Charles Evans Hughes
Charles Evans Hughes Sr. was an American statesman, Republican Party politician, the 11th Chief Justice of the United States. He was the 36th Governor of New York, the Republican presidential nominee in the 1916 presidential election, the 44th United States Secretary of State. Born to a Welsh immigrant preacher and his wife in Glens Falls, New York, Hughes pursued a legal career in New York City. After working in private practice for several years, in 1905 he led successful state investigations into public utilities and the life insurance industry, he implemented several progressive reforms. In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. During his tenure on the Supreme Court, Hughes joined Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in voting to uphold state and federal regulations. Hughes served as an Associate Justice until 1916, when he resigned from the bench to accept the Republican presidential nomination. Though Hughes was viewed as the favorite in the race against incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, Wilson won a narrow victory.
After Warren G. Harding won the 1920 presidential election, Hughes accepted Harding's offer to serve as Secretary of State. Serving under Harding and Calvin Coolidge, Hughes negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty, designed to prevent a naval arms race among the United States and Japan. Hughes left office in 1925 and returned to private practice, becoming one of the most prominent attorneys in the country. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover appointed Hughes to succeed Chief Justice Taft. Along with Associate Justice Owen Roberts, Hughes emerged as a key swing vote on the bench, positioned between the liberal Three Musketeers and the conservative Four Horsemen; the Hughes Court struck down several New Deal programs in the early and the mid-1930s, but 1937 marked a turning point for the Supreme Court and the New Deal as Hughes and Roberts joined with the Three Musketeers to uphold the Wagner Act and a state minimum wage law. That same year saw the defeat of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have expanded the size of the Supreme Court.
Hughes served until 1941, when he was succeeded by Associate Justice Harlan F. Stone. Hughes's father, David Charles Hughes, migrated from Wales to the United States in 1855 after he was inspired by the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. David became a Baptist preacher in Glens Falls, New York, married Mary Catherine Connelly, whose family had been in the United States for several generations. Charles Evans Hughes, the only child of David and Mary, was born in Glens Falls on April 11, 1862; the Hughes family moved to Oswego, New York in 1866, but relocated soon after to Newark, New Jersey and to Brooklyn. With the exception of a brief period of attendance at Newark High School, Hughes received no formal education until 1874, instead being educated by his parents. In September 1874, he enrolled in New York City's prestigious Public School 35, graduating the following year. At the age of 14, he enrolled at Madison University transferred to Brown University, he graduated third in his class at the age of 19, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year.
During his time at Brown, Hughes volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican nominee James A. Garfield and served as the editor of the college newspaper. After graduating from Brown, Hughes spent a year working as a teacher in New York. Hughes next enrolled in Columbia Law School, he passed the New York bar exam in 1884, with the highest score awarded by the state. In 1888, Hughes married Antoinette Carter, the daughter of the senior partner of the law firm where he worked, their first child, Charles Evans Hughes Jr. was born the following year, Hughes purchased a house in Manhattan's Upper West Side neighborhood. Hughes and his wife would have three daughters, their youngest child, Elizabeth Hughes Gossett, was one of the first humans injected with insulin, served as president of the Supreme Court Historical Society. Hughes took a position with the Wall Street law firm of Chamberlain, Carter & Hornblower in 1883, focusing on matters related to contracts and bankruptcies.
He was made a partner in the firm in 1888, the firm changed its name to Carter, Hughes & Cravath. Hughes left the firm and became a professor at Cornell Law School from 1891 to 1893, he returned to Carter, Hughes & Cravath in 1893. He joined the board of Brown University and served on a special committee that recommended revisions to New York's Code of Civil Procedure. Responding to newspaper stories run by the New York World, Governor Frank W. Higgins appointed a legislative committee to investigate the state's public utilities in 1905. On the recommendation of a former state judge, impressed by Hughes's performance in court, the legislative committee appointed Hughes to lead the investigation. Hughes was reluctant to take on the powerful utility companies, but Senator Frederick C. Stevens, the leader of the committee, convinced Hughes to accept the position. Hughes decided to center his investigation on Consolidated Gas, which controlled the production and sale of gas in New York City. Though few expected the committee to have any impact on public corruption, Hughes was able to show that Consolidated Gas had engaged in a pattern of tax evasion and fraudulent bookkeeping.
