10.5.2017 GO EAST YOUNG MAN (1974) Ist volume of Autobiography of William O. Douglas

Chapter 1 - Birthplace

14  ...in the early years my father and William D. Robinson were my heroes among the churchmen...Rabbi Wise, who started his career in Portland, Oregon, had the keen conscience and the thundering courage of the Prophets. these led him to search out the social injustice in his won neighborhood and rally public opinion behind reforms. Davies, the Unitarian,  looked affluent Washingtonians in the eye and asked them from his pulpit what they were doing about Their sums, Their second-class citizens, Their law-enforcement abuses, Their own juvenile delinquents.

as I started to move around the world, I discovered that the Church - whatever creed or faith it espoused - was usually aligned with the Establishment. few clergymen were relating the teachings of their church to the marketplace. there were exceptions. in Latin America, where the

15  BANKS FUNCTION EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE ESTABLISHMENT,  I saw Maryknoll Fathers going about the job of creating credit unions and for he first time providing consumer credit at the village level, where the poor congregated. on the other hand, it was also in Latin america, in Ecuador, that I heard how a priest did in 2 UNESCO workers.  they had come to advise the peasants on how to improve the plots of land they worked as serfs.  to put an end to such 'progress', the priest whispered that they were 'communists'.  the villagers became aroused and one day closed in on the 2 UNESCO  workers, who fled the mob and sought sanctuary in the church. they were killed at the altar.
in the Middle East, I saw the mullahs brigaded (def - a large # of soldiers; a group organized for a  certain purpose) with the landlords to keep the serfs subdued. Moslem mullahs, like christian clergy, assure eh downtrodden that their rewards will come in the Hereafter - if they maintain an attitude of charity and meekness before the Establishment.
in India - where I could smell a village a mile distant before the marvelous village reconstruction program got under way - life was so filled with despair for the average person that the Hindu priests made a religion out of the renunciation of life.
in my early years in Afghanistan, I found an editor on trial for publishing an article whose theme was 'It's time for the legislature to appropriate money for schools rather than for the church.' the crime, of course, was 'sacrilege'; but he was convicted only of 'vagrancy'.

in this country I saw most churches - Catholic, Quaker and Unitarian excluded - regard mixtures of whites and Blacks in one spiritual community as a serious ecclesiastical faux pas (def - a slip or blunder in manners or conduct). and I saw lawsuits started when it was proposed to lay an Indian or a Black alongside a Caucasian in a graveyard for that eternal sleep.

on Park Avenue, in New York, I heard sermons as unctuous as any pronouncement of John Foster Dulles. their main import was to ease the consciences of the Establishment and to assure their members' entrance to the Heavenly City. Park Avenue churches were almost never concerned with the problems of the cancerous growth a few blocks to their north, in the ghettos of Harlem. how could they be? those ghettos are tied  into New York finance and the New York real estate Establishment and all the building inspectors and police that those powerful people corrupt to keep illegality 'legal'.

my point of deepest depression about the Church came in Washington DC,  at the United Presbyterian Church on a Communion Sunday.  a well-know right- wing Republican came down the aisle as an usher,  passing trays of wine and bread, I was seated on the aisle and as he

16  started one tray down my row, he whispered, 'Imagine me sharing Communion with a rank New Dealer such as yourself.
Yakima churches mirrored world views when it came to the attitude of the clergy to social problems. everyone was being prepared for the After Life. the Here and Now of existence was up to the individual. the Protestant ethic of hard work, frugality and honesty would see one through.

these views changed somewhat with the coming of the Big Depression and mass unemployment. the manner in which everyone had become a victim of some Establishment became obvious to more and more people. the prosperity of recent years has seemed, however, to revive some of the old smugness, and by 1972 a majority apparently preferred a Billy Graham to a religion with a social conscience.

Chapter 2 - Childhood

17  when Rather died he left Mother, 3 children and $2500 in life insurance. mother spent $600 of that sum in building our 5 room house in Yakima.  the balance of the money was invested by Mother's lawyer, James O. Cull. he put it in an irrigation project in the Moxee area of the valley - a project of which he was a promoter. a lawyer who did such a thing today would be debarred, for it violates basic fiduciary (def - something held in trust) standards. the project was not fraudulent, but was highly speculative. it was designed to bring water to the dry sagebrush lands lying to the east of Yakima - a scheme later brought to fruition under a vast federal project that bears the name Roza.  the project our money was in failed completely. 
soon after the Moxee debacle, James O Cull went through bankruptcy. we was to me in those days the devil incarnate, for he was the start of all our woes. he caused us to start life penniless at 111 North Fifth Avenue. my brother Arthur, who was 4  at the time, later carried his full share of the family's responsibility, but it was my sister Martha, 7 and I, a year younger,  who felt the brunt of this newly arrived poverty. it was the 10cents or 15 cents that we brought home each evening that often meant the difference between dinner and no dinner...

21  ...though it was nip and tuck for Mother, feeding and clothing 3 children and setting enough aside to pay the real estate taxes, there was a camaraderie (def - good fellowship; a group of soldiers billeted together) about the family that made it a real joint venture. every new job - even the routine of the old ones - cause a sense of excitement, for each meant a conquest of a problem that might engulf us all. we never felt sorry for ourselves; we never felt underprivileged. Class distinctions were nonexistent in our eyes: we went to the same schools as the elite;  we competed for grades with them and usually won. we went to the same church.
because of our poverty, we did occasionally feel that we were born 'on the wrong side of the railroad tracks'. we had only a small tree at Christmas time and the Presbyterian Home Mission sent a Christmas box each year.  it was filled with secondhand clothing which we resented.  one year when I was in my teens a beautiful coat  with a big patch on the right elbow arrived. I liked the coat, but my pride was too great to put it on.
ever since then, Christmas has seemed to me to be a grubby occasion.  (note - the author and i share a very similar 'take' on the empty materialism, even if we come to that from different angles.) for may it is the time to give 'welfare' to the people, although welfare should e of concern 365 days a year. I always felt Ch ought to be the special occasion for expressing one's admiration, respect, affection, or love for a particular person. a Ch gift should be, I thought, a highly individual expression of interest or concern. an apple might serve the end. the ideal gift, however, would be one that the donor had created - like a book or a slingshot or something else resulting from his own efforts. Kloochman Rock near Yak, that rises to a sheer height of 800 feet, has on its ledges a rare species of penstemon (def - from the figwort family with various colored flowers). one of these flowers - tenderly collected and carefully pressed - would make a Christmas gift unequaled.

as I look back, I feel that the patched coat that came from Philadelphia or New York was a perversion of Chr.  the donor gained merit by his generosity in disposing of his cast-off clothing. this charity was he beginning of the end of personal relations. it was a miniature of he foreign aid program of the US in the post WW II year  - a project designed essentially for the welfare of the US, as

22  evidenced by the fact that out of every 5 dollars we advanced, we received 4 back in the form of interest, repayment of principal or dollars expended here.
whatever the merits of that patched coat, it transformed Chr into something offensive o me. Chr eventually became a virtual monopoly of the Establishment whereby retail sales mounted. it almost seemed as if it were the duty of all Americans -measured by the GNP - to give at Chr freely and fully.  it mattered not whether the gift was cigars, lingerie, neckties or booze - so long as one spent money. as the years passed, I came to hate the holiday more and more...

26... in those days it was common to have several itinerants a week knock at the door and ask not for handouts but for a meal they would pay for by chapping wood, mowing the lawn or washing the dishes. we used tailend pieces of wood from the local mill, so the reduction of them was hardly worthy of a woochopper. and our lawn was too small for a mowing rewarded by food. but mother would occasionally feed one of these drifters, if he looked like a 'good' man and did not have alcohol on his breath,  and let him repay by washing dishes.
there was a very kind man by the name of Krauss who lived opposite us. his eyes were warm and his mind was bright, he had humor, wit and gentleness, but he was also a drunkard. what beset him, I do not know. at night I would often hear him coming up Fifth Avenue, singing and shouting in the pitch-darkness. 'Demon rum, Mother would say. 'let that be a lesson to you. one night, when I heart Mr. Krauss singing,  I went out to watch him. it was moonlight and i could see his figure weaving up the rough, uneven sidewalk. as he neared his house, he veered too far right and fell into  a ditch  that was part of our open irrigation system. happily, since the ditch was filled with water, Krauss fell on his back; but unhappily, he got stuck there and could only holler. so I ran over, gave my alcoholic friend  a hand and helped him out. he never remembered by act of friendship. but real friends never keep strict accounts, anyway. 

Chapter 3 - Polio

...38 I do not envy those whose introduction to nature was lush meadows, lakes and swamps where life abounds. the desert hills of Yak had a POVERTY  that  SHARPENED PERCEPTION.  even a minute violet quickens the heat when one has walked far or climbed high to find it. where nature is more bountiful, even the tender bitterroot might go unnoticed. yet when a lone plant is seen in bloom on scabland (def - rough, barren, volcanic topography with thin soil and scant vegetation)  between batches of bunch grass and sage, it can transform the spot as completely as only a whole band of flowers could do in a more lush environment. it is the old relationship between scarcity and value, one of the lessons which the foothills of Yak taught me. 

Chapter 5 - Coming of Age in Yakima

60  ...while there were many children's parties in Yak, we were never invited to a single one and we were far too poor to have one in our own home. we grew up never seeing the inside of another home
in the afteryears I thought it was a blessing that I had not. for if I had been united with the elite of Yak even by so tenuous a cord, I might have been greatly handicapped. to be accepted might then have become a goal in later life, an ambition that is often a leveling influence. to be accepted means living in the right area, wearing the right hat, thinking the right way, saying the right thing. what it means in the law is a Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles or a reactionary president of the Bar association. they cause all the beauty to disappear in a pontifical emptiness. 

61  and so a teenage boy became a stool pigeon (def - one hired to act as a decoy or informer) in a red light district. never did I feel voluptuous women whose faces were etched in sorrow, suffering and fear. their tears never seemed very far beneath their coarse laughs and dirty stories. the men who brought 'white mule' in gallon glass jars for sale to these brothels were shadows respected neither by the prostitutes nor by themselves. they had hunted looks; they swore softly under their breath;  their eyes never met mine. I shamefully bought 'one shot' glasses full of the fiery stuff for a dollar each, putting it to my lips and then tossing it into a  basket or potted plant or under a sofa when no one was looking.
in time I came to feel a warmth for all these miserable people, something I never felt for the high churchman who hired me. they were scum that society had produced - misfits, maladjusted, disturbed and really sick.
what orphanages had turned them out?
what broken homes had produced them? 
which of these prostitutes had first been seduced by her father, causing all standards of propriety and decency to be destroyed?
which of them had turned to prostitution and bootlegging (def - unlawful alcohol...from the practice of hiding a bottle in the leg of a boot in order to escape being caught) as a result of grinding poverty?

as much as my family needed the money, a few weeks of this job were all I could endure. as the evening hours passed along South Front Street,  I heard stories about my employer whose sons were too precious to expose to crime and criminals. South F S did not know that he was financing stool pigeons; it heard, however,  of his other doings. he had put enterprise after enterprise together, including many orchards, in his own lawless way - ruthlessly foreclosing mortgages, ruthlessly forcing competitors to the wall, ruthlessly reducing wages. I went to South FS to entrap a low, petty class of criminals; I discovered on South FS that on the day of the final reckoning there was one high churchman who would have to make a more severe accounting than they.

from this experience 2 impressions burned themselves into my memory. first was the only class consciousness I ever had. most of my own experiences prior to this one and virtually all of them subsequent to it, spelled equality as the dominant American theme. but South F S in Yak made me realize that there were those even in this free land who thought that some men were more equal than others, that their sons

62  were to be preferred over the sons of other people less worthy. second was a residue of resentment of which I have never quite got rid - resentment against hypocrites in church clothes who raise their denunciations against thee petty criminals, while their own sins mount high. this feeling somehow aligned me emotionally with the miserable people who make up the chaff of society. i never sought their company, nor engaged in their tricks or traffic, nor spent my hours with them. I think, however, that I have always been quicker to defend them than I would have been but for the high churchman of Yak.
...the memories of the brothels of Front Street in Yak came back to me years later during my travels. on a visit to Casablanca, I saw a lovely Moorish town with white adobe houses where the Establishment, then French, lived; down below were the miserable huts,made out of pieces of

63  tin and packing cases, of the poor majority. the French word for the area was Bidonville, meaning the oil-drum slums. high on the hill overlooking the squalor was what a Frenchman called 'the best investment in North Africa'.  it was a brothel whose tentacles stretched into the elite of Paris and her institutions. I saw the same in Saigon, where French development projects exalted 2 things: plush gambling casinos and deluxe brothels. these too were owned by the Establishment in Paris. the influence corrupted both Casablanca and Saigon, tying into the underworld, putting petty local officials on its payroll and corrupting the police.
I learned that this industry was not a French monopoly. the Chinese had similar rich projects in the sector of free enterprise in southeast Asia, notably Singapore. America had a like bent. in Cuba we built brothels of splendor and american finance reaped huge dividends. we paid off Batista for his cooperation and we mad our Havana brothers 'first class' by barring Cuban males from them, though staffing them, of course, with Cuban girls.
on my many world travels I learned that slavery still thrives in the world. in the 1960s there were probably 4,000,000 slaves, white, brown, black and yellow. of these people, the women have usually been kidnapped. they fill the brothels of Turkey and Iraq. in Damascus, I was offered by a broker not only a mistress but a cook, a housemaid and a chauffeur from the black market for slaves.

what I had seen as a boy in Yak,  I later saw on a vast scale across the country. our brothels are financed by our banks and protected by real estate lobbies and owners who reap huge profits. that means a close working relationship between the underworld and our Establishment. if anyone doubts it, talk to the mayors and governors who tried to close these places down and found out from what sources the great opposition came.
...Charles Darwin wrote that 'a man who dares wast one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.  it was, I think, the same idea that dept me out of the pool halls of Yak. after visiting them a few times, and finding only indolent men with empty talk,  I put these places behind me forever. the Yak public library was much more interesting. in this

64  squat, square building, donated by the Eastern philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.  I was introduced to all sorts of new books by the lovely Lucille James, my former English teacher, then serving as the librarian. Darwin, Perry and other great explorers could be read, Shakespeare consumed and American history absorbed here...

68...a fourth boyhood hero was G ifford Pinchot. he was Chief of the US Forest Service when I was young. Pin and Teddy Roosevelt were in my eyes romantic woodsmen. I did not then know about Pin's 'multiple use' philosophy, which, as construed, allowed timber companies, grazing interests and even miners to destroy much of our forest heritage under the rationalization of 'balanced use'.  I  only knew that Pin was a driving force behind setting aside wilderness sanctuaries in an effort to save them from immediate destruction by reckless loggers. I was so thrilled by Pin's example that I perhaps would have made forestry my career had the choice been made in my high school days. I kept vaguely in touch with Pin in later years, admiring him for his role as governor of Pennsylvania in the 20s and again in the 30s. 
I was to meet Pin in Washington, DC and of my boyhood public heroes..Pin was the most enduring influence in my life.

Chapter 6 - Minorities

...on one of my trips to the Tieton Basin, I made friends with a young Indian whom I had seen there several times before...

73   I learned from this same friend, on other trips. some of the legends of his people. many of these involved rocks and mountains that I had climbed and so were of particular interest. his philosophy was absorbing and I remember him saying in roughly these simple terms:  'it takes many different shrubs and trees and grass to make a forest. it takes many kinds of animals to fill the woods. the bear, oat cougar, coyote, deer and elk are all different. wouldn't it be too bad if all the animals were alike? it takes many races to make the world. wouldn't it be bad if all people were the same?

