As Joanne Reitano observes in this serviceable biography, Charles Evans Hughes had three careers: as a politician in New York and then as a presidential candidate, as Secretary of State, and as a Supreme Court justice and Chief Justice. That fact poses a problem for a biographer. No one can be expected to master the literature and assess historiographical controversies in the three academic domains that examine the fields in which Hughes worked: American political history in the Progressive Era, U.S. diplomatic history and the history and theory of international relations, and U.S. constitutional history. Reitano is most sure-footed in the first of these. She relies selectively and sometimes a bit confusingly on scholarship in the other fields. In the end her work is a bit pedestrian but rather clearly the best available single-volume overview of the life of a man who was at the center of early twentieth-century Progressive political and constitutional law but who is now remembered mostly by specialists.
Reitano’s guides to the literature come from different historiographical traditions, which gives her presentation something of an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other tone. That tone does reflect some real features of Hughes’s career. As a politician and as Secretary of State, Hughes accomplished quite a bit, but not as much as one senses he ought to have. Most notably, of course, he was the Republican candidate against Woodrow Wilson in 1916 but lost narrowly despite the fact that Republicans seemed to have restored party unity after the break between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in 1912. As Secretary of State, Hughes promoted a program aimed at reducing tensions with Latin American nations arising from what they believed to be U.S. imperialism, but his “pan-Americanism” retained elements of imperial domination and did not have the sweep and seeming majesty of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy. As Reitano notes, “Hughes did not make as much progress as he wanted” (218). Describing Hughes’s actions as governor, Reitano says that he “proved to be more politically astute than expected” (58). Those seem to be apt judgments about much of Hughes’s political and diplomatic careers. Hughes was clearly more successful as a justice and especially as Chief Justice.
How then can a biographer account for Hughes’s successes and shortfalls in his three careers? (Failure seems too strong a term even for Hughes’s presidential campaign; Reitano quotes John Milton Cooper’s observation that “the most striking aspect of the 1916 election was not that Wilson won, but that Hughes almost did” [139].) The obvious candidates are personality, intellect, and circumstances.
Reitano relies primarily upon political scientist Betty Glad’s psychodynamic interpretation for the first two: “Glad considered Hughes emotionally encumbered and intellectually ill-equipped for leadership in the twentieth century” (5). Glad and others do pick up on one aspect of Hughes’s persona but miss other equally important aspects. Hughes was routinely described by journalists as reserved and somewhat aloof in public, characterizations bolstered by his physical appearance and, especially as he aged, by his striking white beard. Reserve and aloofness, one might think, were encumbrances.
Yet equally common are descriptions of Hughes as charming and outgoing in small groups, telling jokes that he would never insert into his public addresses and relating well to his companions on a personal level. These characteristics enabled him to be a successful diplomat and negotiator. And even in his public appearances, Hughes rather clearly connected with his audiences through thoughtful and well-delivered speeches. His speeches were not stem-winders and he lacked charisma, which almost certainly led to disparaging comparisons with Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and even Woodrow Wilson. Glad’s reference to the twentieth century suggests that Hughes suffered because his rhetorical style was more suitable to an earlier period, but again the very fact of his successes suggests as well that the transition to a new style occurred over an extended period.
Reitano hints that Hughes’s public addresses were less successful than they could have been because they were too lawyerly and intellectually inadequate. Journalists regularly described his speeches as well-written and delivered, though perhaps a bit dry. Hughes articulated ideas that were common currency in progressive circles. He did not push progressive thinking forward along any front but defended the advances progressives had achieved and endorsed extending established progressive principles into new domains. As Reitano puts it, “Hughes was a structural reformer using his progressive principles to modernize existing systems and traditional commitments” (146). Particularly as governor of New York, he was inhibited by the circumstances of political factionalism within the state’s Republican Party.
Hughes was a lawyer of the first rank. He began his career as an investigator of corporate wrongdoing in New York and showed that he could understand complex economic matters at a high level. As a judge, he knew how to use the available legal materials skillfully to support results he thought sensible. Not surprisingly, Reitano is less effective in detailing that feature of Hughes’s talent. Doing so requires the kind of deep engagement with the law that a non-specialist necessarily lacks. A close analysis of decisions like Blaisdell, the Minnesota mortgage moratorium case, and the Gold Clause cases shows a master craftsman of the law at work.
Hughes’s success as Chief Justice was untarnished. He led the Court from within. The only criticism his colleagues sometimes leveled against him was that he had mastered the facts and the law of the cases the Court considered so well that his opening recitations when the justices met to deliberate over the cases left almost nothing more to be said. And he collaborated with the opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s court-packing plan to intervene at a crucial moment with a letter contesting Roosevelt’s fig-leaf justification for his proposal, the idea that aged justices were unable to keep up with their work. Within the Court, then, Hughes’s interpersonal skills in small groups and his exceptional talent as a lawyer—his intellect—were the sources of his success.
Reitano concludes that Hughes pursued a “lifelong quest for practical ways to promote a democracy dedicated to the Enlightenment ideals of reason and fairness” and was “ardently dedicated to honesty, duty, equal opportunity, and justice for all” (26). This is pabulum but also quite accurate. It describes a man who, in all three of his careers, was a mainstream progressive more interested in doing than in theorizing. Herbert Croly pops up intermittently in Reitano’s book. Perhaps John Dewey should as well.
