Warren, Charles 1868-1954

views updated

WARREN, Charles 1868-1954

PERSONAL:

Born 1868, in Boston, MA; died 1954, in Washington, DC; son of Winslow and Mary (Tinkham) Warren; married Annie Louise Bliss, January 6, 1904. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1889; Harvard Law School, 1892. Politics: Democrat.

CAREER:

Attorney, educator, author, and civil servant. Admitted to the Bar of the State of Massachusetts, 1887; Moorfield Story (law firm), Boston, MA, associate; private secretary to Massachusetts Governor William E. Russell, 1893; assistant U.S. Attorney General, 1914-17; special adviser to U.S. State Department; appointed special master by U.S. Supreme Court, 1924, 1929, 1938. Lecturer in history and law in various colleges and universities, including Princeton University, Boston University Law School, Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, and College of William and Mary, 1924-40. Massachusetts Civil Service Commission, chairman, 1905-11; Trail Smelter Arbitral Tribunal, member, 1937; member of Conciliation International Committee during treaty between United States and Hungry, 1939; President's War Relief Control Board, member, 1943-46; Harvard University board of overseers, member; New England Conservatory of Music, trustee.

MEMBER:

American Society of International Law (honorary vice president), National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Philosophical Society, Harvard Alumni Association (president, 1941-42), Metropolitan Club and Cosmos Club (Washington, DC), Harvard Club and St. Botolph Club (Boston, MA), Century Club and Harvard Club (New York, NY).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pulitzer Prize for History, 1923, for The Supreme Court in United States History; honorary L.L.D. from Columbia University, 1933.

WRITINGS:

The Girl and the Governor, Scribner (New York, NY), 1900.

(With others) Politics, McClure, Phillips (New York, NY), 1901.

History of the Harvard Law School and of Early Legal Conditions in America, 3 volumes, Lewis Publishing Co. (New York, NY), 1908, volumes 1 and 2 reprinted, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 1970, 3 volumes reprinted, Lawbook Exchange (Union, NJ), 1999.

A History of the American Bar, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1911, reprinted, Longwood Press (Boston, MA), 1980, revised edition, H. Fertig (New York, NY), 1939, reprinted, 1978.

The Supreme Court in United States History, 3 volumes, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1922, revised edition, 1926, reprinted, F. B. Rothman (Littleton, CO), 1987.

The Supreme Court and Sovereign States (Stafford lectures), Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1924, reprinted, W. S. Hein (Buffalo, NY), 2001.

Congress, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1925, revised edition, 1935, reprinted, W. S. Hein (Buffalo, NY), 1994.

The Making of the Constitution, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1928, reprinted, F. B. Rothman (Littleton, CO), 1993.

Congress as Santa Claus; or, National Donations and the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution, Michie (Charlottesville, VA), 1932, reprinted, Arno Press (New York, NY), 1978.

Troubles of a Neutral (bound with The Post-War Development of International Law and Some Contributions by the United States of America by Manley O. Hudson, and Soviet Foreign Policy, by Michael T. Florinsky), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education (Worcester, MA), 1934.

Bankruptcy in United States History, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1935, reprinted, W. S. Hein (Buffalo, NY), 1994.

(Editor) The Story-Marshall Correspondence 1819-1831, New York University School of Law (New York, NY), 1942.

Odd Byways in American History, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1942.

Jacobin and Junto; or, Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758-1822, Blom (New York, NY), 1931, reprinted, AMS Press (New York, NY), 1970.

Contributor to periodicals, including Foreign Affairs.

Warren's works have been translated into Spanish.

SIDELIGHTS:

Attorney, author, educator, and civil servant Charles Warren was extremely influential as a constitutional authority and historian. As much interested in writing as in politics, Warren penned and published a number of works, from short stories to articles in law journals. His important works include the now-classic three-volume History of the Harvard Law School, first published in 1908, as well as Early Legal Conditions in America (1909), and History of the American Bar, Colonial and Federal, to 1860 (1911), the last one of the earliest works on this area of legal history.

Born in Boston in 1868, Warren graduated from Harvard University in 1889, then taught there for a year before entering Harvard Law School. Following an interest in politics, Warren became private secretary to Massachusetts Governor William E. Russell in 1893, and eventually served as Russell's law partner. In 1905 Warren was appointed chairman of the Massachusetts State Civil Service Commission, serving there until 1911 and honing the commission into a more effective instrument. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson appointed Warren, a Democrat, assistant attorney general of the United States. By August of that year the United States was becoming involved in World War I, putting Warren in charge of legal matters relating to the war for the Department of Justice. Warren began to focus on problems associated with neutrality and international law, and eventually became a leading expert in the field. He implemented several important wartime measures, including the Espionage and Trading with the Enemy acts of 1917. He briefed or argued thirty-nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court before resigning in 1918 and returning to private practice.

