Charles Evans Hughes

A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress

Prepared by Thomas Thalken and Audrey Walker
Revised and expanded by Karen Linn Femia

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Washington, D.C.

2002

Contact information: http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/mss/address.html

Finding aid encoded by Library of Congress Manuscript Division, 2005

Finding aid URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms005012

Table of Contents

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

Names:

Subjects:

Occupations:

Administrative Information

Provenance:

Processing History:

Transfers:

Copyright Status:

Microfilm:

Preferred Citation:

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

Organization of the Papers

Description of Series

Container List

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation and listed alphabetically therein.

Administrative Information

The papers of Charles Evans Hughes, governor of New York, secretary of state, and chief justice of the United States, were received by the Library of Congress as deposits in 1934 and 1952 and converted to gift in 1952 by Hughes's daughter-in-law, Marjory Stuart Hughes. The papers have been augmented by additional gifts and deposits from his daughter, Catherine H. Waddell, his biographer, Merlo J. Pusey, and others between 1951 and 2002.

The Hughes Papers were processed in 1952 and reprocessed for microfilming in 1985. The addition was processed and the register revised in 2002.

Photographs have been transferred to the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library where they are identified as part of these papers.

Copyright in the unpublished writings of Charles Evans Hughes in these papers and in other collections of papers in the custody of the Library of Congress has been dedicated to the public.

A microfilm edition of these papers is available on 150 reels. Consult a reference librarian in the Manuscript Division concerning availability for purchase or interlibrary loan.

Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: Container number, Charles Evans Hughes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

The papers of Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) span the years 1836 to 1950 with the bulk of the collection concentrated between the years 1905 and 1940. The papers focus chiefly on Hughes's public service and consist of the following series: Family Papers, Correspondence, Subject File, Speeches and Writings File, Biographical File, Miscellany, and Oversize. The Correspondence series is organized in subseries of family correspondence, general correspondence, secretary of state files, and Supreme Court correspondence. The Addition contains a campaign song book from Hughes' 1916 presidential bid.

The earliest items in the collection relate to Hughes's father, David Charles Hughes. Located in the Family Papers, these items include letters of introduction by ministers and members of Wesleyan Methodist societies which Hughes brought with him when he immigrated to the United States from Great Britain in October 1855; documents attesting to his service as a minister of the New York Conference, New Windsor Circuit, Newburgh District; a letter acknowledging his voluntary withdrawal from Wesleyan University while in good standing; and several papers reflecting his affiliation with Baptist churches, including at Glens Falls, New York, where he was ordained as a Baptist minister. Other items include his certificate of naturalization in 1864 and a letter written by him in 1907 to the Sons of the American Revolution presenting genealogical documentation entitling Charles Evans Hughes to become a member of that organization.

Papers relating to Charles Evans Hughes begin in 1876 with the family correspondence subseries. Early correspondence in this portion consists of letters exchanged between Hughes and his parents while he was a student at Madison (now Colgate) and Brown universities. The letters concern Hughes's studies, health and personal habits, recreational activities, and finances. In a letter of 27 February 1880, he justified having earned money to purchase a pair of skates by writing an essay for a fellow student. Later correspondence in the subseries includes messages and poems by Hughes and his wife, Antoinette, at Christmas and on birthdays and wedding anniversaries. Letters exchanged between Hughes and his son, Charles Evans, Jr., and his son-in-law, Chauncey L. Waddell, relate to personal financial matters and a few legal questions, mainly dating from the years Hughes was secretary of state.

The general correspondence subseries includes a relatively small group of letters that Hughes retained because of their sentimental or biographical importance. The letters were originally included in files organized by subject categories in 1933-1934 by Henry C. Beerits but later reorganized as a general correspondence grouping by the Manuscript Division in 1952 when the collection was first prepared for reader use. Individual and small groups of letters acquired by the Library of Congress between 1934 and 1952 were incorporated into this subseries. The subseries covers the years 1884 to 1950 and contains a few letters relating to all phases of Hughes's career. Major subjects include the New York gubernatorial campaign and election of 1906; Hughes's terms as governor; his appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1910; the presidential campaign of 1916; international issues confronting the United States while Hughes was secretary of state, such as the armaments race, reparations, Allied war debts, Japanese immigration, and smuggling of intoxicating liquors; relations with Latin America, particularly the arbitration of boundary disputes and Pan American conferences; and his appointment as chief justice. Included as well are memoranda of telephone conversations with senators William H. King and Burton K. Wheeler on 19 March 1937 conveying Hughes's decision not to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the Judiciary Reform bill of 1937 and his subsequent letter of 21 March to Wheeler describing the dockets of the Court and giving a comparative statement of the disposition of cases for the preceding six terms.

Although the subseries of secretary of state correspondence contains references to national and international problems during Hughes's years in office, additional material on these topics is also in the Subject File series and to a lesser extent in the general correspondence subseries as well. The subseries of Supreme Court correspondence reflects his public role as chief justice. Many letters are from citizens complaining of injustices they feel only Hughes, the Supreme Court, or an official acting at Hughes's direction, can rectify; others expressed rancor at Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs or indicated religious concerns, especially about Roman Catholics. Many of the letters were written by inmates of prisons and mental institutions. Other letters are from admirers who manifest their esteem for Hughes in letters supporting his decisions and those of the Court, by sending birthday greetings and unsolicited printed material, by invitations, and by requests for appointments, autographs, and photographs. Correspondence concerning controversial cases heard by the Supreme Court is in the Subject File series.

