Charles Evans Hughes

Based on Wikipedia: Charles Evans Hughes

In 1916, a bearded former Supreme Court justice came within a whisker of becoming President of the United States. Charles Evans Hughes went to bed on election night believing he had won. Newspapers declared him the victor. But California's votes trickled in slowly, and by morning, Woodrow Wilson had eked out one of the narrowest victories in American presidential history. Hughes lost by fewer than 4,000 votes in California—a state where, legend has it, he snubbed a local Republican leader by failing to meet with him at a hotel where both men were staying.

That near-miss defines how most people remember Hughes, if they remember him at all. But reducing this man to a footnote about a lost election misses one of the most remarkable careers in American political history.

The Homeschooled Prodigy

Hughes's father, David, had sailed from Wales to America in 1855, inspired by reading Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. The elder Hughes became a Baptist preacher, eventually settling in Glens Falls, New York, where Charles was born in 1862—the same year Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Charles received almost no formal schooling until he was twelve years old. His parents educated him at home, and when he finally entered New York City's Public School 35 in 1874, he graduated within a single year. At fourteen, he enrolled at Madison University (now Colgate). Two years later, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated third in his class at nineteen.

Think about that timeline. While most teenagers were still figuring out basic algebra, Hughes was finishing his undergraduate degree and volunteering for James Garfield's presidential campaign.

He then taught school for a year in Delhi, New York—the only pause in what became an unrelenting upward trajectory—before entering Columbia Law School. He graduated first in his class in 1884 and scored the highest mark ever recorded on the New York bar exam.

The Insurance Crusader

For two decades, Hughes practiced law on Wall Street. He married the boss's daughter, had four children, briefly taught at Cornell, and seemed destined for a comfortable life of corporate litigation. Then, in 1905, everything changed.

The New York World had been running stories about corruption in the state's public utilities. Governor Frank Higgins appointed a legislative committee to investigate, and that committee—on the recommendation of a judge impressed by Hughes's courtroom performance—asked Hughes to lead the probe.

Hughes hesitated. Going after powerful utility companies meant making powerful enemies. But Senator Frederick Stevens convinced him to take the job, and Hughes decided to aim high. He focused his investigation on Consolidated Gas, the company that controlled all gas production and sales in New York City.

Most observers expected nothing to come of it. Investigations like this usually went nowhere.

Hughes proved them wrong. He uncovered systematic tax evasion and fraudulent bookkeeping, then drafted legislation to regulate public utilities and lower gas prices. The bills passed. Hughes had demonstrated something rare in American politics: an investigator who could actually change things.

His success led to an even bigger assignment. The Armstrong Insurance Commission tapped Hughes to investigate the major life insurance companies based in New York—and what he found was spectacular corruption. Insurance executives had been paying off journalists and legislators across the country. They had given themselves enormous raises while cutting dividends to policyholders. Conflicts of interest riddled the industry from top to bottom.

Republican leaders grew nervous. Hughes was becoming too popular, too independent. They tried a clever gambit: nominate him for Mayor of New York City, a job that would pull him away from the investigation.

Hughes refused.

He finished the investigation, forcing the resignation or firing of most top executives at the three largest insurance companies in America. Then he convinced the legislature to bar insurance companies from owning stocks, underwriting securities, or engaging in banking practices. It was a wholesale restructuring of an industry that had grown dangerously corrupt.

The Progressive Governor

By 1906, Hughes had become exactly what Theodore Roosevelt needed: a reformer with credibility, someone who could defeat the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in the New York gubernatorial race.

Roosevelt described Hughes as "a sane and sincere reformer, who really has fought against the very evils which Hearst denounces, but is free from any taint of demagogy." It was a careful distinction. Hughes attacked specific corporate abuses without attacking capitalism itself. He called for an eight-hour workday on public works and opposed child labor, but he defended corporations as necessary to the economy.

Hughes wasn't a charismatic speaker. He won through persistence and the endorsement of nearly every newspaper in the state. He beat Hearst with 52 percent of the vote.

As governor, Hughes governed as a progressive conservative—a label that sounds contradictory today but made sense in the early twentieth century. He expanded civil service positions, taking jobs away from political patronage machines. He strengthened utility regulation. He required political candidates to track campaign donations and expenditures, and banned corporate contributions—reforms that seem almost quaint given today's campaign finance landscape, but were revolutionary then.

