JUDICIARY: Dred Scott Cited

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The fight on Mr. Hughes commenced slowly, almost apologetically, at the instigation of Nebraska's Senator Norris. Gathering momentum, it quickly drew in Idaho's Senator Borah, chronic complainant. Within the year Senator Borah had opposed President Hoover on farm relief, on the tariff, on prohibition enforcement personnel, on "freedom-of-the-seas" at the London Naval Conference. It was no great leap from loyalty for him to object to President Hoover's choice as Chief Justice. One by one other Republican Progressives began to rally against Mr. Hughes. Such assorted Democratic Senators as Virginia's Glass and South Carolina's Blease, Georgia's George and Washington's Dill joined the hue and cry. For three full days with crowded galleries, the Senate Chamber rumbled and roared with pent-up liberal resentment against judicial conservatism. Always the issue remained larger than Mr. Hughes' appointment.

Senator Borah raked the Supreme Court for its decision, in the Baltimore Street R. R. case, wherein it had held that a franchise obtained for nothing was worth $5,000,000 to the company, that earnings of 6.26% were so low as to be confiscatory. He warned of "the great economic oppression" that would follow such decisions. Said he: "I do not know of a proposition of more concern to all the people than the relationship which these properties and natural resources shall bear to the masses of the people in the U. S." The Senator also found that Mr. Hughes's plea that General Electric Co. had a vested right in perpetuity in a broadcasting wave length temporarily assigned it, was "a shocking proposition." Mr. Hughes's views, contended the Senator, "are not views that ought to be incorporated in our legal and economic system."

Flaying the Supreme Court as "the economic dictator of the U. S.," stormy little Senator Glass declared that it "has gone far afield from its original functions and has constituted itself a court in economics." He recalled the fact that as an Associate Justice Mr. Hughes in 1914 had written the famed Shreveport decision which Senator Glass claimed destroyed the last vestige of State control of freight rates.* North Dakota's Senator Nye chimed in: "The sooner citizens get rid of this idea that a judge is more honorable than a legislator, the clearer will become our perception of the evils of judicial usurpation."

Wisconsin's young Senator La Follette blazed away like his father in this fight:† "We are filling the jury box that will decide the issue between organized greed and the rights of the masses. . . . Aggregations of capital threaten to wipe out the great middle class in this country."