(b. Glen Falls, New York, 11 Apr. 1866; d. 28 Aug. 1948) US; Governor of New York 1906 – 10, Republican presidential candidate 1916 Hughes, the son of a Baptist preacher, was educated at Brown University and Columbia Law School, from which he graduated in 1884. He served as a legal counsel for New York in investigations of insurance firms and utility industries in the state. In 1906 he was elected Governor of New York and re-elected in 1908. In this post he established a Public Service Commission to regulate utilities and railroads. He resigned from his Governorship in October 1910 to become a member of the Supreme Court, nominated by President Taft. In the court he was part of the liberal voting block. He resigned in 1916 to seek the Republican nomination for the presidency, and won the nomination on the first ballot. The election was fought as the war clouds in Europe were gathering and the Republicans were strongly neutralist. In spite of being the favourite Hughes lost to the incumbent Woodrow Wilson by 49 per cent to 46 per cent of the popular vote.

Hughes was made Secretary of state by President Harding and served for a time under his successor Coolidge. He managed to slow down the legal armaments race and took steps to improve relations with Latin America. He returned to his private law practice in 1925. Between 1928 and 1930 he served as a judge at the International Court of Justice. In 1930 he began an eleven-year spell as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. This was a controversial period in legal history as the court ruled several New Deal measures unconstitutional. Hughes was unapologetic in striking down the National Recovery Act but supported a number of other measures. He vigorously opposed President Roosevelt's plans for "packing" the court with his own nominees to replace elderly judges.

(b. Glen Falls, N.Y., 11 Apr. 1862; d. Cape Cod, Mass., 27 Aug. 1948; interred Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, N.Y.), associate justice, 1910–1916, chief justice, 1930–1941. It was said of Charles Evans Hughes that no one ever slapped him on the back and called him Charlie. The stern, hardworking, religious Hughes was known for intelligence and integrity rather than conviviality.

Hughes's father, David Charles Hughes, emigrated to the United States from Wales and became a preacher. A Methodist, he converted to the Baptist church to marry a Baptist minister's daughter, Mary Connelly. The Dutch‐descended Connellys traced their American roots to before the Revolution. David and Mary Hughes shared a devotion to their religion, and to their prized only child, Charles. Educated mostly at home by his adoring parents, Charles was a precocious child; he began reading when he was three years old, studied in several languages, and could recite from the classics by the time he was nine. Throughout his life, he was known for intelligence and a photographic memory. Attempts to enroll the adultlike child in various schools failed, as boredom or ill health returned him to home study. His parents were of modest means and passed on to Charles humility and respect for education, hard work, and religion.

Early Career

Hughes entered Madison University (now Colgate University) at age fourteen and later transferred to Brown. He went on to graduate first in his class at Columbia Law School and breezed through the New York bar examination with a record high score. He was admitted to practice in 1884, at the age of twenty‐two. He worked for the firm of Chamberlin, Carter, and Hornblower, where he had earlier served as an unpaid clerk. Walter S. Carter, the senior partner, had a knack for picking legal talent for the emerging elite corporate bar of New York. Hughes attained much‐needed financial rewards through his association with Carter. He also met and married the great love of his life, Carter's daughter Antoinette.

Hughes became a partner, but overwork and poor health soon drove him to a teaching position at Cornell Law School. He basked in the intellectual stimulation of teaching and in a happy home life with Antoinette and their two small children. Financial pressures and guilt‐inducing letters from his father‐in‐law ended the Cornell idyll. Hughes reentered practice and made a minor fortune and major reputation as a leader of the corporate bar.

Hughes became a nationally known figure in the muckraking, trustbusting age as a result of his role as the studious head of the New York “gas inquiry.” His independence, diligence, and capacity for sorting through the endless financial tangle of ratemaking and pricegouging won him a following in the press and the public. He next took on an investigation of corruption in the insurance industry. Hughes's reputation as an independent‐minded Republican led to his election as governor of New York in 1906. Although corporate interest comprised both his former clients and his campaign supporters, Hughes showed independence in his two terms as governor, supporting creation of a Public Service Commission with strong powers to regulate corporate activity.