74  ...by the time my teenage years ended, I had met a different group of outcasts, who made a very deep impression on me. they were the Wobblies, or IWW's of the Far West - the Industrial Workers of the World. though Yak denounced them as criminals, I came to know the Wobblies as people who deserved more than our society had meted out to them. during vacations i worked with harvest crews in the wheat lands of eastern Washington.
...when I was working for Ralph Snyder, who had a big spread near the town of Wahtucna in eastern Washington, I was in an accident with harvest equipment - an accident that might have been fatal. in those days the separator was stationary; the wheat was cut by a reaper and traveled from the reaper up a spout on a belt into a header -box pulled by 4 horses.  the problem of the driver of the header-box was to keep the wagon under the spout, an easy matte on level ground but difficult on steep terrain. (the wheat price was then so high that even marginal land, producing 6 bushels an acre, was planted. these marginal tracts included steep rocky hillsides.) one day I was below the header on such a slope when the wheels of the wagon I was below the header on such a slope when the wheels of he wagon I was driving caught on some rocks, causing the wagon to turn over. I jumped free and watched the wagon and 4 horses go over and over into a deep ravine. much damage was done to the wagon, though no horse was badly hurt.
as I jumped, my shirt, the only one i owned, caught on a nail and ripped in two. a man named Blacky was with me on the crew. I never knew his full name, but I knew he was a card-carrying member of the IWW.in recent years years he would doubtless have been a target for every Un-american committee. Blac kept all of his worldly possessions in an old battered suitcase. they were a pair of high-heeled shoes that he had bought for a girl friend in Seattle and one shirt. after the wagon accident. Blac gave me the shirt and would accept no compensation for it. the shirt was a gift to a person in need. that act of generosity build the first bond between me and the men who rode the rods and camped under railroad bridges, a tie that deepened and has lasted through my life. I never would wear the cast-off clothing sent by friendly people to the Presbyterian church, but Blac's gift of a shirt

75  was on a different plain. it was a gift from the heart and I thought it was the most precious thing I had ever received.
Blac was perhaps 30. he was slight, swarthy, with fingernails always dirty. where he came fro, I never knew. he was a part of the jetsam in the stream of life that poured over the Pacific Northwest in those troubled days. he was slight, swarthy, with fingernails always dirty. where he came fro, I never knew. he was a part of the jetsam in the stream of life that poured over the Pacific Northwest in those troubled days. he talked mostly of women and of his hunger for them. he wondered if he could ever bee a gynecologist. and when I explained to him the work, study, application and the long years through college, medical school, and internship that would be necessary, he threw up his hands. that was no dish for him. the idea had merely caught his fancy  because being a gynecologist would give him access to women and access was what he desired above all else.

the most interesting encounter I ever had with a rattlesnake happened when I worked in the wheat fields with Blac. the separator would blow out the chaff and we used it to make a pile about 4 feet high and long and broad enough for 2 bedrolls. when Blac and i put our bedrooms down and got inside them, the chaff would settle into a rather thin but comfortable mattress. one bright moonlit night I was wakened out of a sound sleep by a blood-curdling scream from Blac. i sat up and saw him somewhere in the air between me and the moon. when he came down, he did not stop running until he reached the header-box. only wen he was safe did he explain what happened. in language unfit to quote he said that a rattler had crawled in bed with him and wrapped itself around his feet.

he was just trying to get warm, I shouted.
Blac's reply is not fit for print, either. thereafter he never, never slept on the ground.

there was no drive or ambition in Blac. but there was kindness, compassion, tenderness and a desperate loneliness. I had seen that same loneliness under the railroad bridge over the Yakima River north of the city, where i used to sit with restless vagabonds, sharing coffee and stew. while the wrath of their discontents against society bubbled out.  their live were mostly empty and filled with despair. I had been raised to believe in the Puritan ethic  - that right was right and wrong was wrong, and that man, endowed with free will, could choose which he preferred. it was all a matter of good and bad, sin and righteousness, reward and punishment. criminals were the product of the wrong moral choice. the poor were the product of lack of desire, energy and will power. the rich were those who took advantage of their opportunities.

76  young as I was, I began to doubt the accuracy of this ethic. I sensed in this restless, lonely community, constantly pursued by the forces of law and order, personal tragedies that had somehow or other  fragmented them.
I traveled extensively with the IWW's and came to know them as warm-hearted people who. it seemed to me even then, had higher ideals than some of the men who ran our banks and were the elders in the church.  a hungry man was always welcome under that railroad bridge not only was he offered food, but there he could feel that he was an equal with every one. and almost always, these drifters left the area clearer than they had found it. as Dan Carlinsky, a latter-day hobo, observed in his book,  'a real hobo takes care of the jungle.
it was under bridges like the one in Yakima that Carl Sandburg spent his wandering years, listening to the folkways of the people and later making the musical transcriptions that in time appeared in his book The American Songbag.
many of these wanderers had real grievances and responded by protesting, sometimes crudely, sometimes eloquently, that their plight was serious, the injustices heaped upon them real. they sang, they swore, they did outrageous things at times. but they were seeking a place of some security in a free society.
i knew my vagrant friends  not as thieves, but as the underprivileged who had only crumbs from the table of our affluent society. by then I had experienced South Front Street and had come o compare the ethics of those at the top with those at the bottom of Yakima society.

the police, in my view. represented the ultimate personality of the Establishment that owned and ran the Yak Valley. they were harsh and relentless and bore down heavily on the nonconformist. they caused a close sifting of loyalties in a young man who felt  the roughness of their hand. I knew their victims too intimately to align myself with the police. my heart was with the impoverished, restless underdogs who were IWW's.
most of the IWW's had no criminal records and engaged in no lawless conduct. yet, though few who ode thee rods were criminals, we were all treated as outcasts or vagrants; we were even fired on by the police in railroad yards.
traveling on freight cars in those days was like hitchhiking at present. those too poor to pay a rail fare waited in the yards for a freight train to make up and pull out. I rode the rails not as a sightseer, but to

77  get myself to places where it would bee likely that I'd find work; I use the freight cars to move back and forth across the valley, to and from school, to and from jobs.

riding in open gondola (def - railroad car with low sides) was one way of getting where you wanted to go. but, like riding on top of a freight car, it had disadvantages, for the brakemen who patrolled the train would detect thee passenger and either eject him or try to shake him down for a fee. if you were lucky, you might spot an open boxcar. you'd hop in, find yourself a nice corner and travel in style. on clear days, in friendlygondola (def - railroad car with low sides) was one way of getting where you wanted to go. but, like riding on top of a freight car, it had disadvantages, for the brakemen who patrolled the train would detect thee passenger and either eject him or try to shake him down for a fee. if you were lucky, you might spot an open boxcar. you'd hop in, find yourself a nice corner and travel in style. on clear days, in friendly country - where there were no police - you could sit on top of a car or a flatcar, in a hidden nook or cranny of a large piece of machinery.

'Riding the rods' was surer, because you were safe from detection on a moving train. though freight cars have changed over the years,  in thee days when i was a boy, there  were 2 rods which ran under most of these cars. they were 2 or 3 feet apart, about 18" beneath the car and about 10" from the ground, running under thee car for almost its entire length.

the trick was to get a couple of boards and lay them across the rods to form a small platform.  we'd lie on the boards, on our stomachs, our heads on our arms and our eyes tightly closed. it was a miserable place to ride because suction of the train kept dust and cinders constantly swirling.unless you fell asleep, it wasn't particularly dangerous, although you did come out pretty grimy. even the nights were hot and the sand stinging.
a faster way to travel was 'riding the blinds', because only the passenger trains had blinds and these trains of course made better time than freights but riding the blinds was much more dangerous. at the place where the coal car backed up to attach itself to the mail car, there would be a piece of heavy fabric, arranged like an accordion, which locked thee cars together. this was the bellow-like 'blinds' and when the engine first pulled against the dead weight of the train, these blinds would separate, so that a man could slip inside. then, as the train picked up speed, the fabric would close up and one would be stuck there until the train once again slowed down, only to start up quickly. the passenger had to be alert to these changes in pace to get either in  or out in time, and he had to get out on the far side of the train lest he be apprehended on the station platform the blinds were also a risky place to hide because they were close to where the mail was being sorted and because if an occasional  fireman or brakeman came through one was trapped.

78  the danger of apprehension, on both passenger and freight trains, was especially cute at Pasco, a railroad junction where the Snake River joins the Columbia in Washington. the railroad company had many 'yard bulls' at Pasco and they  met every train, deploying on both sides. they fired at us frequently, but happily they were poor shots. our practical philosophy toward the was summed up by Dan Carlinsky, who wrote, 'A hobo should never get tough with a railroad bull. the railroads don't hire kindly old gentlemen.
the bulls were widely resented, however and in his book Called Boots, Bert Russell of Idaho tells how one night he and some others found a famous railroad 'bull',  whom I did not know, though he had the name of Yakima Bill. they met him at a barn dance, alone and without a gun. they showered him with beer bottles. then took away his pants and roared with laughter as he ran away 'drawers flapping'. 
traveling with these migrants was not always an experience in camaraderie. some of these men were neither Wobblies nor men who shared the ideas of the Bobs.  there was light- hearted conversation and much storytelling around campfires under the railroad bridges. on the freight trains I was pretty much a loner, preferring to be by myself. sometimes, though, I had no choice but to climb aboard inside a boxcar, which usually meant company. the folk stories of boxcar travel were filled with accounts of how one set of 'passengers' ganged up on another, frisking them and tossing them out the side door or even killing them. I always got in a dark corner of the car and sometimes went to sleep. one night, however, I was uneasy about the demeanor of some of the other 'passengers', and though exhausted, I managed to stay awake until dawn brought us to the town where work was to be found. I never was harmed inside a boxcar, but I lived on the theory that it was wolf eat wolf in those dark confines.
eventually the wrath of Washington, DC and of Woodrow Wilson was turned on the IWW's.  the Immigration bureau also descended on them, sorting out aliens for deportation. these IWW's  were herded like cattle into cars and carried across the country for internment, while not a single lawyer in Washington State spoke up in protest.
Felix Frankfurter, whom I knew in later years, did speak up. he did courageous work in the field of civil liberties in 1917 when he was counsel and Secretary of Wilson's Mediation Commission, an agency created to facilitate the settlement of labor disputes. he traveled extensively in the West, investigating a copper strike in Arizona, an oil-field controversy

79  in California and logging problems in Oregon and Washington. Frankfurter denounced the illegality of wholesale deportations of striking miners from  Arizona to New Mexico. his was, indeed, one of the few voices raised on behalf of my IWW friends. he felt, as he wrote much later, that 'but for an almost negligible percent, all labor is patriotic, is devoted to the purpose of the war and its prosecution' but that some 'industrial conditions'  needed remedy and that 'the masses insist upon an increasing share in determining the condition of their lives.

that was a view with which I would have agreed at the time i worked with the Wobblies and that was the view of the Mediation Commission, which placed most of the blame on the employers whose bitter opposition to unionization 'had reaped for them an organization of destructive rather than constructive radicalism'.  the commission, reflecting frankfurter's views, went on to say that 'sinister influences and extremist doctrines may have availed themselves' of industrial unrest but that 'they certainly have not created them.
in time the logging companies, the mine owners and the large ranchers joined forces with the United states army in one of our ugliest unconstitutional programs. the Army, in effect, displaced the courts and handled the IWW's  exactly like the Soviets handle ideological strays. one of the most disgraceful episodes took place in Centralia, Washington, on Armistice Day, 1919.

Centrailia was a small lumber town where the IWW's had a foothold. as fear of the Wobblies mounted, tempers became inflamed and in the summer of 1919 a Citizens Protective League was organized to 'combat radicalism'. the chief of police in Centralia insisted that the IWW's had a legal right to exist. that displeased the lumber operators and rumors spread  that extra-legal measures would be undertaken to combat the Wobblies.  the IWW's got out a leaflet entitles 'To the Citizens of Centralia We Must Appeal' which exhorted the townspeople to oppose violence against the organization. but, as planned, members of the American Legion, on armistice Day, 1919, made a rush for the hall where the IWW's were located. this hall became a battleground.  the barricaded IWW's  defended themselves, opening fire and killing 3 members of the legion and wounding 2 others.  another legionnaire was dilled by a war-veteran member of the IWW's whom he was pursuing. finally the IWW's were overcome and thrown into jail.
the foregoing is one historical account of what happened in Cen.  but when I read about it at the age of 21 in the papers

80  of eastern Washington, my  impression was that as the legionnaires were parading peacefully, they were wantonly shot down by the IWW's. there was a parade, but whether  it broke up opposite the hall to raid that building or was broken up by the IWW's was certainly not clear from the newspaper account; this became a crucial issue in the trial that grew out of the episode.

it was not until much later that i learned the actual facts. the night of the shooting, Cen was in darkness. a mob broke into the jail and lynched a prisoner. the incident rekindled hatred for the IWW's . wholesale arrests were made. the local Bar association pledged its members not to defend an IWW  no matter what the charge. a Seattle paper, called the Union Record, pleaded for common sense and urged that IWW's be allowed to present their side of the case. this led to the arrest and indictment of 4 members of the staff of the paper by the federal government and the closing down of the plant  by the federal authorities. the rest of the Seattle press thereupon opened an indiscriminate attack upon all organized labor and in one of the Seattle papers, an advertisement was run which advocated mob rule and lynching.
10 IWW's involved in the Centralia episode were tried the following March. the courtroom and town were filled with legionnaires in uniform. the federal government had 2 dozen or more troopers present. when the jury returned a verdict, finding 2 of the defendants guilty of manslaughter, the judge refused to accept the verdict because it was not stiff enough to suit him. on further deliberation, the jury acquitted 2, found one to be insane and found 7 guilty of second degree murder.  the jury recommended clemency, concluding there had been a conspiracy to raid the hall and that the defendants had acted in self-defense. the jury also protested that the IWW's did not receive a fair trial. the trial judge , however, disregarded the jury plea for clemency and imposed maximum sentences ranging from 25 to 40 years. the Washington Supreme Court affirmed that verdict. I thought them and still think, that our record as a nation against the IWW's was disgraceful.

there were many other dramatic episodes at this time. in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, many IWW's were sentenced either under criminal syndicalism statutes or under vagrancy laws. the great bulk of the prosecutions, however, took place in California. for 7 long,  terrible years the IWW's felt the full ford of governmental prosecution.

81  near Pasco, in eastern Washington, a wheat rancher went into town to get a crew for the harvest. of the 20 men he hired, the dominant members were IWW's .  when the men arrived  at the ranch, some 18 miles east of Pasco, they struck for higher wages. the rancher angrily refused their demands, ordered them to leave the ranch and told them to walk back to Pasco. with that announcement he roared out of the place with his truck to go back to town and find another crew. while he was gone, the discharged men found paint, brushes and ladders and painted on each side of his white barn the letters IWW. on his return trip,  the rancher passed the discharged crew as they trudged the hot, dusty 18 miles into Pasco. when he saw the mutilation of his barn, he became doubly indignant; roaring back to Pasco. he got the sheriff and a posse to meet the crew and lodge the in jail for defacement of his property.
the literature of the IWW's usually had as a preamble:  'the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.' but the IWWis  were not out to overthrow the government; they sought to improve working conditions in the logging camps, in the wheat fields, in the coal mines. they were part of the tide of hungry, restless, bitter people who moved south to north along the West Coast, seeking employment wherever they could find it. i heard from their lips unvarnished stories of privations and sufferings.
some logging camps, in the forested mountains of the west side of the state, were in those days as bad as slave-labor camps in other countries. wages were pitifully low, food was atrocious,  the logger's bunk was crescent-shaped, made of metal and stacked in tiers of 3.  in the east side of the state, migratory workers in fruit, berries and wheat were equally badly treated. the ultimate goal of the Wobblies was to form a single big union of all these workers: loggers, migrants, miners, regardless of race, sex, origin, craft or type of work.
the migrant laborers were, of course, not all IWW's, though the latter were prominent among them local people, like the young Douglases, helped make up the force. whole families moved north with the sun, camping in the fields, cooling in the open, tending sick and squalling babies, living in filth. they were looked down on as scum and treated as such by the Establishment.

they were part of the migrant labor force that John Steinbeck later depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. they started working in the fields in southern California and Arizona  in late spring; they reached Oregon and Washington by June in time for berries and cherries; they stayed

82  for the soft fruits; some then went to the wheat harvest, others thinned apples; most of them joined hands to harvest the pears and apples before moving on to later crops in Canada.

years later, I learned that the East, too, has migrant workers. they move north along the Atlantic to harvest potatoes. some linger on in the winter after the harvest to pack the potatoes they life in miserable camps, some of which are owned by labor contractors.

in the late 60s proposals were at long last being made, to the effect that laborers who food are as worthy of a subsidy as the food itself. profits from federal subsidies go into the farmers' pockets. the human machines that work in the fields med like protection.