Due to his experience and reputation in international law, after the end of World War I the Supreme Court named Warren special master in several cases. He later served as American representative on international conciliation and arbitration commissions involving disputes surrounding U.S. territorial rights, and was much sought after as a lecturer. His lectures were often transcribed and bound in book form.

Warren's primary contribution was made through his most important publication, the three-volume The Supreme Court in United States History, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1923. "Unlike earlier books which have been, in the main, histories of the Supreme Court as such, and therefore have been of interest chiefly to members of the legal profession, this elaborate work by Mr. Warren is a narrative of United States history as affected by the Supreme Court, and was written for laymen and lawyers alike," reported a contributor to the American Review of Reviews. One of Warren's major themes was his contention that after the 1880s the Court's intervention in state and national legislative powers increased significantly. He maintained that the resulting "judicial law," though not constitutionally final, is a necessary stage in the evolving process of law. According to Edward S. Corwin in the American Historical Review, "The two principle criticisms of Warren's book are, first, that it is too long; and, secondly, that it is not long enough.…Warren's attempts to correct accepted historical verdicts are not always convincingly successful, but otherwise the work is singularly free of statements to which the informed reader will be apt to take exception.…But these, after all, are very minor blemishes of a highly valuable work." In perhaps the most telling testament to Warren's book, the U.S. Supreme Court has been known to cite TheSupreme Court in United States History when establishing historical precedents.

Warren's second important work was 1925's Congress, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court. William McDonald, reviewing the book in the New York Times, summarized: "Warren …appears in the main to think and speak of the Constitution as comprised in a document framed by a convention in 1787, and put into operation in 1789, and since that time variously amended by joint action of the Congress and states.… When, as sometimes happens, a decision of the Supreme Court runs counter to what a respectable number of people want …we have writers like Mr. Warren hastening to steady the ark of the covenant lest it fall." Warren's The Making of the Constitution followed in 1928 and was written in a similar vein.

Warren remained influential during the 1930s, and worked as a consultant to the Department of State on matters of neutrality and the problems of neutral nations. Many of his suggestions, especially those dealing with contraband and war materials, were incorporated into the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937. He was also influential within the legal profession; in 1938 his research was specifically sited by Justice Brandeis in the Supreme Court's reversal of a nearly century-old decision based on Joseph Story's interpretation of the Judiciary Act of 1789. Similarly, Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower cited Warren on presidential prerogatives in justifying some of their more controversial executive orders.

Although he retired from public affairs after World War I, during World War II Warren served on the War Relief Control Board, where he contributed to the debate over the fate of Axis leaders after the war. Beginning in 1943, he wrote many speeches and articles in which he argued against holding postwar trials under conventional rules of criminal justice. He advocated instead military tribunals, citing numerous precedents for trying the vanquished as part of normal military proceedings. This reasoning and process continued to be followed in the twenty-first century. He died in 1954, in Washington, D.C.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 1922, review of The Supreme Court in United States History, p. 134; January, 1932, review of Jacobin and Junto; or, Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758-1822, p. 354.

American Political Science Review, November, 1929, review of Making of the Constitution, p. 1044; June, 1933, review of Congress as Santa Claus; or, National Donations and the General Welfare Clause of Constitution, p. 497.

American Review of Reviews, July, 1922, review of The Supreme Court in United States History, p. 110; January, 1926, review of Congress, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, p. 109; February, 1929, p. 24.

Booklist, January, 1923, p. 110; February, 1929, p. 195; January, 1936, p. 146.

Boston Transcript, September 24, 1922, p. 7; December 19, 1925, p. 3; November 17, 1928, p. 4; January 14, 1933, p. 1.

Columbia Law Review, February, 1933, p. 392.

Harvard Law Review, November, 1931, p. 204; January, 1936, p. 514.

Nation, January 24, 1925, review of The Supreme Court in United States History, p. 98; December 23, 1925, p. 736.

New York Times, January 10, 1926, review of Congress, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, p. 12; November 25, 1928, review of Making of the Constitution, p. 13.

Saturday Review of Literature, April 6, 1929, p. 97.