page_1035 < previous page page_1035 next page > Page 1035 tempting to restore public confidence after the scandals of the Harding administration, named Stone attorney general. Stone cleaned up the Justice Department, especially its investigative branch, and named J. Edgar Hoover to head the FBI. The following year, an appreciative Coolidge named Stone to the Supreme Court, where he joined Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis in the Court's liberal bloc. Like them, he believed in judicial restraint and was willing to defer to legislatures despite any personal qualms about the wisdom of their policies. Stone emerged as the leader of the liberal bloc during the fight over New Deal legislation. He wrote a number of vigorous dissents upholding Congress's exercise of the commerce and tax powers to meliorate the economic effects of the depression. His most famous dissent came in United States v. Butler (1936), in which he methodically tore apart the majority opinion and charged the conservatives with substituting their judgment for that of Congress. Following the constitutional crisis of 1937, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to pack the Supreme Court, the Court abandoned close review of economic policy and began to focus more on individual rights. Stone made what was possibly his most important contribution to modern jurisprudence in United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938). He held that henceforth the Court would apply only a minimal level of scrutiny to economic legislation but suggested in a famous footnote that laws affecting individual rights and liberties would require more careful review  the basis for the modern doctrine of strict scrutiny. Stone demonstrated what this meant in his lone dissent in the first flag salute case, Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), in which he argued that the Court should not defer to the legislature when it violated civil liberties. When Charles Evans Hughes retired in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt elevated the Republican Stone to be chief justice, an appointment applauded in both parties and in legal and academic circles. His tenure, however, disappointed his admirers. Stone had the misfortune of heading the Court in wartime, when even the cautious often gave in to war hysteria. Stone himself delivered the Court's opinion in the leading Japanese relocation case, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), which upheld the government's actions. Moreover, although possessing a fine legal mind, Stone did not have the tough political skills necessary to keep one of the most fractious benches in history in line. The number of dissents and split opinions increased sharply as the Court divided between a conservative faction headed by Felix Frankfurter and devoted to judicial restraint and the more activist group centered around Hugo Black, which plunged ahead with the logic of Stone's Carolene Products footnote. Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (1956). MELVIN I. UROFSKY See also Supreme Court. Stowe, Harriet Beecher (18111896), author. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet Beecher was the seventh child of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Congregational minister and moral reformer, and Roxanna Foote Beecher. She was schooled at the Pierce Academy and at her sister Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary, where she also taught. She moved with the family to Cincinnati in 1832, when her father was appointed president of Lane Theological Seminary. The spectacle of chattel slavery across the Ohio River in Kentucky and its effects on the acquiescent commercial interests of white Cincinnati moved her deeply. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, professor of biblical literature at Lane. The death of a son in 1849 led her away from her father's Calvinism and gave supremacy in her views to the redemptive spirit of Christian love. By 1850, the family had moved to Maine, where, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of that year, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), her most celebrated work. Sentimental and realistic by turns, the novel explored the cruelties of chattel slavery  < previous page page_1035 next page >

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