Journal of Supreme Court History

I Introduction

Between 1934 and 1941 Robert Houghwout Jackson had one of the most meteoric rises within the officialdom of the federal government. He went from being general counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (1934) to temporary special counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission (1935) to assistant attorney general in the Tax Division of the Department of Justice (1936) to assistant attorney general heading the Justice Department's Antitrust Division (1937) to solicitor general of the United States (1938) to attorney general of the United States (1940) to associate justice of the Supreme Court (1941). In that time interval he had become deeply involved in support of the Roosevelt administration's 1937 plan to change the membership of the Court, resulting in the eventual publication of a book, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy, which emphasized the "outmoded" response of Court majorities to New Deal legislation and argued that in those cases the majority's view of constitutional interpretation was cramped and unresponsive to changing social and economic conditions.¹ In the process Jackson had become an intimate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, so much so that Roosevelt initially intended to appoint him chief justice after Charles Evans Hughes retired in 1941, only retreating from that position after he was convinced that appointing Associate Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, who had been named to the Court by Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1925, would be an effective bipartisan gesture as the United States drew closer to entering World War II.²

Before taking the job at the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Robert H. Jackson had been a lawyer in Jamestown, New York, a small city in the southwestern part of the state. He had engaged in general practice, developing a successful and lucrative career, and although he had spent a brief interval practicing law in [End Page 148] Buffalo and had been modestly involved in state Democratic politics, he had shown little inclination to move beyond Jamestown since first entering practice there in 1913 at the age of 21. He had married Irene Gerhardt, a native of Kingston, New York, in 1916 and fathered two children. By the 1930s his income from practice was around $30,000 a year, over a million dollars in current value, and his family had been able to build an impressive home and keep a motor yacht on Chautauqua Lake near Jamestown. Jackson's practice ranged from criminal cases to regular representation of a local telephone company and local banks and manufacturers. In the midst of the Great Depression, he had carved out a successful and lucrative life as a small city lawyer. In an unpublished autobiography Jackson began in 1944, he said that "I had an excellent law practice," and "a private law practice was the best public office."³

Thus despite his longstanding connection to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he had first met in 1912, Jackson showed no inclination to leave Jamestown for government work or politics as Roosevelt became a national figure in the late 1920s and early 1930s, culminating in Roosevelt's becoming Governor of New York in 1928 and securing the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932. It was not Roosevelt, but Robert Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Herman Oliphant, General Counsel to the Treasury Department, who urged Jackson to take a position with the Bureau of Internal Revenue in 1934. Jackson initially only agreed to assume the position if he could serve on a part-time basis, commuting from Jamestown to Washington and retaining his law practice. But this arrangement soon proved unworkable, with the result, as Jackson recalled, that "in about six months I found it expedient to dissolve my law firm and aside from continuing old matters it was the end of private practice."⁴ Eventually Jackson and his wife Irene moved into an apartment in the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, along with their daughter Mary Margaret, their son William boarding at St. Albans' preparatory school in D.C.⁵

When Jackson arrived at the Bureau of Internal Revenue he found that a major challenge awaited him. The Roosevelt Justice Department had resolved to bring criminal...