Service as Associate Justice

President William Howard Taft's nomination of Hughes to the Supreme Court was uncontroversial. Hughes shared the bench with the formidable Oliver Wendell Holmes and developed an intellectual camaraderie with him, although they often disagreed. In Bailey v. Alabama, (1911), Hughes wrote the majority opinion declaring unconstitutional a state statute that, in effect, enforced peonage. Holmes dissented. This case represents the contrasting ideology of Hughes, the conservative reformer, and Holmes, the unsentimental defender of legislative prerogative. Hughes, although a conservative, was more likely to use the power of the bench to engage in moderate social reform. In Frank v. Mangum, (1915), Holmes and Hughes joined as dissenters, decrying the “lynch law” trial of a Jew accused of murdering a young southern woman, during a time of antisemitic mob violence. Neither Hughes nor Holmes would tolerate baldfaced lawlessness.

As an associate justice, Hughes sat on the Court during a period of emerging challenges to economic legislation. Hughes voted to uphold congressional powers to regulate commerce, and he dissented in Coppage v. Kansas (1915), which forbade the prolabor Kansas legislature from outlawing the “yellow dog” contract. Hughes, who started his public career as a reformer, was capable of rejecting employer arguments that protective labor legislation interfered with freedom of contract (see Due Process, Substantive; Labor).

Hughes' national reputation made him an obvious choice to run for president against the popular incumbent Woodrow Wilson. Hughes was nominated by the Republicans, and on 10 June 1916 he resigned from the Court to commence his unsuccessful campaign. After the close election, he promptly returned to a successful private practice and to active participation in the civic affairs of the period.

From 1921 to 1925, Hughes served as secretary of state under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. He pushed for U.S. participation in the League of Nations, advocated international reduction of arms, promoted the World Court, and supported various international efforts to fend off another world war. In 1925, suffering from overwork, Hughes resigned his cabinet post to resume private practice. He briefly served on the International Court of Justice before his 1930 appointment by President Herbert Hoover to serve as chief justice of the United States.

Service as Chief Justice

Hughes led the Court in what were perhaps its most significant days since the time of Chief Justice John Marshall. The Great Depression and the gradual economic recovery, along with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's effort to coerce the court into supporting his policies through the court‐packing plan, marked Hughes's tenure. Hughes also managed the court during the period when the great Justice Holmes was failing in health and when the strongminded liberal, Louis Brandeis shared the bench with stubborn, conservative old‐timers. Hughes was said to possess a diplomacy that limited acrimony and promoted efficiency in the beleagured Court.

Substantively, Hughes was a moderate, capable of activism when, in his view, the Constitution so compelled. Hughes supported civil liberties, generally voting in favor of free speech rights, as in Stromberg v. California (1931) and Herndon v. Lowry (1937).

Hughes also supported the rights of the accused in the infamous Scottsboro Boys cases, in which African‐American youths were sentenced to death on dubious rape charges (see Powell v. Alabama, 1932). Hughes looked realistically at the facts when racial discrimination was probable. A true believer in the sanctity of the legal process, he was outraged by the flagrantly racist practices common in the criminal justice system of his time. In cases such as Brown v. Mississippi (1936), in which authorities had obtained confessions by torturing African‐American defendants, Hughes responded with angry denunciation (see Race and Racism).

When the New Deal legislation hit the courts, Hughes again voted as an independent‐minded, moderate reformer. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), he opposed the National Recovery Act as too broad an allocation of power, although at other times he had supported state and federal regulatory powers, as in Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934).

Roosevelt grew dismayed at the Court's repeated rejection of legislation designed to combat the depression. After his reelection in 1936 by a resounding landslide, Roosevelt proposed a bill—known as the court‐packing plan—to add judges to the Court. After the announcement of Roosevelt's plan, the Court handed down progovernment decisions in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), with Hughes writing for the majority, and National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937), which sustained the National Labor Relations Act.

In spite of his support for government economic regulation in the past, Hughes was now seen by some as capitulating to Roosevelt's threats. Hughes maintained that nothing in his legal analysis had changed. Roosevelt withdrew his controversial plan.

Hughes was determined to retire before his capacities faded, and he resigned on 1 July 1941. In his retirement years he enjoyed time with his family, and he organized records of his career for the benefit of historians. He died in 1948.

