Lawyer's Lawyer

(See front cover)

On the 17th floor of the 24-story American Surety Co. building at No. 100 Broadway, Manhattan, is a black wall sign with this gilt lettering:

HUGHES, SCHURMAN & DWIGHT

CHARLES E. HUGHES

GEORGE W. SCHURMAN

RICHARD E. DWIGHT

AUGUSTUS L. RICHARDS

WALTER F. CARTER

ALLEN S. HUBBARD

OSCAR E. EWING

RALPH S. HARRIS

RAYMOND M. LOWES

Last week in the law offices behind this sign was a hustle-and-bustle indicative of a prime event. Clerks scuttled across thick-rugged floors in more-than-ordinary haste. Lawyers swung in and out of doorways bearing armfuls of documents. Typists rattled their keys with a triumphant staccato. In a high-ceiled inner room overlooking Trinity Church's grimy spire, an elderly man with thin white hair, a well-trimmed white beard parted in the middle, good solid shoulders and a small paunch, sat bolt upright in a stiff high-backed chair. The pivot of all the commotion, he was intensely busy--and intensely happy. Within a few days, God willing, he would become the eleventh Chief Justice of the U. S.

But he was not as excited as the youngest of his partners--a youth of 27 named John Fletcher Caskey who referred reverentially to the senior partner as "the judge." Only eight short years ago he came to the Yale Law School right out of Cassville in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. The corn, said New Havenites, was growing rapidly out of his hair. It was therefore with some astonishment that his law mates observed him standing No. 1 in his class at the end of his first year and at the end of his course. That such a man, still bashful, should this year become a partner of the most famed lawyer in the land while contemporaries were struggling as clerks, is not only astounding but characteristic of the firm.

What is characteristic of the firm is the character of its chief. Exteriors, sociability, connections mean little or nothing to him. Solitude and brain output thereof is his delight.

Another man might contemplate the chief justiceship with some reluctance. Not so Charles Evans Hughes. It is a lonely job--one of the world's few entirely exalted and lonely life-jobs. By custom the Chief Justice is hedged off from free and easy association with his fellow beings lest they in some inexplicable manner corrupt his integrity, warp his judicial soul. Chief Justice White sought solitude to the point of never accepting a Washington invitation, of avoiding all official functions. For all his surface affability Chief Justice Taft observed much the same caution in his daily contacts. He shunned Society and it was only last year that he relaxed his stand against the world to the point of attending a Gridiron dinner (TIME, April 22).

But in no essential will it be necessary for Mr. Hughes to change his manner of life. He is a lonely man. These last years he has been making the "real money"--two or three hundred thousand a year perhaps--that he promised himself, when he left the Coolidge cabinet. He has not made it by much bartering and foregathering with his fellow man. Day after day he has gone to a skyscraper club for lunch--alone, or possibly with his partner and son, Charles Evans Hughes Jr.* with whom he has returned quickly to the office. Even on his frequent trips to Washington, where many a public man would be flattered to be his host, he has followed his lonely course, taking many of his meals alone.

Of course he has seen his clients (in the office) and they have included a long list of the premier U. S. corporations. Last week he had to dissociate himself from all those tangled legal alliances which make up the fabric of his profession. He had represented the Los Angeles & Salt Lake City R. R. in its valuation fight with the I. C. C. He was counsel for the Delaware & Hudson R. R. in its effort to retain a lease on the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh. He had been engaged to help defend minority Ford stockholders, other than Senator James Couzens, in the government's futile attempt to levy extra taxes on them. He had argued and lost the Interborough's 7-c- fare case in the Supreme Court. He was special attorney for John Davison Rockefeller Jr. in his successful ouster of Col. Robert Wright Stewart from the chairmanship of the Standard Oil Co. of Indiana. He had defended Francis G. Caffey, receiver for the New York & Cuba Steamship Co. Other clients whose cases he carried to the Supreme Court: Victor Talking Machine Co., Beechnut Packing Co., Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co., Aetna Insurance Co., Swift & Co., De Forest Radio, U. S. Industrial Chemical Co.. Anaconda Copper Mining Co., Wabash R. R., General Electric Co. When his son Charles Evans Hughes Jr. became Solicitor General of the U. S. last year, Mr. Hughes Sr. dropped all cases in which the U. S. was his opponent.

Most people viewed Mr. Hughes's corporation practice with equanimity, begrudged him none of his "real money." Not so Henry Latham Doherty, oil and public utility tycoon, head of Potent Cities Service Corp., who spoke out against Mr. Hughes's nomination. Wrote he: "No Justice of the Supreme Court should capitalize into wealth the prestige and influence acquired. ... He should neither expect nor receive appointment to the position of Chief Justice. . . . There are rumors afloat that a huge and uncontrollable political machine has been built up whereby governmental control will be lodged in the hands of a few men and, with the confirmation of Judge Hughes, the control will embrace each of three coordinate branches of the Federal Government. . . . We'll be fortunate if we don't wake up to find the Supreme Court has handed down opinions which will give a monopoly in perpetuity to some one corporation. . . ."

