Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Hughes's Sense of Humor

Charles Evans Hughes (LC)
James C. McReynolds (LC)
To follow up on Professor Olken’s paper on Charles Evans Hughes and Blaisdell, here’s an old note I stumbled across earlier in the week, from Felix Frankfurter’s President’s Personnel File at the Roosevelt Library.  On December 1, 1935, FDR wrote Frankfurter that during the Supreme Court justices' recent formal call on the President, “I think the Chief Justice pulled a fast one on me.  After he had been talking with me himself for ten minutes he got up, said he thought some other members of the Court could have a talk with me and went across the room and brought McReynolds and plumped him down.  The Chief Justice has a sense of humor though few people realize it.  Thank God no photographers were present.”