Hatton William Sumners was a Democratic Congressman from the Dallas, Texas area. He rose to become Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee.
Background
Hatton was born on May 30, 1875 on a farm in Boons Hill, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of William A. Sumners, a teacher and farmer, and of Anna Walker. During his childhood Sumners lived in Boons Hill, where his parents operated an academy. He then spent his adolescence on the family's sizable farm. There he became convinced "that we are only responsible for doing our best" with obstacles that "are the gymnastic paraphernalia of Nature. "
Education
Sumners briefly attended Garland High School and then began to read law in the offices of a Dallas firm.
Career
Admitted to the bar in 1897, Sumners was elected county attorney in 1900 on an antigambling platform. He was defeated in his bid for reelection in 1902, but regained the office in 1904. Returning to private practice in 1907, Sumners worked as a lobbyist for Texas cotton farmers and the Dallas business community. The resulting political connections enabled him to win election as a congressman-at-large in 1912.
In his early years in Congress, Sumners supported the policies of President Woodrow Wilson, though he had qualms about preparedness in 1916 and conscription in 1917.
He was named to the Judiciary Committee in 1918, and during the 1920's his congressional career prospered. Friendship with Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who called him the best lawyer in Congress, added to his influence in the selection of candidates for the federal bench. Sumners appeared in four cases before the Supreme Court as a spokesman for Congress, and he managed impeachment trials of three federal judges between 1926 and 1936. He became chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 1931, when the Democrats regained control of the House, and he assisted Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins when she confronted a Republican-inspired impeachment resolution in 1939.
In 1934 he helped draft a constitution for the Philippine Islands. But by 1935 disagreements over federal anticrime measures had strained relations between Sumners and the White House. Because of his Judiciary Committee chairmanship, Sumners was a central participant when Roosevelt proposed, in February 1937, to enlarge the membership of the Supreme Court so as to facilitate the appointment of justices more sympathetic to the New Deal.
Sumners had introduced legislation in 1935 to make it easier for members of the Supreme Court to retire with full salaries, and he had submitted the bill again in January 1937.
Sumners bottled up the "court-packing" bill in his committee and may have helped persuade Justice Willis Van Devanter to retire on May 18, a key setback for the court plan. On July 13 he told the House that the bill was creating havoc and urged that it be dropped. Within a month the administration, seeing inevitable defeat, accepted a mild congressional reform of the judiciary that left the Supreme Court intact.
Sumners was not the sole architect of Roosevelt's loss of the court fight, but he helped delay the bill until the forces opposed to packing the Supreme Court could assemble their coalition. The court battle isolated Sumners from the House leadership, and his influence gradually waned.
In March 1941 he said that striking war workers "may have to be sent to the electric chair. " Most of his time was spent giving speeches that warned of the loss of state power to the federal government. After a hard-fought reelection race in 1944, arising from his opposition to the president, Sumners retired from politics in 1946 to write and speak about government problems.
He died in Dallas.
Politics
He became the Democratic representative from the Fifth Congressional District in 1914 and was reelected every two years until 1946.
Views
Sumners considered government bureaucracy a prime danger to the nation. A frequent speaker before bar associations and civic groups, he denounced "this great big, expensive bureaucratic Federal machine. " He attributed the Great Depression to the country's having been "on a grand jazz" for a decade. Sumners tolerated the New Deal in its early years and voted for many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs.
Quotations:
After the war he wrote, "The past four years have been like a nightmare to me. "
Membership
He was a member of the Miller group in Washington.
Personality
He was balding, stoop-shouldered, and round-faced.
He was an effective speaker and a competent legislator with a sense of self-importance nurtured by his rise from youthful poverty.