Woody Guthrie wrote a song about these people:

Quit beating that woman, Officer! We're peaceable folks
out on the hunt of a job of work

30 days we go to spend in jail
'Cause we spoke at a union and we ain't got bail.

come on, black man! Come on, white!
show these rich how the poor can fight!

Stand up, woman and meet a man!
gonna make this country the promised land!

Gonna have a house with strawberry pie!
I aim to live some before I die!

Gonna have a meeting and all talk free!
come on, you cops and be like me!

at this time I was working in the fields and orchards, there were no Blacks among the migratory workers in my region. there were, however, many Chicanos, whom I came to love. by and large they worked  in family units and their grandchildren make up a sizable community in the Yakima Valley today. among the drifters who rode the freight trains with me, there were few, if any, Chicanos;  but the ones I knew and worked with in the fields were good, hard-working, God-fearing laborers. the local people treated these Chicanos as though they were afraid of them, as I guess they were.  but why this nation of foreigners should be afraid of foreigners, i could never fathom.

it would be over 40 years before Cesar Chavez would organize

83  these farm laborers into unions. while Chavez was attempting to do so, Humberto Fruentes of Idaho was forming migrant councils to provide the Chicanos and others with services in education, economic development and housing. day-care centers for children were also part of the program, these councils used federal money and fought against federal domination.

Chav and Fuen have worked on different segments of the same problem - the elimination of discrimination against a minority. tremendous progress has been made since my time, though the Chicanos still get the rough backhand of the elite.  the fear and resentment was evidenced  by the fact that in Yakima a Chicano who could not write or read or speak English could not vote, though he might be literate in spanish. the courts have now ended that particular kind of discrimination. today migrant workers in Yak have fairly respectable campgrounds and clean water. in y day  they had nothing. they were despised and denounced by the growers who, however, could never have got their crops in without them. the situation was the American equivalent of the 19th century British factory system which I read about in school in Dickens, our most popular author. later, as I traveled the world, I discovered that the conditions under which migratory laborers of our Far West work were only a microcosm of those that plague the earth.
I remember, in about 1917, standing beside the railroad tracks in Yakima, when word came that there was to be a big roundup of IWW's.  the newspapers carried the story that the government was coming through with a train full of them I went down to the railroad and waited for hours.

the train that passed through Yak was not carrying men on display. these were Sealed boxcars carrying human being, 30 or 40 in each car, the authorities were taking outcasts through our city. there were no toilets no food, no water, just sealed boxcars with these poor bastards inside.

I walked home with tears in my eyes. i thought of all the pompous members of the Establishment of Yak who should have been in those cars. the men who were there had only tied to increase the benefits to working people. they go rid of the bad food and the crescent-shaped beds that working people had to sleep on, on which you would crawl through the rear and lie on a piece of tin. as one example of the work of the IWW's the men in the forests lived better;

84  they had fruit and liver or beefsteak, whereas before they had been fed crust of bread or porridge and coffee.
having been one, I have an enduring love for migrant workers. they are still looked down upon as we were. yet they are wonderful people who take care of their children and their wives and they are the direct descendants, spiritually, of our working people of the beginning of the century.

Charles Ares, my law clerk at the time, did some research into the matter and the 2 of us together wrote and published an article about it. it expressed the opinion that the vagrant is a man whose only crime is that he does not have any money. a publisher of the Tucson newspaper, however, thought I was Public Enemy Number One during this period and he wrote an editorial saying that 'Justices should stick to their last'  Tucson, 2 or 3 years later, when I was making some speeches in the Southwest, the people of that city became so enthusiastic that a Tucson paper wrote, "Mr Justice, we are proud'.
during the FDR period, a local ordinance was passed in Washington, DC, making it a crime for anyone to come into town without visible means of support. the bill came to FDR for approval and he vetoed it. the talk around Washington called the bill 'the Jimmy Roosevelt Law', a comment on the working habits of the President's son. FDR said, 'Why the hell are they after Jimmy? if this law passed, half of Washington would be in jail.

Chapter 7 -  WWI

the war in Europe seemed far away to a boy in Yakima i 1914. I was 15 that summer and about to begin my junior year in high school. just before school opened and after the cherry, apricot, peach and pear crops had been picked, I saw a chance to get away for a few days of back-packing.

I wanted to see the fall colors of he high lake country in the area of Mount Tumac - the willow, Douglas maple and tamarack in their various shades of yellow and orange. so I caught the train up to Naches and hiked from there along the Tieton to the headwaters of Indian Creek. I went alone, carrying my usual horseshoe-shaped pack.
I imagined I would run into a sheepherder in the high country and since sheepherders those days were very isolated, I  decided to take some recent issues of newspapers and magazines with me. by mid-September, a sheepherder who had been on the  high ridges all summer would have been away from the world for over 3 months and he would be hungry for news. there were no radios then, and whatever information he received would have been brought by 'shoe telegraph',  as they say in Iran. so I put several issues of the Yakima Daily Republic and a recent issue of the weekly Outlook in with my blankets all carried

86  front page stories of the war which had broken out and spread through Europe in the previous few weeks.
a few days out, I spotted a sheep camp on the edge of a meadow to high country east of Cowlitz Pass. the smell of sheep was everywhere. a curl of smoke and a half-dozen yapping sheepdogs came out of a clump of fir. it was only 2 hours before sundown and i was overjoyed, because a sheep camp at that time of day meant a wonderful meal.
the sheepdogs quieted at the voice of their master,  and the sheep-herder who greeted me was a middle aged man with a full brown beard and blue and kindly eyes.  his face was bronzed and when he took off his hat i could see that his tan ran up his massive forehead and into the bald spot on the top of his head. he looked a little as I imagined Walt Whitman must have looked:  tall, long-legged, long-armed, a wiry, rangy man who appeared to be equal to any challenge of the mountains.  his voice was resonant, with powerful carrying qualities even in ordinary conversation. it was a voice that came back to me 4 years later as I drilled and marched in the uniform of the United States Army.

he greeted me with 'Hi ya' and extended a hand as gnarled and tough as the alpine fir that dotted the ridges to the west. he invited me to his camp on the far side of the grove of fir.  it faced the edge of a smaller meadow I had not seen from the trail. firewood had been split and piled near his tent. there was a crude table of small pine and fir logs.
as I walked into camp, 2 or 3 camp robbers, birds which apparently had been stealing bread from inside the tent, flew up. my host turned his dogs on them and they went through the futile exercise of pursuit, with much barking and wagging of tails. then at a soft, almost inaudible command, something like 'All right, boys',  they stopped and curled up in the shade.
it turned out that the packer,  the man who ran the pack train and kept the camp provided with food ,  had left on the previous day for supplies. he would be back in 2 days, when camp would be moved beyond Cowlitz Pass to the west. the sheepherder, whose name I never knew, had come back to camp to start a fire and cook supper. I was invited to share it with him.

'I haven't seen a paper for 4 months, he said. so you will have to bring me up to date.

he lit a fire and started to prepare the food. I brought him cold

87  water from a fast-flowing spring that fed a rivulet (def - 'rivyelet' a small stream) winding its way through this small meadow for a100 yards or so and then pouring out into a soggy, swampy expanse of grass and reeds. I made my camp close by the sheepherder's big tent and collected white fir boughs for my bed.
by that time the sheepherder had his pots on the fire. I handed him the Yakima papers and magazine. he thanked me, saying after a pause,  'Will you do me a favor? read me the paper while it is still light.

so while he cooked supper, I read the most recent paper, headlines and all, starting with the left-hand column on the front page. most of it was news of war - the Kaiser, the Huns, (def - a nomadic and warlike Asian people who devastated or controlled large parts of eastern and central Europe and who exercised their greatest under Attila in the 5th Century AD.), the English Channel,  Flanders,  the Rhine.  it was deep dusk when i finished the first page. supper was about ready.

'Thanks, son, he said. now bring your plate and get some mutton chops, potatoes and peas. there's bread and butter and jelly in the tent. do you like your coffee real stout?

when I started to eat, he left with his dogs to tend the sheep. he was back in an hour or less. as he was filling his own plate, he said, 'son,  do you think you can see to read me some more?

so I lay on my belly by the campfire and read on and on as he ate. when he had finished, we did the dishes.
'Now we'll build up this fire a bit and hear the rest of the news, he declared.

it was a still, clear nigh. there was a touch of chill in the air. I sat close to the fire. he cross-examined me. he not only wanted to know about the war, he wanted to know about baseball, the price of hogs, sheep, cherries and hay, the news of the valley, of woodrow wilson, whom he admired, Congress, Teddy roosevelt and Pershing. I could not answer all the questions he asked, though i tried to give him a synopsis of the events of the summer of 1914.

after he had pumped me dry, there was silence - not even a murmur of wind stirred the tops of the fir that guarded the camp.  only the crackling of the fire and the faint sound of the snoring of one of the dogs could be heard. all else was quiet. the stars hung so low that they almost touched the firs.

my heart was filled. there was hard work in the valley and freedom in the mountains and, it seemed, endless opportunities ahead. I saw my future shaping up in vague outline. I had some family responsibilities,  but i had no worries or doubts or fears. i felt a place awaited me

88   in America.  I felt I belonged here and that I was part of something exciting  and important.

the war in Europe was as remote as the typhoon that swept bare an island in the south pacific whose name i could not even pronounce.  War in Europe?  that should not concern anyone here. hasn't Europe always had wars? been a Hundred Years' War? the war was remote, as foreign as a flood in China or a revolution in persia.
that is why, i think, the evening in the meadow below Cowlitz Pass remains so vivid in my mind. for as i sat in silence, thinking of the war as something wholly removed and apart from our world, the sheepherder spoke, 'Well, you boys may have to finish this.


I was startled.  I plied him with questions. why should a war in Europe affect us? how could 15-year-old boys finish a war? why would America want to fight in Europe?

we talked into the night by the campfire on the edge of the lonely meadow in the high Cascades.  my host did not have much formal education, but he was informed and highly intelligent. he could make a complicated thing seem simple; he had the capacity o putting seemingly irrelevant things into a pattern. or perhaps it was an ability on his part to make one see things his way.  he was indeed exciting. he gave me my first seminar on war. he told me why  it was that this war would soon be 'our war'. he said the war was a maelstrom that no Big Power in the West could avoid and predicted that we would soon be sucked into it man was warlike and war ran in cycles, he said; citing American history, he pointed out that each generation on this continent had had a war. and because we had not had a conflict since the Spanish American War, it was time for another.  'there's nothing like martial music to stir people up, I remember him saying.
this was the most unsettling talk I had ever heard. I was back on the trail early in the morning, striking down toward Indian Creek, Kloochman Rock, the Naches and home. as I swung along in silence, the words came back to me:  'You boys may have to finish this.

Brad, Elon and I? perhaps my did brother Art, too? would we have to kill people with knives and guns? we 15 year old boys, who loved everything that moved in the mountains, who swore we never could kill a doe or a fawn, would be killing people soon? the guy must be nuts? another daffy sheepherder!

then I remembered the last scene with him. he had cooked me a great breakfast - ham and eggs, potatoes, hot cakes with butter and syrup and coffee. I had washed the dishes and assembled my pack. I

89  stood on the edge of the meadow facing the east as I said good-by.  there was gentleness in his voice. he placed a hand on my shoulder and stood in silence a moment. 'You will make a good soldier. a kid that can lug a pack over these ridges can go anywhere Uncle Same wants to send his army.
then I picked up the cadence  - one, two, three, four; left, left, left,right-left - as i marched down the trail to home and to my junior year in high school and out of the Cascades on the last wholly carefree trip i ever had in the high mountains.

Chapter 8 - Whitman College

94  I went to Whit, Walla Walla, Washington, in the fall of 1916 because Whit gave me a scholarship. most of my high school friends were going to the University of Washington in Seattle, but there was a program at the time whereby the valedictorians of certain public high schools across the state - and i was one - where offered full tuition scholarships of $100 a semester to Whit.

fortunately, I preferred the east side of the state to Seattle, which was across the Cascades to the northwest.  it would be harder to get to than Whit, which lay down the valley from Yakima along the rail lines to the east. i thought also, seattle would be large and crowded, with less opportunity for part-time work and although i'd never even set foot in a city up to up to that time, I was sure I would not like it.
in between fruit crops that summer i rode the rails to Walla Walla to scout out employment possibilities. even with the tuition scholarship, I knew I could not go to college unless I earned all my living expenses and sent Mother $20  a month. I decide at once that Walla Walla was a sleep town where I would have to struggle for existence, but i found what seemed to be an anchor - Falkenberg's jewelry store, which is still there.
I met the owner, Kristian Falkenberg, a Norwegian not long out of

95   the gold fields of alaska; Philo Rounds, his assistant and Jerry L. Cundiff, then a clerk, now the proprietor. they offered me a job at .10c an hour. after checking with the college registrar's office, I learned I could have all my classes from 8 a.m. to noon, leaving 5 hours for work at Falkenberg's in the afternoon.
.50c a day was not enough, however, so I also found an early morning job as janitor of an office building and of a candy store,  which I could do from 5:30 am to 7:30 am, making up the needed $20 for Mother. a third job as a waiter in a 'hash house',  a boarding house for working people, gave me my main 2 meals each day. so armed, I went back to Yakima, finished my farm work and left for Walla Walla by bicycle (which I wanted to keep on campus)  in September. it was a 165 mile ride.

I shared the janitor job with another student named Harper Joy.  Harp had been in vaudeville with a 'black-face' act and had also been a clown in a circus. in later years - even after he had become a respectable investment banker in Spokane, Washington - Harp often took his vacation with a circus, still playing the role of clown and loving every minute of it. Harp had stage presence and real ability. I think his musical scores of old-time vaudeville songs are one of our best collections, even to this day....(and on an on the interesting tales go!)

117  ...rejection by the Rhodes scholarship; committee did not turn me immediately to law, but it did dampen my enthusiasm for English literature as a career. 2 years' experience in teaching English, Latin and public speaking did the same.
 moreover, my growing awareness of the American Legion, its intolerance and its injustices, also helped turn me closer toward the law as a safeguard of freedom. when I was teaching at Yakima High, I joined the local branch  of the American Legion, but I did not long remain a member. I do not recall whether I resigned or whether I let my membership go by default. the barrage of intolerance that soon was laid down by the national organization made me think that the Legion was at times the most un-American of any group.
The American Legion in its Minneapolis convention in Nov. 1919 - its first national convention - had resolved in favor of the exclusion of Japanese and other members of the Oriental race. the Legion demanded that no foreign-born Japanese be allowed to become naturalized.  it demanded that Congress prepare an amendment diluting the 14th Amendment by making it read that 'no child born in the US of foreign parenttage' shall hereafter be eligible for citizenship 'unless both parents were so eligible at that time.  the Orientals whom I knew were a credit to our country and the Legion's drive against them was a real affront to me.
the Legion at that first national convention in 1919 also resolved to combat 'all anti-American tendencies, activities and propaganda'.  it

118 resolved 'to organize immediately for the purpose of meeting the insidious propaganda of Bolshevism, IWWism, radicalism and all other anti-Americanisms by taking up the problem of...detecting anti -American activities everywhere and seizing every opportunity everywhere to speak plainly and openly for 100% Americanism and for nothing else'.

