Sherman "Shay" Minton (October 20, 1890 – April 9, 1965) was an American politician and jurist who served as a U.S. senator from Indiana and later became an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; he was a member of the Democratic Party.
After attending college and law school, Minton served as a captain in World War I, following which he launched a legal and political career. In 1930, after multiple failed election attempts, and serving as a regional leader in the American Legion, he became a utility commissioner under the administration of Paul V. McNutt, Governor of Indiana. Four years later, Minton was elected to the United States Senate. During the campaign, he defended New Deal legislation in a series of addresses in which he suggested it was not necessary to uphold the United States Constitution during the Great Depression. Minton's campaign was denounced by his political opponents, and he received more widespread criticism for an address that became known as the "You Cannot Eat the Constitution" speech. As part of the New Deal Coalition, Minton championed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's unsuccessful court packing plans in the Senate and became one of his top Senate allies.
After Minton failed in his 1940 Senate reelection bid, Roosevelt appointed him as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Roosevelt's death, President Harry S. Truman, who had developed a close friendship with Minton during their time together in the Senate, nominated him to the Supreme Court. He was confirmed by the Senate on October 4, 1949, by a vote of 48 to 16, 15 Republicans and one Democrat (Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia) voting against him. He served on the Supreme Court for seven years. An advocate of judicial restraint, Minton was a regular supporter of the majority opinions during his early years on the Court; he became a regular dissenter after President Dwight Eisenhower's appointees altered the court's composition. In 1956, poor health forced Minton to retire, after which he traveled and lectured until his death in 1965. To date, he is the last member of the United States Congress to be named to the Supreme Court.
According to historians, Minton's judicial philosophy was largely a reaction to the relationship between the New Deal senators and the conservative 1930s Court, which ruled much of the New Deal legislation unconstitutional. Minton believed the Supreme Court should be more deferential to the political branches of government, and supported a broad interpretation of the powers of Congress. He generally opposed any effort to rule federal legislation unconstitutional on the principle that the court was overstepping its authority. As a result of his judicial philosophy, he sought to uphold the intent of the political branches of government. Historians note the unusual contrast this created between his role as a partisan liberal Senator and his role as a conservative jurist. When Minton became a Justice, the Senate had become more conservative, leading Minton to uphold the constitutionality and intention of conservative legislation. He often played peacemaker and consensus builder during a period when the Court was riven by feuds. He generally ruled in favor of order over freedom as a result of his broad interpretation of governmental powers. These rulings and their limited impact have given some historians a negative opinion of his judicial record. Other historians consider Minton's strong commitment to his judicial principles laudable. In 1962, the Sherman Minton Bridge in southern Indiana and the Minton–Capehart Federal Building in Indianapolis were named in his honor.
Early life
Family and background
alt=A white two-story house|thumb|right|Minton's birthplace and boyhood home
Minton was born on October 20, 1890, to John Evan and Emma Livers Minton, in their Georgetown, Indiana, home. He was the third of the couple's four children, and was nicknamed Shay because of his younger brother's inability to properly pronounce "Sherman". His classmates included such people as future Governor of Indiana Paul V. McNutt and future presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie, both of whom later had substantial impacts on Minton's political career. Minton continued to improve his oratory and debate at Yale; he won the Wayland Club prize for extemporaneous public speaking, and helped organize the university's legal aid society. Minton returned to camp and requested to repeat his training course, still hoping to receive a commission; after finishing the training he was commissioned as a captain. in which he concluded the urgent needs of the masses outweighed the need to uphold the Constitution. The speech backfired wildly and papers and opponents across the state called Minton's remarks traitorous. The measure was placed in an omnibus bill designed to reform judicial salaries and districting, among many other measures. Republicans quickly discovered the court-packing provision and targeted the bill. At the time, Democrats held super-majorities in both chambers of Congress, and passage of the bill at first seemed assured.
Most controversial of all, Minton proposed a bill in April 1938 to make it a felony for newspapers or other periodicals to publish as "fact anything known to the publisher, or his, or its, responsible agents, to be false," punishable by up to a two-year prison sentence or a $10,000 fine. Minton made clear that his main targets were the anti-New Deal press including the Chicago Daily Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Those who know Senator Minton," Newsweek suggested, "say he must have had Roosevelt's tacit approval before introducing a bill to make news distortion a felony." The unanticipated opposition to the bill was overwhelming and transcended the political spectrum. Many charged that Minton was trying to muzzle the critics of the New Deal through censorship. When he raised the idea of a more "objective" across-the-board investigation, it too failed to gain support. A consequence of the reaction against the Minton Bill was to spur the formation of the Bill of Rights Committee of the American Bar Association.
Although Minton supported the Roosevelt Administration and became a regular guest at the White House, Minton broke with the president on some measures. He voted to override a presidential veto of a grant of $2.5 billion ($ billion in 2015 dollars) in bonus pay for World War I soldiers (Bonus Army). Despite Minton's heavy campaigning, he lost the close election to Willis by 5,179 votes out of over 1.5 million cast.
