A Wilson Family Tree
Notes for James Clark McReynolds
"Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 4: 1946-1950", American Council of Learned Societies, 1974
(obtained from http://0-www.galenet.com.albuq.cabq.gov:80/servlet/BioRC):
James Clark McReynolds
Birth: February 3, 1862 in Kentucky, United States
Death: August 24, 1946
Occupation: Supreme Court Justice
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
McReynolds, James Clark (Feb. 3, 1862 - Aug. 24, 1946), justice of the United States Supreme Court, was born in Elkton, Ky., a farming region a few miles north of the Tennessee border. The second child and first son of John Oliver McReynolds and Ellen (Reeves) McReynolds, he was descended from Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had migrated to Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century and moved to Virginia before settling in Kentucky, where in time they joined the Disciples of Christ. His mother was a devout, kindly, but dominating woman. His father, a graduate of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, was a physician. A narrow autocrat, "Dr. John" was called "The Pope" because of his belief in his own infallibility.
After attending a private school operated by a cousin, young McReynolds matriculated at Green River Academy in Elkton. In 1879 he entered Vanderbilt, which granted him the B.S. degree with first honors in his class in 1882. Two years later he graduated from the law school of the University of Virginia; he was influenced there by John B. Minor, who emphasized fixed principles of law and the need to restrain government from infringing on property rights. Steeped in the ideas of the Old South, McReynolds did not leave the region permanently until he was in his forties.
Following a brief period as secretary to Sen. Howell E. Jackson of Tennessee, a conservative Democrat, McReynolds went to Nashville, where he developed an extensive law practice and a profitable real estate business. A low-tariff, sound-money, limited-government Cleveland Democrat, he ran as a "Gold Democrat" nominee for Congress in 1896, but met defeat in his only bid for elective office. From 1900 to 1903 he taught at Vanderbilt law school.
In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed McReynolds assistant to the attorney general of the United States, an office in which he served diligently until 1907, when he joined the New York law firm headed by Paul D. Cravath. He returned to Washington in 1910 to take part in the antitrust prosecution of the American Tobacco Company, but left in anger the following year when the attorney general approved a dissolution decree that McReynolds thought too favorable to the old "Tobacco Trust." When an attorney for the trust accused him of favoring confiscation, McReynolds replied: "Confiscation! What if it is? Since when has property illegally and criminally acquired come to have any rights?" (Hendrick, p. 30). Once again, he moved to New York City, this time to open his own law office.
In 1913, at the urging of Col. Edward M. House, who had been impressed by McReynolds' reputation as an antitrust reformer, President Woodrow Wilson appointed the Kentuckian attorney general of the United States. McReynolds proved to be a zealous foe of the trusts. After winning a dissolution decree that ended the Union Pacific Railroad's control of the Southern Pacific, he balked the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's plan to monopolize all telephone and telegraph systems in the United States. The difficult struggle over the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, which resulted in a consent decree, brought McReynolds censure as well as praise. His campaigns against the trusts led some to regard him as a radical; in fact, he was a tenacious conservative who regarded such prosecutions as a logical consequence of his faith in a competitive society.
In August 1914 Wilson elevated McReynolds to the Supreme Court. The Senate approved the appointment over the strenuous objections of George W. Norris and others. By then McReynolds had become, as he was to remain, a storm center of controversy, as much for his temperament as for his ideas. As attorney general, he had antagonized senators who accused him of maintaining a corps of spies who investigated federal judges to influence their decisions, a charge he vigorously denied. He also got on poorly with other members of Wilson's cabinet; a feud with Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo reached such a point that communications between their departments had to be carried on through the White House. On the bench, McReynolds won a reputation for churlishness toward counsel and toward his fellow justices. Chief Justice William Howard Taft described him as "one who seems to delight in making others uncomfortable. He has a continual grouch." He was especially rude to his Jewish colleagues. On one occasion, when he refused to accompany the court on a trip to Philadelphia, he explained to Taft: "I am not always to be found when there is a Hebrew abroad."
While most of Washington thought him a crotchety, acerbic misanthrope, a small circle of friends found him gallant, courteous, sentimental, and fond of children. A man of few pleasures, he enjoyed duck hunting, golf, walking, and European travel. Slender, erect, slightly over six feet tall, he had piercing steel-blue eyes, spoke with a high-pitched voice, and carried himself like a Roman senator. McReynolds never married. Only after his death did it become known that he had resolved to remain true to the memory of Miss Will Ella Pearson, who in 1885 had died suddenly at the age of twenty-four.
