Sweatt v. Painter

About the Author

Frederick Moore Vinson was the only member of the Supreme Court to have served in all three branches of government. He was born in Louisa, Kentucky, on January 22, 1890, and from an early age displayed a remarkable intellect, graduating at the top of his class from Kentucky Normal College in 1908. In 1911 he graduated from Centre College Law School with the highest scores in the school’s history. A talented baseball player, he played semiprofessional ball in the Kentucky Blue Grass League and tried out for the Cincinnati Reds. But he returned to Louisa, where he became a small-town lawyer. He won his first elective office in 1921 as commonwealth attorney for the Thirty-second Judicial District of Kentucky. Three years later, Vinson won a special election to complete an unexpired term in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1938, except for the years from 1929 to 1931. For his support of New Deal programs, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where he took his seat on the bench in 1938.

Vinson’s service in the executive branch of government began in 1943, when he resigned from the court and became director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. There his chief task was controlling inflation during the war by fighting off requests from businesses for price increases and from organized labor for wage increases. Other posts in the executive branch soon followed. In March 1945 he became administrator of the Federal Loan Agency. One month later, he was appointed director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, the purpose of which was to ensure the smooth conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy. President Truman recognized Vinson’s skills as a fiscal manager and in July 1945 appointed him secretary of the Treasury. In this post he played a major role in creating the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund.

In April 1946, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone died. To replace him, Truman turned to Vinson, who took his seat on the High Court as chief justice on June 24, 1946, a position he held until his death. His tenure as chief justice coincided with the early years of the cold war and the nation’s fear of Communism. Vinson supported the right of the federal government to legislate against groups that advocated the overthrow of the American system. Throughout his judicial career, he was deferential to executive and legislative authority. He upheld, for example, President Truman’s emergency seizure of the coal mines following a nationwide strike in 1946, and in 1952 he dissented from a Court ruling that Truman had exceeded his authority by interceding in the steelworkers’ strike during the Korean War and forcing a labor settlement, claiming wartime executive power. Truman held Vinson in high regard and mentioned his name as a possible successor as president. Vinson died of a heart attack in his apartment in Washington, D.C., on September 8, 1953. He had devoted nearly his entire career to public service and left behind an estate worth less than $1,000.