CLARKE, JOHN H(ESSIN)

born Sept. 18, 1857, New Lisbon, Ohio, U.S. died March 22, 1945, San Diego, Calif. associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (191622). Clarke studied law under his father and in 1880 opened a practice in Youngstown, Ohio, where he also bought an interest in the Youngstown Vindicator and helped make it an influential liberal newspaper. He gained a reputation in railroad law and was active in local Democratic politics, breaking briefly with the party over the silver issue but returning to become a supporter of the reform mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, Tom L. Johnson (190109) and Johnson's successor, Newton Baker. He was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in 1903 and in 1914 was appointed a federal district judge. In 1916 Clarke was named to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson. Clarke generally favoured the extension of government regulatory powers over the economy. (His opinions sometimes were used later as precedents in the antitrust decisions during the New Deal.) His position on civil liberties was ambivalent, however, and he relied on a very narrow construction of First Amendment rights in his decisions concerning the suppression of free speech during the Red Scare of 191920. Clarke resigned from the court in 1922 after the death of his two sisters, with whom he had lived in Youngstown, and he devoted the rest of his life to the cause of international peace.