Fred M. Vinson, American judge and politician, 13th Chief Justice of the United States (d. 1953)
Frederick Moore Vinson (January 22, 1890 – September 8, 1953) was an American lawyer and Democratic politician. One of the few Americans to have served in all three branches of the U.S. government, Vinson served as a U.S. Representative from Kentucky from 1924 to 1928 and 1930 to 1938, as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1938 to 1943, as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1945 to 1946, and as the 13th chief justice of the United States from 1946 until his death in 1953.
Born in Louisa, Kentucky, Vinson pursued a legal career and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. After the war, he served as the Commonwealth's Attorney for the Thirty-Second Judicial District of Kentucky before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1924. He lost re-election in 1928 but regained his seat in 1930 and served in Congress until 1937. During his time in Congress, he became an adviser and confidante of Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Vinson to be a judge on the D.C. Circuit. Vinson resigned from the appellate court in 1943, when he became the Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. After Truman acceded to the presidency following Roosevelt's death in 1945, Truman appointed Vinson to the position of Secretary of the Treasury. Vinson negotiated the payment of the Anglo-American loan and presided over the establishment of numerous post-war organizations, including the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund.
After the death of Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone in 1946, Truman appointed Vinson to the Supreme Court. To date, Vinson is the last Chief Justice nominee nominated by a president from the Democratic Party to have been confirmed. Vinson dissented in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, which ruled against the Truman administration's control of the nation's steel mills during a strike. He ordered a rehearing of the Briggs v. Elliott case, which was eventually combined into the case known as Brown v. Board of Education.