Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone was born on October 11, 1872, in Chesterfield, New Hampshire. Stone attended Amherst College before earning his bachelor of law degree from Columbia Law School in 1898. He practiced law in New York City for a few years before returning to Columbia as a teacher and later the dean. During World War I, Stone served on the War Department’s board of inquiry, reviewing nearly 3,000 cases of conscientious objectors that had been denied by their draft boards. After the war, he grew increasingly unhappy at Columbia and resigned his deanship, joining a prestigious New York law firm. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge (who had known Stone at Amherst) appointed him US Attorney General. Coolidge believed Stone would be a fitting person to oversee all of the investigations into the scandals of the Harding administration. Among his first acts in this new office was appointing J. Edgar Hoover to head of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI).