Harlan
Fiske Stone was born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, on 11th October,
1872. After graduating from Columbia University in 1898 he worked
as a lawyer in New York City.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge appointed Stone
as his attorney general and was responsible for reorganizing the Federal
Bureau of Investigations. The following year Coolidge appointed
Stone as a member of the Supreme Court.
Over the next few years Stone, Oliver Wendell
Holmes and Louis Brandeis, emerged
as the three liberal justices who defended legislation that had been
passed to protect women, children
and trade unions from business interests.
However, they were in a minority and this legislation was often judged
to be unconstitutional.
During the administration of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, Stone disagreed with the conservative members of
the Supreme Court that much of the New
Deal legislation was unconstitutional.
When Charles Evans Hughes retired in
1941, Roosevelt appointed Stone as chief justice. During the Second
World War he argued that religious pacifists who refused to take
the statutory oath to bear arms could still be naturalized as citizens.
Harlan Fiske Stone died in Washington,
on 22nd April, 1946.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
