Justice for Sale by Gary Stein

Author:Gary Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

‌‌Chapter Fourteen

“He Is an Old Friend”

Manton, FDR, and Another Shot at the Supreme Court

Although the Depression devastated Manton’s finances, incentivizing his abuse of office, it also carried a Democrat back into the White House, reviving Manton’s hopes for a Supreme Court appointment. Despite his rejection in 1922, Manton still aspired to a seat on the high court. When a vacancy loomed in late 1924, Manton tried again to ignite a campaign for the Court. Friendly newspapers claimed that Manton “is regarded as the most likely to be selected.” Manton procured endorsements from close friends of Chief Justice Taft such as Clarence H. Kelsey, an old Yale classmate and the president of Title Guarantee & Trust in New York, and Isaac M. Ullman, a prominent businessman and Republican leader in Connecticut. “My friend” Manton “is very anxious” for an appointment, Ullman advised the chief justice.1

Taft would have none of it. There was not “the slightest chance of President Coolidge entertaining [Manton] as a possibility,” he admonished Ullman. With equal firmness he wrote Kelsey that Manton possessed “neither the qualifications nor the standing entitling him to come to our Court,” also noting Manton’s “attack” on Coolidge during his Columbus Day dinner speech in the run-up to the recent election. Taft marveled at “the gall of the man” in trying to engineer a promotion when “[t]he truth is he ought never to have been appointed to the place where he is.” Manton will “never” be a Supreme Court justice “in this Administration,” Taft vowed.2

Manton must have been relieved when Taft, in ill health, resigned in early 1930. Attempting to ingratiate himself with President Hoover’s choice for chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, Manton hosted a dinner in Hughes’s honor to which he invited New York’s leading judges and lawyers.3 Yet there is no evidence that President Hoover seriously considered Manton for the seat opened up by the death of Justice Edward Terry Sanford in 1930. Instead, Hoover named a dyed-in-the-wool Republican lawyer from Philadelphia, Owen Roberts. Hoover’s last Supreme Court appointment, in 1932, did go to a sitting judge who was an ethnic New York Democrat. But it was the Jewish Benjamin N. Cardozo whom Hoover chose to fill the shoes of Oliver Wendell Holmes, not the Catholic Manton. Like Harding before him, it appears Hoover was warned about Manton’s unsuitability for higher judicial office. One of Manton’s Second Circuit colleagues reportedly paid a visit to Hoover to make certain Manton would not be appointed to the Supreme Court.4

With the election of fellow Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Manton must have felt his prospects brighten. Here was a president he knew personally. Manton attended Roosevelt’s first inauguration as governor of New York in 1929, and he and the new chief executive corresponded about the state’s role in enforcing Prohibition.5 At Manton’s request, FDR provided a signed photograph for Manton’s twelve-year-old daughter Catherine, “a great admirer of Governor Roosevelt,” Manton assured him, “who she thinks is going to be the next President.” (“I have heard

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