Charles Evans Hughes
by Merlo J. Pusey
Summary
Merlo Pusey came to Charles Evans Hughes through an unusual route: researching Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court led him to the sitting chief justice who had helped defeat that plan from behind the scenes, and Hughes, impressed enough by Pusey's interest, granted him interviews and full access to his own private papers, an unusual degree of cooperation for a biography of a still living subject. The two volume book follows Hughes from his early legal career in New York through the investigations that made his public reputation, a 1905 inquiry into utility company corruption and a subsequent investigation into fraud among the country's major life insurance companies that toppled a generation of industry executives.
Pusey follows Hughes into the governorship of New York, then through a resignation from the Supreme Court in 1916 to run for president against Woodrow Wilson, a race Hughes came close enough to winning that a shift of fewer than four thousand California votes would have changed the outcome. The book covers his later service as secretary of state, where he negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty limiting the world's major navies to a fixed ratio, and then, most fully, his return to the Supreme Court as chief justice in 1930, where Pusey traces the court's early hostility to New Deal legislation and the pivotal 1937 term when Hughes joined a majority upholding a minimum wage law and the Wagner Act, decisions that broke the deadlock between the court and Roosevelt.
Pusey writes with the access of a genuine confidant, and reading the book means following the full arc of a man who shaped early twentieth century American law and diplomacy from inside several branches of government at a level few other Americans of his era matched. It suits a reader interested in Progressive era reform and the constitutional fights of the New Deal alike, since Hughes sat at the center of both.
Historical Context & Significance
Pusey's two volume Charles Evans Hughes won both the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and that year's Bancroft Prize, an unusual double for a single work of political biography. Macmillan published the book in 1951, drawing on the private papers Hughes had personally opened to Pusey, a Washington Post editorial writer who had spent his own career following the same Supreme Court Hughes once led.
The book remains a standard source on Hughes precisely because of that access, since Hughes died in 1948 without leaving as full a public record in his own words as some of his contemporaries did. Historians still cite Pusey's account of the court's 1937 turn toward upholding New Deal legislation, when Hughes's vote helped ease the confrontation between Roosevelt and the judiciary without the structural change Roosevelt had originally proposed.