JUDICIARY: Dred Scott Cited

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The objections specifically to Mr. Hughes were negligible: I) his resignation from the Supreme Court in 1916 to run for President; 2) his corporation law practice; 3) his silence on moral obloquy in the Harding Cabinet; 4) his defense of onetime Senator Newberry of Michigan on the ground that the Senate had no constitutional right to look into State primaries. Assuring critics he would be a fair-minded judge, his friends in the Senate let the opposition blow itself out. made no formal effort to defend him. Mr. Hughes was confirmed as the eleventh Chief Justice of the U. S. (The vote: 52 to 26.) He was ready to take his special oath which begins: "I do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons and do equal rights to the rich and to the poor. . . ."

But this oath meant little to the critics of the Supreme Court. Washington's Senator Dill, who had shouted that Abraham Lincoln would have had no chance of appointment today as Chief Justice because he would be rated a "radical,''* warned that the people would find a method of curbing the Supreme Court if it did not change its ways on economic questions. The Senate was shocked at his passionate use of the word "revolution." Senator Norris predicted that the Hughes appointment would become an issue in the next campaign, called it "Banquo's ghost come back to plague" the G. O. P. Senator Brookhart babbled of more Constitutional Amendments to restrict the Supreme Court.

No one was foolish enough to imagine that the Supreme Court, now headed by Chief Justice Hughes, would for an instant be cowed by the criticism Senators had heaped upon its economic principles. Its members, as always, were silently aloof from such political ructions. But economics make war for politicians no less than for nations. To many the Senate phenomenon, no unwholesome sign, marked the commencement of wholesale political discussion of the Supreme Court's part in the economic destiny of the U. S.