Charles Evans Hughes Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Charles Evans Hughes was born in 1862 in New York State to Welsh immigrant parents. His father was a Baptist minister, and his mother placed an early premium on study and discipline. A precocious student, he sped through school, entered Brown University as a teenager, and graduated with highest honors in 1881. He then attended Columbia Law School, completed his legal studies in 1884, and was admitted to the New York bar. In 1888 he married Antoinette Carter, daughter of prominent attorney Walter S. Carter, a partnership that sustained his demanding public career. The couple raised a family that included a son, Charles Evans Hughes Jr., and three daughters, among them Elizabeth Hughes, who later became one of the earliest patients successfully treated with insulin.

Law Practice and Reform Work
Hughes built a reputation in New York City as a meticulous, even-tempered lawyer with uncommon stamina for complex regulatory issues. He briefly taught at Cornell Law School and returned to practice, where his careful preparation gained the confidence of reformers such as Elihu Root. In 1905 he served as counsel to the New York State legislative investigation into the life insurance industry, known as the Armstrong Committee. His incisive questioning exposed self-dealing and led to sweeping reforms. He later investigated gas and electric rates in New York City, work that showed his preference for fact-finding, expert administration, and public accountability over fiery rhetoric.

Governor of New York
Harnessing the public trust won by his investigative work, Hughes ran for governor of New York in 1906 and defeated William Randolph Hearst. Reelected in 1908, he governed as a progressive Republican, expanding state oversight of public utilities through a new Public Service Commission, advancing labor protections and civil service reforms, and tightening corporate regulation. He worked cooperatively with reform-minded national figures, including Theodore Roosevelt and Root, and became a national symbol of managerial progressivism: careful, data-driven, and personally austere. His steady executive performance drew the attention of President William Howard Taft.

Associate Justice and the 1916 Presidential Campaign
In 1910 President Taft appointed Hughes as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. On the Court he wrote with clarity and restraint, attentive to federalism and individual rights. His influence grew quickly, but in 1916 he took the unusual step of resigning to accept the Republican nomination for president, with former Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks as his running mate. The campaign against incumbent Woodrow Wilson was intensely fought, with California proving decisive; a much-noted failure to connect with Progressive leader Hiram Johnson there was among several factors in Hughes narrowly losing the election. Defeat reinforced his nonpartisan self-conception. He returned to private practice rather than reenter day-to-day party politics.

Secretary of State and International Leadership
In 1921 President Warren G. Harding asked Hughes to serve as Secretary of State, a post he continued to hold under President Calvin Coolidge. Hughes quickly emerged as a leading architect of interwar diplomacy. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922, he stunned delegates by opening with a detailed plan to halt the naval arms race; negotiations with British statesman Arthur Balfour and others produced the Five-Power Treaty limiting capital ships, the Four-Power Treaty on Pacific security, and the Nine-Power Treaty reinforcing the Open Door in China. He guided U.S. policy through a complex thicket of war debts, reparations, and regional issues, and he lent support to the Dawes Plan to stabilize European finances. After stepping down in 1925, he resumed practice, advising clients in major regulatory and international disputes.

Chief Justice of the United States
President Herbert Hoover nominated Hughes to be Chief Justice in 1930 following the retirement of William Howard Taft. Upon confirmation, Hughes's son, Charles Evans Hughes Jr., resigned as Solicitor General to avoid conflicts of interest. The Hughes Court confronted the constitutional storms of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Working with colleagues Louis Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, and later Benjamin N. Cardozo, and often with the decisive vote of Owen J. Roberts, Hughes navigated between the conservative bloc of James C. McReynolds, George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, and Pierce Butler and the Roosevelt administration's ambitious legislation.

Hughes wrote the Court's opinion in Near v. Minnesota (1931), a landmark for freedom of the press that struck down prior restraints. In Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), he upheld a Minnesota mortgage moratorium, emphasizing the state's power to meet emergencies under the Contracts Clause. The same Term, the Court unanimously invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act's central code in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), an opinion by Hughes that stressed limits on delegation and the Commerce Clause as then understood.

The constitutional landscape shifted dramatically in 1937. Hughes authored West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, upholding a state minimum wage law and signaling the end of the Lochner era's approach to substantive due process. He then wrote for the Court in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., sustaining the National Labor Relations Act and expanding the understanding of interstate commerce. In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), he required a state that maintained a law school for white students to provide genuinely equal legal education to black applicants, a step that foreshadowed later civil rights rulings.

Hughes also helped preserve judicial independence during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 proposal to enlarge the Court. In a widely publicized letter to Senator Burton K. Wheeler, he refuted claims that the Court was overburdened, undercutting the rationale for the plan. Behind the scenes he steadied the institution, valuing unanimity where possible and carefully assigning opinions to build durable doctrines.

Later Years and Legacy
Hughes retired in 1941, and President Roosevelt elevated Harlan Fiske Stone to succeed him as Chief Justice. He spent his final years quietly with Antoinette Carter Hughes, reflecting on a career that had ranged from statehouse reform to international diplomacy and from the crucible of the 1916 campaign to stewardship of the nation's highest court during economic crisis. He died in 1948.

Across six decades of public life, Hughes displayed a blend of managerial competence, learning, and institutional loyalty. He championed administrative expertise as governor, sought stability and restraint as Secretary of State, and, as Chief Justice, combined constitutional flexibility with principled limits on power. The network around him was correspondingly distinguished: mentors such as Elihu Root; presidents from Taft to Hoover, Harding, Coolidge, and Franklin D. Roosevelt; colleagues including Brandeis, Stone, Cardozo, Roberts, and Holmes; adversaries and antagonists from Hearst to the conservative justices McReynolds, Sutherland, Van Devanter, and Butler. His family anchored that public life, especially Antoinette Carter, his son Charles Jr., and Elizabeth Hughes, whose survival with the earliest insulin treatments intertwined a private triumph with an era's scientific breakthroughs. Hughes's imprint endures in the administrative state he helped legitimate, the diplomatic architecture he shaped after World War I, and the constitutional settlement forged in the late 1930s that recognized modern government while protecting core liberties.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Charles, under the main topics: Justice - Freedom - Work Ethic - War - Stress.

Other people realated to Charles: Louis D. Brandeis (Judge), Hugo Black (Judge), Nicholas M. Butler (Philosopher), Frank B. Kellogg (Politician), Warren G. Harding (President), Frank Murphy (Politician), Joseph McKenna (Politician), Crystal Eastman (Lawyer)