appointed Minton a federal appellate judge in 1941 on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Truman’s ascension to the presidency on Roosevelt’s death in 1945 made Minton’s appointment to the nation’s highest court unsurprising when it was announced in 1949. Justice Wiley B. Rutledge died on September 10, and five days later Truman nominated Minton to fill the vacancy on the Court. Ironically, in light of his future career on the Court, opposition to the nomination came chiefly from the conservative end of the political spectrum, which feared that Minton would bring his New Deal political activism to the Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee requested the nominee to appear before it for questioning, but Minton declined. He was nevertheless confirmed by a vote of 48-16 on October 4,1949, and he took the oath of office as a Supreme Court justice eight days later.
Ill health finally forced Minton to retire from the Court on October 15, 1956. Neither he nor the nation had any illusions about the grandeur of his contribution to the Court during his seven years of service. “There will be more interest in who will succeed me than in my passing,” he announced on the day of his resignation. “I’m an echo.” He had already drifted to the periphery of the Court’s power during the later days of his tenure. Earl Warren, who became chief justice in 1954, soon joined with the Court’s liberal wing and Minton’s conservative influence consequently suffered a sharp decline. After leaving the Court, Minton returned to New Albany, where he died on April 9, 1965.
Those who had prognosticated liberal activism from the Hoosier justice, with either fond anticipation or fearful foreboding, soon discovered that Minton the justice was an entirely different creature than Minton the politician. The new justice drew a sharp distinction between the work of a judge and the work of a legislator. The judge, he believed, had to resist the impulse to approach social problems with the same creative zeal as the legislator. The judge existed only to correct the patent abuses of the other branches, which, by constitutional charge, were given more immediate responsibility for lawmaking.
This mind-set immediately propelled Minton into the conservative orbit of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, generally occupied as well by Justices Tom Clark, Harold Burton, and Stanley Reed, and placed him at odds with liberal justices such as his former Senate colleague, Hugo Black, and William O. Douglas. In par-ticular, and to the great consternation of liberal observers of the Court, Minton joined the Court’s cold warriors, who regularly sided with government efforts to restrain the perceived threat of domestic communism at the expense of ffee-speech interests. He also routinely supported government interests over the constitutional claims of criminal defendants. Only in die area of racial segregation did Minton depart steadfastly from the conservative mold of the time. He enthusiastically joined in the Court’s decisions dismantling segregation, culminating in the decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
He married Gertrude Burtz on August 11, 1917; the two would eventually have two sons and a daughter.