...the Legion recommended that the Dept. of Justice be changed 'from a passive, evidence-collecting organization to a militant and astute group of workers, whose findings shall be forcefully acted upon by this, our American Government.
to me, this sounded like an espousal of the police state.  the 'Red Raids' which accompanied WWIO and its immediate aftermath were the product of this kind of thinking. it was many years before I learned the details of these raids, which were made a mater of public record by a courageous judge, George W. Anderson of Boston.  what (he)...found shows that as a government we acted dishonorably under Mitchell Palmer and his field man, J. Edgar Hoover, who was one day to rise to an eminent position. innocent men and women, whose only crime was being foreigners, were descended upon by the FBI in the wintertime, loaded into lorries, moved onto islands off Boston and placed in houses that had no heat, no blankets, no food. we temporarily made intolerance of the alien our god and dishonored our Constitution by practicing un-Americanism of the worst kind in disrespect of  the rights of nonviolent, peaceful minorities.

119  that phrase 'hiding behind the cloak of religion' was to become familiar as I discussed it as well as  a host of other subjects in Yakima, in 1921, with a new friend, O. E. Bailey. like my feelings about the Legion, B's views on the clergy, morality and the law also helped lead me to a legal career....

120  ...I used to walk into the federal courtroom in Yakima and listen to proceedings before Judge Frank H. Rudkin...His voice was cavernous and when he spoke he seemed to have the power of the Prophets in him. how great a judge he was I never really knew, but he became to me the embodiment of the law.

121  slowly I cast my vote for law and against English Lit...Mother's objections notwithstanding...

by the spring of 1922 I had written Harvard Law School to apply for admission and I received notice that i had been accepted. it was May and I had been at the YMCA exercising . after a shower I went to the reading room and had an experience that shows how accidental some good things are. I barely noticed a man sitting opposite me, also reading. if either one of us had read faster than the other, we probably never would have met. but it so happened that each of us threw his magazine on the table at precisely the same time.
that started a conversation. he was james T. Donald, just arrived in Yakima to practice law. I expressed the hope that in 3 years I would perhaps him at the Yakima Bar. he asked where I would study law, and when he learned I had applied to Harvard, he added, 'I hope you have a lot of money.  I told him I did not have a cent, that I'd have to work my whole way through. 
'the go to Columbia, he said.
we settled down for a long serious talk. he had worked his way through Col and 'knew the ropes' and he would help with letters and advice...

Chapter 10 - Law School and Law Practice

123  in Sept., 1922, having decided to go to Columbia Law School, it was time to go East. after 2 years of teaching I had saved $75 and, of necessity, my transportation across the country was to be by freight train. I had arranged to go to Wenatchee, Washington, to take over 2,000 sheep owned by a Yakima firm and see them safely on the Great Norther Railroad to the Chicago stockyards.
the night before I left, Mother, my sister, my brother and I gathered for a final evening together. I remember sitting on the stool by the organ that Mother often played for us, my heart heavy. this seemed like a permanent  parting of the ways, as I would be gone 3 years.  there were tears in my eyes as I took an old battered suitcase with a suit and change of clothes in it and left by the back way to the railroad yards, where I would catch a freight to Wenatachee.

I made my rendezvous with the sheep and rode in style in the caboose. as the train pulled out of Wen in the late afternoon, I climbed to the top of a car and faced the setting sum. soon the orchards of Wen were swallowed up with the sheep and we entered the sagebrush, rattlesnake country of the Inland Empire. this was long before Grand Coulee Dam had made it possible to irrigate this potentially rich country

124  of volcanic ash.a quarter-century late irrigation water would run into the old bed of the Columbia and not only turn a wasteland into a garden, but, to the surprise of the engineers, fill many an ancient pothole with water from subterranean channels. blue water lakes and rich green fields would transform the desert we crossed that night. now it was dry and unproductive.

those matters, of course, were no part of my dreams. mine were vague, like those of any boy going into battle in a strange and faraway place. I was this night concerned only with getting away from Yakima.

why did I leave? what was the source of my confidence that, even penniless, I would succeed? I do not know, though I have often wondered about it. in Yak, I had a feeling of being caught; escape was essential and yet there was a feeling of guilt too - guilt for leaving an impoverished mother, who by that time had decided that if I applied myself, i could in another 10 years become principal of the high school.
the impulse to leave had won out. I had the fear of being trapped into a dull and listless life. I had come to dislike the place;  its environment was oppressive. ideas were not congenial to yakima. the pulpits  - with the one exception I mentioned - were filled with Billy Grahams.  later I was to become very homesick for Yak as the rough environment of New york buffeted me. but the night I left I was filled with the happiness of one who after a great ordeal escapes a prison. the clickety-click of the wheels of the old freight and the cool night air made these early hours of my escape exquisitely serene.
we had not yet left Washington State before the railroad strike of 1922 was upon us. the train was at once sidetracked, high and dry and we stayed on a siding over 24 hours. I knew enough law to know that carriers had feeding and watering responsibilities to livestock in transit.  'My sheep will die, I told every railroad employee i could reach. hours passed and finally a switch engine appeared and hauled us to a town that had pens for feeding livestock. there we stayed another day, waiting to be carried. East.
this was my first long journey both in miles and in time. it took almost 2 weeks to reach Minneapolis. whenever the freight train was moving, I was in the caboose. it had a coal stove in the middle and a long, narrow bench on each side. my hat and my coat were my pillow for the few hours of sleep I was able to get at night. lying there, or sitting, I love the familiar, rhythmic click of the wheels as they passed over the links in the rails. i also admired a tobacco-chewing brakeman, who could spit like nobody's business. he would sit opposite me and

126  shoot a was across he caboose, over my prostrate body and out the open window. he never missed.
it took us 3 days to reach Miles City, Montana, where we stayed all night in a pouring rain. I spent the night in the freight house wit a railroad employee who had a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Harvard.  somewhere along the line he had lost out, with a probable assist from alcohol. we talked all night, dissecting the universe while my sheep bleated.
the immensity of my country cam home to me as we cleared the Rockies and entered the Great Plains. dust storms were making up every day and beginning to cast a pall over the land, the situation that came to a crises under FDR years later. I was soon to find full confirmation of what my Yakima friend, O.E. Bailey, who grew up in North Dakota, had told me  about the privation of the farmers who settled west of the rich Red River Valley. as a consequence of their suffering, North Dakotans had rebelled, formed unorthodox political parties, and turned socialistic under such leaders as William Langer, whom I was to meet years later in Washington DC, when he became a senator. in 1920 the US Supreme Court had sustained in a unanimous opinion the constitutionality of the socialist program. on this freight train ride that offbeat program gained new meaning in my mind. my reading of Thorstein Veblen had taught me the manner in which the Establishment was exploiting our material and human resources,  and this situation suddenly came alive for me. I began to see, in the rawness of North Dakota, the stuff out of which great reforms were being created.

when we reached Williston, North Dakota, we were side traced a mile from the station, hours went by and it seemed as though we never would get clearance to go ahead. by that time 10 days had passed since I had left home, and I had had little sleep and little to eat. assured by the crew that we would not leave for some hours, I crawled under and over a dozen or more trains to get to the lunch counter in the station at Williston.  I ordered several dollars' worth of food - oranges,  sandwiches, peanuts, and candy - which I held in my left hand. I had just left the station when I heard a whistle and saw my freight train on the far sidetrack pulling out and going East. I raced like mad, it would be a close call. just as I reached the train, the caboose was entering the main line, going 10 miles or more an hour.  the paper bag burst, strewing my provisions along the track. I had time only to step aboard with my apple pie. climbing on top of the caboose, i sat there eating every last morsel of it. no pie ever tasted better.

126  not long after that, we reached Minot, North Dakota, where there were feeding pens but no food. to save the sheep, I herded them across the plains for one entire day and then back to Minot at night. I had no dog to help me and no other assistant. at dusk  I brought the sheep down the main street, where the store folk came out to cheer me. I loaded the animals in the cars - all but one. a ewe escaped and to the delight of the people of Minot, she ran all over town, with me in pursuit. she finally got stuck under a warehouse platform and I went in and got her, dragging her out and carrying her in my arms to the freight yards.
3 days later we were in Minneapolis, where a wire from the owner of the sheep awaited me. I was to deliver them to such and such a broker, which I did. not one sheep was lost, thought each had lost weight. my job done, I had only to get to New York City.

on the trip from Minneapolis to Chicago I paid my toll to the crew of the freight train 50c apiece, as I recall. when we came to a new division point, I discovered that the new crew was also collecting fares. I was easy prey, for I was on a flatcar - the only available space, except underneath on the rods or on top of the boxcars. this was a loaded and sealed train, carrying for the most part fruit in refrigerator cars. when the new brakeman came along, he asked for a dollar and I paid him. nothing more happened for a long time.  it was 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning on a clear, cold night when the train's conductor came by and also asked for a dollar; he said there were yard bulls ahead, he did not want me to get into trouble. for the dollar, he would see that the bulls did not arrest me. it was the same old story.
I was silent for a while, trying  to figure how I could afford to part with another dollar.
I had only 2 or 3.
I had not had a hot meal for 7 days;
I had not been to bed for 13 nights;
I was filthy and without a change of clothes.
I needed a bath and a shave and food;
above all else, I needed sleep.
even flophouses cost money.
and the oatmeal, hot cakes, ham and eggs and coffee -which I wanted desperately  - would cost 50 or 75c.
'why should I pay this guy and become a panhandler in Chicago?  I asked myself.
He shook me by the shoulder and said, 'Come on, buddy. do you want to get tossed off the train? 

127  'I'm broke, I said.
'Broke? he retorted.  'you paid the brakeman and you can pay me.
'have a heart, I said. I bet you were broke sometime. give a guy a break.
he roared at me to get off or he would turn me over to the bulls.  I was silent.
'Well, jump off or I'll run you in, he said.
I watched the lights of Chicago come nearer. we wee entering a maze of tracks. there were switches and sidetracks, boxcars on sidings, occasional loading platforms. and once in a while we roared over a short highway bridge.
it was dark and the train was going about 30 mph.
the terrain looked treacherous.
a jump might be disastrous.
but I decided to husband my remaining dollars. 
I stood poised on the edge of the last car, searching the area immediately ahead for a place to jump.
suddenly in my ear came the command: Jump! I jumped.
something brushed my left sleeve. it was the arm of a switch. then I fell clear, hitting a cinder bank. I lost my footing, slid on my hands and knees for a dozen feet down the bank and rolled to the bottom.

I got slowly to my feet as the last cars of the freight roared by and disappeared with a twinkling of lights into the East. my palms were bleeding and full of cinders. my knees were skinned. I was dirty and hungry and aching. I sat on a pile of ties by the track, nursing my wounds.

a form came out of the darkness. it proved to be an old man who obviously also rode the rods. he put his had on my shoulder and said,  "I saw you jump, buddy. are you hurt?
'No, thank you, I replied. not much. just scratched.
ever been to Chicago?
No.
well, he said, don't stay here, it's a city that's hard on fellows like us.
You mean the bulls?
Yes, they're tough, he said. maybe they have to be. but it's not only that. do you smell the stockyards?
I had not identified the odor, but I had smelled it even before i jumped. So that's it?
Yeah. I've worked there. the pay ain't so bad. but you go home at night to a room on an alley. there's not a tree. there's no grass. no birds. no mountains.

128  what do you know of mountains? I ventured.

my question led to his story. he had come, to begin with, from Northern California. he had worked in the harvests and as he worked he could look up and see the mountains. before him was Mount Shasta. he could put his bedroll on the ground and fall asleep under the pines. there was dust in the fields of Northern California, but it was good clean dirt. people were not packed together like sardines. they had elbow room  a man need not sit on a Sunday looking out on a bleak alley. he could have a piece of ground,  plant a garden and work it. he might even catch a trout, or shoot a grouse or pheasant or perhaps kill a deer.
I listened for about an hour as he praised the glories of the mountains of the West and related his experiences in them. I asked what had brought him to the freight yards at this hour of the morning,  he said he had come to catch a westbound freight - back to God's own land, back to the mountains.

dawn was breaking and now I could see the smoke and some of the squalor of which my friend spoke. lonesomeness swept over me. never had I loved the Cascades as much as I did that early morning near the stockyards of Chicago. never had i missed a snow=capped peak so much. never had i longed more to see a mountain meadow filled with heather and lupine and paintbrush. I could see smokestacks everywhere and in the distance, to the east, the vague outlines of tall buildings. but there lay before me nothing higher, no ridge or hill or meadow - only a great monotony of cinders, smoke and dingy factories with chimneys pouring out a thick haze over the landscape.

the old man and I sat in silence a few moments. he said, do you know your Bible son?
Pretty well.
then you will remember what the psalmist said about the mountains.
I racked my brain. 'no, I don't recall.
then the old man said with intonations worthy of the clergy, 'I will life up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. my help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

there was a whistle in the East. a quarter mile down the track a freight was pulling onto the main line.

that's my train, he said. that train takes me to the mountains. he took my hand. 'Good luck, son. better come back with me. Chicago's not for us.

129  I shook my head and said good-by with sadness.
he smiled. 'stay clear of the flophouses. they'll roll you when you're asleep. Go to the YMCA.  its cheap and clean and they're on the level.

the engine went by. the passing train was picking up speed. the old man was more agile than he looked. he trotted easily along the track, grabbed a handhold and stepped lightly aboard on the bottom rung of the ladder. climbing to the top of the boxcar, he took off his hat and waved until he was out of sight.
I watched as the freight disappeared into the West. that old man had moved me deeply. I recognized his type from the hobo jungles i had visited between Yakima and Chicago. I felt the jungle companionship in this old man of the stockyards. he was a vagabond, but he was not a bum. he had made me see, in the dreary stockyards of America some of the country's greatness, kindness, sympathy selflessness, understanding.
I sat watching the sun rise through the smoke and haze. even though Chicago's environment was depressing in 1922,  it had not yet reached the stage of deterioration which was achieved by 1972. not all its waters were open sewers;
smog had not possessed the city;
industrial poisons had not yet taken over the Great Lakes nor made Lake Erie a fire hazard.
yet there was a smell in the air that even the touch of the sun could not cleanse.
there was not a tree or shrub or blade of grass in view.

that morning I saw none of the gracious, warm-hearted people I later came to know in the city. nor did I see the Chicago that Carl Sandburg painted in his robust lines of Chicago Poems.

that morning I had only a distorted and jaundiced view. I was hungry, dead-tired, homesick, broke and bruised. I had a great impulse to follow my vagabond friend to the West, to settle down in the valley below Mount Adams and to live under its influence. most of my friends and all the roots I had in life were in the Yakima Valley. there would be a job and a home awaiting me and fishing trips and mountain climbs and nights on the high shoulders of Goat rocks. it was a friendly place, not hard and cruel like these freight yards. people on the West were warm-hearted and open-faced, like my hobo friend. I would be content and happy there.
then why this compulsion to leave the valley?
why this drive to leave the scenes I loved?
to reach for unknown stars,
to seek adventure,
to abandon the comfort of home?...
but what of pride?

130  what would I say if I returned?
that I didn't have guts to work my way East,
to work my way through law school,
to live the hard way?

it was too late to go back. law school would open in a week. there was still a challenge ahead. new horizons would be opened, offering still untested opportunities.

I turned my face to the East - toward my convictions - and walked along the railroad track, headed  for the YMCA, as my friend had recommended. I would sleep the clock around and then return to the freight yards to catch a ride to NYC and Columbia Law School. the bath at the Y was a very enjoyable physical experience, and the long sleep was refreshing - all for 50c.

when i finally pulled into the freight yards in NYC, I had only 6c of my $75 left in my pocket. I was grimy and weary and I'd had very little to eat for several days. I had had no bath since Chicago, no change of clothes and doubtless looked like a bum. my clothes were tattered, my had was nondescript, my battered brown suitcase was held by a piece of rope. I was utterly lost. as I walked along a broad avenue lined with tall apartment buildings, I tried to stop a man, asking, 'How do I get to Columbia? his eyes swept by me and he kept going. over and over again I tried to stop people  to ask directions, and each time I was rebuffed. no one would even speak to me. it would have been different in Yakima or Walla Walla.  the stranger who asked a native for directions might even end up as a luncheon guest. not so in NYC.  the stranger - especially the one with no badge of affluence - knew only the rough back of the hand. I quickly saw the cold side of New York City and I never got over it.
somewhere in my suitcase was a slip of paper on which I'd written the address of the New York headquarters of Beta Theta Pi. after untying the rope that held my bag together and rummaging around, I found the address and eventually, made my way to the staid and rather elegant Beta Club.