To eliminate or mitigate those abuses, Hughes drafted and convinced the state legislature to pass bills that established a commission to regulate public utilities and lowered
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s, beginning in the United States. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, it was the longest and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is used as an example of how intensely the world's economy can decline; the Great Depression started in the United States after a major fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929, became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession; some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II; the Great Depression had devastating effects in countries both poor. Personal income, tax revenue and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%.
Unemployment in the U. S. rose to 25% and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities around the world were hit hard those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was halted in many countries. Farming communities and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by about 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few alternative sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as mining and logging suffered the most. Economic historians attribute the start of the Great Depression to the sudden devastating collapse of U. S. stock market prices on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. However, some dispute this conclusion and see the stock crash as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the Great Depression. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 optimism persisted for some time. John D. Rockefeller said "These are days. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again." The stock market turned upward in early 1930. This was still 30% below the peak of September 1929.
Together and business spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the corresponding period of the previous year. On the other hand, many of whom had suffered severe losses in the stock market the previous year, cut back their expenditures by 10%. In addition, beginning in the mid-1930s, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the U. S. By mid-1930, interest rates had dropped to low levels, but expected deflation and the continuing reluctance of people to borrow meant that consumer spending and investment were depressed. By May 1930, automobile sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, although wages held steady in 1930. A deflationary spiral started in 1931. Farmers faced a worse outlook. At its peak, the Great Depression saw nearly 10% of all Great Plains farms change hands despite federal assistance; the decline in the U. S. economy was the factor. Frantic attempts to shore up the economies of individual nations through protectionist policies, such as the 1930 U.
S. Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries, exacerbated the collapse in global trade. By 1933, the economic decline had pushed world trade to one-third of its level just four years earlier. Change in economic indicators 1929–32 The two classical competing theories of the Great Depression are the Keynesian and the monetarist explanation. There are various heterodox theories that downplay or reject the explanations of the Keynesians and monetarists; the consensus among demand-driven theories is that a large-scale loss of confidence led to a sudden reduction in consumption and investment spending. Once panic and deflation set in, many people believed they could avoid further losses by keeping clear of the markets. Holding money became profitable as prices dropped lower and a given amount of money bought more goods, exacerbating the drop in demand. Monetarists believe that the Great Depression started as an ordinary recession, but the shrinking of the money supply exacerbated the economic situation, causing a recession to descend into the Great Depression.
Economists and economic historians are evenly split as to whether the traditional monetary explanation that monetary forces were the primary cause of the Great Depression is right, or the traditional Keynesian explanation that a fall in autonomous spending investment, is the primary explanation for the onset of the Great Depression. Today the controversy is of lesser importance since there is mainstream support for the debt deflation theory and the expectations hypothesis that building on the monetary explanation of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz add non-monetary explanations. There is consensus that the Federal Reserve System should have cut short the process of monetary deflation and banking collapse. If they had done this, the economic downturn would have been much shorter. British economist John Maynard Keynes argued in The General Theory of Employment and Money that lower aggregate expenditures in the economy contributed to a massive decline in income and to employment, well below the average.
In such a situation, the economy reached equilibrium at low levels of economic activity and high unemployment. Keynes' basic idea was simple
Censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government private institutions, corporations. Governments and private organizations may engage in censorship. Other groups or institutions may petition for censorship; when an individual such as an author or other creator engages in censorship of their own works or speech, it is referred to as self-censorship. It occurs in a variety of different media, including speech, music and other arts, the press, radio and the Internet for a variety of claimed reasons including national security, to control obscenity, child pornography, hate speech, to protect children or other vulnerable groups, to promote or restrict political or religious views, to prevent slander and libel. Direct censorship may or may not be legal, depending on the type and content. Many countries provide strong protections against censorship by law, but none of these protections are absolute and a claim of necessity to balance conflicting rights is made, in order to determine what could and could not be censored.
There are no laws against self-censorship. In 399 BC, Greek philosopher, defied attempts by the Greek state to censor his philosophical teachings and was sentenced to death by drinking a poison, hemlock. Socrates' student, Plato, is said to have advocated censorship in his essay on The Republic, which opposed the existence of democracy. In contrast to Plato, Greek playwright Euripides defended the true liberty of freeborn men, including the right to speak freely. In 1766, Sweden became the first country to abolish censorship by law; the rationale for censorship is different for various types of information censored: Moral censorship is the removal of materials that are obscene or otherwise considered morally questionable. Pornography, for example, is censored under this rationale child pornography, illegal and censored in most jurisdictions in the world. Military censorship is the process of keeping military intelligence and tactics confidential and away from the enemy; this is used to counter espionage.
