Forty-three years ago today, Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice by a vote of 69-11. But despite the lopsided Senate vote, his nomination battle had dragged on for most of that summer.

Thurgood Marshall had served as the NAACP’s chief litigator for nearly three decades, arguing 32 cases before the Supreme Court – and prevailing in all but three.

In 1954, Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court case in which racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional. Other cases argued by Marshall on behalf of the NAACP included

• Smith v. Allwright (1944), which ruled that exclusion of African-American voters from state primary elections was unconstitutional;
• Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which ruled against state judicial enforcement of racial “restrictive covenants” in housing; and
• Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), two cases in which the concept of “separate but equal” state university facilities for black professionals and graduate students was deemed unconstitutional.

Marshall’s reputation as a skilled and successful fighter for civil rights made him the target of the segregationist faction within the Senate. Among his Senate foes were Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who urged the FBI to investigate whether Marshall had any ties to the Communist party, and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who once ran for president as a segregationist.

Thurmond’s main tactic was to question Marshall at length in search of responses that he could use to paint the nominee as unqualified. At one point, Thurmond asked Marshall to name the members of the committee that had drafted the 14th Amendment. When Marshall replied that he didn’t know their names, Thurmond called Marshall a “stupid guy.” Then Ted Kennedy turned to Thurmond and asked him the same question. “I’ll let you know,” Thurmond replied.

By the time the confirmation came up for a vote, Marshall’s landslide victory was assured – mainly because Lyndon Johnson had convinced 20 segregationist senators to abstain. Marshall was sworn in two days later and served in the Supreme Court until 1991, cementing his stature as a giant of the civil rights movement.

“Martin Luther King Jr., with his preachings of love and non-violent resistance, and Malcolm X, the fiery street preacher who advocated a bloody overthrow of the system, are both more closely associated in the popular mind and myth with the civil rights struggle,” author Juan Williams wrote in his book, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. “But it was Thurgood Marshall, working through the courts to eradicate the legacy of slavery and destroying the racist segregation system of Jim Crow, who had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either of King or X.”

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” – 19th Amendment

Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919, sending it to the states for ratification. And since several southern states opposed the amendment, it all came down to a dramatic vote in the Tennessee capitol, 90 years ago today.

It was a hot and sticky Friday afternoon when Harry T. Burn, a young Republican state representative from a rural Tennessee district, shocked his anti-suffrage colleagues by casting the tie-breaking vote that would extend voting rights to 17 million women.

The 24-year-old representative changed his vote from “nay” to “aye” after rereading a letter from his mother that he carried in his pocket. Febb Burn (shown here) was a strong-willed widow who ran the family farm. In her seven-page letter, interspersed with family news, she urged her son to vote “yes” on the 19th Amendment. Here are some excerpts:

Dear Son, … Hurray and vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. I noticed Chandlers’ speech, it was very bitter. I’ve been waiting to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet…. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt with her “Rats.” Is she the one that put rat in ratification, Ha! No more from mama this time. With lots of love, Mama.

Burn wore a red rose on his lapel that day – the symbol of the anti-suffrage crowd – but his intent was only to postpone the vote until after the fall election. However, when efforts to table the amendment failed, a new motion – to ratify the 19th Amendment – came up for a vote, and Burn knew what he had to do.

When he voted “aye,” many of his colleagues assumed that Burn was merely confused about the question on the floor. But when he stood by his vote, their amusement soon gave way  to rage. Burn was accused of being a “traitor to manhood’s honor” and of accepting bribes from the pro-suffrage camp. Even so, he was elected to a second term later that year.

“I had always believed that women had an inherent right to vote,” Burn said, years after his monumental vote. “It was a logical attitude from my standpoint. My mother was a college woman, a student of national and international affairs who took an interest in all public issues. She could not vote. Yet the tenant farmers on our farm, some of whom were illiterate, could vote. On that roll call, confronted with the fact that I was going to go on record for time and eternity on the merits of the question, I had to vote for ratification.”

And so the 19th Amendment was ratified 90 years ago today, thanks in part to a single letter from a woman to her son, urging him to “be a good boy.”

For a detailed and entertaining retelling of the Harry Burn story, see this excellent article (PDF) from the Tennessee River Valley Consortium’s Teaching American History website.

When Hawaii gained statehood in 1959, its streets and beaches erupted in celebration. But 51 years earlier, when Hawaii was annexed by the United States, most native Hawaiians weren’t in any partying mood.