Seventh Circuit
Appointment
On May 7, 1941, Roosevelt announced Minton's nomination to the Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Minton joined the United States Supreme Court, the decision was appealed to that body; Minton recused himself from the case, which the court decided to overturn. In another decision, Minton was in the majority that ruled under the Sherman Antitrust Act that the New York Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company was a monopoly, ordering the company to break up its grocery business. Minton was also in the majority in several cases filed to enforce decisions made by the National Labor Relations Board, usually to end worker strikes. Many liberals condemned the court at the time of the decision. The ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 1946 appeal. The candy company produced a one-cent gumball dispenser in which almost all the gumballs were the same color. A few different-colored gumballs were included which, when dispensed, entitled the purchaser to a prize from the merchant who owned the machine. The FTC had an injunction put in place barring the company from producing the machines because they claimed it violated anti-gambling laws. Minton wrote the majority opinion and sided with the majority to keep the injunction in place, but dryly mocked the counsel for the defense and the gambling law, stating:
<blockquote>Counsel for the petitioner discussed at great length from a sociological point of view, of the age-old problem of the gambling instinct in the human being. According to his analysis, gambling pervades our entire economic system; thus insurance contracts are a gamble, stock and grain exchange transactions are gambles, and the farmer's dependence on weather is a gamble. Counsel's attempt to apply this analysis to the present case left us cold and unimpressed. He even reminded us that our great idol, Mr. Chief Justice John Marshall, in his day attended the horse races and wagered with his clergyman. In fact, they ran a book. As indicating how times have changed and how even our coarse nature has yielded to the protecting care of governmental policy, we confess we do not even know a bookmaker, clerical or otherwise, and our passes to the beautiful race tracks around Chicago lie in our desk unused. The panel met every two weeks which, along with his responsibilities on the circuit court, kept Minton very busy and afforded him little rest, leading to a deterioration in his health. Minton had already privately accepted the nomination several days earlier after a telephone conversation with Truman. He mentioned his broken leg and hinted in his letter that it could be detrimental to his health to travel in his condition. Although hearings had occurred irregularly in the past, it was not customary at that time to have a hearing on a nominee. During an absence of Jenner's, Minton's allies worked to have the hearing request dropped. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 9–2 on October 3, 1949, to forward his nomination to the full Senate with a favorable report. The long debate over Minton's appointment focused on his partisanship, support of the court packing plan during his time in the Senate, and poor health. His opponents launched numerous delaying tactics; the Senate session before the vote to confirm Minton lasted until midnight. His confirmation was approved 48–16 on October 4, 1949,
Judicial restraint
Minton's central judicial philosophy was to ascertain and uphold the original intent of legislation. Of all the cases in which Minton was involved, he disagreed most with the Youngstown decision and "went into a tirade" during the conference where the decision was made. He framed the complex question of the case as: "Can a racially restrictive covenant be enforced at law by a suit for damages against a co-covenantor who allegedly broke the covenant?" The Court decided the answer in the negative.
Minton voted to uphold anticommunist legislation during the period of the "red scare", siding with the majority in 1951's Dennis v. United States, which upheld the conviction of the leader of the US Communist Party. During the same period, the Court was split over the legality of governmental loyalty tests. Many agencies had programs in place to ensure that members of the government were not communists. Minton's vote proved to be the deciding factor in cases regarding loyalty tests. while in the decision he authored in the case of Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath, he voted to uphold the plaintiff's position that he had been terminated illegally because of his support of fascist ideology. This proved to be the most important vote as it allowed the tests to be given with only minimal suspicion of a person's disloyalty to the government. Linda Gugin pointed out that Minton was a disappointment to liberals because he consistently chose order over freedom. Gugin also concludes that Minton had the strongest commitment to judicial restraint and ideological neutrality of any justice, past or present.
Politics
Although Minton was on the Supreme Court, he remained casually involved in Democratic internal politics. He wrote Truman several letters criticizing Justices Robert H. Jackson and Hugo Black, referring to Black as a demagogue. He also offered advice on dealing with Republican opposition in the Senate. In a 1954 letter, after Truman left office, he urged Truman to help focus public attention on the economy and away from communism, a threat he claimed the Republicans were exaggerating to avoid confronting their own problems.
Minton did not enjoy the limited influence of his judicial role in the later years of his term, when he was more frequently in the minority in voting on cases. He was succeeded by William J. Brennan Jr. He left most of his personal papers and judicial records to the Truman Presidential Library.
Minton is the eponym of the Sherman Minton Bridge, which carries Interstate 64 across the Ohio River, connecting western Louisville, Kentucky with New Albany, Indiana. Minton attended the dedication of the bridge at a 1962 ceremony. He is also the namesake of the annual Sherman Minton Moot Court Competition, held at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. He is also honored (with Indiana Senator Homer E. Capehart)—in the "Brutalist" style designed by Woollen, Molzan and Partners and with architectural art by Milton Glaser—in the centrally located Minton-Capehart Federal Building on Indiana World War Memorial Plaza in Indianapolis. A bronze bust of Minton was created and put on display in the Indiana Statehouse. Schwartz went on to say, "he ranks near the bottom of any list of Justices."
Minton's time on the court marked the end of a transitory period in the judiciary. Since Minton, justices have tended to serve increasingly longer terms on the court, which has had strong political science implications on the Supreme Court. The growing concept of judicial non-partisanship became the norm in American politics after Minton—he was the last member of Congress to be appointed to the Court.