Political censorship occurs. This is done to exert control over the populace and prevent free expression that might foment rebellion. Religious censorship is the means by which any material considered objectionable by a certain religion is removed; this involves a dominant religion forcing limitations on less prevalent ones. Alternatively, one religion may shun the works of another when they believe the content is not appropriate for their religion. Corporate censorship is the process by which editors in corporate media outlets intervene to disrupt the publishing of information that portrays their business or business partners in a negative light, or intervene to prevent alternate offers from reaching public exposure. Cuban media used to be operated under the supervision of the Communist Party's Department of Revolutionary Orientation, which "develops and coordinates propaganda strategies". Connection to the Internet is censored; the People's Republic of China employs sophisticated censorship mechanisms, referred to as the Golden Shield Project, to monitor the internet.
Popular search engines such as Baidu remove politically sensitive search results. Strict censorship existed in the Eastern Bloc. Throughout the bloc, the various ministries of culture held a tight rein on their writers. Cultural products there reflected. Party-approved censors exercised strict control in the early years. In the Stalinist period the weather forecasts were changed if they suggested that the sun might not shine on May Day. Under Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania, weather reports were doctored so that the temperatures were not seen to rise above or fall below the levels which dictated that work must stop. Possession and use of copying machines was controlled in order to hinder production and distribution of samizdat, illegal self-published books and magazines. Possession of a single samizdat manuscript such as a book by Andrei Sinyavsky was a serious crime which might involve a visit from the KGB. Another outlet for works which did not find favor with the authorities was publishing abroad.
Iraq under Baathist Saddam Hussein had much the same techniques of press censorship as did Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu but with greater potential violence. According to Christian Mihr, executive director of Reporters Without Borders, "censorship in Serbia is neither direct nor transparent, but is easy to prove." According to Mihr there are numerous examples of censorship and self-censorship in Serbia According to Mihr, Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vučić has proved "very sensitive to criticism on critical questions," as was the case with Natalija Miletic, correspondent for Deutsche Welle Radio, who questioned him in Berlin about the media situation in Serbia and about allegations that some ministers in the Serbian government had plagiarized their diplomas, who received threats and offensive articles on the Serbian press. Multiple news outlets have accused Vučić of anti-democratic strongman tendencies. In July 2014, journalists associations were concerned about the freedom of the media in Serbia, in which Vučić came under criticism.
In September 2015 five members of United States Congress have informed Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden that Aleksandar's brother, Andrej Vučić, is leading a group responsible for deteriorating media freedom in Serbia. In th
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the Federal Government of the United States. The legislature consists of two chambers: the House of the Senate; the Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D. C.. Both senators and representatives are chosen through direct election, though vacancies in the Senate may be filled by a gubernatorial appointment. Congress has 535 voting members: 100 senators; the House of Representatives has six non-voting members representing Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U. S. Virgin Islands, the District of Columbia in addition to its 435 voting members. Although they cannot vote in the full house, these members can address the house and vote in congressional committees, introduce legislation; the members of the House of Representatives serve two-year terms representing the people of a single constituency, known as a "district". Congressional districts are apportioned to states by population using the United States Census results, provided that each state has at least one congressional representative.
Each state, regardless of population or size, has two senators. There are 100 senators representing the 50 states; each senator is elected at-large in their state for a six-year term, with terms staggered, so every two years one-third of the Senate is up for election. To be eligible for election, a candidate must be aged at least 25 or 30, have been a citizen of the United States for seven or nine years, be an inhabitant of the state which they represent; the Congress was created by the Constitution of the United States and first met in 1789, replacing in its legislative function the Congress of the Confederation. Although not mandated, in practice since the 19th century, Congress members are affiliated with the Republican Party or with the Democratic Party and only with a third party or independents. Article One of the United States Constitution states, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."
The House and Senate are equal partners in the legislative process—legislation cannot be enacted without the consent of both chambers. However, the Constitution grants each chamber some unique powers; the Senate ratifies treaties and approves presidential appointments while the House initiates revenue-raising bills. The House initiates impeachment cases. A two-thirds vote of the Senate is required before an impeached person can be forcibly removed from office; the term Congress can refer to a particular meeting of the legislature. A Congress covers two years; the Congress ends on the third day of January of every odd-numbered year. Members of the Senate are referred to as senators. Scholar and representative Lee H. Hamilton asserted that the "historic mission of Congress has been to maintain freedom" and insisted it was a "driving force in American government" and a "remarkably resilient institution". Congress is the "heart and soul of our democracy", according to this view though legislators achieve the prestige or name recognition of presidents or Supreme Court justices.
