James Clark McReynolds | Biography

James Clark McReynolds served as attorney general and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. McReynolds was a very conservative justice who gained prominence for his opposition to the New Deal legislation of the 1930s and for his unprecedented number of opinions declaring acts of Congress unconstitutional. McReynolds was born on February 3, 1862 in Elkton, Kentucky, the son of a prominent surgeon. McReynolds graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1882 and then attended the University of Virginia law school, where he graduated in 1884. He established a law practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and became a successful business attorney. In 1900 he was appointed professor of law at Vanderbilt.

During the period 1886-1900, McReynolds established himself as a conservative Democrat, running unsuccessfully in 1886 for Congress despite substantial Republican support. Although a Democrat, he found favor with Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who appointed McReynolds assistant U.S. attorney general in 1903. He remained in the department until 1907.

In that year he moved to New York and joined a large law firm. In 1913, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson appointed McReynolds U.S. attorney general. He gained prominence for his prosecution of antitrust cases. McReynolds obtained a decree requiring American Telephone and Telegraph to relinquish its monopoly of wire communications. In addition, he dissolved the United States Thread Association, obtained an injunction restraining the National Wholesale Jewelers' Association from a conspiracy to restrain trade and forced the New Haven Railroad to give up its monopoly of transportation in New England. This was a remarkable amount of activity in a brief time, for McReynolds left the office of attorney general in 1914 when Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court.

McReynolds' conservatism was consistent and unbending. He believed in a restricted role for the federal government, which meant that he opposed federal social and economic regulation. Thus, he voted to strike down state and federal regulations on business, including provisions that mandated working conditions and restricted child labor. His views matched those of most of his fellow justices during the 1920s and 1930s, but the Great Depression and the New Deal legislation of Franklin Roosevelt soon put McReynolds in the spotlight.

President Roosevelt advocated a new approach for the federal government. In place of an unregulated economy, Roosevelt and Congress enacted laws that made the federal government a major factor in economic decisions and planning. These new laws and the ideology behind them infuriated McReynolds. He, along with justices George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, and Pierce Butler, became the core of opposition on the Supreme Court to federal efforts to revitalize the economy and create a social safety net. McReynolds voted with the majority to strike down as unconstitutional the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 55 S.Ct. 837, 79 L.Ed. 1570 (1935) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 in United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 56 S.Ct. 312, 80 L.Ed. 477 (1936).

As McReynolds and the conservative majority struck down each new piece of New Deal legislation, President Roosevelt became frustrated. Roosevelt had been returned to office in the landslide election of 1936 and the country seemed to be solidly behind his program. The only obstacle for the New Deal was the Supreme Court. Therefore, Roosevelt proposed a "court-packing" plan that would have added additional justices to the court, in hopes of gaining a more sympathetic majority. Although Congress rejected his plan, the national debate over the role of the federal government and the recalcitrance of the Supreme Court led more moderate members of the court to change their positions and vote in favor of New Deal proposals.

McReynolds was outraged at this switch and the resulting expansion of the federal government. Now in the minority, he issued stinging dissents against what he believed were unconstitutional acts by the national government. In Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548, 57 S.Ct. 883, 81 L.Ed. 1279 (1937), he dissented from a decision that upheld the Social Security Act, castigating the idea that the Constitution gave the federal government the right to provide "public charity throughout the United States."

On a personal level, McReynolds ranks as one of the most troubling figures ever to sit on the court. A virulent anti-Semite, McReynolds treated justices Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, both Jews, with undisguised contempt. He refused to sign joint opinions with Brandeis or sit next to Brandeis at official court ceremonies. Increasingly isolated, McReynolds retired in 1941. He died on August 24, 1946 in Washington, D. C.