The band played ”Hawaii Pono `I,” the Hawaiian national anthem, as the flag of the Republic of Hawaii was lowered on August 12, 1898. Then, to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the stars and stripes went up.

The ceremony took place at the ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, where Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani had been forced to abdicate the throne five years earlier. The relatively bloodless coup d’etat was organized by the islands’ powerful American and European sugar-plantation interests and carried out by a 1,500-man militia known as the Honolulu Rifles.

After the overthrow, the constitutional monarchy was replaced with a provisional government set up by the foreigners. The stated goal of the new government was annexation, with an ultimate goal of gaining more favorable tariff treatment for Hawaii’s sugar exports.

President Grover Cleveland opposed annexation because the overthrow appeared to be illegitimate. “I suppose that right and justice should determine the path to be followed in treating this subject,” Cleveland said in a message to Congress. “If national honesty is to be disregarded and a desire for territorial expansion or dissatisfaction with a form of government not our own ought to regulate our conduct, I have entirely misapprehended the mission and character of our government and the behavior which the conscience of the people demands of their public servants.”

However, when the deposed queen refused one of President Cleveland’s conditions for her reinstatement – amnesty for the coup’s planners – he eventually stood aside and allowed Congress to proceed with the annexation.

More than half of the 40,000 native Hawaiians signed a petition against the annexation, a bold move that put many of their jobs at risk, but to no avail; the provisional government’s strict voting requirements prevented most of the population from voting at all. And to this day, some argue that Hawaii is not really a state at all, but rather a nation under siege.

It was 80 years ago today that Joseph Crater stepped out of a New York City chophouse, said good-bye to his two dining companions, headed down West 46th Street and disappeared into the city night, never to be heard from again.

The disappearance of the New York State Supreme Court justice was one of the most famous missing-persons cases of the 20th century. New Yorkers were so familiar with the headline-grabbing story that “pulling a Crater” became the local slang term for vanishing without a trace.

To this day, no one knows for sure what became of the judge, but there are dozens of theories. Some speculated that he ran off with his mistress. Others believed he was killed by operatives for Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic Party political machine – possibly to protect Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York (and the one who appointed Crater to the high court).

Robert Tofel, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of a 2004 book on Crater’s disappearance, has an even more sordid theory: After leaving the restaurant, the judge attended a Broadway comedy and then made his way to a high-class brothel, where he expired from natural causes. The brothel’s proprietor, a well-known madam with numerous Tammany Hall connections, could then have asked someone – one of her mobster friends, perhaps – to quietly dispose of the body. (Tofel’s theory is based on details from an early draft of a bestselling book authored by the madam.)

In any case, the suddenly famous judge was known for decades as the “missing-est man in America” – until a man named Jimmy Hoffa pulled a Crater in 1975.

For more about the investigation and its ripple effect through Tammany Hall, pick up Richard Tofel’s book, “Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind.”

It was 45 years ago today that President Lyndon Johnson enacted national health insurance for millions of elderly Americans with the stroke of a pen – a pen handed to him by Harry Truman.

Immediately afterward, Johnson signed the paperwork that would make Truman and his wife, Bess, the very first Medicare enrollees.

“They told me, President Truman, that if you wish to get the voluntary medical insurance you will have to sign this application form, and they asked me to sign as your witness,” Johnson told the former president. “You’re getting special treatment, since cards won’t go out to the other folks until the end of this month – but we wanted you to know, and we wanted the whole world to know, who is the real daddy of Medicare.”

While Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to publicly endorse national health insurance, Truman did more than any other to advance the concept that would become Medicare. During World War II, Truman was troubled by the number of draftees who failed their induction physicals due to untreated medical conditions. Truman saw this as evidence that too many ordinary Americans couldn’t afford adequate care. “That is all wrong in my book,” he said. “I am trying to fix it so the people in the middle-income bracket can live as long as the very rich and the very poor.”

With the war’s end in 1945, Truman proposed the first national health care plan to Congress. Originally conceived to cover most Americans, the proposal was gradually scaled back until, by the end of his presidency in 1953, it was roughly equivalent to Medicare.

President John F. Kennedy resurrected the Medicare concept in a 1962 speech, but it continued to face formidable opposition from most Republicans and from the American Medical Association, which regarded any government involvement in health care as “socialized medicine.” At the height of its campaign against Medicare in 1963, the AMA hired actor-turned-pitchman Ronald Reagan as its spokesperson, just a year before Reagan launched his political career with an energetic pitch for Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention.