One analyst argues that it is not a reactive institution but has played an active role in shaping government policy and is extraordinarily sensitive to public pressure. Several academics described Congress: Congress reflects us in all our strengths and all our weaknesses, it reflects our regional idiosyncrasies, our ethnic and racial diversity, our multitude of professions, our shadings of opinion on everything from the value of war to the war over values. Congress is the government's most representative body... Congress is charged with reconciling our many points of view on the great public policy issues of the day. Congress is changing and is in flux. In recent times, the American south and west have gained House seats according to demographic changes recorded by the census and includes more minorities and women although both groups are still underrepresented. While power balances among the different parts of government continue to change, the internal structure of Congress is important to understand along with its interactions with so-called intermediary institutions such as political parties, civic associations, interest groups, the mass media.
The Congress of the United States serves two distinct purposes that overlap: local representation to the federal government of a congressional district by representatives and a state's at-large representation to the federal government by senators. Most incumbents seek re-election, their historical likelihood of winning subsequent elections exceeds 90 percent; the historical records of the House of Representatives and the Senate are maintained by the Center for Legislative Archives, a part of the National Archives and Records Administration. Congress is directly responsible for the governing of the District of Columbia, the current seat of the federal government; the First Continental Congress was a gathering of representatives from twelve of the thirteen British Colonies in North America. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, referring to the new nation as the "United States of America"; the Articles of Confederation in 1781 created the Congress of the Confederation, a
George Sutherland
George Alexander Sutherland was an English-born U. S. jurist and politician. One of four appointments to the Supreme Court by President Warren G. Harding, he served as an Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court between 1922 and 1938; as a member of the Republican Party, he represented Utah in both houses of Congress. Born in Buckinghamshire, England and his family moved to Utah Territory in the 1860s. After attending the University of Michigan Law School, Sutherland established a legal practice in Provo and won election to the Utah State Senate. Sutherland won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1900 and to the United States Senate in 1905. In Congress, Sutherland supported several progressive policies but aligned with the party's conservative wing, he was defeated in the 1916 election by Democrat William H. King. Harding nominated Sutherland to the Supreme Court in 1922 to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement of Associate Justice John Hessin Clarke. Sutherland made up part of the "Four Horsemen", a group of conservative justices that voted to strike down New Deal legislation.
He retired from the Supreme Court in 1938, was succeeded by Stanley Forman Reed. Sutherland wrote the Court's majority opinion in cases such as Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. Powell v. Alabama, U. S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp.. Sutherland was born in Stony Stratford, England, to a Scottish father, Alexander George Sutherland, an English mother, Frances, née Slater. A recent convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the latter moved the family to Utah Territory in the summer of 1863 and settled his family in Springville, Utah but moved to Montana and prospected for a few years before moving his family back to Utah Territory in 1869, where he pursued a number of different occupations. In the 1870s, the Sutherland family left the Church, with George remaining unbaptized. At the age of 12, the need to help his family financially forced Sutherland to leave school and take a job, first as a clerk in a clothing store and as an agent of the Wells Fargo Company. However, Sutherland aspired to a higher education, in 1879, he had saved enough to attend Brigham Young Academy.
There, he studied under Karl G. Maeser, who proved an important influence in his intellectual development, most notably by introducing Sutherland to the ideas of Herbert Spencer, which would form an enduring part of Sutherland's philosophy. After graduating in 1881, Sutherland worked for the Rio Grande Western Railroad for a little over a year before moving to Michigan to enroll in the University of Michigan Law School, where he was a student of Thomas M. Cooley. Sutherland left school before earning his law degree. After admission to the Michigan bar, he married Rosamond Lee in 1883. After his marriage, Sutherland moved back to Utah Territory, where he joined his father in a partnership in Provo. In 1886, they dissolved their partnership and Sutherland formed a new one with Samuel Thurman, a future chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court. After running unsuccessfully as the Liberal Party candidate for mayor of Provo, Sutherland moved to Salt Lake City in 1893. There, he joined one of the state's leading law firms, the following year was one of the organizers of the Utah State Bar Association.
