New Year's Trivia Answers
The long and the short of it
Here are the answers to last week’s trivia questions:
Q. Who is the tallest justice in the history of the Supreme Court? Who is the shortest justice? And what is the difference in height between the two?
A. Horace Gray, who served on the Supreme Court from 1882 to 1902, is the tallest justice in Supreme Court history. He stood six feet six inches tall—a height he is said to have reached at the age of 13.
Alfred Moore, who had a short tenure (less than four years) on the Court from 1800 to 1804, is the shortest justice in Supreme Court history, at four feet five inches. (You might also remember Moore as a serious competitor for the distinction of least significant justice.)
So the difference in height between Gray and Moore is a remarkable 25 inches.
Q. Which two individuals served nonconsecutively as associate justice and chief justice?
A. John Rutledge and Charles Evans Hughes.
George Washington appointed Rutledge as one of the seven original justices on the Supreme Court, but in 1791—after barely a year on the Court and without ever taking part in a decision—Rutledge resigned in order to become chief justice of South Carolina’s highest court. In 1795 Washington recess-appointed Rutledge as chief justice after John Jay resigned to become governor of New York, but Rutledge resigned from the Court at the end of 1795 after the Senate refused to confirm his nomination.
William Howard Taft appointed Hughes to the Supreme Court in 1910. Hughes resigned from the Court in 1916 in order to accept the Republican nomination as president. Hughes became Secretary of State under Warren Harding in 1921. In 1930, Herbert Hoover appointed him to succeed Taft as chief justice. He retired from the Court in 1941.
Q. Who is the only Supreme Court justice to have subsequently served as a United States senator?
A. David Davis.
David Davis was Abraham Lincoln’s campaign manager during the 1860 presidential campaign. Lincoln appointed him to the Court in 1862.
In 1877, Davis was selected as one of the 15 members of the Electoral Commission established by Congress to decide whether Rutherford B. Hayes or Samuel Tilden won the 1876 presidential election. The commission was to be composed of 15 members, including five justices. Davis was regarded as the likely decisive vote on the commission. In order to curry favor with him and secure his support for Tilden, Democrats in the Illinois legislature elected Davis as a United States senator. But their plan backfired when Davis immediately resigned from the Court, and thus forfeited his seat on the commission, in order to join the Senate. He served one term in the Senate.
Q. Who is the only Supreme Court justice to be nominated to his seat on the Court by one president and appointed by another?
A. John Catron.
A federal statute enacted on March 3, 1837—the last day of Andrew Jackson’s presidency—expanded the Supreme Court from seven seats to nine. Jackson nominated two individuals, John Catron and William Smith, to fill those seats, and the Senate confirmed those nominations on March 8, in the initial days of Martin Van Buren’s presidency. Van Buren appointed Catron to the Court, where he served until 1865. (Van Buren also appointed Smith, but Smith declined the appointment and never served on the Court.)
Q. Charles Pickering was the second recess appointee to a court of appeals seat who did not win Senate confirmation to that seat. Who was the first?
A. Wallace McCamant.
In 1925, Calvin Coolidge recess-appointed McCamant to a seat on the Ninth Circuit. After Coolidge nominated McCamant to a lifetime position in that seat, the Senate rejected the nomination (apparently without a recorded vote—see Congressional Record, March 17, 1926, p. 5796).
McCamant’s nomination was apparently doomed by Senator Hiram Johnson of California. As Time magazine wrote while McCamant’s nomination was pending in the Senate, “One of Senator Johnson's characteristics is that his memory is long and his forgiveness is short.” In 1920, McCamant, as a delegate to the Republican convention, had failed to support Johnson’s candidacy for the presidential nomination. After the convention nominated Warren Harding, McCamant surprised everyone by proposing Coolidge as the vice-presidential nominee, and he thus was (as Time put it) the “primum mobile of the chain of accidents which made our present President. But Coolidge’s gratitude was matched by Johnson’s continuing anger, especially over a 1920 letter in which McCamant wrote that Johnson was “not a good American.”