Soon after joining the Supreme Court, McReynolds aligned himself with the conservative wing. He viewed the Constitution as an immutable body of principles that should be interpreted chiefly as limitations on the exercise of governmental power. A believer in stare decisis, he apparently never wrote an opinion that reversed a judgment. McReynolds, who rarely took a position that could be interpreted as favorable to the cause of labor, formed part of the minority of four in Wilson v. New (243 U.S. 332 [1917]), which held the Adamson Eight-Hour Act unconstitutional, and he joined the majority of five in the landmark case of Adkins v. Children's Hospital (261 U.S. 525 [1923]), which invalidated a District of Columbia minimum wage law. Despite his determination to curb government, he was willing to sanction a limited range of regulation, especially when it aimed at promoting unrestrained competition. In the field of civil liberties, McReynolds wrote the opinions in Meyer v. Nebraska (262 U.S. 390 [1923]), which held void a Nebraska law forbidding instruction of elementary school pupils in modern foreign languages, and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510 [1925]), which overturned an Oregon statute requiring pupils to attend public schools. More typical of McReynolds' views was his action in 1932 when he was one of two justices who opposed granting new trials to the Scottsboro defendants. Rarely assigned opinions in important cases, McReynolds in his long career on the bench averaged only nineteen opinions a year, mostly on minor questions in such fields as maritime law. These opinions were generally brief and pungent.
To a Cleveland Democrat like McReynolds, the New Deal was anathema. In every crucial New Deal case, he voted against the administration, usually as a member of the conservative bloc of justices, which also included Willis Van Devanter, George Sutherland, and Pierce Butler. Speaking for this minority of four, McReynolds early in 1935 delivered a blistering oral dissent in the gold-clause cases: "The Constitution as many of us have understood it, the Constitution that has meant so much, is gone. . . . Horrible dishonesty! . . . Shame and humiliation are upon us." When Justice Owen Roberts joined the conservatives that spring, the anti-New Deal bloc secured a majority that persisted in most cases through the end of 1936. In Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority (297 U.S. 288 [1936]), however, McReynolds was the lone dissenter when the Court sustained a Tennessee Valley Authority contract. McReynolds characterized President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "a fool," "not quite sane," and "bad through and through." Roosevelt, for his part, found McReynolds obnoxious. When in 1937 the president submitted his scheme to "pack" the Supreme Court, he took particular pleasure in the fact that it was based on a similar proposal McReynolds had advanced when he was attorney general.
Although Roosevelt's court plan met defeat, the president won a substantial victory when the Supreme Court in the spring of 1937 began to uphold New Deal legislation and when the first of a series of resignations enabled him to begin reconstituting its membership. As the last survivor on the Court of the conservative "Four Horsemen," McReynolds protested in vain against the "Constitutional Revolution" which saw the Court sanction an enormous range of governmental authority over the economy at the same time that it safeguarded an ever-widening scope of civil liberties. From 1937 through 1941 he dissented 119 times; in his twenty-six years on the bench, he recorded 310 dissents, a record number. Some believed that McReynolds remained on the Court only to deny Roosevelt the opportunity to name a successor. After 1937 he refused to attend the president's annual state dinner for the Supreme Court, and when the justices paid their traditional courtesy call on the president before the opening of the October term in 1939, McReynolds did not appear.
Two days after Roosevelt was inaugurated for a third term, McReynolds wrote out his resignation in two terse sentences. He left the bench on February 1, two days before his seventy-eighth birthday. He spent his final years quietly, attracting national attention only when during World War II he "adopted" thirty-three British refugee children. McReynolds died at the age of eighty-four at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, where he had been under treatment for "an acute exacerbation of a chronic gastro-intestinal condition"; on the day before his death, he developed indications of bronchopneumonia and a failing heart. He was buried in the family plot at Glenwood Cemetery in Elkton, Ky. After his death, it was revealed that beneficiaries of the old bachelor's bequests included a "lovely" lady, the "mother of my lively triplet girl friends," the Kentucky Female Orphans School, and Centre College, "to promote instruction of girls in domestic affairs." Born in the second year of the Civil War, he died in the first year of the cold war, a man who long ago had outlived his times.
-- William E. Leuchtenburg
Note: Some of the information in these pages is uncertain. Please let me know of errors or omissions using the email link above. ...Mike Wilson
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