Charles Evans Hughes and the Dawning of Modern America

The essential biography of Charles Evans Hughes, whose indelible career in politics and law shaped American modernization in the twentieth century.

In the first full-life biographical study of Charles Evans Hughes in over seventy years, Joanne Reitano provides a fresh assessment of Hughes’s distinguished, multifaceted public service during the first half of the twentieth century. His exceptional career included the roles of governor of New York (1906–1910), associate justice and presidential candidate (1910–1916), secretary of state (1921–1925), and chief justice of the Supreme Court (1930–1941).

A household name in his own time, Hughes challenged bossism in New York politics, championed post–World War I internationalism, and brokered the world’s first arms limitation agreement. On the Supreme Court, he was instrumental in modernizing legal doctrines concerning the interstate commerce clause, substantive due process, and civil liberties. Reitano unpacks the seemingly paradoxical nature of Hughes’s political and legal careers, arguing that he was neither radical nor reactionary, but a structural reformer and a practical idealist who significantly impacted the nation’s transition into the twentieth century.

Drawing on a wealth of sources, Reitano’s work will be the definitive account of Charles Evans Hughes for years to come.

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