Homer Stille Cummings

CUMMINGS, HOMER STILLE

Homer Stille Cummings was the 55th attorney general of the United States, serving from 1933 to 1939 in the administration of President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT. Cummings was a DEMOCRATIC PARTY leader and an advocate for reform of prisons in the United States. He was instrumental in establishing the Alcatraz Island Prison, which was envisioned as a model for housing maximum security-level inmates in the federal prison system.

Cummings was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 30, 1870. He attended Yale University
where he received his undergraduate degree in 1891 and two years later, his law degree. Cummings was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1893 and began a private practice in Stamford.
He rose in prominence as a litigator, becoming a
member of the New York bar. He also was
admitted to practice before a number of federal
district courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cummings became involved with the
Democratic Party and was elected mayor of
Stamford for three terms. He also served, from
1908 to 1912, as the city’s corporation counsel.
In 1902, Cummings ran for a seat as congress-
man at large from Connecticut and lost; he also
ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in 1916.
Cummings’s entry on the national scene began
when he served seven terms as a delegate at large
to the Democratic National Convention. From
1919 to 1920, he was chairman of the Democra-
tic National Committee.

Beginning in 1914, Cummings served for a
decade as the state’s attorney for Fairfield
County, Connecticut. His interest in the topic of
prison reform paid off in 1930 when he was
appointed chairman of Connecticut’s Committee
on State Prison Conditions. Cummings’s long years of labor on behalf of the Democratic
Party and his work on the successful 1932 presidential
campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt were
rewarded. In 1933, President Roosevelt
appointed Senator Thomas J.Walsh of Montana
to be his attorney general, but Walsh died
suddenly of a heart attack on a train trip to
Washington, D.C., to attend the presidential
inauguration. Roosevelt then appointed Cummings
as U.S. attorney general. Cummings
turned out to be the first of four attorneys general
appointed by Roosevelt, the nation’s
longest-serving president.
The 63-year-old Cummings’s interest in and
experience concerning prison reform proved to
be significant in his work as attorney general.
Cummings proposed and oversaw improvements
in various prison conditions and in the
general operation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons
that had been established in 1930 to oversee
the 11 federal prisons that then existed.
With public fear escalating over the 1932
KIDNAPPING of the baby son of national hero
Charles Lindbergh, an expanding list of “public
enemies,” and mob violence at a peak, Cummings
also advocated for the establishment of a
maximum security prison for the nation’s most
dangerous criminals. He chose Alcatraz Island,
located in the San Francisco Bay, to house the
country’s most dangerous criminals. Nicknamed
“Uncle Sam’s Devil’s Island,” the prison
opened in 1934 and quickly entered the public
imagination as a symbol of the tough punishment
to be dealt out to the worst offenders.
In 1935, Cummings merged the Justice
Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI), the
Prohibition Bureau, and the Bureau of Identification
into the newly renamed FEDERAL BUREAU
OF INVESTIGATION (FBI), all under the control
of FBI Director J. EDGAR HOOVER.
In 1937, after the conservative U.S. Supreme
Court had overturned much of Roosevelt’s NEW
DEAL legislative reforms that focused on moving
the country back on the road to economic prosperity,
Cummings drafted a proposal that came
to be known as the court-packing plan. Enthusiastically
endorsed by Roosevelt, the plan would
have given the president the power to appoint a
new judge for each incumbent judge who was 70
or older. Because six of the nine justices were
over the age of 70, the new law would have
meant a Supreme Court with 15 members.

While the president and his attorney general saw the proposal as a way to get around the fact that Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure, such a drastic change in the composition of the court was too much even for the Democratic Congress, and the bill failed. Chief Justice CHARLES EVANS HUGHES and Associate Justice OWEN ROBERTS began to vote more often with the more liberal justices, however, thus allowing Roosevelt to proceed with many of his economic reform measures. Many saw the failed proposal as having been the stimulus for Justice Hughes’s changed voting pattern. Cummings remained as attorney general until his retirement in 1939. He died on September 10, 1956, in Stamford, Connecticut.

FURTHER READINGS
Attorneys General of the United States, 1789–1985. 1985. Justice Department.Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.