Bibliography

• Samuel Hendel, Charles Evans Hughes and the Supreme Court (1951).
• Merlo Pussey, Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols. (1951)

— Mari J. Matsuda

The American jurist and statesman Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) served as secretary of state in two administrations and was a chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Charles Evans Hughes was born at Glens Falls, N.Y., on April 14, 1862, the son of a minister. Precocious and gifted with a phenomenal memory, Hughes entered Madison University at the age of 14, transferring later to Brown University. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 1884. For the next 20 years he practiced law, briefly interrupting his work to teach law at Cornell.

At the age of 43 Hughes was chosen by a legislative committee to investigate the gas and electric industry in New York. His brilliant success in exposing extortionate rates led to his appointment as investigator of the insurance scandals in New York. In 1906 he was nominated as the Republican gubernatorial candidate. He won in a bitter campaign against William Randolph Hearst.

Hughes was a vigorous governor. He won a battle for the regulation of public utilities, strove to stamp out racetrack gambling, and was interested in conservation and in an employment compensation law. He was an exacting administrator, demanding high standards.

After a second term as governor, Hughes was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court by President William Howard Taft. He distinguished himself by supporting national railroad rate regulation and wrote one of the most important decisions in this field. In 1916 Hughes resigned from the Court to accept the Republican presidential nomination. He was beaten by a narrow margin in the ensuing campaign against Woodrow Wilson. In 1920 Hughes advocated ratification of the League of Nations treaty with reservations and urged the election of Warren Harding to implement acceptance. However, once appointed Harding's secretary of state, he made no effort to secure American adherence to the League Covenant.

Hughes was a brilliant secretary of state. He began by calling the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, at which he electrified the delegates by proposing a specific schedule for reducing the battleship force of the great naval powers. After some jockeying, a treaty was signed. In a significant concession to Japan, the United States agreed not to increase its fortifications in the Far Pacific. Hughes also brought about a partial settlement of the vexing question of German World War I reparations, gave a more precise definition to the Monroe Doctrine, and improved the quality of the U.S. Foreign service.

After 1925 Hughes for the most part practiced law until, in 1930, he was nominated by President Herbert Hoover as chief justice of the United States. Hughes presided over a Court badly divided and hostile to the New Deal of incoming president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He joined in the Court's decision to set aside the National Recovery Act of 1934 and in the ruling against the Agricultural Recovery Act of 1935. When President Roosevelt advanced his famous Court-packing plan in 1937, Hughes carefully pulverized the President's argument that the Court was behind in its work. This sparring ended when Hughes joined four other justices in sustaining the Wagner Labor Relations Act, an important piece of New Deal legislation. Hughes always maintained that he acted on the basis of the law, not political considerations.

Hughes took an advanced stand on civil rights, especially in cases involving African American rights, and he was a firm advocate of freedom of the press. He resigned from the Court in 1941 and died on Aug. 27, 1948.

Further Reading

The authorized biography of Hughes is Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (2 vols., 1951). A briefer study is Dexter Perkins, Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (1956). A study of the Progressive movement in New York State, with the focus upon Hughes's years as governor, is Robert F. Wesser, Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910 (1967).

Additional Sources

Perkins, Dexter, Charles Evans Hughes and American democratic statesmanship, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Pusey, Merlo John, Charles Evans Hughes, New York: Garland Pub., 1979.

For more information on Charles Evans Hughes, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: Apr. 11, 1862, Glens Falls, N.Y.
• Education: Colgate University, 1876–78; Brown University, B.A., 1881; M.A., 1884; Columbia Law School, LL.B., 1884
• Other government service: special counsel, New York State Investigating Commissions, 1905–6; governor of New York, 1907–11; U.S. secretary of state, 1921–25; U.S. delegate, Washington Armament Conference, 1921; U.S. member, Permanent Court of Arbitration, 1926–30; judge, Permanent Court of International Justice, 1928–30
• Appointed by President William Howard Taft to be associate justice Apr. 25, 1910; replaced David Brewer, who died; appointed by President Herbert Hoover to be chief justice Feb. 3, 1930; replaced Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who retired
• Supreme Court term: confirmed as associate justice by the Senate May 2, 1910, by a voice vote; resigned June 10, 1916, to become Republican party candidate for President; confirmed by the Senate as chief justice Feb. 13, 1930, by a 52–26 vote; retired July 1, 1941
• Died: Aug. 27, 1948, Cape Cod, Mass. Charles Evans Hughes served two terms on the Supreme Court, first as an associate justice (1910–16) and then as the chief justice (1930–41). He resigned from his first Court term to become the Republican party candidate for President. He lost to his Democratic party opponent, President Woodrow Wilson, by only 23 electoral votes.

