Sherman Minton
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Sherman Minton
Sherman Minton, (October 20, 1890–April 9, 1965) was a United States Senator and an associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
A native of New Albany, Indiana, Minton graduated from the law school of Indiana University in 1915 and completed graduate work at Yale University in 1916. He served overseas during World War I. After practicing law in New Albany for several years, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Indiana in the 1934 Democratic landslide.
Minton served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 until 1940. A staunch Democrat, he was a close ally of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Minton faithfully supported the New Deal and Roosevelt's "court-packing" plan, stands which cost him reelection in traditionally Republican Indiana in 1940. Minton remained popular in Democratic Party circles for his party loyalty under political pressure, and he was appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals by FDR in 1940. Minton was appointed to the high court by President Harry S. Truman on October 5, 1949, to replace the deceased Wiley Rutledge.
On the Court, Minton, influenced by his disapproval of the activist pre-1937 Court, took a broad view of governmental powers, dissenting in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), which ruled unconstitutional President Truman's wartime seizure of the steel mills in order to avert a strike. He disappointed liberals by voting to uphold anti-communist legislation during the period of Joseph McCarthy's red scare, voting with the majority in 1951's Dennis v. United States to uphold the conviction of the leader of the U.S. Communist Party. However, Minton abhorred racial segregation and provided a solid vote to strike down the school segregation practices at issue in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education.
The gregarious, backslapping Minton was popular among his colleagues on the Court, as he proved a soothing presence during a period on the Court marked by bitter personal feuds between strong personalities such as William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter. Minton did not, however, make much of a mark on the Court jurisprudentially. He served on the Court until October 15, 1956, when he resigned from the Court for reasons of ill health.
| Preceded by: Wiley Blount Rutledge | Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States October 12, 1949 – October 15, 1956 | Succeeded by: William J. Brennan |