In 1896, he was elected as a Republican to the new Utah State Senate, where he served as chairman of the senate's Judiciary Committee and sponsored legislation granting powers of eminent domain to mining and irrigation companies. In 1900, Sutherland received the Republican nomination as the party's candidate for Utah's seat in the United States House of Representatives. In the subsequent election, Sutherland narrowly defeated the Democratic incumbent, William H. King, by 241 votes out of over 90,000 cast, he went on to serve as a Representative in the 57th Congress, where he fought to maintain the tariff on sugar and was active in both Indian affairs and legislation addressing the irrigation of arid lands. Sutherland declined to run for a second term and returned to Utah to campaign for election to the United States Senate. With the state legislature under Republican control, the contest was an intra-party battle with the incumbent, Thomas Kearns. With the backing of Utah's other senator, Reed Smoot, Sutherland secured the unanimous support of the caucus in January 1905.
Sutherland repaid his debt to Smoot in 1907 by speaking on the floor in the Senate in defense of the senior senator during the climax of the Smoot hearings. Sutherland's tenure in the Senate coincided with the Progressive Era in American politics, he voted for much of Theodore Roosevelt's legislative agenda, including the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Hepburn Act, the Federal Employers Liability Act. He was "a longstanding women’s rights advocate, he introduced the Nineteenth Amendment into the Senate... campaigned for the passage of that amendment, helped draft the Equal Rights Amendment, was a friend and adviser of Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party." However, he sided with the "Old Guard" of conservatives who battled with their Progressive counterparts within the party during William Howard Taft's presidency. He was involved with the legal codification of the period and joined Taft in opposing the legislation admitting New Mexico and Arizona into the union because of clauses within their constitutions allowing for the recall of judges.
The election of Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic takeover of Congress in 1912 put Sutherland and the other conservatives on the defensive. By now a national figur
Foreign policy of the United States
The foreign policy of the United States is its interactions with foreign nations and how it sets standards of interaction for its organizations and system citizens of the United States. The stated goals of the foreign policy of the United States, including all the Bureaus and Offices in the United States Department of State, as mentioned in the Foreign Policy Agenda of the Department of State, are "to build and sustain a more democratic and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community." In addition, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs states as some of its jurisdictional goals: "export controls, including nonproliferation of nuclear technology and nuclear hardware. U. S. foreign policy and foreign aid have been the subject of much debate and criticism, both domestically and abroad. Subject to the advice and consent role of the U. S. Senate, the President of the United States negotiates treaties with foreign nations, but treaties enter into force only if ratified by two-thirds of the Senate.
The President is Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, as such has broad authority over the armed forces. Both the Secretary of State and ambassadors are appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate; the United States Secretary of State acts to a foreign minister and under Executive leadership is the primary conductor of state-to-state diplomacy. Congress is the only branch of government. Furthermore, Congress writes the civilian and military budget, thus has vast power in military action and foreign aid. Congress has power to regulate commerce with foreign nations; the main trend regarding the history of U. S. foreign policy since the American Revolution is the shift from non-interventionism before and after World War I, to its growth as a world power and global hegemony during and since World War II and the end of the Cold War in the 20th century. Since the 19th century, U. S. foreign policy has been characterized by a shift from the realist school to the idealistic or Wilsonian school of international relations.
Foreign policy themes were expressed in George Washington's farewell address. These policies became the basis of the Federalist Party in the 1790s, but the rival Jeffersonians feared Britain and favored France in the 1790s, declaring the War of 1812 on Britain. After the 1778 alliance with France, the U. S. did not sign another permanent treaty until the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. Over time, other themes, key goals, attitudes, or stances have been variously expressed by Presidential'doctrines', named for them; these were uncommon events, but since WWII, these have been made by most presidents. Jeffersonians vigorously opposed a large standing army and any navy until attacks against American shipping by Barbary corsairs spurred the country into developing a naval force projection capability, resulting in the First Barbary War in 1801. Despite two wars with European Powers—the War of 1812 and the Spanish–American War in 1898—American foreign policy was peaceful and marked by steady expansion of its foreign trade during the 19th century.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the nation's geographical area. The U. S. bought Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, it annexed the independent Republic of Hawaii in 1898. Victory over Spain in 1898 brought Puerto Rico, as well as oversight of Cuba; the short experiment in imperialism ended by 1908, as the U. S. turned its attention to the Panama Canal and the stabilization of regions to its south, including Mexico. The 20th century was marked by two world wars in which Allied powers, along with the United States, defeated their enemies, through this participation the United States increased its international reputation. President Wilson's Fourteen Points was developed from his idealistic Wilsonianism program of spreading democracy and fighting militarism to prevent future wars, it became the basis of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The resulting Treaty of Versailles, due to European allies' punitive and territorial designs, showed insufficient conformity with these points, the U. S. signed separate treaties with each of its adversaries.
