JUDICIARY: The Big Debate

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By 1937 he had gone through one more confusing transformation. On the private side, Charles the Baptist, the human icicle and animated feather duster Chilly Charlie had become one of Washington's favorite dinner guests. He and Mrs. Hughes go out only on Saturday nights and are dated up months ahead.† Still not a gregarious man, he is a definitely affable and agreeable oldster who chuckles much in whiskers, and the twinkle in his eye is really there. On the public side he has come to represent something new to liberals. Besides voting on the liberal side in pre-New Deal cases, he wrote the dissenting (liberal) opinion in the New York Minimum Wage Law case, and declined to go so far as the majority in throwing out the Guffey Coal Act lock, stock & barrel. Yet he is definitely in liberal disfavor, not so much because of his anti-New Deal votes in other cases, as for something they sense in his attitude.

His cause is not liberalism. The cause to which he is devoted is the Supreme Court, let the decisions fall where they may. If, like a good Baptist, he kneels before he goes to bed at night to pray, it is highly probable that his daily prayers include the final line of the invocation with which his court crier opens every session: "Oyez, Oyez, Oyez. . . . God save the United States and this Honorable Court." There is doubtless a twinkle in his eye as he says it nowadays, for he is a statesman as well as a jurist and there is ample evidence that his mood today is not one of impotent bitterness. To the American Law Institute last May he said: "I am happy to report that the Supreme Court is still functioning."

The Justices of the Supreme Court never, never, almost never publicly express themselves on questions of the day. But even a judge must have friends and acquaintances, and there are grapevines in Washington. How the Court is going to decide any given case is something that never can be found out, but how the Court feels is seldom a secret. It is not today. In his way, Charles Evans Hughes is perhaps the only worthy adversary that Franklin Delano Roosevelt has yet picked. The measure of that is that Mr. Hughes, knowing the President will very likely have his way, at least in part, regards the issue with a smile just as broad and rather more genuinely philosophic than that mustered by Mr. Roosevelt.

Nor is the attitude of Mr. Hughes much different from that of his Court. Its most conservative members, who personally dislike the President as acutely as he does them, were not unduly disturbed by the President's proposal. It was no more than they expected of him. If there are any angry men on the Court today, they are liberal Justices. This violence offered to their Court is not their idea of Liberalism. As matters stand today, Mr. Hughes and his confreres are more united than they have been for years.