Charles Evans Hughes

Biography

Charles Evans Hughes was born in Glens Falls, New York, in 1862, the only child of a Welsh-born Baptist preacher. He entered Madison University (now Colgate) at fourteen, transferred to Brown University, from which he graduated in 1881, and took a law degree at Columbia in 1884. He joined a Wall Street firm, became a partner in 1888 and taught at Cornell Law School from 1891 to 1893.

In 1905 he led a New York legislative investigation of gas utilities and then served as counsel to the Armstrong committee on life insurance companies, exposing payments to politicians and conflicts of interest. The work made him a public figure, and he was elected governor of New York, serving from 1907 until 1910, when President Taft appointed him to the Supreme Court.

Hughes resigned from the Court in 1916 to run as the Republican presidential nominee and lost narrowly to Woodrow Wilson. As secretary of state under Harding and Coolidge from 1921 to 1925 he convened the Washington Naval Conference, where his proposal to halt capital-ship building and fix tonnage ratios led to the Washington Naval Treaty, and he also secured the Four-Power Treaty and a separate peace with Germany. He later sat on the Permanent Court of International Justice from 1928 to 1930.

Hoover appointed him chief justice in 1930. His court first struck down and then, from 1937, upheld New Deal measures, and Roosevelt's plan that year to enlarge the Court was defeated. Hughes retired in 1941 and died in 1948.