I went up to the clerk, told him I was a fraternity member and asked, 'Do you have a room for the night?

the fellow took one look at the dust-covered specimen before him and answered with an abrupt 'No'.  furthermore, he didn't believe I was a member of the fraternity.

as we stood arguing, a Whitman fried, William M. Wilson, came down the stairs. he was passing through New York on his way to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to study medicine.

131  I greeted Bill with great joy and in high indignation turned to the clerk and said, 'Ask Him who I  am?'
Bill Wilson said,This is my fried Bill Douglas, from the Whitman College chapter of Beta. put him up. 
in addition to that intercession, Bill loaned me $75 as seed money to get me started in New York.

the next day I registered at the Columbia Law school and was assigned a room in Furnald Hall. then I scurried around to try to find work. in this hungry time, I often had only one meal a day. I sold newspaper and waited on table, but I still could not get far enough ahead to pay my tuition and my room rent at furnald Hall.
Miss Breed, head of the university's employment agency, tried to help me. she was perhaps in her 30s, an exceedingly attractive brunette, well educated and adroit with people she carefully interviewed each student who sought work I gave her Jim Donald's letters, but she had few doors to open for me. finally the bursar of Columbia called me into his office and said, 'you have not paid your tuition or your dormitory rent. I have consulted the regulations of the university and learned that I will violate none of them if I drop you from the Law School.

I was stunned and saddened. now it seemed that my legal career would have to wait. but before accepting that, I thought I would get advice from the dean, who was then Harlan F. Stone. I went to Dean Stone's office and was ushered to him at once. I would never have given credence to anyone who would have prophesied that he, an eminent law teacher and I, fresh from the freight yards, would, in 17 years, be sitting together on the Supreme Court. of course, there was no such prophet.

years later, on the Court, I told Stone of my arrival at columbia by freight. he asked the name of the railroad. I said it was the Great Northern most of the way to Chicago.  'then you should always ride the Great Northern, paying first-class fares. after a pause he added, 'come to think of it, why not send them a check for your Law School transportation?

Stone, then as later, was a portly man with a broad face and twinkling eyes. a mop of hair usually hung down his forehead. all in all, he had somewhat the appearance of a farmer. his voice was soft and he

132  was patient with people he never begrudged an hour with a student, mulling over personal problems. he talked to me as a father and i listened as a son. his advice was to drop out, get a job, save my money,and come back in a few years. he had nothing to offer in terms of a scholarship or a loan.
so I went from the dean's office across to New Jersey and got a job as a teacher of Latin and English in a high school. I packed my bag, said good bye to a few friends  and left Furnald Hall. but on my way to the subway and New Jersey, I made one last stop at the Appointments office. 'Not a thing, said AMiss Breed. 'Now wait a minute -what's this?
picking up a memo, she read a message from her assistant. a man with offices in Columbus Circle ran a correspondence school. he was doing well with various courses, including one on hemstitching. now he wanted a course in law. could a third year law student be sent down to help him?
'Ill go, I said.
'But you're not a third-year man, Miss Breed said.
'Let me try, I implored.
she gave in, handed me a note of introduction and agreed to keep an eye on my bag while I visited Columbus Circle. I reached it by subway in less than a half-hour. the proprietor did the talking and in 5 minutes I realized that I knew more law than he did. he handed me a textbook on business law, saying he thought he would start with that.
lets be modern, I said.  'Let's make it a case law course. we'll divide the book into 50 parts and prepare 50 lessons.
the idea had suddenly come to me to assign 5 pages of text, say for Lesson No. 1, sending each student a true legal problem taken from a prominent New York decision. the student would read the text, study the question and write his answer, returning it for grading. we would give the citation to the law report so that he could, if he wished, go to a library and read it. in 30 minutes we agreed on this format. he would sell each course for $25  - five for the book, twenty  for the questions and answers.. did I want a part in the profits?
no, I said  and quickly adding up my cash requirements for the year, i announced I would do it for a flat $600 fee, but i needed a $200 advance. within the hour I walked out of the office at Columbus Circle with a check for $200 and a contract that would pay me $400 more on delivery of the manuscript in 6 weeks. 

133  I repaired at once to Columbia, paid $200 to the bursar, picked up my bag, moved back into the dormitory and canceled my New Jersey employment.
preparation of the correspondence course was such a formidable undertaking that I did not go to law classes for 6 weeks. I spent practically every working hour of every day in an alcove in the library of old Kent Hall putting my case material together: finding the best illustrative cases and making digests of them. at the end of 6 weeks I had finished the job and resumed classes, working feverishly to catch up.
when I turned in the manuscript and received the balance of the fee, I realized what a foolish bargain I had made, the proprietor had already sold 1000 courses on which I could easily have had a quarter or more interest.  for a while I graded the papers for hi at a normal hourly rate. then I got others to do it, for soon i was in big-money tutoring. I saw my correspondence-course friend frequently. he was making money fast and never realized hat the chap who had prepared his course in law had had less than 6  weeks of legal education.
I was in NYC for 6 years altogether; i attained considerable professional achievements there - as a student, as a practitioner, and as a teacher. so logically, perhaps, I should have only happy associations with New York. but those 6 years developed in me a deep dislike for the city. that feeling goes back, no doubt, to my early reception when I first walked Park Avenue. later, I was often feted in New York apartments and came to know the warm-hearted people who live there. but though warm-hearted, they are still far, far removed from the miserable people of the ghettos that surround the. New York City is highly stratified, as are most metropolitan areas, and it is run largely for the middle and upper classes. during those first few miserable, starving months in New York, I saw the ugliness of the city.
moreover, I felt alien to the city because I came from the wide-open spaces, where only the haunting call of the coyote or wind in the pines broke the stillness of night. now whenever I awoke, I heard nothing but the roar of traffic.  this constant noise always grated on my ears. in one of my early years in New York,  I had a room looking onto an air shaft. the only green thing in it was a miserable geranium plant struggling to survive. the sun touched the shaft only briefly each day and never reached the room. for me this was as depressing as I imagine a prison would be. even when I acquired a sunny room, the depression never left me.  the din of the city was still present.  the only bird I ever saw was a pigeon. I longed for the call of the meadowlark, the

134  noisy drilling of the pileated woodpecker, the drumming of the ruffed grouse. I would sleep well, I thought, if I could only hear the music of a wilderness creek flowing over ledges. but all I ever heard above the distant rumble of the city was the dripping of a faucet.

I needed grass and earth under my feet.  but unless I traveled far - either west or north - all I found was concrete. i saw block after block of apartment houses - some standing in splendor, most in squalor - with no tree, no touch of grass to adorn them, no playground except a paved one, no nature trails.
the earth and all its wonders were too much a part of me to shake off. I needed them as a daily diet. when I thought of the babies being born and raised in these unlivable concrete prisons, I became even more depressed.
I was able to live very cheaply in New York, though it was supposed to be an expensive city. I found real warmth in places like the Horn and Hardart restaurants. until recently, they had food on display in machines with glass doors that could be opened with a coin. for 10c I could get a dish of pork and beans; for 5c,  a glass of milk, or bread and butter, or a piece of apple pie.  that was a good 25c supper, which carried me through many a day during the first few rough months of my first year in Law School. the food was good and it was nourishing,  as good and as nourishing as the $25 meals that I later ate in Sardi's or the Oak Room at the Plaza or other high-class restaurants where the head waiters would bow and scrape. I liked the people who ate at Horn and Hardart. most of them were open-faced and friendly. I always seemed to be on the same wave length with them.
there was a Child's Restaurant at Broadway and 100th, where one day by chance I met the famous John Bassett Moore, leading international law expert who taught at the Law School. I met him only because the sole empty chair in the crowded restaurant was at his table and he asked me to join him. that was the beginning of a warm friendship. he was short and rotund and bald and at the time, sported a gray goatee. his eyes always seemed to dance to the excitement of his ideas as he talked.

there were, of course, other kind people in NYC...

135... there was much sadness among the people I knew. I had known Jews in the West ; and some of them were my dear friends. but the jews in NYC were more numerous and were my dear friends. but the Jews in New York City were more numerous and inclined to be clannish. the faced the problem of discrimination organized in a way that I had never seen before.  the power structure was  against them...

137  other outings of the DYNT (Do Ye Next Thing) group were on the New Jersey seacoast. at that time NYC took its garbage to sea on barges and duped it. the tides carried it to New Jersey and my Italian boys and I had the greatest difficulty in finding clean waters for swimming along the New Jersey coast. crates, cabbage heads, orange peels, dad dogs and cats, and all the junk one can imagine were washed up there. the sight was unseemly and popular indignation finally reached a boiling point. New Jersey at long last sued New York in the United States Supreme Court, and in 1931 an injunction was obtained forcing the city to acquire incinerator.
this DYNT club brought me some of the happiest associations I had in my many years in NYC.  the boys blossomed and matured as they got on understanding terms with Mother Earth. they escaped the dirty alleys into the sunlight of woods and waters. they
138  grew to be fine citizens and over the years they wrote me personal, affectionate notes.

....156 Chapter 11 - Columbia and Yale Faculties

my return to Columbia marked the first time in my life when I had leisure to study. from the first grade through high school I had been trotting while i learned, work on the side consuming most of what should have been my study hours.  in college i had no more than an hour a day to prepare for classes. in my first year at Columbia Law School I had missed 6 weeks while I holed up preparing the correspondence course. after October my outside activities left not more than an hour or two for studying after classes. when I practiced law and taught, I was always rushing. I never had a chance to read, reflect, reread, study, converse at leisure. I always had to live on an intellectual subway, racing from point to point as I tried to absorb a book on the way.

as a result, I developed a photographic mind, being able to take in a page at a glance, but it was not learning in depth. my years of teaching law,  first at Columbia and then at Yale, produced the opportunity to probe deeper into various problems that interested me.

my new leisure gave me time to reflect on my past and future and put current problems in perspective. for the first time I  had the chance to browse in libraries. now my intellectual perspective began to acquire new dimensions. I made many friends in other fields -Stanley Gill at

157  the Engineering School, John Dewey in Philosophy, James Bonbright in the Business School.

at Columbia, revolt against the traditional approach to law was now under way. Underhill Moore, Herman Oliphant, Hessel Yntema, Karl Llewellyn and Walter Wheeler cook were the renegades. I joined their ranks. we picked up another renegade from the History department, Julius Goebel and one from Political science. Thomas Reed Powell. we wanted to discover whether the law in books served a desirable social end or should be changed. we were dubbed the leaders of 'sociological jurisprudence'.
we wanted to join forces with other disciplines at Columbia - such as business, economics, sociology - to examine an entire area. we wanted interdepartmental fertilization of ideas - a process that critics later dubbed interdepartmental 'sterilization' of ideas. in finance, we wanted to teach the anatomy of finance as well as the rules of law. in criminal law, we wanted psychiatry as well as the criminal code. in credit transactions, we wanted to explore all the institutions of credit as well as the commercial code. the same was true of almost every other subject. the teaching of law in other fields was largely unrelated to the sociological, economic, or financial data with which that branch of law dealt.

Law had become a compartmentalized specialty, quite remote from the actualities of life. if we could integrate the various disciples, we could learn what the law should be, by learning the problems with which it must deal. to do that  we had to reeducate the teachers, making them familiar with each field. and I was to discover that reeducating teachers was the major stumbling block.

such a program required a great faculty effort. most law professors did not want to throw away the notes they had been using for years. they were not concerned with nor did they discuss with their students, the bias in existing laws and whether they truly served the public interest. we wanted a dean at Columbia who would be interested in that approach and give us, in time, a capable faculty.

we were blunt and outspoken in our demands. one of our more acid-tongued members was Herman Oliphant, later general counsel to the US Treasury. I had know him as a severe teacher, now I came to know him as a human being and as a friend.
Karl Llewellyn was a nonconformist, interested in commercial law, who was not satisfied with reciting 'what the law is'. he wanted to

158  know how it got that way, whose ends it served, why it should not be changed and the lawyer's and judges' roles in changing it.
another member of the Columbia Law faculty, Julius Goebel - soon to be our foremost legal historian - liked to prick the Establishment's favorite balloons. he delighted in showing the silly, foolish purposes some laws had been designed to serve. he had many enemies, the most violent dubbing him a Katzenjammer Kid.
Underhill Moore, who taught Sales and Walter Wheeler cook, who taught Equity, were fireballs. they were legal nonconformist. Moore, as I  have described, was a teacher par excellence who kept every student intellectually honest and tidy. he zeroed in on every bit of loose talk and drove the speaker into the open for annihilation. cook was similar. they both disliked intellectual arrogance, and Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, was the epitome of that.

in banking transactions Underhill Moore wished to consider not only 'the facts of the case'  as developed in the record, but also 'the relation between judicial behavior and institutional ways of behaving in the  contemporary culture of the place when the  facts happened and the decision was made'  (38 Yale L.J. 703, 705)  his pursuit of that study as revealed in his reports (41 Yale L.J. 1109; 45 Yale L.J. 1.260) produced great guffaws among some of his colleagues at Yale, and ridiculed by Frankfurter at Harvard. but as Moore told me before he died, 'it may take 1000 years for the idea to take hold. but custom - not only the dry 'facts of a case - is a powerful conditioner of the law, operating perhaps subconsciously.
I have said enough about our revolutionaries to indicate how dangerous they sounded to President Butler...he was so terrified at the prospect of Columbia being dominated by 'sociological jurisprudence' that he appointed a dean, Young B. Smith, without consulting the Law faculty. I had nothing against Smith. he was a fine man but he was the antithesis of what we wanted: he represented the past. under him our educational venture was doomed. we had been working with John Dewey and James Bonbright, trying to bring into focus the various disciplines that bore on legal issues. we hoped to open the law to reexamination in the light of philosophy, sociology and history and smith was utterly opposed to what we were trying to do.
so I wrote a letter to President Butler. it had only one sentence and it said in substance:  'in view of your appointment of a dean of the Law school without consulting the faculty, I tender herewith my resignation. my resignation was never formally accepted.

160  James T. Donald, who had steered me to Clumbia and away from Yakima to Baker, Oregon and asked me to join his prospering law firm. I was attracted by the offer not only because of Jim, but because of his partner as well - Blaine Hallock - who was with me in the same company in WWI. but i finally decided to return to Yak, my first love. and so the decision stood, until a night in May, 1928, when Richard Walsh, head of John Day Publishing Company, invited me to spend an evening with him at his club in Pelham, New York. I had met Walsh in Pelham and through him, his wife, Pearl buck, from whom I learned much about the Far East, particularly China.

the guest speaker that night at dinner was the attractive and brilliant dean of the Yale Law School, Robert M. Hutchins, who was then in his late 20s.  we met in a foul-smelling locker room of the country club, that being the meeting place because only there could bootleg liquor be served. I was with the committee that put Hutchins on a new Haven train very late that night. 

161  the next morning I was awakened by a call from Hutchins, always an early riser. he told me he had summoned the Yale faculty to a 9 o'clock meeting and they had elected me to the faculty. my first question to him was almost insulting:  'Where is Yale?  I was so ignorant of the East that i actually did not know where that university was. there were other questions, too, all of which in time were satisfactorily answered, and so, by Sept., 1928, I was ensconced (def -settle securely  or snugly) in Hendri Hall as an Associate Professor of Law. In 1929 Hutchins left Yale to become president of the University of Chicago. he asked me to go with him to become dean at Chicago.

the top salary in law at Chicago was $10,000. Hutch persuaded his board of trustees to offer me two and a half times that amount, saying that i was 'the most outstanding law professor' in the nation. that eloquent statement insulted many law professors who defected as friends of Hutch. moreover, although I accepted the Chicago appointment, I never taught there. I stayed at Yale and became Sterling professor of Law until 1934, when I went to Washington, DC.

