Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!
The nomination of which Supreme Court justice reportedly received gasps from the Senate when his name was submitted by President Woodrow Wilson? The fight that followed dragged on four months, the longest confirmation battle in the Court’s history to that point, and produced the first public Senate hearings ever held on a Supreme Court nominee.
Hint: The hearings boasted 47 witnesses and some 1,500 pages of testimony. The opposition to the nomination was a who’s-who of the establishment: former president William Howard Taft, who branded the nomination “an evil and a disgrace,” along with Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, J.P. Morgan Jr., and six former presidents of the American Bar Association.
