Very few Americans have held prominent positions in all three branches of the federal government. The 13th chief justice was one of them.
Frederick Moore Vinson was born in 1890 in Louisa, Kentucky, a small town near the border of West Virginia and Kentucky, to a southern family of “reduced circumstances.” While on the campaign trail a few decades later, Vinson would joke that he was “born in jail” – which was not entirely untrue, given his father worked as the county jailer and the family lived in front of it. Vinson interacted with the law fairly early on, as a local judge sometimes allowed him to sit near the bench while a case was in session. But Vinson’s interests weren’t entirely cerebral: the future chief justice was also reportedly an excellent student athlete, playing as quarterback of his football team before heading off to Kentucky Normal School (yes, it was called “Normal School”) and then to Centre College, where he graduated from its law department – at the top of his class – in 1911.
In a special January 1924 election, Vinson was elected to Congress as a Democrat. He would serve until 1938, with just one interruption due to a 1928 defeat, the first and only election that Vinson lost. In Congress, he was known as an expert on fiscal policy and became a reliable ally of the New Deal. Vinson also “played a leading role in shaping the Social Security Act (1935) and supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan.”
In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Vinson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But the country’s involvement in World War II led Vinson to move to the executive branch; in 1943, Vinson became director of the office of economic stabilization, where he helped oversee the wartime American economy and controlled inflation. In July 1944, Vinson chaired the American delegation to the Bretton Woods Conference to reshape the world’s monetary order. In 1946, President Harry Truman named him Secretary of the Treasury. (Vinson’s seeming willingness to take on whatever Washington needed earned him the nickname “Available Vinson“).
After Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone died in 1946, former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and former Associate Justice Owen Roberts both recommended Vinson as chief to Truman, with Hughes noting that “the Chief Justice of the United States should not only know the law but that he should understand politics and government.” Truman took Hughes’ advice and nominated Vinson to the center seat on June 6, 1946. The Senate confirmed his appointment on June 20. Truman’s hope was that Vinson (who, by the way, had been a regular at his White House poker games) could calm a divided court, led by Justice Hugo Black on one side and Justice Felix Frankfurter on the other.
Despite his impressive background, Vinson did not exactly establish himself as a heavyweight on the bench. Vinson preferred a restrained judiciary, encouraging the court to defer to the executive branch when evaluating its actions. In 1951’s Dennis v. United States, for example, Vinson wrote for a court plurality affirming the convictions of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, extending the “clear and present danger” test to cover conspiracies advocating violent overthrow of the government even if the perceived threat was relatively remote. Vinson also dissented in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, where he argued that Truman’s seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War was a legitimate use of presidential power to prevent a strike. Nor, as Truman had hoped, was Vinson able to tame a fractured court: although he was in the majority a staggering 97% of the time in one term, only around 30% of his court’s decisions proved unanimous (during the Roberts era, that figure is around 42%).
Vinson’s more enduring legacy, however, may lie in the realm of civil rights. In 1948’s Shelley v. Kraemer, Vinson held that enforcement of “racially restrictive [housing] covenants” violated the equal protection clause. Two years later, in Sweatt v. Painter, Vinson wrote for a unanimous court that a qualified Black law school applicant could not be constitutionally denied admission to the University of Texas Law School under the “separate, but equal” doctrine.
Although Vinson heard Brown v. Board of Education, he never got to decide it – just before Brown was scheduled for reargument, the chief justice died of a heart attack at the age of 63. It is unclear how Vinson would have voted in Brown – while some have expressed doubt that he would have been willing to make such a momentous decision, others contend that Vinson would have – like his successor, Chief Justice Earl Warren – authored a unanimous opinion invalidating segregation in public schools. According to Carlton Larson on SCOTUSblog back in 2012, had Vinson lived only slightly longer, “Brown would be seen not as the opening salvo of the Warren Court, but as the logical culmination of Vinson’s decisions in a line of unanimous race cases.”