HUGHES, CHARLES EVANS

born April 11, 1862, Glens Falls, N.Y., U.S. died Aug. 27, 1948, Osterville, Mass. Charles Evans Hughes. jurist and statesman who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (191016), U.S. secretary of state (192125), and 11th chief justice of the United States (193041). As chief justice he led the Supreme Court through the great controversy arising over President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal social legislation. A member of a major New York City law firm, Hughes gained prominence in 1905 as counsel to New York state legislative committees investigating abuses in the gas and electric power industries and the life insurance business. In 1906, with the aid of President Theodore Roosevelt, he defeated the flamboyant newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst for governor of New York. Reelected in 1908, he resigned to accept an appointment to the Supreme Court by President William Howard Taft. In 1916 Hughes resigned from the Supreme Court upon receiving the Republican presidential nomination, as well as the endorsement of a Republican splinter group called the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party. He was narrowly defeated (277 electoral votes to 254) by Woodrow Wilson, who had the decisive advantage of the popular belief that he had kept the nation out of war in Europe. Five months later the United States entered World War I. As secretary of state in the early postwar years, Hughes negotiated a separate peace treaty with Germany after the Senate had failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. He supported attempts to secure the entry of the U.S. into the League of Nations, and he planned and then served as chairman of the Washington (D.C.) Disarmament Conference of 192122. He returned to private law practice at the end of President Calvin Coolidge's first term. Appointed chief justice by President Herbert Hoover, Hughes was confirmed despite liberal opposition in the Senate. In many cases involving problems raised by the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hughes generally favoured the exercise of federal power. On Feb. 18, 1935, he delivered three opinions upholding the right of the government to forbid payment of public and private debts in gold. In Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States (1935), however, he spoke for the court in invalidating the National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the principal New Deal statutes. In 1937 President Roosevelt proposed to pack the Supreme Court by appointing a new (and presumably liberal) justice to offset each sitting justice over the age of 70 who refused to retire. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hughes attacked the plan, and on April 12, 1937, he delivered the opinion in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1, sustaining the right of collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act). A few weeks later the court upheld various provisions of the Social Security Act. It was widely believed that these pro-New Deal decisions contributed to the defeat of the court-packing bill in Congress. Hughes retired in 1941 at the age of 79. He wrote Foreign Relations (1924), The Pathway of Peace (1925), The Supreme Court of the United States (1928), and Pan-American Peace Plans (1929). Additional reading Biographies include Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vol. (1951, reissued 1963); and Dexter Perkins, Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (1956, reprinted 1978). Charles Evans Hughes. Brown Brothers Hughes, David (Edward) born May 16, 1831, London died Jan. 22, 1900, London Anglo-American inventor of the carbon microphone, which was important to the development of telephony. His family emigrated to the United States when he was seven years old. In 1850 he became professor of music at St. Joseph's College, Bardstown, Ky. Five years later he took out a U.S. patent for a type-printing telegraph instrument; its success was immediate, and in 1857 Hughes took it to Europe, where it came into widespread use and in some places continued in use until the 1930s. Hughes's microphone, invented in 1878, was the forerunner of the various carbon microphones now in use.