They did not welcome Vinson as a kindred spirit; instead, they looked down on him as second-rate; his former political strengths became liabilities. “This man,” Philip Elman, an influential Frankfurter clerk, wrote his boss, “is a pygmy, morally and mentally. And so uncouth.” Not that Frankfurter, a great intellectual snob, needed a great deal of convincing. If anything, the Court under Vinson fragmented even further, and in the early McCarthy years, as the issues of civil liberties came before the Court, Vinson took a simplistic (some might say craven) view toward protecting them.
