Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Harry S. Truman’s presidency is his judicial legacy, with even the finest of Truman biographies neglecting to consider the influence he had on the Supreme Court. Yet, as Rawn James lays out in engaging detail, president Harry Truman successfully molded the high court into a judicial body that appeared to actively support his administration’s political agenda. In rulings that sparked controversy in their own time, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld Truman’s most contentious policies, including actions to restrict free speech, expand civil rights, and manage labor union unrest.
The Truman Court: Law and the Limits of Loyalty argues that the years between FDR’s death in 1945 and Chief Justice Earl Warren’s confirmation in 1953—the dawn of the Cold War—were, contrary to widespread belief, important years in Supreme Court history. Never before or since has a president so quickly and completely changed the ideological and temperamental composition of the Court. With remarkable swiftness and certainty, Truman constructed a Court on which he relied to lend constitutional credence to his political agenda.
Author(s): Rawn James Jr.
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 319
City: Columbia
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One: “We Must Have Steel.”
Chapter Two: Justice Harold Burton
Chapter Three: Attorney General Tom Clark
Chapter Four: The Court Truman Inherited and a Justice Abroad
Chapter Five: “The Very Nearly Indispensable Man”
Chapter Six: Death of a Chief Justice
Chapter Seven: “The General Utility Man of Government”
Chapter Eight: Open Warriors and Assassins
Chapter Nine: “A Man to Trust”
Chapter Ten: Meatless On-Strike Midterm Elections
Chapter Eleven: Labor’s Troubled Waters
Chapter Twelve: The Chief Takes Charge
Chapter Thirteen: A Civil Service
Chapter Fourteen: Truman at the Lincoln Memorial
Chapter Fifteen: Shelley v. Kraemer: The Judicial Revolution Begins
Chapter Sixteen: Justice Douglas and the 1948 Presidential Election
Chapter Seventeen: The Vinson Mission
Chapter Eighteen: Justice Tom Clark
Chapter Nineteen: Justice Sherman Minton
Chapter Twenty: Civil Liberties and Loyalty
Chapter Twenty-One: The Path to Brown: First Steps
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Path to Brown: Unanimous Progress
Chapter Twenty-Three: Caution in the Wind
Chapter Twenty-Four: Monongahela River Valley Hope
Chapter Twenty-Five: The District Court Hearing
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Supreme Court Hearing
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Conference and Resolution
Chapter Twenty-Eight: “Zone of Twilight”
Chapter Twenty-Nine: A President’s Nadir
Chapter Thirty: The Truman Court
Notes
Index
