Hughes v. Brandcis

Chief Justice Hughes has a Republican son practicing law in Manhattan. Associate Justice Brandeis has a Democratic daughter practicing law in Manhattan. Last week while their fathers sat amicably together on the U. S. Supreme Court bench, Charles Evans Hughes Jr. and Susan Brandeis campaigned vigorously against each other for their respective presidential candidates.

Miss Brandeis, plump and fortyish, is the wife of Lawyer Jacob Gilbert, mother of two boys and a girl. Bryn Mawr graduated her in 1915. Last week she appeared before 400 women, including Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at Manhattan's Pan-Hellenic Hotel and in a soft voice flayed President Hoover for not balancing the Budget, for cutting taxes for "party purposes" at the beginning of the Depression. From her father's famed dissenting opinion in the Oklahoma ice case (TIME, April 4), she quoted:

" 'The people of the United States are now confronted with an emergency more serious than war. Misery is widespread, in a time, not of scarcity, but of overabundance. The long-continued Depression has brought unprecedented unemployment, a catastrophic fall in commodity prices and a volume of economic losses which threatens our financial institutions. Some people believe that the existing conditions threaten even the stability of the capitalistic system. Economists are searching for the causes of this disorder and are re-examining the bases of our industrial structure.' "

Mr. Hughes, spare and fortyish, is, like his father, a Brown graduate. In 1929 he was appointed U. S. Solicitor General by a President grateful for the elder Hughes's services during the 1928 campaign. With the President he played Hooverball each morning behind the White House. When his father was appointed Chief Justice he promptly resigned as Solicitor General, the Government's No. 1 advocate before the Supreme Court. As a parting keepsake the President gave him a Hooverball. Last week Mr. Hughes, also in a soft refined voice, addressed the Essex County (N. J.) Women's Republican Club. Excerpt:

"In no other depression has the Government taken a hand. But this time, after the first shock, in the autumn of 1929, the President called a conference of business leaders. His concern was for the working people. . . . The President's foresight and prompt action upheld the wage scale for a year and a half in the face of constantly diminishing profits. Then the Government created emergency jobs for workers who otherwise would have had none.

"Would we have been as well off if some one other than Herbert Hoover had been in the White House? His every act and utterance have been instilled with utter consecration to his task, without thought of personal fortune. We cannot afford in times like these to do without the mind, the heart and the seasoned experience and above all the character of Herbert Hoover."

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