The Subject File encompasses all aspects of Hughes's public career. Most of the files were established by Beerits in 1933-1934 when he organized all of Hughes's papers except the secretary of state and Supreme Court correspondence files. When the letters were reorganized in 1952, a list of letters transferred was appended to each subject folder. These lists have been retained as cross references in the present arrangement of the collection. The Subject File series includes reports, notes, and clippings relating to Hughes's service as counsel or chairman of local and national investigatory commissions or boards from the gas and insurance investigations of 1905-1906 in New York to his appointment by Woodrow Wilson as special assistant to the attorney general in an investigation into the breakdown of aircraft production in 1918. The series also includes files from Hughes's two terms as governor of New York, material from his term as secretary of state; papers pertaining to his participation in state and national political campaigns, documents chronicling his role in international arbitrations, and a smaller number of files from his tenure as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The most extensive of the secretary of state material in the Subject File pertains to the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments in Washington, D.C., 1921-1922, more commonly known as the Washington Conference. It includes draft resolutions, memoranda exchanged between members of the American delegation and with the State Department, annotated drafts of the four treaties concluded at the conference, press releases, and printed copies of finished documents. Other papers from this period included memoranda of interviews with members of the diplomatic corps. These memoranda, arranged alphabetically by country, summarize the interviews Hughes had with representatives of foreign countries from 1921 to 1924. There are notes in several of the folders indicating interviews for which memoranda were not received with the collection.

Files related to Hughes's interest in international adjudication contain documents, notes, reports, and memoranda concerning his election to the Permanent Court of International Justice, his participation in the Sixth International Conference of American States held at Havana and the International Conference of American States on Conciliation and Arbitration held at Washington, D.C., the settlement of the dispute between Peru and Chile over the provinces of Tacna and Arica, and the resolution of a boundary dispute between Guatemala and Honduras.

Papers representing Hughes's years on the Supreme Court include proof sheets of the last pages of opinions rendered by the Court circulated among the justices for their comments. Hughes saved these sheets because he believed the comments of the justices on the reverse of the pages manifested the "friendly and generous feeling of my brethren who are no longer here to speak for themselves" and "show the strength of the support for the opinions I wrote in certain difficult cases." The remainder of the Supreme Court subject files consists of miscellaneous items and correspondence from the public concerning issues before the court.

The Biographical File provides a chronology of events in Hughes's life. It consists of "Autobiographical Notes" which Hughes wrote between November 1941 and the end of 1945, memoranda of Henry C. Beerits, drafts and galley proofs of Merlo J. Pusey's Charles Evans Hughes, and miscellaneous documents. The "Autobiographical Notes" focus on Hughes's public life and trace the events and personal reflection which culminated in his private and public decisions. They were edited by David Joseph Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin and published by the Harvard University Press in 1973. The Beerits memoranda were prepared in the fall of 1933 and spring of 1934 by Henry C. Beerits, who was employed by Hughes to review and organize his papers. Beerits arranged the papers into subject categories suitable for a chronological overview of Hughes's life. He then prepared memoranda with bibliographical references covering the major topics which Hughes reviewed as time permitted. The Beerits memoranda previously dispersed throughout the Subject File series have been assembled as a unit in the Biographical File. The Pusey biography, published in 1951 with the approval of the Hughes family, was based on information in Hughes's papers and from interviews with Hughes.

The Speeches and Writings File covers the years 1905-1940. According to a statement in his "Autobiographical Notes," Hughes hired stenographers at his personal expense to record speeches as they were delivered "in order to avoid the publication of inaccurate or purely sensational scraps based on the hurried notes of a reporter." This practice is evident in the collection of speeches made during the presidential campaign of 1916 for which there is a fairly complete record beginning with a wire of 10 June 1916 and speech of 31 July to the Republican National Convention accepting the nomination and ending with the closing speech of his campaign at Madison Square Garden, 4 November 1916. Speeches made in 1908 are located in the Miscellany series in a scrapbook relating to his term as governor of New York. The only manuscript of Hughes's writings in this collection is a draft of the booklet Foreign Relations, which he wrote for the Republican National Committee for the presidential campaign of 1924.

Scrapbooks in the Miscellany span the years 1905-1930. Thirty-four of them contain clippings representing coverage mainly by New York newspapers of the gas and insurance investigations in the early part of the century. Three scrapbooks are devoted to Hughes's terms as governor of New York, and one contains copies of his letters to the state legislature and speeches and extracts from speeches made in April and May 1908. The remaining scrapbooks relate to his term as secretary of state and to his appointment as chief justice.

Correspondents in the Hughes Papers include Nicholas Murray Butler, Calvin Coolidge, Charles G. Dawes, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, George Harvey, Herbert Hoover, Alanson B. Houghton, William E. Jillson, J.J. Jusserand, Frank B. Kellogg, Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), John V. A. MacMurray, John Bassett Moore, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt (1887-1944), Elihu Root, C. Bascom Slemp, Harlan F. Stone, William Howard Taft (1857-1930), Willis Van Devanter, and Woodrow Wilson.

Organization of the Papers

The collection is arranged in eight series:

• Family Papers, 1854-1907
• Correspondence, 1876-1950, n.d.
• Subject File, 1905-1947
• Speeches and Writings File, 1905-1940, n.d.
• Biographical File, 1906-1951
• Miscellany, 1836-1945, n.d.
• Addition, 1916
• Oversize, 1908-1933

Description of Series

Container List