Hughes served two Republican Presidents, Harding and Coolidge, as secretary of state. In this role, he negotiated several important treaties to limit international weapons buildups and promote world peace. He was a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice when President Herbert Hoover appointed him to succeed William Howard Taft as chief justice of the United States.

Under Hughes's leadership, the Supreme Court actively protected the constitutional rights of individuals. In Stromberg v. California (1931), Near v. Minnesota (1931), and DeJonge v. Oregon (1937), Hughes used the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to deny state governments the power to abridge 1st Amendment freedoms of speech, press, and assembly. He also weakened the “separate but equal” doctrine on racial segregation. In his opinion for the Court in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Hughes wrote that a state university had violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause by its refusal to admit a qualified African-American student to its law school.

During President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term (1933–37), Hughes influenced the Court to reject key parts of the President's New Deal program that, according to the Court's majority, gave the federal government too much power to regulate or direct private businesses in their relationships with workers and consumers. Hughes also successfully resisted Roosevelt's court-packing plan, by which the President had hoped to add justices to the Court who would support his New Deal.

After 1937, however, Hughes began to support important New Deal legislation, to the delight of President Roosevelt and his supporters. It seems that Hughes recognized that the vast majority of the American people supported Roosevelt's programs. They had voted overwhelmingly for his reelection in 1936. So Hughes bowed to the election returns and ceased to be a major obstacle to the President's program.

Upon his retirement in 1941, Hughes was hailed as a great chief justice. In 1942 the American Bar Association honored Hughes with its medal for distinguished contributions to the law. (1937); Near v. Minnesota; Stromberg v. California

See also Court-Packing Plan

Sources

• Merlo Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1951)

(1862-1948), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Hughes had an extraordinary public career. In addition to serving as chief justice in 1930-1941, he was New York governor (1907-1910), Supreme Court justice (1910-1916), Republican presidential candidate (1916), secretary of state (1921-1925), and World Court judge (1928-1930). His rise in public life was due largely to his intelligence, sense of duty, capacity for hard work, and self-sufficiency.

A precocious child, Hughes learned to read at the age of three and a half. Before he was six, he was reading and reciting verses from the New Testament, doing mental arithmetic, and studying French and German. After only three and a half years of formal schooling, he graduated from high school at the age of thirteen. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University, Hughes went to Columbia Law School, where he ranked first in his class. When he took the New York bar examination in 1884, he received the highest grade given up to that time, 99 1/2 percent. He had a photographic memory and could read a paragraph at a glance, a treatise in an evening. These abilities made Hughes a formidable opponent at the bar--he practiced law for almost thirty years--and contributed to his success as a politician, judge, and negotiator.

To Hughes, duty meant doing worthy things and doing them well. He drove himself mercilessly. His sense of duty led him to public service and enabled him to excel in almost everything he undertook. Hughes had no personal or political advisers, no favorites, no confidants. Herbert Hoover once said that he was the most self-contained man he had ever known. He made his own judgments based on his own analyses. At work, he was organized, intense, and serious, and had little time for pleasantries. That side of him gave rise to an aloof, cool, and humorless public image. At home, however, he showed warmth and humor; he was a sensitive husband and a caring father of three children.

Hughes came close to being elected president in 1916. A shift of less than four thousand votes in California would have given him that state's electoral votes and the presidency. If Hughes had not projected such an austere public image (or if he had secured the support of Governor Hiram W. Johnson), he would probably have been elected.

As secretary of state in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, Hughes negotiated a separate peace treaty with Germany when the Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. He also chaired the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1921-1922, supported U.S. participation in the World Court, and withheld American recognition of the Soviet Union. Although he served two presidents who made political capital of rejecting Woodrow Wilson's vision of internationalism, he conducted a foreign policy that recognized the international responsibilities of the United States. In Latin America he sought a means to reduce U.S. intervention while defending a traditional conception of the national interest. In Europe he asserted a constructive role for the United States while avoiding formal commitments that would have involved Congress or excited public opinion.

As chief justice, Hughes led the Supreme Court during one of its most difficult periods. He presided over the Court's transformation of its basic role from defender of property rights to protector of civil liberties, writing the period's landmark opinions on freedom of speech and press--Near v. Minnesota, Stromberg v. California, and DeJonge v. Oregon. He also successfully opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937.