12 - George Draper

174  at Columbia,  I had met Geo Draper, a Professor of Clinical Medicine...he practiced on the side and for a while was my physician...
we became fast friends and developed almost a father-son relationship. he introduced me to the world of psychosomatic medicine, in which he was a pioneer. he had been psychoanalyzed by Jung and had probed deeply into Freudian mysteries. his book Human Constitution is a classic...

..my problem was migraine headaches, which threatened to ruin my career. I had gone to several New York specialists, paying the last one $600. he had said as I left, 'Call me sometime when you are quite sick, maybe i can come up with something....

175  ...'it is the imponderable that causes much illness, said Draper. ..(he)eventually psychoanalyzed me and helped me discover and understand the stresses and strains that produced the headaches. once i faced up to them, the migraines disappeared....
when it came to his interest in 'disease tendencies', Draper was not exactly a pioneer, because Hippocrates had gone into the same field, as had many subsequent students both here and in Europe. but while many urged the medical profession to study the physical constitution, the interest of the profession in considering the mind and body together greatly waned. Draper though that possibly when Pasteur revealed the vast and mysterious world of microbes as the case of disease, the entire thought of the medical world or most of it was deflected from the study of the human constitution to the study of the external causes of disease.  Draper sounded the call to the medical profession to look at man as  a whole, not as a thumb, wrist, elbow, head, stomach, liver or neck. he was interested in diagnostic clues.
Drap rebelled because he realized that while disease could be understood only in the context of the whole man, disease more and more was being considered in separate and discrete aspects. there were now nose specialists, foot specialists, kidney specialists, heart specialists and so on..(he said, ) 'how can

176  thumb expert know about its problems unless he knows the whole man?'

he thought that personality types were representative of tendencies to certain types of disease...

he identified disease not only by the human psyche. but by physical tendencies as well...

the mechanistic approach to medicine  - greatly influenced, he thought , by Rockefeller and other foundation grants - had sent doctors off on the wrong trail by establishing taboos against the powerful force of the human psyche. yet one's psyche, he explained, was an important and very potent element of an individual's inherited characteristics and played a prominent part in many diseases.

the hours with Drap were scintillating. he was strong in intuition, insight and gentleness. he lived a generation too early, largely denounced by his contemporaries. but he had the distinction of being the father of psychosomatic medicine in this country...

181 13 - Fear

'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

these words of FDR,  spoken at his 1933 Inaugural, reflected - to me - the wisdom of George Draper. by the time FDR made this speech, I had leaned from personal experiences that he spoke the truth.

stark, naked fear is the most devastating force man knows.  I knew this, to some extent, as a boy, but it came to full consciousness only as a man when I was psychoanalyzed by George Draper. all of my residual fears of the elements were at long last isolated, but they were not as important as those that lay under the surface of consciousness.
fear is man's worst enemy and many of his fears come from imponderables that the victim often does not eve suspect. the person who cannot without great apprehension enter an elevator or an airplane or other locked vehicle may be a casualty of a sever birth trauma. fear of water, fear of lightning, fear of the darkness, fear of animals. fear of open spaces can also be real and forbidding.

I suppose few people started life with more fears than i  - and few reached the 30s with less. the best way of riddance is talking with a knowledgeable person, I had few of those opportunities as I grew up, since i had no adult confidant. most of my fears were resolved

182  since I had no father to guide me as I grew up, I became much too dependent, emotionally, on my mother. as a result of my bout with polio, Mother pampered me during my early childhood. as I grew up, i was torn between wanting to be tied to her apron stings and rebelling at the very thought of it....
the sessions with Dra probed deeply into many fears. the toughest, the most intractable and yet the puniest were infantile fears. others of course also came to the surface. my fear of water was very great.

183   ...my introduction to the YMCA swimming pool revived unpleasant memories and stirred childish fears, but in a little while I gained confidence. I paddled with my new water wings, watching the other boys and trying to learn by aping them. I did this 2 or 3 times on different days and was just beginning to feel at ease in the water when a misadventure happened.

one day I went to the pool when no one else was there. the place was quiet. the water was still and the tiled bottom was as white and clean as a bathtub. I was timid about going in alone, so i sat on the side of the pool to wait for others to show up.
I had not been there long when in came a big bruiser of a boy, probably 18 years old. he had thick hair on his chest and was a beautiful physical specimen, with legs and arms that showed rippling muscles. he yelled, 'Hi, skinny! How's you like to be ducked?

with that he picked me up and tossed me into the deep end. I landed on the water in a sitting position, swallowed what felt like half the pool and went at once to the bottom. I was frightened, but not yet frightened out of my wits. on the way down I planned;  when my feet hit the bottom, i would make a big jump , come to the surface, lie flat on it and paddle  to the edge of the pool.

it was a long way down. those 9 feet seemed more like 90, and before i touched bottom my lungs were ready to burst. but when my feet finally hit, I summoned all my strength and made what I thought was a great spring upward, instead of coming to the surface like a cork. i rose slowly. i opened my eyes and saw nothing by water - water that had a dirty yellow tinge to it. I grew panicky. i reached up as if to grab a rope, and my hands clutched only at water.

184  i was suffocating. I tried to yell, but no sound came out. then my eyes and nose emerged from the water - but not my mouth.
I flailed at the surface, swallowed more water and choked. I tried to bring my legs up, but they hung like dead weights, paralyzed and rigid. a great force was pulling me under. I screamed, but only the water heard me. i had started on the long journey back to the bottom of the pool.

I struck at the water as I went down, expending my strength as one in a nightmare fights an irresistible force. i had lost all my breath. my lungs ached, my head throbbed. i was getting dizzy. but I remembered the strategy; I would try again: spring from the bottom of the pool and, hopefully, to the surface; lie flat on the water, s trike out with my arms and thrash with my legs. then i would bet to the edge of the pool and be safe.
I went down, down, endlessly. I opened my eyes. nothing but water with a yellow glow - dark water that one could not see through.
and then sheer, stark terror seized me, terror that knows no understanding, terror that knows no control, terror that no one can understand who has not experienced it. i was shrieking under water. i was paralyzed under water - stiff, rigid with fear. even the screams in my throat were frozen. only by heart and the pounding in my head said that i was still alive.

and then in the midst of the terror came a touch of reason:  I must remember to jump when I hit the bottom. at last I felt the tiles under me. my toes reached out as if to grab them. i jumped with everything i had. but it made no difference. the water was still all around me. I looked wildly for ropes, ladders, water wings. nothing but water. a mass of yellow liquid held me. now terror struck deep inside me, like a great charge of electricity. I trembled with fright. my arms wouldn't  move. i tried to call for help, to call for Mother. Nothing happened.

then I started down a third time. i sucked for air and got water. the yellowish light was going out.

all effort ceased. I relaxed, even my legs felt limp. a blackness swept over my brain. it wiped out fear; it wiped out terror. there was no more panic. it was quiet and peaceful. nothing to be afraid of. this is nice...to be drowsy...to go to sleep...no need to jump...

185   ...too tired to jump... it's nice to be carried gently... to float along in space...tender arms around me...tender arms like Mother's...now I must go to sleep...

I fell into oblivion and the curtain of life fell.
the next i remember i was lying on my stomach beside the pool, vomiting. the chap who threw me in was saying 'but i was only fooling'. someone said, 'the kid nearly died. be all right now. let's carry him to the locker room.
several hours later I walked home. i was weak and trembling. I shook and cried when I lay on my bed. i couldn't eat that night. a haunting fear was in my heart. the slightest exertion upset me, made me wobbly in the knees and sick to my stomach.

I never went back to the pool. now i truly feared water.

a few years later, when i came to know the waters of the Cascades, I badly wanted to swim in them. but whenever i did - whether  - whether I was  wading the Tieton or Bumping fiver or bathing in warm Lake of the Goat Rocks - the terror that had seized me in the pool would come back. it would take possession of me completely. my legs would become paralyzed. icy horror would grab my heart.

this handicap stayed with me as the years rolled y. in canoes on Maine lakes fishing for landlocked salmon, bass fishing in New Hampshire, trout fishing on the Deschutes and Metolius in Oregon, fishing for salmon on the columbia, at bumping Lake in the Cascades - wherever i went, terror of the water followed me. it ruined my fishing trips, deprived me of the joy of canoeing, boating and swimming. i became convinced it had something to do with my puny legs, since they became useless once i got into deep water. that fact puzzled me. i often said to myself, 'It's funny that i can walk and run and climb with my legs, but not swim with them''. but once the panic seized me in the  water. i had no command over them.

the phobia grew and grew. it made every expanse of water a source of anxiety ,. and yet, a challenge.it was at once an invitation to overcome the fear and a fear that I would never succeed in doing so. my aversion to water was, indeed, mixed with a great attraction for it. often I would be mesmerized and would stand on the edge of a pond or a pool, looking into the water as if to draw from its depth the secret of its conquest of me. it was the master, i was the servant. that created a deep and unreasoning resentment and the more helpless i was in conquering my fear, the more intense the resentment became. the waters of the rivers and lakes tempted me, but as one an have an appetite for food

186   to which he is allergic, so the waters to which i was drawn filled me with apprehension.

my fears, of course, went back to the day i almost drowned. for many years i thought it took only will power and courage to overcome any fear. it was from Draper that i learned that the early fears of childhood worked through the sympathetic nervous system, which does not depend on will power for its functioning. when the man says 'yes', the sympathetic nervous system will often say 'No' and send him helter-skelter in the direction opposite from where he believes he had decided to go. if this goes on long enough, a man can end up frustrated and in the grip of an illness that no medicine can cure.

by the time I reached Yale in 1928,  I decided to conquer that fear.  i reported to Bob Kipmuth, Yale's famous swimming coach and he laid out a plan for me. I went to the Yale pool and practiced 5 days  a week, an hour each day. the instructor put a belt around me, a rope attached to the belt went through a pulley that ran on an overhead cable. he held on to the end of the rope, and we went back and forth, back and forth across the pool, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. on each trip across the pool a bit of the panic seized me. every time the instructor relaxed his hold on the rope and i went under, some of he old terror returned and my legs froze. it was 3 months  before the tension began to slacken. then the instructor taught me to put my face under the water and exhale and to raise my nose and inhale. i repeated the exercise hundreds of times. bit by bit I shed the panic that seized me when my head went under water.
next he held me at the side of the pool and had me kick with my legs. for weeks I did just that. at first my legs refused to work. but they gradually relaxed and finally I could command them.

thus, piece by piece, he built a swimmer. and when he had perfected each piece, he put them together into an integrated whole. in april he said, 'now you can swim. dive off and swim the length of the pool, crawl stroke.
I did. the instruction was finished.
But i was not finished. i still wondered if i would be terror-stricken when I  was alone in  the pool. I tried it. i swam the length up and down. tiny vestiges of apprehension returned. but now i could say, 'trying to scare me, eh? we-ll, here's to you! look! and off  i'd go for another length of the pool.

this went on until July. but i was still not satisfied. so I went to lake Wentworth in New Hampshire, dived off a dock at Triggs island,

187  and swam 2 miles across the lake to Stamp Act island. I swam the  crawl, breast stoke, side stroke and back stroke. only once did I feel fear. when i was in the middle of he lake , I put my face under and saw nothing but bottomless water. the old sensation returned in miniature. but i laughed and said, 'Well  Mr. Terror, what do you think you can do to me? it fled and i swam on.

yet I had residual doubts. at my first opportunity I hurried Wes, went up the Tieton to Conrad Meadows, up the Conrad Creek Trail to Meade Glacier and camped in the high meadow by the side of Warm Lake, where i had panicked as a boy. the next morning i stripped, dived into the lake and swam across to the other shore and back  - just as Doug Corpron and my other boyhood friends used to do. I shouted with joy and Gilbert Peak returned the echo. I had conquered my fear of water.

at last I felt released. by immersing myself in water and coming to know that medium of life as well as the medium of air, I conquered that fear.
fear of lightning was another force in my life, originating in religious dogma...

fear of inadequacy because of my weak legs as a result of my bout with polio was another overwhelming force....I probably overcompensated for that fear in many ways. but when i could hike and climb with the best of them, that fear dissolved  just as a white cloud on a summer day slowly disappears when it encounters a cold air stream high in the sky.

but my rebellion against the shame of being called a weakling had lasting effects. as already noted,. it cause me to become very much a loner. moreover, it inured me in a subtle way to all criticism.not

188  not that i enjoyed criticism, i certainly did not, but criticism never made me turn tail and run. rather, it impelled me forward into the thick of the fight.

my fears included the fear of wild animals, or at least some of them...

many times since I  have awakened to find the tracks of a cougar not far from my bedroll or tent. but i did not know in those early days that a cougar is the most difficulty of all animals to approach in the mountains and rarely attacks man...

grizzly bears are, of course, different. they are vicious if attacked or wounded...

190  ...tossing a rock at a grizzly is a very dangerous thing to do, as some college students discovered at Glacier park;  and many people have been injured or killed at provocations as slight as that...

195  as a result of many alpine adventures, I had no fear of great heights,  especially after I learned how to use crampons and ice axes on glaciers. I now know what a boy could not know, that the fear of death is made

196  up or all other fears. I know now  that long years ago in the rugged Cascades I had begun to shed that great, overpowering fear.
many people have phobias that doom them to exile from the mountains. though i believe I could walk the cornice of the Empire State Building without qualms, I understand the panic that seizes some of my friends at the very thought of looking down a sheer wall....

I have no fear of riding horseback, even though a freakish accident in the fall of 1949 nearly took my life...
14  - Conservation

201  Colin Turnbull in The Mountain People tells how one African people the IK, had survived by putting every person - man, woman and child - on his won, tossing out the window familial love and community cooperation, a phenomenon that startled me even though I had long had a hunch that we already were drifting in that direction.
DeTocqueville wrote in 1857 that 'Christianity has obviously tended to make all men brothers and equal'.  I have seen very little of such a result in daily life. what i have seen is that ... men.. fight each other  and despoil the earth...
  (God told the first man to 'dress and keep' the garden in  Eden in Genesis 2.15. because men, starting with Adam, were given the free will go obey or disobey God, one of the unfortunate results has been a continuing rape of the earth and the resources placed on her by God her maker by His creatures, mankind.)
204  Henry David Thoreau, who said in 1851,  'in wildness is the preservation of the world. (his) philosophy was not that man should take to the woods and live in primitive fashion,  but rather that wilderness should offset cities, that men needed retreats from urban life, that the wild spaces and the cultivated ones should be balanced, that the harmony in the out-of-doors should be preserved. (note - though this is good the Bible, at the end of proverbs 31, in combination with God's judgment on the tower of Babel in Genesis, provides a much better!)
John Muir was this century's powerful promoter of ..Thoreau...it was the work of Aldo Leopold, whom I knew only through his book Sand County Almanac, which taught me man's responsibility to the earth.  emphasized ecology - the interdependence of all  living things in a given environment. he transformed conservation from an economic to an ethical problem. Leo talked bout the 'impertinence of civilization' in laying waste to land, polluting waters and exterminating species of wildlife. he realized that unless we changed our attitude toward the earth and its life, we would have sick communities. he taught that it was a moral wrong for man to regard his natural environment as a slave. man should not be a conqueror of land but a member of the land community. Leo articulated the need for a land ethic - a challenge that consumed much of my energies in the latter part of my life.

