Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/549

 526 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS and to have betokened the coming of a new unity, a broader tolerance and a deeper nationalisnL What could be more striking than the fact that the head of this peculiarly strong national institution should once have been in arms against John Marshall — in defense of the doc- trine of state sovereignty I Yet this * * solid Southerner, ' ' ex- Confederate, Roman Catholic Democrat was appointed by a Northern, Protestant, Republican president and sworn in by a Republican justice, a Grand Army veteran. One instance will further serve to illustrate how rapidly of late years sec- tional animosities are being forgotten. When, in 1894, Mr. White was appointed Associate Justice by a Democratic pres- ident, Mr. Cleveland, the appointment was bitterly criticised by no less stanch a Democratic journal than the Brooklyn Eagle. The lingering * * bloody shirt * '-waving proclivities, and the strangely provincial attitude as well, relative to the make- up of the Supreme Court, were strongly shown by the Eagle. among the Associate Justices been other than a New Yorker and never before has one who was a rebel soldier been chosen for an exclusively Northern circuit. * ' And only sixteen years later we are told that the appointment of Justice White as Chief Justice **was urged by a progressive Republican, rail- roaded through the Senate by a conservative Republican and unanimously approved by all the Democratic, as well as Re- publican senators." Waived, even, was the usual formality of referring the President 's nomination to the Judiciary Com- mittee. Such action was doubly significant. It was a high tribute to the man. It was also a tacit admonitory declara- tion to the country — **Let the dead past bury its dead." Justice White has the distinction of being the first Chief Justice to be promoted to the head of the Court from the Su- preme Bench itself. He was the first ex-Confederate soldier to be appointed to the Supreme Court. His appointment was perhaps the first great national honor or trust which had gone to that section of the nation which controlled the government in ante-bellum days. With the exception of Roger B. Taney he is the only Roman Catholic to occupy a seat on the Supreme
 * Never before," it declared, **has a New Yorker's snccessor