S. never joined the League of Nations, established as a result of Wilson's initiative. In the 1920s, the United States followed an independent course, succeeded in a program of naval disarmament, refunding the German economy. Operating outside the League it became a dominant player in diplomatic affairs. New York became the financial capital of the world, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 hurled the Western industrialized world into the Great Depression. American trade policy relied on high tariffs under the Republicans, reciprocal trade agreements under the Democrats, but in any case exports were at low levels in the 1930s; the United States adopted a non-inte
Hugo Black
Hugo Lafayette Black was an American politician and jurist who served in the United States Senate from 1927 to 1937, as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections. Having gained a reputation in the Senate as a reformer, Black was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 63 to 16, he was the first of nine Roosevelt nominees to the Court, he outlasted all except for William O. Douglas; the fifth longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, Black was one of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the 20th century. He is noted for his advocacy of a textualist reading of the United States Constitution and of the position that the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights were imposed on the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. During his political career, Black was regarded as a staunch supporter of liberal policies and civil liberties.
However, Black wrote the majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States, during World War II, which upheld the Japanese-American internment that had taken place. Black consistently opposed the doctrine of substantive due process and believed that there was no basis in the words of the Constitution for a right to privacy, voting against finding one in Griswold v. Connecticut. Before he became a senator, Black espoused anti-Catholic views and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, but he resigned in 1925. Years he said: "Before becoming a Senator I dropped the Klan. I have had nothing to do with it since that time. I abandoned it. I discontinued any association with the organization." Hugo LaFayette Black was the youngest of the eight children of William Lafayette Black and Martha Black. He was born on February 27, 1886, in a small wooden farmhouse in Ashland, Alabama, a poor, isolated rural Clay County town in the Appalachian foothills; because his brother Orlando had become a medical doctor, Hugo decided at first to follow in his footsteps.
At age seventeen, he enrolled at Birmingham Medical School. But Orlando suggested. After graduating in June 1906, he established a legal practice, his practice was not successful there, so Black moved to the growing city of Birmingham in 1907, where he specialized in labor law and personal injury cases. Consequent to his defense of an African American, forced into a form of commercial slavery after incarceration, Black was befriended by A. O. Lane, a judge connected with the case; when Lane was elected to the Birmingham City Commission in 1911, he asked Black to serve as a police court judge – his only judicial experience prior to the Supreme Court. In 1912, Black resigned that seat, he was not done with public service. Three years during World War I, Black resigned in order to join the United States Army reaching the rank of captain, he was not assigned to Europe. He joined the Birmingham Civitan Club during this time serving as president of the group, he remained an active member throughout his life contributing articles to Civitan publications.
On February 23, 1921, he married Josephine Foster, with whom he had three children: Hugo L. Black, II, an attorney. Josephine died in 1951. In 1926, Black sought election to the United States Senate from Alabama, following the retirement of Senator Oscar Underwood. Since the Democratic Party had dominated Alabama politics since disenfranchising most blacks at the turn of the century, Black defeated his Republican opponent, E. H. Dryer, winning 80.9% of the white vote. He was reelected in 1932. Senator Black gained a reputation as a tenacious investigator. In 1934, he chaired the committee that looked into the contracts awarded to air mail carriers under Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, an inquiry which led to the Air Mail scandal. In order to correct what he termed abuses of "fraud and collusion" resulting from the Air Mail Act of 1930, he introduced the Black-McKellar Bill the Air Mail Act of 1934; the following year he participated in a Senate committee's investigation of lobbying practices.
He publicly denounced the "highpowered, telegram-fixing, Washington-visiting" lobbyists, advocated legislation requiring them to publicly register their names and salaries. In 1935, during the Great Depression, Black became chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, a position he would hold for the remainder of his Senate career. In 1937 he sponsored the Black-Connery Bill, which sought to establish a national minimum wage and a maximum workweek of thirty hours. Although the bill was rejected in the House of Representatives, an amended version of it, which extended Black's original maximum workweek proposal to forty-four hours, was passed in 1938, becoming known as the Fair Labor Standards Act. Black was an ardent supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and