Though many people consider Mr. Doherty's opinions on public questions as less sound than his views on utilities, he did reflect a minority opposition which mustered two out of ten votes in the Senate Judiciary Committee against the Hughes nomination.

Meanwhile the Senate's ultimate confirmation appeared certain. Mr. Hughes hurried last week to close out his connection with his firm and assume his centre seat on the court when it reassembles Feb. 24.

"Plan of Study." No great sagas fancifully encrust the childhood of "Charlie" Hughes. He was born April 11, 1862 at Glens Falls, N. Y. His father, a Welsh immigrant, was a Baptist minister, poor in goods, rich in classic learning. The boy at five started school at Oswego, N. Y., only to return to his father a few weeks later with a paper written by him and headed: "Charles Evans Hughes' Plan of Study." After that he was taken out of school, given home instruction by his parents. The family moved to Newark, N. J., then on to New York City where Charles attended "Old 35 Grammar School," wrote precocious essays on "The Evils of Light Literature," "The Limitation of the Human Mind."

From Madison (now Colgate) College he transferred to Brown from which he was graduated in 1881 with honors. The parental wish that he enter the Baptist ministry he rejected, to turn to law. He was graduated, No. 1 in his class, from Columbia Law School in 1884. He immediately entered the law firm of Chamberlin, Carter & Hornblower, was made a partner and married Miss Antoinette Carter, daughter of the firm's senior member.*

Crusader. Lawyer Hughes's public career began in 1905 when he was named counsel to the Stevens Gas Commission, created by the New York Legislature. A remarkable investigator on fire with public zeal, Counsel Hughes exposed the Consolidated Co.'s gas monopoly, forced rates based on overcapitalization down 20%. With this crusade over, he plunged into the next as counsel for the Armstrong Insurance Commission which dredged up the hidden slime of insurance companies' greed and corruption. Popular acclaim swept him into the Governorship in 1906 over William Randolph Hearst. There he proceeded to execute the pledges of a "reform" administration. He was re-elected on the promise to drive horseracing and gambling out of the State.

Red Whiskers. In that period Mr. Hughes's whiskers were large and red and unkempt. He wore department store clothes, lacked metropolitan polish. He was a crusading Liberal, the political darling of those who five years later became Progressives under Roosevelt. He cut a memorable figure in the Taft Inaugural parade (1909) mounted upon a large white horse, his coat tails and red whiskers blowing in the thick snow.

1916. In 1910 President Taft put him on the Supreme Court bench as an associate justice. In 1916, a tart note to President Wilson marked his resignation from the court and his entry upon one of the most stupidly-managed political campaigns in U. S. history. On the evening of Nov. 8 he went to bed convinced that he would be the next President of the U. S. On the morning of Nov. 9 he arose to find himself once more a private citizen.

Grand Duke. When President Harding in 1921 named him Secretary of State, Mr. Hughes's appearance suddenly improved. His beard was trimmed shorter. The best tailors got orders for his suits. He engaged a valet to turn him out to perfection. He resembled nothing so much as a Russian grand duke under the empire. He conducted the State Department in the grand manner.

U. S. history bulks large with his diplomatic achievements: peace with Germany. the Washington Conference 5-5-3 naval ratio, rationalization of the nonrecognition of Soviet Russia, the World Court, resumption of diplomatic relations with Mexico.

But the pure white flame of Liberalism had burned out in him to a sultry ash of Conservatism. He had become a cosmopolitan figure, with icy grace and assurance, but had lost all his old fervor of a reform crusader. His mind had captured his heart.

"Chilly Charlie." As a Harding Cabinet member, he was no White House crony. He played no poker with the President, Albert Bacon Fall, Harry Micajah Daugherty and Charles Forbes. They called him "Chilly Charlie"--and worse-- resented his austere respectability.

"One-Man Theory." Last week it was a man of awful prestige whom President Hoover made Chief Justice of the U. S., a lifetime job paying $20,500 per year. His elevation, from the popular viewpoint, put him in the same category as such famed lifetime jobholders as the Grand Dalai Lama at Lhasa. Like them, he was invested with a new sanctity, an infallibility that set him above and apart from ordinary human beings. From this notion springs the belief that only the man who holds the office is fit to hold it.

Against this "one-man" theory last week stood Calvin Coolidge "Apostle of Common Sense," who will be long remembered as a U. S. President who said that U. S. Presidents do not have to be great or distinguished men. While others marveled aloud at the unique perfection of the Hughes appointment, Citizen Coolidge took it as a matter of course, implied that the U. S. was well stocked with other good and able men available for the highest posts. Said he:

"I have said before that this is not a one-man country. This event [Taft succeeded by Hughes] has again demonstrated it."

* Mr. Hughes Jr. resigned from the firm when President Hoover last year made him Solicitor General of the U. S. He promptly retired from that post when his father was named Chief Justice. *Walter F. ("Dutch") Carter, Mr. Hughes's brother-in-law, famed oldtime Yale baseball pitcher, partner in Hughes, Schurman & Dwight, was last week named a director of the Brooklyn Baseball Club ("Robins") by John A. Heydler, National League president.

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