In 1964, Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide – and with large Democratic majorities riding Johnson’s coattails into both houses of Congress, the stage was set for Medicare’s passage.

If President Franklin D. Roosevelt had gotten his way, today’s presidents would be able to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court for every justice who remained on the bench after the age of 70 1/2. This would have meant that the current court could have as many as 13 members, because justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia were all born during the 1930s.

Roosevelt’s plan was a response to a conservative Supreme Court that seemed determined to knock down the various pieces of legislation that made up the president’s New Deal. During FDR’s first term, four of the nine Supreme Court justices – Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter – voted so consistently against federal government expansion under the New Deal that editorial writers took to calling them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And in 1935, a fifth justice – Owen Roberts – began voting regularly with the Four Horsemen, giving them a solid majority.

In 1935 and 1936, the Supreme Court invalidated more significant Congressional acts than any court in history. Among its targets were the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt’s industrial redevelopment agency, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which provided subsidies to farmers. The justices toppled these and other pillars of New Deal through a systematic narrowing of the commerce clause, which was constricted to the point that even the massive coal industry no longer met the High Court’s threshold for Congressional oversight.

Roosevelt and his supporters feared that the Court was poised to strike down two cornerstones of the New Deal: the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, which gave private-sector workers the right to organize. In February of 1937 – shortly after his landslide reelection – Roosevelt’s backers in Congress proposed the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937. The stated reasoning behind the bill was that the current nine justices were getting older (the youngest was 60) and falling behind in their work.

Even though it was clear that the Supreme Court wasn’t behind in its docket, many expected the Democratic majority in Congress to pass the bill anyway. However, on July 22, 1937, the Senate voted to send the bill back to the Senate Judiciary Committee, explicitly ordering it to strip out the court-packing provisions.

One possible reason for the proposal’s demise: Starting in early 1937, Justice Owen Roberts broke away from the Four Horsemen and began voting to uphold progressive legislation in the face of court challenges. But even without Roberts’s change of heart, the controversial proposal would have faced an uphill battle, because even many of FDR’s allies saw it as executive overreach. The Senate Judiciary Committee called it “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”

And so it is that the Supreme Court has been composed of nine justices for 142 years and counting – even though adding a justice (or two, or three) would require nothing more than a simple majority vote in both houses of Congress.

For a richly detailed account of the politics and events surrounding FDR’s court-packing scheme, read “Showdown on the Court” on Smithsonian.com.

During the hot summer months of 1787, 55 representatives of the various states met in Philadelphia to hammer out a replacement for the toothless Articles of Confederation. And the temperature in the already-sweltering room surely increased a few degrees when the topic of debate turned to legislative representation.

For obvious reasons, the larger states wanted proportional representation in both houses of Congress – a potential dealbreaker for the small states, which feared being trampled by their larger neighbors. This big-versus-little split was so divisive that it threatened to derail the entire Constitutional Convention.

After weeks of off-and-on debate over several competing proposals, the large states finally relented, agreeing to a Senate composed of two delegates per state, regardless of population.

This “Great Compromise” is also known as the Connecticut Compromise or Sherman’s Compromise, after Roger Sherman, the Connecticut delegate who proposed it.

Though not as famous as the other Founding Fathers, Roger Sherman played a central role at the convention. In fact, according to the scrupulous notes taken by James Madison, Sherman spoke more often than any other delegate except Madison himself.

A bar-admitted attorney with a gift for oratory, Sherman was held in high esteem by the other Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson once said, “That is Mr. Sherman of Connecticut, a man who never said a foolish thing in his life.” (Judging from his many portraits, it’s possible that he never smiled in his life, either.)

More interesting facts about Roger Sherman:

• He was a member of the “Committee of Five” that drafted the Declaration of Independence.
• He was opposed to paper money (a hot political topic of the time) and tried to insert a clause into the Constitution to make “gold and silver coin” the only legal tender in the United States.
• He was married twice and had a total of 15 children.
• He was distantly related to General William Tecumseh Sherman and more closely related to Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin.
• Not one, but two towns are named in his honor: Sherman, Connecticut, and Sherman, New York.

Just six months into his first term as president, Ronald Reagan announced his decision to nominate Sandra Day O’Connor, an appellate judge in Arizona, to the U.S. Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart.

In nominating the first woman to the high court, Reagan fulfilled one of his key campaign pledges.

O’Connor rose to the top of a crowded field of contenders that included men as well as women. Her resume included five years as an Arizona state legislator, and as a moderate Republican, she had cast votes on both sides of the abortion issue, a perennial hot topic in confirmation hearings.

