Frederick Moore Vinson

Frederick Moore Vinson died in his Washington apartment on September 8, 1953, of a heart attack. He was sixty-three. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, on January 22, 1890, in a house looking at the jail his father kept, he learned the law in a mountain county and never quite lost the habit of counting votes as well as precedents. Centre College and then a practice in Louisa sent him to the House, where he became a tax and fiscal workhorse for the New Deal, a man other members trusted with a bill that had to add up. Roosevelt put him on the Emergency Court of Appeals, then at Economic Stabilization and the Federal Loan Agency. Truman made him secretary of the Treasury in 1945 and, a year later, the thirteenth Chief Justice of the United States. He inherited a Court that was short of agreement and long on the cases the war had postponed. He wrote for majorities on labor, loyalty, and the steel seizure he did not live to see fully settled in the country's memory; Youngstown would come with his successor. He tried to keep a conference from becoming a feud. Friends said he was better at a cloakroom than a philosophy seminar, which was not an insult in the Washington he served. Louisa remained the town on the letterhead. The Chief Justice's chambers were a rented life. He played for the Centre football team as a young man and still talked like a coach when a clerk needed steering. Roberta, his wife, and their sons knew both addresses. A state funeral was held in the Capital. He is buried in Pinehill Cemetery in Louisa, Kentucky — not in Washington. Earl Warren took the seat two weeks later.