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Senate Body Approves Frankfurter After Hearing His Testimony on Civil Liberties Union

January 13, 1939
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The Senate Judiciary subcommittee today filed with the full committee a report unanimously favoring the confirmation of Prof. Felix Frankfurter as Supreme Court Justice, after closing its three-day hearings with testimony by Prof. Frankfurter. The full committee will met next Monday.

Prof. Frankfurter had been questioned at length about his relationship to the Civil Liberties Union and whether he believed in Marxism. He said the union had consulted him on “major issues.” Under questioning by Senator Borah he declared that some time ago he had supported the request of the Ku Klux Klan to hold a mass meeting in Boston because “civil liberties mean liberties for those we like and those we detest.”

Questioned concerning the date and place of his birth, he said that he was born in November, 1882 in Vienna in “what was Austria.” He was also questioned about the citizenship of his father, which he answered to the committee’s satisfaction. The racial issue did not arise at this morning’s hearing, as it did yesterday when Allen Zoll, a supporter of Father Charles E. Coughlin, declared that the adding of a Jew to the Supreme Court would increase anti-Semitism in the United States.

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