1103801
United States Supreme Court
Circa 1943-1945
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Supreme Court of the United States, 1943-1945. Formal portrait of the Supreme Court, signed by Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and all eight Associate Justices, Harlan F. Stone, Owen J. Roberts, Hugo L. Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, Wm. O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, Robert H. Jackson, and Wiley Rutledge.
This is an 11½" x 11⅞" Harris & Ewing portrait of the Supreme Court. It dates from the period between February 11, 1943, when Justice Wiley B. Rutledge joined the Court, and July 31, 1945, when Justice Owen J. Roberts retired. Each of the Justices has signed in the white margin beneath the image. The photograph comes in the original Harris & Ewing presentation folder.
President Calvin Coolidge appointed Stone, his Amherst College classmate and at the time his Attorney General, to the Supreme Court in 1925. Although Stone was a Republican, his strong support of New Deal social and economic welfare legislation led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to elevate him to Chief Justice in 1941. Stone wrote perhaps the most famous footnote in American constitutional law, footnote 4 in United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144 (1938), which introduced the notion that the Supreme Court should apply varying levels of scrutiny to evaluate the constitutionality of statutes "directed at particular religious . . . or national . . . or racial minorities" or that create "prejudice against discrete and insular minorities."
Liberals Black and Douglas and the cautious Frankfurter, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union but nevertheless somewhat a judicial conservative, were giants of the Court throughout most of its time under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Jackson held a dual role as the United States prosecutor at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, at which a number of prominent Nazis were sentenced to death or to various terms of imprisonment. Those four Justices and Reed joined the unanimous decision to declare racial segregation in the public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Accompanying this photograph is an unsigned, unfinished 11" x 14" Bachrach proof of the preceding Court, including Justice James F. Byrnes, whom Rutledge replaced.
The signed Harris & Ewing portrait has a vertical crease that runs from the top margin through the images of Rutledge and Black and into the signatures, affecting those of Black and, to a lesser extent, Rutledge. The crease is not, however, as pronounced as the light reflection on the scan below makes it appear. The toning around the image is part of the photographic print, not the result of prior framing. Overall the photograph is in fine condition.
The unsigned, unfinished Bachrach proof has some erosion at the corners but overall is also in fine condition.
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