205  ...we, the so-called civilized people, have moved into what Michael Frome calls 'a shell of artificial, mechanical insulation'.  we have lost touch with our environment. we allow engineers and scientists to convert nature into dollars and into goodies. a river is a thing to be exploited, not treasured. a lake is better as a repository of sewage than as a fishery or canoeway. we are replacing a natural environment with a synthetic one.
my old hero, Gifford Pinchot, once said, 'conservation is the foresighted utilization, preservation and-or renewal of forests, water, lands and minerals, for he greatest good of he greatest number for the longest time.
but he left behind a group of 'experts' who specialize in conquering nature. one who watches the 'experts' in washington, DC, who are supposed to be guardians of the 'public interest', will conclude that we have no conservation ethic. individuals in the bureaucracy understand it; but few bureaus practice it. America is dedicated to the dollar sign and the pressure of the Establishment on any of these bureaus is overwhelming.
we get our oxygen for breathing from the green plants.  who is the guardian of the rate of combustion versus the  rate of photosynthesis? certainly no  one in Washington, DC.

conservation early became a major interest of mine. by the time i was in my teens the Cascades of Washington - public lands - were being cruelly destroyed by sheep, cattle and lumbering. the grazing was cruel and prolonged. lazy sheepmen kept flocks in meadows much too long. sheep with their sharp hoofs and close bite can destroy a sanctuary as
206  they work hard to get every blade off grass. when i was a boy some alpine basins were already dotted with hummocks of grass where wind erosion did the rest. this was a public subsidy to an irresponsible sheep industry.
much the same happened when cattle were turned loose. they left their droppings in every campsite and turned high lakes into muddy wallows.
the lumbermen were the third curse across the land. they built roads and clear-cut entire sections, taking every tree down. the ensuing erosion was calamitious. clear blue streams became muddy watercourses, ruining salmon  and steelhead fishing. if the clear-cutting is high  up. sluiceways of dirt and gravel are built that wash dreadfully. after clear-cutting may come new growth, usually berries in the early years. bears come for the berries and occasionally strip a fir and hemlock seedling for the sweet cambium layer of bark. so the lumbermen insist that there be an open season on bears. that came to pass in the State of Washington. the lumber companies sent their hunters into the woods and the result was the virtual extermination of the black bear in the pacific Northwest.

I have hiked practically all the mountains of this country and I saw the tragedy of sheep, cattle and/or lumbering repeated over and again.the public domain was up for grabs and its riches were being dispensed by the federal ( in Texas, the state) bureaucracy to a favored few.

the heads of the federal agencies are nominees of Cabinet officers.  when they take action, the public has no right to be heard even on vital issues;  the bureaucracy is a powerful steamroller. the agencies are headed not by ecologist but by men trained in forestry or livestock management or who are tuned to those interests. the Congress passes laws making those public lands subject to 'multiple use'  - to watershed development, wildlife, recreation, wilderness and the like as well as timber and grazing, but the Forrest Service and the Bureau of Land Management largely forgets the word 'multiple' and turns the public domain over to the exploiters. and they are rewarded; a high percentage of retired Forest Service personnel go to work for lumber companies.

during my early days in the East I discovered New England and its trails. the Long Trail in Vermont is a favorite...

207  it is only by foot that one can really come to know this nation.

we of the Far West have conifer forests of which only the tamarack or larch is deciduous. (note - shed leaves) they , plus the willow and vine or Douglas maple, give touches of color to our mountainsides.  but the hardwoods of New England produce a rare dramatic effect in the fall....

I learned in New England that a people's love of he mountains can be a powerful and contagious force. that section of our country was cruelly exploited by lumbermen. it was reduced to stumpage where previously majestic white fir and stately hemlock grew. New England loggers

and New England pulp mills were no less avaricious than the Western ones. but when the work of the despoilers became clear and the population increased and the recreational demand on each acre multiplied, the civic response was considerable. today the legend persists that it was the dedication of Harvard professors to conservation that tuned the tide.

...over the years I wrote and spoke a great deal about the reforms that were needed to correct these evils. the eastern and southeastern parts of the US, where I hiked during my early days in the East, were not bothered by depredations (def - preying upon, plundering, robbery) of sheep and cattle. the threat of the lumbermen was different from that of their Western counterparts. in the East the desire was to harvest all the hardwoods, which grow slowly, and replant with pine, which grow much faster. another threat was advancing 'civilization'. (def - bring out of a savage (fierce, ferocious, cruel, untamed), uneducated, or rude (discourteous, impolite) state/...CIVIL - allegiance to government)
ROADS WERE BUILT EVERYWHERE.  Housing projects encroached on land whose most desirable use would be for RECREATION. and then there was the problem of industrial and sewage pollution, which was a result of THE CROWDING OF PEOPLE.

my first experience with water pollution occurred in the 40s. Stanley Jewett, of the Fish and Wildlife Service and I caught a mess (def - a course (part) of a meal)  of rainbow tout, put them in a wire cage and lowered them at the confluence (with + to flow) of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers at Portland, Oregon. the Willamette was then heavily polluted by 7 pulp mills, whose refuse contaminated the waters in that part of Oregon. I do not remember exactly how long the trout lived in water with practically zero oxygen, but it was not long. eventually, the people of Oregon agitated to correct this condition.
Industrial pollution was followed by municipal pollution and as I traveled I kept my own inexpert account of the slow decline of our natural resources, predicting by some years the demise of Lake Erie. i saw lovely pristine lakes in Wisconsin turn sour (def - acidic) under the accumulation of sewage. the Potomac, Missouri, the lower Yakima, the Hudson became

209  open sewers and we raced merrily on, bragging about our Gross National Product when we should have been worrying bout our Net National Product, that is, what would be left after we deducted what was needed to clean up the mess.

I became disillusioned with the  government bureaus in control i saw that our federal agencies were at times the worst offenders. Army installations often duped raw sewage into rivers. the  Navy did the same in San Francisco Bay. so did the first federal building erected in Knoxville, Tennessee in the 1870s.
Under FDR and the  New Deal, dam building received a great impetus. Georg Norris, Republican senator from Nebraska, was spiritual head of the hydroelectric school of though. I remember his pointing at cascades in the Potomac and saying what a shame it was that they went to wast e when they could generating electric power.
I had taken a dim view of dams, however, ever since an experience on the Tieton. there was a meadow in the Cascades where the North fork and South Fork of the Tieton River met. it was known as McAllister Meadows and it was a lush place, resplendent with flowers and rimmed with pine and fir. willows grew along its banks. the meadow was ideal for a boy, with small steams and no great hazards. it was as idyllic a place as i ever knew.
early in this century a dam was placed across the Teiton at a point where it enters a narrow gorge and McAllister Meadows was buried forever.  the water that filled the reservoir was milky from the fine glacial grist and was a source of supply to farmers down below whose lands needed irrigation. but the loss of McAllister Meadows, I thought, was too great a price to pay. some other valley - and there were plenty - should have been used, where the loss of the river bottom would not have been tragic.

so I did not share the enthusiasm for dams that FDR and George Norris kindled among people. on the Columbia River the new dams did great damage, not to river bottoms but to salmon and steelhead that go up the river to spawn - usually in some tributary but sometimes in the bed of the  main river itself. as a boy I speared salmon in McAllister meadows, may hundreds of miles from the  ocean. most of the  Columbia dams had fish ladders - a series of pools which a migrating salmon o trout could easily negotiate. coming down toward the sea, the  young salmon fry would have to go through the turbines. so there was some loss there, but the greater losses came as a result of the accumulation

210  of nitrogen in the pools which could case the blood vessels of a fish to break.

none of us knew about the nitrogen hazard at the time the Columbia River dams were built,  but we did know about the other risks to the  migratory fish. I was so concerned that I visited the dams to see how the fish ladders were working and on seeing FDR after one of those visits, i asked him for the job of counting the fish at Bonneville, the only job which i ever asked him to give me. he took it as a joke and roared with laughter, saying , 'you've got yourself a new job.

as the dams on the Columbia grew in number, the damaging impact on salmon and steelyhead increased. finally, when the Corps of engineers announce plans for the Benjamin Franklin Dam above hanford, Washington, we formed a protest group and wrote and spoke extensively against it. that dam, which was finally shelved, would have wiped out the spawning grounds for a great deal of the fall run of Chinook salmon. it would also have buried numerous islands whee tens of thousands o ducks winter and where several thousand Canada honkers. congregate.

I joined conservation groups in opposing the Corps plans for 12 dams on the Potomac and succeeded in defeating them. its largest one would have been at River Bend, a huge structure that would back the water up into an 85 mile long reservoir, flooding the prize farm lands of western Maryland. the river fluctuates so much that the downpull would leave hundreds of acres of stinking mud flats exposed. one of the chief purposes of the dam was to provide a head of water that would flush the Potomac of sewage. we proposed instead an amendment to the law which would authorize the Corps to build sewage disposal plans. congressman Henry Reuss of Wisconsin introduced the necessary legislation. shortly, at Washington, DC, social events one began to hear, 'think of all the generals whose names could be attached to sewage plants. for who should we name the  lone?

in 1954 the C&O Canal, which runs west from Washington, DC. for a 180 miles to Cumberland, Maryland, seemed doomed as a recreational area. plans had matured to turn it into a freeway. a few of us -37 in number - felt that the old canal deserved a better fate and proposed that it be made a national historical park. we went on a protest hike in March, 1954,  catching a train to Cumberland and walking back in 8 days. our easiest day was 21 miles and our longest 27.  the radio and TV networks

211  covered the event because it apparently was newsworthy that people were still walking.

almost every town we passed sent delegations out to meet us. the hike heightened public interest in the canal as a recreational property. people began to express themselves in favor of its preservation. in time the Washington Post, which had once sponsored the  freeway, came out for the national park. the National Park Service reversed its position and opted for the national park. the sentiment on the Hill also crystallized that way and a bill passed the Senate but could not get through the House. just before leaving office, Dwight Eisenhower made the canal a national Monument. the idea of a national historic park was renewed under Kennedy and Johnson, but Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, sabotaged it. finally, under Nixon, the  much-maligned Walter Hickel, briefly Secretary of the interior, took hold of the  proposal and sponsored i. the bill finally passed both the House and the Senate in 1970 and became the  law in 1971.

meanwhile, I took part in almost innumerable crusades across the country to save a river here, a lake there, a bit of woods some there else. the culprit was at times an industry. more often than not it was a municipality or other branch of local government. even more frequently it was a federal agency and over the years we began to rate such agencies as public enemies.

NUMBER ONE was the CORPS OF ENGINEERS, obsessed with building dams. we went to eastern Kentucky to help save the Red River Gorge - a genuine piece of Daniel Boone country  - from being flooded by another Corps dam. we ran the Buffalo in arkansas to dramatize the need to preserve its wonderful river bottom from a needless dam. we went to allerton Park in Illinois to try to prevent the Corps from building a dam on the sangamon, its purpose - again - to flush the river of sewage. beyond that the Corps would have channelized the river below the river below the dam, putting it in a fume and spraying the spoil banks with herbicides to keep another river bottom from developing.

the story was the same all over the country. River bottoms full of game, trails, picnic grounds, swimming holes would be lost forever.  'How can the benefits be rated so great when the costs are so enormous? we would ask.  but the loss of a river bottom was never listed among the costs of so-called 'progress'.
NUMBER TWO  on the  public-enemies list was the BUREAU OF PUBLIC ROADS,  which until the '70s had no conservation standards and which ruined probably more trout streams, scenic ridges and fertile

212  valleys than any other agency. its motto was more and more roads, when it should have been sounding the alarm over what the price of these roads as in terms of ecological values.

NUMBER THREE  was TVA, also dedicated to building ruinous dams. the battle for the TVA in the early days was almost a holy cause for the liberals. the issue was public power would shed all of the malpractice of private power. but as time passed and the  new bureaucracy fastened its hold on tennessee and on the people. TVA became a sacred white cow that did untold damage to the environment. we fought to save the little Tennessee River from a TVA dam, which was needed neither for flood control not power. turning the Little T into a lake was supposed to add new industrial sites with cheap water transport down the Ohio River system. but we counted over 800 unused industrial sites that TVA  already had.
this was a poor excuse for flooding forever some of the choice farmlands of eh South, wiping out ancient Cherokee village sites and ruining  the  finest trout stream in the south east. Brown trout in the Little T ran as high as 12 pounds. I floated on it and fished it and camped on its shores - and I wrote  and spoke against the dam. it was saved temporarily  by the Vietnam war, because of lack of funds, but TVA goes merrily on its way, an ensconced bureaucracy  - a principality, if you please - where Parkinson's Law operates to perfection.
TWA is shattering the dream of FDR and Norris in another way, it is the greatest strip miner  in the nation. TVA originally designed to preserve the land, is now despoiling it. it has 11 coal-burning steam plants. it uses about 32, 000,000 tons of coal a year, half of it strip mined with the modern shovels which often remove 50 to 100 feet of the  top of a mountain to reach a seam of coal.  the earth and rock reserve spill over the side of the hill. rains cause severe erosion and floods. rocks and shales adjacent to coal produce pyritic rock, which is a potent producer of acid, iron and other pollutants.  the acid kills all fish in the drainage streams and most of the plant life. there is no effective reclamation after this has happened. I think it was Congressman Ken Hechler of West Virginia who said that the reclamation being done was 'like putting lipstick on a corpse.

NUMBER FOUR on the public-enemies list was the BUREAU OF RECLAMATION, which, like the Corps of Engineers and the TVA, operated under the pressure of Parkinson's Law and so keep its engineers busy building dams in marginal areas where drainage turned the run-off into salt.

213  water. Exhibit a is the Colorado River, which by the '60s delivered only salt water to Mexico. though our 944 treaty guaranteed that Mexico would receive annually 1,500,000 acre-feet, viz. 1,850,234,000 cubic meters ( except for an extraordinary drought or serious accident to the delivery system in the US, in which event the consumptive use in each nation was to be reduced in equal proportions). everyone thought, of course, that the  water to be delivered would be usable water.

NUMBER FIVE was the SOIL CONSERVATION SERVICE, which, again like the  Corps, was obsessed with converting rivers into flumes or sluiceways,  keeping the spoil banks sprayed so that no new river bottom would be created. Coastal states lost their wetlands. so did interior states whose potholes were breeding grounds for waterfowl.  creation of flumes to replace rivers kept engineers busy and insured the destruction of our waterways.  by 1971 SCS had completed 284 projects and approved 1,033 more, its aim being to channelize 11,000 streams, substituting sterile ditches for pleasant, meandering streams.

NUMBER SIX was the FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE.  it has poisoned or helped to poison most every section of land west of the Mississippi. the poison are in killed animals put out for predators, primarily coyotes, but also for eagles. any predator that eats off the carcass of a poisoned animal also dies. so the chain of food poisoning increases to include even magpies, crows, and ravens. the poisoning is so extensive that on a ten day trip in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming  we saw almost no living thing  - no animal, no bird,  only a marten. the poisoning is so extensive that on a 10 day trip in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming we saw almost no living thing  - no animal, no bird, only a marten. the poisons work faster than animals can breed. we are being deprived of all our meat-eating wildlife so that a few sheep and cattlemen can be appeased. Genesis told man to 'have dominion...over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.' the federal agencies have given Genesis an evil twist by filling the public domain with poisons for predators.

NUMBER SEVEN was the ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION,  an active promoter of pollution by radiation. scientists are divided on whether or not radiation from nuclear-energy plants will be harmful to humans. those who mine uranium are, of course, subject to special risks. the nuclear plant in operation emits radiation; its waste materials must be transported and buried; and there is always the danger of an operating accident. these are highly dangerous elements, so dangerous that at the rate at which we in this country - and in Europe - are erecting nuclear energy plants, some think the germ plasm of man is being jeopardized.