Bibliography:

David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes (1973); Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (1951).

Author:

David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin

See also Elections: 1916; Supreme Court.

(hyūz) , 1862–1948, American statesman and jurist, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1910–16), U.S. Secretary of State (1921–25), and eleventh Chief Justice of the United States (1930–41), b. Glens Falls, N.Y.

Political and Diplomatic Career

A graduate of Columbia law school, he was admitted to the bar in 1884 and practiced law in New York City, where he advanced rapidly in his profession. He served (1905) as counsel for a committee of the New York state legislature investigating gas companies and, as counsel (1905–6) for another state investigating committee, achieved national prominence for his exposure of corrupt practices of insurance companies in New York. This led to his election (1906) as Republican governor of New York. In this post (1907–10), Hughes brought about the establishment of the public service commission, the passage of various insurance-law reforms, and the enactment of much labor legislation. He resigned the governorship after President Taft appointed him (1910) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, but left the Court in 1916 to run for President on the Republican ticket.

The election was one of the closest presidential contests in American history, Woodrow Wilson defeating Hughes by an electoral vote of 277 to 254 and a popular vote of 9,129,606 to 8,538,221. The vote of California, which went to Wilson by less than 4,000 votes largely because of the disaffection of Hiram Johnson, decided the election. Hughes again devoted himself to his law practice. In 1921, President Warren Harding appointed him Secretary of State. He continued in this office under President Coolidge. Hughes prepared plans for the limitation of naval armaments at the Washington Conference (see naval conferences), directed negotiations for several important foreign treaties, and vastly increased the prestige of the U.S. Dept. of State. He was a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1926–30) and a judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice (1928–30).

Supreme Court Chief Justice

In 1930, Hughes was appointed Chief Justice of the United States by President Hoover; he retired in 1941. As Chief Justice, Hughes generally held a moderately conservative position, and was often a swing vote on a court divided between conservative and liberal factions. The Hughes court helped develop the modern notion of freedom of speech through such decisions as Near v. Minnesota (1931), which largely voided all laws permitting prior restraint of press publication. More often than not, he voted to uphold controversial legislation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, though in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), he wrote the opinion that found the act that created the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional. He vigorously opposed Roosevelt's unsuccessful effort to reorganize the Supreme Court in 1937.

Bibliography

Many of Hughes's addresses were published in The Pathway to Peace (1925), The Supreme Court of the United States (1928), Our Relations to the Nations of the Western Hemisphere (1928), Pan-American Peace Plans (1929), and Nations United for Peace (1945). See his autobiographical notes, ed. by D. J. Danelski and J. S. Tulchin (1973); biographies by B. Glad (1966) and R. F. Wesser (1967).

The long public career of Charles Evans Hughes prepared him to be a powerful chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Hughes was a legal and political dynamo. Beginning as a lawyer and law professor in New York in the 1880s, he became known nationally for his role in investigating power utilities and the insurance industry. He went on to a career in national and international affairs—first as a two-term governor of New York, second as a Republican nominee for president, and third as secretary of state. He was twice appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, serving as an associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and as chief justice from 1930 to 1941. His intellectual vigor and strong hand guided the Court through the critical period of the New Deal era when it made significant changes in its views on the constitutional limits on government power.

Hughes was born April 11, 1862, in Glen Falls, New York. Educated at Columbia University Law School, he spent his twenties and thirties in private practice and teaching law at Columbia and Cornell Universities. His expertise was in commercial law and by the time he was in his forties he had built a considerable reputation in that area. The New York state legislature chose him in 1905 to lead public investigations of the gas and electrical utilities in New York City and to probe the state's insurance industry. His work not only resulted in groundbreaking regulatory plans, later highly influential across the United States, but also catapulted Hughes into a political career. He immediately ran for governor of New York and twice won election to that office as a politician known for independence of mind and commitment to administrative reform. In 1910, his second term as governor had not yet expired when he stepped down and accepted President William Howard Taft's appointment to the Supreme Court.

