"We Serve Our Hour"

On election night in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes went to bed thinking that he had been elected President of the U.S. He woke to find that he was wrong; victory vanished as the returns came in from California. He accepted his defeat philosophically. He was a judicial man who, someone said, looked "like a Victorian child's image of Almighty God." And history had a judicial role cut out for him. He lived out a public career as a tidier-up of disorder, an impeccable caretaker of constitutionality.

Charles the Baptist. The son of a Baptist Minister, he read Greek at eight, graduated from Brown University at 19, studied law and joined a Manhattan law firm. The public first heard of him in 1905. Appointed a special counsel, he investigated a scandalous gas monopoly and won a consequential cut in rates. He also uncovered a venal conspiracy between city officials and New York insurance firms. On the strength of these crusades, he was elected governor of New York over the Democratic nominee, William Randolph Hearst.

As a reform governor who despised ward politics, he exasperated the politicians, who dubbed him "Charles the Baptist." Nevertheless, he was reelected. Taft appointed him to the Supreme Court (where he stayed until his unsuccessful race for the presidency); Harding made him his Secretary of State.

He became surprisingly sociable. In private, he even unbent. Friends recall the time he read a note from Soviet Russia signed by one V. Urin. "Hmm," Hughes mused gravely, "he must be a member of the Privy Council."

One accomplishment of which he was proud was the Washington Naval Conference, which in 1922 seemed like a long step toward peace. He resolutely refused to recognize the revolutionary government of Russia, declaring that "no state is entitled to a place within the family of nations" if it repudiates the rights of private property. He was wildly attacked for this stand.

Because he was a corporation lawyer, he was attacked by a vehement Senate minority and by liberals for his "fixed, set, intolerant mentality" when Herbert Hoover appointed him Chief Justice in 1930.

He frequently voted with the court's "liberal wing"--Brandeis, Cardozo and Stone. New Dealers castigated him for rejecting NRA, but all the other justices rejected it too. He voted for many New Deal measures, including the Wagner Act. His attitude was that if a social revolution was being legislated, it should be legislated in an orderly, constitutional way.

The Servant's Role. When Franklin Roosevelt made his frontal assault on the "nine old men," Hughes reacted, in public at least, with Jovian calm. But he quietly and effectively fought F.D.R.'s effort to pack the court. When Roosevelt stood before him to be sworn in for a precedent-breaking third term, Hughes whispered through his beard: "Franklin, isn't this becoming a trifle monotonous?" A few months later, at 79, he resigned as Chief Justice and retired to a quiet life of quiet honors.

In 1939, addressing the 150th anniversary session of Congress, he had stated his credo: "We are here not as masters but as servants . . . We serve our hour by unremitting devotion to the principles which have given our Government both stability and capacity for orderly progress in a world of turmoil and revolutionary upheavals." Last week, having fulfilled his faithful servant's role, Charles Evans Hughes, 86, died.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.