JUDICIARY: Supreme Matters

(See front cover)*

Seated within a three-panel screen, an old Negro pulls a red plush cord to swing open a small door and admit you to the Supreme Court of the U. S. Mounting two steps around a partition, you come abruptly into the court chamber. Facing you sit the nine Justices of the U. S. seated augustly behind their long desk-like bench. You immediately identify Chief Justice Taft, ponderous in the centre. The small semicircular chamber is dimly lighted. Faces, features, are not sharp. Level voices fall without echo in the shadows.

Scanning the bench, an inquisitive eye moving to the right, comes to rest upon a large man in the last high-backed chair. Attention is fastened by his breadth of black-gowned shoulder, breadth of fore head, breadth of jaw. Other Justices break in to ask attorneys questions, but this one sits silently intent upon the argument, his square chin cupped in his palm, his elbow propped on the table before him. His light blue eyes are small, concentrated, penetrating. His dark brown hair, quickly parted on the left, looks slightly disarranged. He is Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, the junior member of the Court.

Last week, through the Press, the long arm of Rumor reached out and tried to pluck Justice Stone from the sanctity of the supreme chamber and place him at the head of the Law Enforcement Commission which President Hoover is slowly selecting. Annoyed or embarrassed, Justice Stone protested: "The matter has not been proposed to me nor have I it under con sideration or in mind in any way."

A certain reasonableness underlay the Rumor. Between President Hoover and Justice Stone exists a thoroughgoing friendship. Justice Stone was in the Hoover family circle the night its head was nominated at Kansas City. He fished with the President-Elect Hoover off Florida, and there suggested the name of William DeWitt Mitchell for Attorney-General. He dropped in for a friendly morning chat the day Mr. Hoover became President. He was among the first asked to join the medicine-ball exercise at 7 a. m. back of the White House (see map, p. 10).

Justice Stone played guard on Amherst football teams when slender, rusty-haired Calvin Coolidge was there at college, a class behind. A powerful man of 200 lb., he knocked the wind out of President Hoover in one of the medicine-ball games last month. For two days little Hugh Gibson, U. S. Ambassador to Belgium (see p. 21), bore a red mark on his nose after attempting to catch one of Justice Stone's mighty throws. The Stone roughness was sufficient to cause protests to the President; reminders that, after all, it was "all-in-fun."

Also in the field of law does Justice Stone stand strongly forth. No legal job is too hard for him to tackle. Well has he always guarded the public interest. Within him is centered a broad and understanding humanity to temper his justice. Tackle, guard or centre—Justice Stone has always been a comfort to the coach, in Washington as on the Amherst Gridiron.