Portal:Indiana/Selected biography/29

Sherman Minton (October 20, 1890 – April 9, 1965) was a Democratic United States Senator from Indiana and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born in rural southern Indiana, he was impoverished during his youth after his father was disabled and his mother died of breast cancer. He worked to pay his way through high school and went on to attend Indiana University, Yale and the Sorbonne, served as a Captain in World War I, and then launched his legal and political career. After two failed attempts to be elected to the United States House of Representatives, Minton became involved in the administration of Governor of Indiana Paul V. McNutt where he earned a reputation for saving the government and the public money through his oversight of utility regulations. He won election to the United States Senate in 1934. As part of the New Deal Coalition, he was fiercely partisan and championed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's unsuccessful court packing plans in the Senate. After failing to be reelected to the Senate in 1940 and briefly serving as an administrative aid at the White House, he was appointed by Roosevelt to a federal judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where he served for eight years and authored over 250 opinions. Minton was nominated by President Harry Truman and confirmed to replace a deceased Justice in 1949, becoming the last member of Congress to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He served on the Supreme Court for seven years where he advocated judicial restraint and opposed judicial activism. Initially a regular supporter of the majority opinions, he became a regular dissenter after the makeup of the court was altered due to the deaths and replacements of three of his fellow jurists. He retired from the court in 1956 due his worsening anemia. Minton was memorialized in southern Indiana when the Sherman Minton Bridge was named in his honor in 1962.