Charles Evans Whittaker

views updated May 29 2018

Charles Evans Whittaker

Charles Evans Whittaker (1901-1973) was named to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Dwight Eisenhower. Supreme Court justices receive a lifetime appointment, but Whittaker resigned after serving only five years.

Charles Whittaker was born in Troy, Kansas, on February 22, 1901, and was raised on his father's farm. Grief-stricken at the death of his mother on his 16th birthday, he quit high school and buried himself in full-time farm work. In describing this difficult period in his life, Whittaker movingly commented to the Senate Judiciary Committee many years later: "I rode a pony to school through six miles of mud night and morning for about a year and a half. When my mother died, it broke my heart; she died on my birthday, 1917. I felt I couldn't go on and I quit high school."

After agreeing to be tutored in high school subjects, Whittaker was accepted into the night program at the University of Kansas City Law School in 1921. The future justice financed his education, in part, through money he earned from selling the furs of animals he trapped. While a law student, Whittaker also worked in the Kansas City law firm of Watson, Gage, and Ess as an office boy, putting in a nine-hour day before attending classes from 4:30 to 9:30 in the evening. He would then study until midnight. Whittaker passed the Missouri Bar Exam in 1923—one year before he received his law degree. After passing the bar, he joined the Watson firm and became a partner after two years. In 1928 Whittaker married Winifred R. Pugh, with whom he had three sons.

In his private practice Whittaker was a litigator who represented both national and local corporations, including Union Pacific and Montgomery Ward. From 1953 to 1954 he served as president of the Missouri Bar Association, but was otherwise uninvolved in social or political activities. Nevertheless, his position as the leader of the local bar made him well-known to state political leaders.

When a vacancy occurred on the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri in 1954, Whittaker received strong backing from state and local political and bar leaders. In addition, Roy Roberts, Republican publisher of the Kansas City Star, and Arthur Eisenhower, brother of the president and a close friend of Whittaker, pushed his nomination. Thus, President Dwight Eisenhower named him a U.S. District Court judge. Two years later Whittaker was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and was confirmed by the Senate on July 22, 1956.

In 1957 Justice Stanley Reed retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, and President Eisenhower nominated Judge Whittaker to take Reed's seat on March 2, 1957, apparently at the recommendation of U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Eisenhower's selection criteria and Whittaker's background were a perfect match. Like Kentuckian Reed, Whittaker was from a border state; he was a reasonable age (56); he had compiled an outstanding record as a regional corporate lawyer; he was a conservative Republican but had succeeded in being a nonpartisan attorney and jurist; and he had the all-important (to Eisenhower) experience of serving on the lower federal courts. The Senate confirmed him on March 19, 1957, without a formal roll call, making him the first justice born in Kansas and appointed from Missouri.

Justice Whittaker served only five years on the Supreme Court. Despite his previous legal and judicial experience, he found himself temperamentally unsuited for the pressured life of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Decision-making and opinion-writing were excruciating exercises for him. Thus, during his short tenure he wrote only eight majority opinions, and none is of particular note. He voted with the majority in a number of close 5-to-4 decisions, however.

One major case in which Whittaker participated and wrote a separate opinion was Gomillion v. Lightfoot in 1960, which involved the gerrymandering of Tuskegee, Alabama. The state had redrawn the city boundaries to exclude all African American voters, making Tuskegee's city limits into a 28-sided figure. This left only four or five African American voters within the city. The affected African American voters argued that they were denied due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment and the right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment. Whittaker wrote a concurring opinion to the unanimous decision. The majority opinion written by Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that segregating a racial minority was discriminatory and violative of the Fifteenth Amendment. Whittaker stated that this application extended the amendment to include the right to vote, as well as the right to vote in a particular district. Whittaker, however, believed that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was better suited to the ruling because redistricting is not a true violation of voting rights. The redrawing of the Tuskegee city limits was a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

After five years on the Court, Justice Whittaker retired, succumbing to physical exhaustion on April 1, 1962. Eventually, he went to work on the legal staff of General Motors. The ex-justice died on November 26, 1973, at the age of 72, in Kansas City, Missouri.

Whittaker, Charles Evans

views updated Jun 11 2018

WHITTAKER, CHARLES EVANS

Charles Evans Whittaker served as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1957 to 1962. The Missouri-born Whittaker practiced law for thirty years before being appointed to the federal bench in 1954. He served on the U.S. District Court in Missouri until 1957, when President dwight d. eisenhower nominated him for a position on the Supreme Court. His appointment and service have been the subjects of caustic commentary, for Whittaker was not cut out for the duties of the higher court: he served only five years before retiring in a state of physical exhaustion.

Born on February 22, 1901, in Troy, Kansas, Whittaker was the son of farmers. As a teenager, he knew that he wanted to be a lawyer: the ambitious high school student enrolled in law school during his senior year. Graduating in 1923 from the University of Kansas City Law School, where he was recognized for his talents as an orator, he passed the state bar and immediately began practicing for the law firm of Watson, Gage, & Ess. He litigated cases for the same Missouri firm for three decades.

Unlike countless other lawyers who used political careers to gain entry to the judiciary, Whittaker was plucked from relative obscurity. In fact, he generally avoided politics. He had a modest reputation in his home state for his work in corporate law and on the state bar, and this reputation attracted the attention of U.S. Attorney General herbert brownell, who selected him for the U.S. District Court in Missouri. Whittaker presided as a judge on the court from 1954 to 1956.

During this period, Whittaker displayed a lack of appreciation for certain constitutional rights. In 1955 he heard Davis v. University of Kansas City, 129 F. Supp. 716 (W.D. Mo. 1955), a lawsuit brought by a professor claiming he had been unfairly dismissed from the University of Kansas City for refusing to tell a Senate subcommittee whether or not he was a Communist. Such cases were typical in the cold war era, as was Whittaker's dismissal of the claim. But the judge's outburst from the bench was not: he announced that the public should not tolerate teachers who belong to a "declared conspiracy

by a godless group to overthrow our government." Although ostensibly recognizing the professor's fifth amendment right not to incriminate himself, Whittaker, in effect, believed that he was bound to answer.

"Private-property rights are the soil in which our concept of human rights grows and matures. As long as private-property rights are secure, human rights will be respected and will endure and evolve."
—Charles Evans Whittaker

In 1957 President Eisenhower appointed Whittaker to the Supreme Court to replace the outgoing Justice stanley reed. Whittaker became the first judge from the Western District to be elevated to the Court. Generally, he voted conservatively. He wrote no significant opinions, and, indeed, had little discernible judicial philosophy. In 1959 his appointment came under attack from the attorney (and eventual Chief Justice) william rehnquist who wrote a scathing article attacking the U.S. Senate for not adequately considering Whittaker's nomination. In the Harvard Law Review Rehnquist noted dryly that the Senate hearings had revealed detailed information about the young Whittaker's life and education, but discussed nothing

about his views on due process and equal protection.

In any event, Whittaker's views quickly did not matter. He found the work of the Supreme Court overly taxing, and, by 1962, suffering from exhaustion, he accepted his physician's advice that he retire. Some distinction was made as to his retiring rather than resigning and, as a result, he was allowed to continue to take part in Supreme Court ceremonies. No invalid, however, he later returned to legal practice, a move that set him apart from other modern justices. He died on November 26, 1973, in Kansas City, Missouri.