An Echo Fades

"Time was," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sherman ("Shay") Minton last week, "when they waited onan elderly Justice and told him he wasn't doing his work right. I don't want that to happen to me." So saying, Justice Minton, 65, tendered his resignation from the court, effective Oct, 15, for reasons of ill health, thereby terminating a career of 15 unremarkable years on federal benches and eight remarkable years in the brawling, bruising New Deal politics of his home state of Indiana and the Senate of the U.S.

Born poor in the southern Indiana hill country, Shay Minton went to work when he was "about 14," put himself through Indiana University and Law School (top of the class) and Yale Law School (cum laude, 1916), served in the infantry in World War I at Soissons and Verdun. Settling in New Albany, Ind., he practiced law, was elected to the U.S. Senate in Depression-drugged 1934 with a straight New Deal platform and a battle cry: "You can't offer a hungry man the Constitution." For six years Minton had a place in the vanguard of the New Deal extremists and fought especially hard on behalf of F.D.R.'s plan to pack the Supreme Court. He even introduced a bill to gag the press by imposing a $1,000 to $10,000 fine for printing what he called "a fact known to be false."

Gratefully, F.D.R. appointed Minton in 1941 to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, where Minton toned down his predilection for fiddling with the Constitution and did a fair and workmanlike job. Eight years later, when Harry Truman appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, he granted that he had been "a strong partisan" in the Senate, but had put all that behind him. Returning last month from a six-week jaunt to Europe, Minton raised legal eyebrows by reverting to partisanship, endorsing Candidate Adlai Stevenson as "a very able man" and denigrating Candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower as "terribly handicapped physically." When his discretion was challenged, he blustered: "Hell, I wasn't speaking judicially."

Judge Minton had a heart attack in 1945, four years before Harry Truman named him to the highest court. He recovered, but developed pernicious anemia about a year later. "It's hard for me to walk more than a block, and this last term I had to take to a cane," he said. "My knees buckle and I lose my balance. It's pretty depressing. This thing keeps pecking away at me. Worst of all, it's gone to my brain. It affects my power to concentrate and think and retain arguments in my mind."

Thus did Shay Minton, New Deal fire-eater and reticent lawyer, step out of the U.S. scene on full pay, by reason of his long service, of $35,000 a year for the rest of his life. "It is not an easy place to leave," he said sadly. "I hate to go." Then he thought of the future and the past, and added: "There will be more interest in who will succeed me than in my passing. I'm an echo."

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