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“Constructions of the Constitution…”
"Constructions of the Constitution will be found to vest the power where it will be exercised--in the national government"--Secretary Root's Speech
Harper’s
Weekly was concerned about the centralization of governmental power
during the administration of Republican Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909),
and in December 1906 criticized an address in which Secretary of State Elihu Root called for federal intervention in situations
where the states failed to act. Root’s
speech, which the newspaper assumed was actually written by President
Roosevelt, is excerpted in the caption of the featured cartoon.
The cartoon warns that William Moody, whom the president had
recently named to the U.S. Supreme Court, will be a judicial tool by
which Roosevelt can expand federal powers at the expense of state
control through new “constructions of the Constitution.” On
the right, Secretary of War William Howard Taft sits studying the
“Simplified Constitution” while waiting his turn for the next
appointment to the Supreme Court (he had already declined the offer, but
would later serve as chief justice, 1921-1930). The same issue of Harper’s Weekly carries another
cartoon by Rogers in which the grinning president is whitewashing out
the names of individual states on an American flag, while Root delivers
his oration to a shocked audience including Uncle Sam clutching the
Constitution. Beside Moody,
President Roosevelt also appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes (1902) and
William Day (1903) to the U.S. Supreme Court.William Henry Moody was born on
December 23, 1853, in Newbury, Massachusetts, the son of farmers.
He graduated from Phillips Andover Academy in 1872 and Harvard in
1876, leaving Harvard Law School after four months to read law under
Richard Henry Dana. After
admission to the state bar in 1878, Moody practiced law in Haverhill,
Massachusetts, where he was elected city solicitor (1888-1889).
In 1890, he was named the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District
of Massachusetts, and three years later helped prosecute Lizzie Borden,
who was accused of murdering her father and step-mother with an axe.
Although Borden was acquitted, Moody gained recognition for his
courtroom skills. In 1895,
he was elected as a Republican to fill a vacant seat in Congress, and
subsequently elected three more times.
He impressed his congressional colleagues with his command of
legislative details and debating skills, and served on the powerful
House Appropriations Committee.
In May 1902, President
Roosevelt appointed Moody, whom he had befriended in 1895, as secretary
of the navy. Moody served in that capacity for two years, working to
expand and improve the U.S. naval fleet, and reform the navy’s
organization. In June 1904,
the president named him as the U.S. Attorney General.
In his new position, Moody became a key advisor to the president
and played a leading role in the prosecution of the administration’s
antitrust lawsuits, successfully arguing Swift and Company v. United
States (1905) before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He agreed with Roosevelt’s distinction between “good” and
“bad” trusts. The
Justice Department under Moody negotiated agreements with large business
corporations that it deemed were working in the public interest, such as
International Harvester and U.S. Steel, but prosecuted Standard Oil
because its economic power and business activities were considered
contrary to the public interest. As
attorney general, Moody took a case concerning peonage of blacks to the
Supreme Court, and ordered contempt proceedings against a sheriff who
allowed a black rape suspect to be lynched.
When Justice Henry Brown
resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1906, President Roosevelt tried
unsuccessfully to convince Taft to take the position and then considered
appointing a Southern Democrat. Finally,
on December 12, 1906, the president announced the selection of Moody,
emphasizing the attorney general’s nationalist philosophy by
describing him as a follower of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall,
not states’ rights advocates Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun.
The Senate approved the nomination on December 17.
During Moody’s brief tenure on the Supreme Court, he wrote 67
opinions, including 5 dissents. His
most famous dissent came in the Employers’ Liability Cases
(1908) in which his minority opinion upheld the constitutionality of a
congressional statute protecting employees involved in interstate
commerce. The
constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, he argued,
included the authority to legislate labor-management relations.
Despite his general support of enhanced federal powers, Moody’s
most important majority opinion (later overturned) ruled that the
federal constitutional provision in the Fifth Amendment against
self-incrimination did not apply in state courts (Twining v. State of
New Jersey, 1908).
Moody’s
judicial career was cut short when he developed debilitating rheumatism
in early 1909 and was increasingly forced to neglect his judicial
responsibilities.
In 1910, Congress passed legislation that permitted Moody to
qualify for federal retirement benefits, and he retired from the Supreme
Court.
A saddened President Roosevelt remarked, “there is not a public
servant, at this particular time, that the public could so ill afford to
lose.”
Eventually incapable of moving his arms and legs, Moody lived
seven more years with the painful disease, cared for by his sister until
his death on July 2, 1917.
Robert C. Kennedy
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