This move characterized the lifelong tension between Hughes's attractions to the legal and political spheres. He left public office to join the Court; later he would leave the Court to run for office again, then return to the Court as chief justice. In his nearly seven years on the Court as an associate justice, he displayed a flexibility of thought that led him to side at times with liberals and at times with the conservative majority. His most significant opinions turned on the issue of federal power. In particular, these opinions weighed the extent to which the Commerce Clause of the Constitution gave the federal government authority to regulate the national economy. The opinions were delivered in the Minnesota and Shreveport Rate cases, in which the Court's decisions laid the groundwork for the expansion of federal regulation in the years to come (Simpson v. Shepard, 230 U.S. 352, 33 S. Ct. 729, 57 L. Ed. 1511 [1913]; Houston, East & West Texas Railway Co. v. United States, 234 U.S. 342, 34 S. Ct. 833, 58 L. Ed. 1341 [1914]).

The middle years of Hughes's career saw tumultuous change. In 1916 he stepped down from the Court to return to politics. Although he had not actively sought the Republican party's nomination for president, the party drafted him, and he reluctantly agreed to run against Woodrow Wilson. Despite a hard-fought campaign, Hughes lost the close election and returned to private practice. His respite from public service was brief. In 1921 President Warren G. Harding appointed Hughes secretary of state, a difficult position because of the challenges facing the United States in the aftermath of World War I: the war debt, reparations, the newly established Soviet Union, and especially relations with East Asia. Naval disarmament ranked high among Hughes's concerns. In 1921 and 1922, he organized the Washington Conference, which for nearly a decade curbed naval growth and brought stability to the western Pacific.

The final chapter in Hughes's career returned him to the Supreme Court. Hughes served as secretary of state to Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, then resigned in 1925 to work in private practice. In 1930 President Herbert Hoover nominated him for chief justice. Bitter opponents, critical of Hughes's political career and his earlier resignation from the Court, failed to block his appointment in a confirmation vote of 52-26. At age sixty-eight, Hughes became the oldest man ever to be chosen chief justice.

The Hughes Court sat during a controversial period in U.S. legal history. The Depression years had brought misery and a radical federal response. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic recovery plans, known collectively as the New Deal, met opposition in Congress and from the justices of the Court. Several pieces of New Deal legislation faced constitutional tests and failed. After unanimously holding unconstitutional the National Industrial Recovery Act (48 Stat. 195 [1933]) in Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 55 S. Ct. 837, 79 L. Ed. 1570 (1935), the Court provoked a battle with the frustrated president. Roosevelt proposed an increase to the number of seats on the Court, hoping to then pack the Court with justices favorable to his views. Hughes wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a move to help thwart Roosevelt's plan.

By taking a largely dim view of both federal and state regulatory power, the Hughes Court differed little from its conservative predecessors. In 1937 this changed dramatically. In upholding the National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C.A. §151 et seq., Hughes wrote a landmark opinion that greatly strengthened the labor movement (NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 57 S. Ct. 615, 81 L. Ed. 893 [1937]). Also that year the Court upheld a state minimum wage law, in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379, 57 S. Ct. 578, 81 L. Ed. 703. The Parish decision was a striking departure from rulings of previous decades. Only fifteen years earlier, for example, the Court had refused to force employers of adult women to pay a minimum wage, viewing such a requirement as an unconstitutional infringement of the liberty of contract. The 1937 decisions together have been called a constitutional revolution because they marked a great change in jurisprudence that liberalized the Court's view of government power.

When Hughes retired at last in 1941, at age eighty, he had made a powerful impression on the law and on the Court. During his tenure as chief justice, he had shown the same flexibility of mind that marked his period as an associate justice: siding alternately with liberal and conservative colleagues, he often cast the swing vote. He had clearly run the Court with a strong hand, not only in leading the discussion but frequently in persuading justices to vote with him. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who served under Hughes, likened him to the conductor of an orchestra: "He took his seat at the center of the Court with a mastery, I suspect, unparalleled in the history of the Court."

Hughes died August 27, 1948, in Osterville, Massachusetts. Succeeding generations have compared his bold leadership to that of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who headed the Court two decades later.

Quotes:

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."

"The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known."

"I believe in work, hard work, and long hours of work. Men do not breakdown from overwork, but from worry and dissipation."

"The power of administrative bodies to make finding of fact which may be treated as conclusive, if there is evidence both ways, is a power of enormous consequence. An unscrupulous administrator might be tempted to say Let me find the facts for the people of my country, and I care little who lays down the general principles."

"We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution."