Melville Weston Fuller served as the eighth Chief Justice of the United States, presiding over the Supreme Court for more than twenty years during the turbulent industrial age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Augusta, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College and briefly at Harvard Law School, he moved to Chicago, where he built a prosperous law practice and became active in Democratic politics.
Though he had never served as a judge, Fuller was nominated Chief Justice by President Grover Cleveland in 1888. A modest, courteous man and a skilled conciliator, he proved an effective administrator who managed a strong-willed Court harmoniously and streamlined its work.
The Fuller Court handed down some of the most consequential — and, in retrospect, infamous — decisions of the Gilded Age. In Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust (1895) it struck down the federal income tax, a ruling overturned only by the Sixteenth Amendment; in United States v. E. C. Knight it sharply limited federal antitrust power.
Most lastingly, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Court upheld state-imposed racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal," giving constitutional cover to Jim Crow for the next half century. Fuller also served on the international tribunal that arbitrated the Venezuela–British Guiana boundary dispute. He remained Chief Justice until his death in 1910.