Harold H. Burton

Harold H. Burton (born June 22, 1888, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 28, 1964, Washington, D.C.) was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1945–58).

Burton was the son of Alfred E. Burton, a dean and professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Gertrude Hitz Burton. He graduated from Bowdoin College (where he also played quarterback for the football team) in 1909 and received a law degree from Harvard in 1912. That year he married Selma Florence Smith and was admitted to the bar, whereupon he secured employment in the law office of his wife’s uncle in Cleveland, Ohio, a city that had been headed (1901–09) by Burton’s idol, reform mayor Tom L. Johnson. Burton practiced law in Cleveland for two years before moving to Salt Lake City, Utah, where he practiced law until 1914. His experience in Salt Lake City led to further corporate law opportunities in Boise, Idaho, where he worked as counsel for a public utility.

In 1917, following the United States’s entry into World War I, Burton entered the infantry and saw battle in France; rising to the rank of captain, Burton was injured during battle and was awarded a Purple Heart. He returned to Cleveland, where he resumed corporate law practice, and by 1925 he had become partner in his own firm, Cull, Burton, and Laughlin. During the next three years his political ambitions evolved, and he engaged in local civic actions while practicing law and lecturing part time at Western Reserve University School of Law (now Case Western Reserve).

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In 1927 Burton was elected to the East Cleveland Board of Education, and one year later he won election as a moderate Republican to the Ohio House of Representatives. From 1929 to 1932 he served as director of law for the city of Cleveland, and he was also acting mayor in 1931–32. He won election to a full term as mayor in 1935 and subsequently won reelection twice. Nicknamed “the Boy Scout Mayor,” Burton won widespread praise for fighting organized crime and for helping to establish programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities during the Great Depression. In 1940 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he advocated a liberal foreign policy and conservative domestic policies.

Shortly after Harry S. Truman became president in 1945, Owen Roberts resigned from the Supreme Court. Although Truman was a Democrat, he and Burton were old friends; perhaps more importantly, Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had appointed only Democrats to the court, and the vacancy gave Truman an opportunity to reach across the political divide. This mixture of respect (Truman and Burton served together in the Senate, most notably on the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense) and political shrewdness (Truman also knew that the Democratic governor of Ohio would fill Burton’s vacant Senate seat with a Democrat) paved the way for Burton’s nomination; he subsequently won unanimous approval from the U.S. Senate on September 19, 1945.

During his 13 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, Burton earned a reputation as a diligent but quiet justice, often working more than 80 hours per week and rarely leaving his office for social occasions. He was a study in contrast to several of his peers, especially Felix Frankfurter. Unlike Frankfurter, who aggressively lobbied for votes on cases, Burton honored the more traditional approach of circulating drafts of opinions; and unlike Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Earl Warren, Burton was not an opinion leader. He was essentially an ideologically stable, strict constructionist. Throughout his tenure on the court, the ideological balance shifted; during the first third of his career on the bench, he formed part of a loose conservative majority, and in the next third he became part of a solid centrist bloc. With the appointments of Warren (1953) and William Brennan (1956), the final years of Burton’s tenure found him increasingly in the minority, though he was one of the early supporters of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which mandated the end of racial segregation in public schools; he also voted to invalidate restrictive housing covenants, which forbade some homeowners from selling their property to racial minorities. Burton generally opposed union power and antitrust legislation; he also supported greater governmental intervention on social matters (e.g., he rejected claims of free speech rights made by communists) and less governmental intervention on economic ones.

Burton began to suffer from the symptoms of Parkinson disease, and on October 13, 1958, he resigned from the Supreme Court. In retirement he served (by court designation) on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit until his death.

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