For workers, Hughes established a 48-hour maximum workweek for manufacturing workers under sixteen and barred young people from dangerous occupations. His labor policies drew on the ideas of economist Richard Ely, who believed in improving working conditions without embracing the more radical proposals of union leaders like Samuel Gompers.

And in May 1907, Hughes took on a project that had nothing to do with politics. A lifelong Northern Baptist, he helped create the Northern Baptist Convention and served as its first president. Before this, northern Baptist churches had been independent, connected only through missionary societies. Hughes helped unify thousands of congregations into a single denomination that would eventually become the American Baptist Churches USA—one of the major Protestant bodies in America today.

The First Supreme Court Term

By 1910, Hughes was exhausted and ready to leave Albany. When Justice David Brewer died, President William Howard Taft offered Hughes the vacant Supreme Court seat. Hughes accepted immediately.

The Senate confirmed him unanimously on the same day the Judiciary Committee reported favorably on his nomination. Then came an ironic twist: two months later, Chief Justice Melville Fuller died. Taft had hinted he might elevate Hughes to lead the Court, but instead promoted Associate Justice Edward White, who had more seniority and more friends among his fellow justices. Theodore Roosevelt's coolness toward Hughes probably didn't help either.

On the Court, Hughes formed an unlikely alliance with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the most influential jurists in American history. The two men frequently voted together to uphold state and federal regulations—minimum wage laws, workmen's compensation, limits on working hours for women and children.

Hughes's opinions expanded federal power over commerce. In Baltimore & Ohio Railroad v. Interstate Commerce Commission, he upheld the government's right to regulate railroad workers' hours. In the 1914 Shreveport Rate Case, he ruled that the federal government could regulate commerce within a single state if that commerce affected business crossing state lines. This was a significant expansion of federal authority, though Hughes carefully avoided directly overturning precedent.

He also wrote opinions protecting civil liberties. In McCabe v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, Hughes required railroads to give African Americans "equal treatment." In Bailey v. Alabama, he struck down a state law that made it a crime for laborers to quit before fulfilling their contracts—a law Hughes said violated the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition on involuntary servitude and discriminated against Black workers.

In one notable case, Hughes and Holmes were the only dissenters when the Court refused to grant habeas corpus to Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager convicted of murder in Georgia. Frank's case became a national cause célèbre; he was later lynched by a mob after the governor commuted his death sentence. Hughes and Holmes saw something deeply wrong with the proceedings, even when their colleagues did not.

The Almost-President

The Republican Party was a mess in 1916. Taft and Roosevelt had split bitterly in 1912, with Roosevelt running on his own Progressive Party ticket. The result was a three-way race that handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Four years later, Republicans desperately needed a candidate who could reunite the party. Hughes seemed perfect: a reformer acceptable to progressives, a corporate lawyer acceptable to conservatives, and a sitting Supreme Court justice above the political fray.

Hughes initially refused to pursue the nomination, but speculation grew anyway. He eventually relented and resigned from the Court—something no justice had ever done to run for president.

The race against Wilson was close. Hughes went to bed on election night thinking he had won. Early returns looked favorable, and some newspapers called the race for him.

But California was still counting. Hughes lost the state by about 3,800 votes, and with it, the presidency. Wilson won 277 electoral votes to Hughes's 254.

The legend persists that Hughes lost California because he snubbed Hiram Johnson, the state's popular progressive Republican senator. Both men were staying at the same hotel during Hughes's campaign visit, but they never met. Johnson supposedly felt insulted and declined to campaign for Hughes. Whether this actually cost Hughes the election is debatable—California was close for many reasons—but the story captures something true about Hughes: he could be stiff, formal, difficult to warm up to. His beard made him look severe. He lacked the common touch.

The Diplomat Who Prevented an Arms Race

After his defeat, Hughes returned to practicing law and became one of the most sought-after attorneys in America. When Warren Harding won the presidency in 1920, he asked Hughes to serve as Secretary of State.

Hughes's most significant achievement in the role was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1921-1922. After World War One, the United States, Britain, and Japan were heading toward a naval arms race. All three nations were building battleships at enormous expense, and the competition threatened to destabilize the Pacific.

Hughes proposed something radical: all three powers would agree to limit the size of their navies according to a fixed ratio. The United States and Britain would maintain equality; Japan would accept a smaller fleet. To make it work, the nations would actually scrap existing warships, not just pause construction.

