George Harrold Carswell (December 22, 1919 – July 13, 1992) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He was also an unsuccessful nominee to the United States Supreme Court in 1970.

Education and career

Carswell was born in Irwinton, Wilkinson County, Georgia. He graduated from Duke University with an Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1941 and briefly attended the University of Georgia School of Law before joining the United States Navy at the beginning of World War II. Carswell did six months of postgraduate work at the United States Naval Academy and served in the Pacific aboard the heavy cruiser as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve; he was discharged in 1945 (when the war ended). Carswell graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University in 1948. Griffin Bell, 72nd Attorney General of the United States, was one of Carswell's classmates at Mercer. Carswell unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Georgia legislature in the fall of 1948. He then moved to Tallahassee, Florida, where he worked as a private attorney from 1948 to 1953. In 1953, he was appointed United States Attorney for the Northern District of Florida by President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Carswell served in this position until 1958.

Personal life

Carswell married his wife Virginia (née Simmons) in 1944.

Federal judicial service

Carswell was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on March 6, 1958, to a seat on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida vacated by Judge Dozier A. DeVane. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on March 31, 1958, and received his commission on April 10, 1958. He served as Chief Judge from 1958 to 1969. His service terminated on June 27, 1969, due to his elevation to the Fifth Circuit.

The Senate Judiciary Committee opened hearings on the nomination eight days after Nixon made the announcement; and the president anticipated that the nomination would proceed smoothly. Before they began, however, the press uncovered a speech delivered by Carswell during his unsuccessful Georgia legislative bid in 1948 that espoused the principles of white supremacy. In the August 2, 1948 speech to the American Legion chapter at Gordon, Georgia, he said:

When the story broke, Carswell said "specifically and categorically, I renounce and reject the words themselves and the thought they represent; they are abhorrent."

Other issues regarding Carswell's civil rights record soon also came to light, such as his being involved in turning a public golf course into a segregated private club in Tallahassee, Florida, signing a deed to property which contained a racially restrictive covenant and prolonging the duration of a school desegregation case from 1963 to 1967.

Meanwhile, feminists accused him of being an opponent of women's rights. Various women, including U.S. Congresswoman Patsy Mink and Betty Friedan, testified before the Senate, opposed his nomination. They described a case in which Judge Carswell refused a rehearing for a complainant who was the mother of preschool children.

The remark was criticized by many as being anti-semitic, which further damaged Carswell's cause. the Senate rejected Carswell's nomination on April 8, 1970, by a 45–51 vote,

Between the rejections of Haynsworth and of Carswell, the Senate rejected two of a single president's Supreme Court nominees. Before Nixon, the Senate had not done so since Grover Cleveland in 1893–94.

U.S. Senate campaign

On April 20, 1970, Carswell resigned from his judicial position to run for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Florida. His opponent was U.S. Representative William C. Cramer of St. Petersburg. Expecting to benefit politically in Florida from the rejection of Judge Carswell to the Supreme Court, aides of either Governor Claude R. Kirk, Jr., or U.S. Senator Edward Gurney of Winter Park urged Carswell to resign from the bench to run for the Senate seat being vacated by the long-term Democrat Spessard Holland. Cramer claimed that Gurney had in a 1968 gentlemen's agreement agreed to support him for the seat. Gurney declined to discuss the gentlemen's agreement with Cramer but said that he and Cramer, who had been House colleagues, had "totally different opinions on this. That is ancient history, and I see no point in reviving things. … If I told my complete version of the matter, Cramer would not believe me, and I don't want Bill angry at me." Gurney claimed that he was unaware that Cramer had considered running for the Senate in 1968 and had deferred that year to Gurney, with the expectation that Cramer would seek the other Senate seat in 1970 with Gurney's backing.

When Kirk and Gurney endorsed Carswell, Lieutenant Governor Ray C. Osborne, a Kirk appointee, abandoned his own primary challenge to Cramer. Years later, Kirk said that he "should have stuck with Osborne", later an attorney from Boca Raton, and not encouraged Carswell to run. Kirk also said that he had not "created" Carswell's candidacy, as the media had depicted.

Carswell reported that U.S. Representative Rogers Clark Ballard Morton of Maryland, who was also in 1970 the Republican national chairman, had told him that he believed Carswell was "clearly electable" and that Cramer should not risk the loss of a House seat that had been in Republican hands since 1955. Cramer, however, claimed that Morton had termed the intraparty machinations against Cramer the worst "double crosses" that Morton had ever witnessed in the party. President Nixon sat out the Carswell-Cramer primary even though in 1969 he had strongly urged Cramer to enter the race. Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Lee Warren said that Nixon had "no knowledge and no involvement" in Carswell's candidacy.

Gurney claimed that Harry S. Dent, Sr., a South Carolina political consultant with ties to Republican U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, had urged Carswell to run. Thereafter, Cramer was defeated, 54%–46%, by the Democrat Lawton Chiles of Lakeland in a Democratic year.

Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, who opposed Carswell's confirmation to the Supreme Court, said that Carswell "was asking for it, and he got what he deserved".

Later years

In 1976, Carswell pled guilty to battery for advances he made to an undercover police officer in a Tallahassee men's room. Then, in September 1979, Carswell was attacked and beaten by a man whom he had invited to his Atlanta, Georgia, hotel room in similar circumstances. Until these incidents there had been no public talk of Carswell's sexuality.