Mckenna, Joseph (1843–1926)

• Author: Michael E. Parrish
• Pages: 1709-1710

Page 1709

Few Justices sat longer upon the Supreme Court than Joseph McKenna, the son of an Irish immigrant baker, who served for twenty-seven years from 1898 until 1925 under three Chief Justices. During McKenna's tenure, the nation's political system grappled with the problems generated by industrialization, urbanization, and rising class conflict. The same problems followed many of the issues that came before the Court, whose decisions lacked consistency and predictability.

When President WILLIAM MCKINLEY named McKenna, his old House of Representatives colleague, to the seat vacated by Justice STEPHEN J. FIELD, he recognized not distinction at the bar or on the bench but loyal service. McKenna had been a four-term representative from California, a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and attorney general of the United States. In these roles McKenna had earned a justified reputation for devotion to the Republican party, the protective tariff, and the interests of his chief patron, the railroad mogul Leland Stanford. Even as a member of the circuit court, McKenna had written several opinions protecting Stanford's powerful Southern Pacific company from the unfriendly behavior of local and state officials who sought to regulate the carrier's rates and terminal facilities.

As a member of the Supreme Court during the high tide of the Progressive era, however, McKenna supported the efforts of THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S and WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S administrations to bring the country's major railroads under a larger measure of administrative control through the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Times had changed. By the turn of the century, even the railroads desired a degree of federal regulation that would protect them from conflicting state laws and the debilitating rate wars which drained away profits. McKenna wrote opinions for the Court that confirmed the new relationship between the carriers and the federal government by upholding the ICC's statutory powers with respect to fact-gathering and rate-making.

McKenna also became a robust supporter of congressional efforts to regulate other aspects of the nation's economic and social life under authority of the COMMERCE CLAUSE. He joined Justice JOHN M. HARLAN'S crucial opinion in CHAMPION V. AMES (1903), which laid the foundation for a NATIONAL POLICE POWER by giving Congress the authority to exclude from the channels of INTERSTATE COMMERCE supposedly harmful goods...