Reagan appreciated O’Connor’s measured approach to divisive political issues, and he seemed confident that her nomination would prevail over any objections raised by religious conservatives. Here’s what he wrote in his diary on July 6, the day before publicly announcing his pick. “Called Judge O’Connor in Arizona and told her she was my nominee for Supreme Court. Already the flak is starting, and from my own supporters. Right-to-life people say she’s pro-abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she’ll make a good justice.”

Despite early opposition from some conservatives, the Senate approved her nomination later that year by a vote of 99-0.

A few more interesting facts about our first female Supreme Court justice:

• O’Connor grew up on the Lazy B, an Arizona cattle ranch, and she didn’t have electricity or hot running water when she was a child.
• She graduated from Stanford Law in 1952, third in her class of 102 – and two places behind future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.
• After graduation, O’Connor couldn’t find a single law firm in California willing to hire a female attorney – although one did offer a position as a legal secretary.
• In 1972, after three years as an Arizona state legislator, O’Connor’s Republican colleagues made her the majority leader – the first woman to hold such a position in any state.

O’Connor retired from the bench in 2005 – in a way. Since her retirement, she’s participated in dozens of federal appellate cases as a substitute judge. She’s also written two children’s books and founded an educational website (which we blogged about a while back).

“The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.”

– The Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

On this day in 1971, North Carolina became the 38th state to approve the 26th Amendment, giving the amendment the required approval by at least three-quarters of the states.

The amendment came about due to the growing belief that it was unfair to force young men to fight in the Vietnam War when they couldn’t even vote for or against the elected leaders who put them there.

In 1970, Congress passed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act with a provision that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in federal and state elections. This provision was soon struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded in Oregon v. Mitchell that Congress didn’t have the authority to set the voting age for state elections.

Congress responded by proposing the 26th Amendment, which essentially did what the statute was intended to do. The ratification process took less than four months – the shortest time ever for a Constitutional amendment.

A few more interesting factoids, courtesy of the American Bar Association:

• In 1969, Congress introduced 50 resolutions to lower the voting age, but none made it into law.



• In 1970, 18-year-olds had the right to vote in 35 nations.
• Much of the credit for passage of the 26th Amendment has been given to peaceful protests and letter-writing campaigns by young men and women on college campuses and elsewhere.
• The slogan “old enough to fight, old enough to vote” is usually associated with the Vietnam War, but it actually originated during World War II, when two states – Georgia and Kentucky – became the first to lower their voting ages to 18.

“We must replenish our supply of persons qualified to discharge the heavy responsibilities of the postwar world. We have taught our youth how to wage war; we must also teach them how to live useful and happy lives in freedom, justice, and decency.”

– Franklin Roosevelt, in a message to Congress, October 27, 1943

Throughout World War II, President Roosevelt and other political leaders were concerned about what would happen after the war. The Great Depression of the 1930s was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the fear that the United States could relapse into another depression was very real.

Congress responded by passing the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. Signed into law on June 22, the “G.I. Bill of Rights” provided a number of valuable benefits for returning veterans, including:

• Education and training. Veterans were offered tuition for vocational schools and colleges, at a time when a college education was viewed as a privilege reserved for the upper class.
• Loan guarantees. Veterans could apply for government-backed loans to buy homes and farms or start their own businesses.
• Unemployment pay. This was known as the “52-20” benefit, because it provided $20 per week for up to 52 weeks to unemployed veterans looking for work.

The unemployment provision was so controversial that it nearly derailed the G.I. Bill in Congress. But as it turned out, most veterans didn’t need this benefit; less than 20 percent of the budgeted funds were doled out.

The education benefit was wildly popular among returning soldiers. Nearly half of all World War II veterans used this provision, and in the peak year of 1947, veterans accounted for nearly half of all college admissions. Not only did this transform the nation’s higher education system, it also transformed the economy as thousands of blue-collar kids took the opportunity to become doctors, lawyers and engineers.

The home loan guarantees were another transformative feature. By the end of 1952, the Veterans Administration had backed nearly 2.4 million home loans for World War II veterans, giving a generation of soldiers their first real opportunity to own their own homes and plant themselves firmly in the middle class. The mortgage guarantees also contributed to the creation of many of the nation’s inner-ring suburbs – the first step in the suburbanization of America.

For a more detailed history of this historic legislation, see “Born of Controversy: The GI Bill of Rights” on the Veterans Affairs website.