The treaty held for over a decade, preventing what could have been a ruinously expensive competition. It eventually broke down in the 1930s as Japan grew more aggressive, but for a time, it represented a genuine achievement in arms control.

Hughes served under both Harding and Calvin Coolidge, leaving office in 1925 to return once again to private practice.

The Chief Justice and the New Deal

In 1930, President Herbert Hoover nominated Hughes to succeed William Howard Taft as Chief Justice of the United States. It was an unprecedented return: no one had ever served on the Supreme Court, left, and come back as its leader.

Hughes inherited a Court divided between two factions with colorful nicknames. The "Three Musketeers"—Justices Brandeis, Stone, and Cardozo—generally supported government regulation and the constitutionality of progressive legislation. The "Four Horsemen"—Justices Butler, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Van Devanter—were deeply skeptical of government power and hostile to economic regulation.

Hughes and Associate Justice Owen Roberts held the balance. Where they voted determined the outcome of nearly every major case.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 and launched the New Deal, the Hughes Court began striking down major programs. The National Industrial Recovery Act fell in 1935. The Agricultural Adjustment Act followed in 1936. Roosevelt grew frustrated. After winning reelection in a landslide, he proposed what critics called the "court-packing plan"—legislation that would let him appoint additional justices for every sitting justice over seventy who refused to retire.

The plan was legally permissible but politically explosive. It looked like an attempt to subvert judicial independence.

Then something shifted. In 1937, Hughes and Roberts began voting with the Three Musketeers. The Court upheld the Wagner Act, which protected workers' rights to organize unions. It upheld a state minimum wage law after having struck down a similar federal law just a year earlier.

Journalists called it "the switch in time that saved nine"—a change in voting that made Roosevelt's court-packing scheme unnecessary. Whether Hughes and Roberts changed their minds because of political pressure, or simply because the cases were genuinely different, remains debated by historians.

What's clear is that the court-packing plan died in Congress, and Hughes deserves some credit for that outcome. He wrote a devastating letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, signed by Justices Brandeis and Van Devanter (representing both liberal and conservative wings), explaining that the Court was not behind in its work and did not need additional justices. The letter helped turn public opinion against Roosevelt's proposal.

Hughes retired in 1941, at age seventy-nine, after eleven years leading the Court through one of the most turbulent periods in its history.

The Strange Life of Elizabeth Hughes

One footnote deserves attention: Hughes's youngest daughter, Elizabeth.

In 1919, at age eleven, Elizabeth was diagnosed with diabetes. At the time, this was essentially a death sentence. Doctors could only recommend starvation diets that delayed the inevitable.

Then, in 1922, Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin. Elizabeth Hughes became one of the first humans ever injected with the substance. She weighed just 45 pounds when treatment began—a skeletal fifteen-year-old who had been slowly dying for three years.

Insulin saved her life. Elizabeth went on to marry, have three children, and live until 1981. She served as president of the Supreme Court Historical Society, the organization devoted to preserving the history of the institution her father had twice served on.

She rarely spoke publicly about being among the first insulin patients. When she died at seventy-three, many of her friends didn't even know she was diabetic.

The Verdict on Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes held more major positions than almost anyone in American history: governor, Supreme Court justice, presidential nominee, Secretary of State, and Chief Justice. He never stopped working, never coasted on reputation, never seemed satisfied with past achievements.

His legacy is complicated. As Chief Justice, he presided over a Court that first blocked and then enabled the transformation of American government during the New Deal. Whether he was a principled jurist following the law where it led, or a political actor responding to pressure, depends on who you ask.

But his earlier career speaks clearly. As an investigator in New York, Hughes took on powerful interests and won. He cleaned up the insurance industry and regulated public utilities when few believed such things were possible. As a governor, he expanded civil service, protected workers, and fought corruption.

He missed the presidency by a few thousand votes in a single state. History turned on that margin. Woodrow Wilson led America into World War One and shaped the peace that followed. What Hughes would have done, we can only guess.

But perhaps it's fitting that Hughes's greatest achievements didn't require the presidency. He proved that a single determined investigator could change an industry, that a governor could enact meaningful reform, that a diplomat could prevent an arms race, and that a Chief Justice could help his country navigate a constitutional crisis without breaking its institutions.

Not bad for a homeschooled kid from Glens Falls.