214  NUMBER 8  was the PARK SERVICE,  which built cities inside the sanctuaries of the parks ( witness, Yellowstone) and crisscrossed most of the wilderness areas with highways; or built funiculars (def - of or pertaining to rope or cord) so that the public could get into the wilderness the easy way. by 1970 Yellowstone National Park, believe it or not, was beset with smog, like Los Angeles.
NUMBER  9 was the FORREST SERVICE, which listened attentively to the lumbermen's talk and cut, cut, cut for commercial purposes. there were left, to be sure, a few 'wilderness' areas, but they were much too small for the population in the 1960s, not to mention the 2000s.

these agencies were all protectors by statute of the 'public interest'.  yet in practice they were the great despoilers, competing with the moguls of industry to flatten, grind up, pollute and destroy the earth.

but the  conservation groups battled on, doomed to defeat by the pressure of population and by the pressure of lobbies. planning could have kept highways and the  crowds of people on the perimeters of these sanctuaries. planning could have preserved most of our free-flowing rivers. but there was no plans, not even regional ones.
Coolidge and later Hoover, had a cabin on the Rapidan River in Virginia at the junction of 2 steams - Mill Prong and Laurel Prong. that old cabin has been restored and is maintained by the National park Service. it is still a quiet, serene place, miles from all noise and from all civilization. Coolidge used to fish there, Vermont style - that is to say, he used worms to catch rainbow and brook trout. 2 Secret Service men accompanied  him - one to bait the hook, the other to remove the fish. on one July day he caught 11 trout out of one pool, and still kept casting - without further success.

finally one Secret Service agent summoned enough courage to say, 'You have caught 11 out of this pool, Mr. President. Shouldn't we try another pool?
the sardonic reply was 'Well, they put 12 in, didn't they?

that comment represents in a nutshell modern man's dedication to the conversion of every part of the earth into money or into fun. there is no place in america where that cause is more reverently respected than Texas, as I recounted in my book Farewell to Texas. everything in Texas will be converted into dollars, except perhaps the sunsets and I would not be surprised to find some syndicate that had designs on them.
the disease is not peculiar to free enterprise. it is found in russia under a socialistic regime. it is found in authoritarian states. as well as in mixed systems. it is not a manifestation of modern technology.

215  the industrial state, as we know it, has merely broadened the dimensions of exploitation and made it an easy, almost effortless process.
the root of the disease is in man's obsession with the GNP. a continuous rise in the Gross National Product means an increasing conversion of natural resources into dollars, rubles, francs and so on. the search is on for these resources.
he who stands up to defend the last untouched granite cliff or Yosemite (which can, by the way, be ground up and used to produce energy) , or the last acre of redwoods or the  last pristine lake in Vermont ( which would make a cheap bathtub for new industrial wastes),  or the rolling grasslands of eastern Montana (being converted into badlands by bulldozers in search of coal) will in time be denounced as un-American.
so many federal agencies are enemies of the environment, it is easy to despair. moreover, Washington, DC, is filled with lobbyists for every special interest that is trying to make a fast buck out of some piece of the  public domain. the  alliance between lobbyist and agencies is so close that the prospects of keeping our part of the hemisphere habitable is very chancy. only an aroused and revolutionary attitude by people can save the  day.
in the '30s and '40s I had viewed the creation of an agency as the solution of a problem. I learned that agencies soon became spokesmen for the status quo, that few had the guts to carry through the reforms assigned to them I also realized that Congress defaulted when it left it up to an agency to do what the  'public interest indicated should be done. 'Public interest' is too vague a standard to be left  to free-wheeling administators. they should be more closely convince to specific ends or goals.

all agency heads, I thought, should be confirmed by the  Senate - the  Chief Forester, the director of the park Service, the head of the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Reclamation, the Chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service and all such officials. they formulate policy and their predilections, back ground and experience should be tested in the crucible of Senate hearings.

beyond all that is the  need for public participation in agency decisions of an administrative character. the  people are as sophisticated and knowledgeable as the bureaucrats. they know whether an alpine basin should be sprayed to kill sagebrush with the hope that more grass will grow for the permittee, a cattleman. they know the scourge of poisons set out for predators. they know that likely effect of the

216  cutting of a virgin stand of timber on runoffs, on the quality of a stream as spawning grounds, and so on.
I concluded that the so-called experts had come close to ruining our environment, that a return to common sense had come close to ruining our environment, that a return to common-sense judgments of laymen was essential.

19  The Bureaucracy

the great creative work of a federal agency must be done in the first decade of its existence if it is to be done at all. after that it is likely to become a prisoner of bureaucracy and of the  inertia demanded by the Establishment of any respected agency. this is why i told FDR over and over again that every agency he created should be abolished in 10 years. and since he might not be around to dissolve it. he should insert in the basic charter of the agency a provision for its termination. Roosevelt would always roar with delight at that suggestion and of course never did do anything about it.

20   FDR

319  ...like Hugo L. black, who campaigned vigorously for FDR's (note - court packing) plan ,  I was opposed to the expansive meaning the Court had given to the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. the Court had been using those clauses to strike down laws that shocked their sensibilities. the 14the Amend. says that 'No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. the 5th Amend. places the same restraint on congress. the old Court construed 'liberty' in such an expansive way as to make it virtually impossible for the government to enact social legislation that interfered with the freedom of the owner of a business - corporate or otherwise - to run it as he chose. even regulation of prices of theater tickets had been struck down. and Congress had been stymied in its efforts to prohibit child labor by the Court's interpretation of the Commerce clause, which in 1916 was held not broad enough to allow Congress to make a law preventing the interstate movement of the products of child labor.

the Supreme Court had over the years used the concept of due process in the substantive sense, it would hold that a statute such as one limiting work hours for women violated due process, because it limited the women's right to work and the employer's right to hire them. the Court held that this sort of law deprived a person of his liberty without due process. the liberty it was protecting had to do with working under miserable conditions for more hours than were physically healthy, with a lack of sanitary facilities, etc.
that use of due process clauses in the 5th and 14th Amendments injected into the constitutional definition of 'liberty' the laissez-faire ( def - the theory or system of government that upholds the autonomous character of the economic order, believing that government should intervene as little as possible in the direction of economic affairs.) philosophy of Adam Smith. what it came down to was

320   the individual judge's opinion of the 'wisdom'  of the law. Holmes, Brandeis, Stone and Hughes regularly dissented, saying, 'Control of working conditions is within the reach of the police power of the state.
the old Court did in fact sit as a superlegislature over Congress and the states. to that, I was opposed. yet displacing judges whom one did not like with those who shared the ideology of the incoming administration was a dangerous precedent. if FDR could do it because he had a different view of due process, a less benign President could follow the same precedent because he had a different view of the First Amendment. the Justices were old men and would soon pass on. far better that time rather than political maneuvering rectify their errors.
the way to get these Justices to retire would have been to inaugurate a retirement program. while FDR made no such proposal in his Court-packing plan, the opposition in the Congress rushed through such a program for members of the Supreme Court.
Holmes had resigned on 1.12.1932.  he said, 'the condition of my health makes it a duty to break off connections that i cannot leave without deep regret after the affectionate relations of many years and the absorbing interests that have filled my life. but the time has come and i bow to the inevitable. i have nothing but kindness to remember from you and from my brethren. my last word should be one of grateful thanks.
Hoover in accepting the resignation told Holmes, 'No appreciation I could express would even feebly represent the gratitude of the American people for your whole life of wonderful public service, from the time you were an officer in the Civil War to this day - near your 91st anniversary.  I know of no American retiring from public service with such a sense of affection and devotion of the whole people.
when Holmes left the Bench, members of lower federal courts could 'rtire' receiving the same salary for life. members of the Supreme Court could not get a pension by retiring. they could, however, 'resign' having reached the age of 70 and having served at least 10 years and receive their regular salary for life.  at the time of Holmes the salary was $20,000.  so when Holmes resigned, he received a pension of that amount. in a year or so Congress went on an economy binge and reduced Holmes' pension, as i remember, to $10,000. I recall how shocked I was that Congress should be so callous,

321   and many members of the Bar and Bench felt the same way. the Constitution afforded no protection except a guarantee against the diminution  of judges' pay 'during their continuance in office'.  the opponents of the FDR Court program, therefore, made a strategic move when they passed the Retiremeent Act of Mar. 1, 1937.

the idea of  'packing' the Court stuck in the public craw. (def - cause considerable or abiding resentment; rankle) Bob Jackson - to whom FDR promised the Chief Justiceship once Hughes retired - was the knight in shining armor who carried the battle on this issue and later, in 1941, wrote a book about it, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy. but a few of us around FDR were saddened by the Court-Packing project.
as I have said, I had been much opposed to many of the rulings of the old Court that struck down social legislation because in its opinion it violated the due process clauses of the Fifth and fourteenth Amendments. i mad speeches at Yale and elsewhere, denouncing the Justices who added their personal social philosophy of laissez-faire to the Constitution. but i did not favor the Court-packing plan. the President never asked me what i thought of it, he never asked me to help him promote it. and once the President had acted or taken a public position on an issue, I never went to him to offer unasked-for  advice.

21  The New Deal

341  FDR was storming the country and soon was elected in a landslide.

there was, throughout the days of the New Deal,  a good amount of speculation about the political theory and philosophy of FDR's program.  the  words 'liberal', 'progressive',  'radical', and 'conservative', however, are not too meaningful. it is often difficult to fit any one person neatly into one of these categories.
a 'CONSERVATIVE' in constitutional law would technically be he who stuck closest to the constitutional structure of  1787. but in modern-day parlance, those who do so are called 'left-wingers'.
a 'conservative' in constitutional law has come to mean he who construes the  Constitution and Bill of Rights the best to serve the Establishment.

the 'LIBERAL' has come to mean one

342  opposed to existing practices, although still working within the constitutional framework,  the

the 'RADICAL' is one who, if necessary, would dispense with the framework in seeking solutions

after the 1940's the word  'PROGRESSIVE' disappeared from our vocabulary.

in American politics FDR was not regarded as a conservative, though his roots, his family, his early associations were all with the conservative. group. when he used politics to serve causes beyond that group's interests, he was viewed as a traitor, as was anyone who, though an original member of their group, late  used politics, education, the pen. the pulpit or the law to serve ends they  considered hostile. my friend Harry Golden, of North Carolina, who espoused desegregation of the races, was not considered a traitor, since he was not born in the South.  the traitor would be the native Southerner who takes a desegregation stance on race. the  conservatives of America  - members of the Establishment  - never forgave FDR for deserting the cause,  which they thought was his by reason of birth.
those of us close to FDR never felt he deserted the conservative cause in principle. except for the installation of real collective bargaining, he left the  social and economic order largely untouched. his energy was spent in cleaning up that order, eliminating its excesses and making capitalism respectable.  FDR was, in american terminology, more a progressive than a liberal. he worked in the La Follette. tradition. probably no politician can survive who moves left from that position, for the  US has usually been conservative  in its inclinations.
During the New Deal days the people were prisoners of their own illusions, as Robert M. Hutchins once put it. the major delusions, to use his categories, were:
the budget should be balanced annually;
currency must be 'sound';
the gold standard was untouchable
socialism was a menace
free enterprise could provide a job for everyone, if it were left alone;
the states were supreme
the federal government largely impotent.
as Hutchins has said, these 'received ideas' were alien to the new world that was in the making.  these are the reasons why, I think, the New Deal has become largely meaningless to the subsequent generation.

FDRs's embrace of capitalism and most of the basic tenets of the Establishment were made evident by his NRA  (National Industrial Recovery Act), which was enacted in 1933 and expired in 1935. this was the Blue Eagle scheme whereby industry was given power to make the rules governing competition and prices. the NRA stemmed from Rex Tugwell's effort to get Roosevelt to give business the authority.

343 to fix its own prices and to put such restrictions on production as it chose. Tug, an advisor to FDR, was trying to persuade him, even prior to the nomination, as to the merits of 'economic self-government'. (Tug describes that idea in his book The Brain Trust.) Tug was opposed to the Wilson-Brandeis view that the  Sherman Act and Clayton Act, restricting monopolies and restraint of trade, were desirable, that big units should be broken into small components and kept that way.  he thought that the antitrust laws prevented 'any sort of social management' and kept competition 'at a destructive level',.  he saw that monopoly in electric power was inevitable and competition impractical, but from that example, he argued with FDR that if 'power production could not be fractionalized, neither could other similar industries'. Tug thought that prices could be controlled in ways other than fractionalization and competition, by government responsibility for the  planning of production. Tug proposed 'an orderly mechanism that might enable industry to produce a cooperation now considered illegitimate.
Tug did not make much headway in selling the  idea to FDR prior to the  1932 election. his plan, as submitted, was in the form of a proposal for a White House Economic Council whose job would be to reorganize industry on the model of the  Federal Reserve System in banking. 'the antitrust acts can be repealed and each industry can be encouraged to divide itself into suitable regional groups on which will sit representatives of the  Economic Council.
in these early years FDR tried to placate business, banking, agriculture, labor and industry to achiever 'business recovery'.  he added, 'What an all American team that would be! of all the measures FDR proposed and got enacted in the  first year, two were most crucial to business. one was the Agricultural Adjustment Act,  which was to make a few farmers rich and make the  plight of the sharecroppers more serious. the other was the NRA, which allowed businessmen to control production and fix prices.
Hugo L. Black, then in the Senate, made a prophetic speech:
'this bill, if it shall pass and become law, will transfer the  lawmaking power of this nation, insofar as the control of industry is concerned, from the Congress to the trade associations. there is no escape from that conclusion. that is exactly what has happened in Italy, and as a

344  result, the legislation passed by the  parliamentary body of Italy, as expressed by one economist, has reached the vanishing point (77 Congress Rec5284)
under the NRA, the President, on application of 'one or more trade or industrial associations or groups', was empowered to 'approve a code or codes of fair competition for the trade or industry or subdivision thereof, represented by the applicant or applicants'.  once a code was approved, its pro0visions 'shall be the standards of fair competition' for the particular trade or industry, any violation of which carried sanctions both civil and criminal.

there are those who still say that NRA  was FDR's fling with socialism, but it had no resemblance to any school of socialist thought. NRA  was an attempt to grant to industry the power to set production quotas and prices it was a grant of monopolistic power to private industry, placing the making of the rules governing business in the hands of business itself.

as Black had said, this Act thus place lawmaking in the hands of private  industry subject to Presidential approval. Tugwell was an economist, not a lawyer, but New Dealers who blessed this monstrosity  cannot be excused. they certainly knew better. and it is difficult, even after long reflection, to grasp the mentality of Tug , an extremely able man, in conceiving an industrial system under which the biggest, the most powerful units in business lad down the  rules of price and competition for the  group. the result would obviously be a vicious form of cartel, in which a few companies would determine the destinies of the smaller entrepreneurs.

the project was declared unconstitutional by a unanimous Court in 1935,  (Schechter Poultry Corporation v. US, 295 US 495) a Court that included Brandies and Cardozo, Butler and McReynolds. any Supreme Court that ever sat would have so ruled, because lawmaking under the Constitution is a matter for Congress, not for private parties. that proposal of FDR's would have made a structural change in captalism that would have strengthened the Establishment and taken us a long way down the road to the corporate state.
FDR exploited the old liberal cliches, but he never touched the basic problems of the ghettos - the citadels of the  bakers, real estate brokers, moneylenders and the  city officials whom they control. he multiplied agencies, but never aimed at permanent control of basic industries. he never reached the race problem. personally he worried  about it, but

345   politically he aligned himself with the  powers-that-be  in the South so far as Black people were concerned. and during his administrations he never even effected complete integration of the races in the Armed Forces.
in this regard, one day my secretary announced the  presence of a Black woman who had come with credential from my old classmate Paul Robeson. when the  woman was escorted in, I offered her a chair, but she remained standing and asked, 'Who am I?
'you are kin to my friend paul robeson.
'I know my name. but who am I?
I shook my head.
she replied, 'I am the bastard daughter of the brother o f former Supreme Court Justice.

what she was conveying to me was that she was in the Supreme Court building as a matter of right,. her demand was that I persuade FDR that there should be an immediate desegregation of the races in the Armed Forces.
I talked with FDR about this lady's idea. he did not laugh, scoff, or scorn. he listened intently and with approval and said, 'We'll see. after a long pause he added, lighting a cigarette, 'You know they call the Missus a nigger-lover. perfectly dreadful what they say. he reminisced about the strong hold that the South had on the Congress and how his old wheelhorses (meaning people like Jimmie Byrnes and Joe Robinson) had a deep racial bias. and then he passed to other things and we never did get back to integration in the  Armed Forces. when at last integration was achieved under Truman, whit officers, who had commanded Black troops, said it was the  best thing that had ever happened, for though loyal and a physical part of the  Armed forces. Black troops  were understandably sullen and resentful as long as they remained segregated.
yet in spit of FDR's moderate stance on race and on capitalism, he had a host of bitter enemies.  the rancher for whom I had worked in the wheat fields in my early years in the  State of Washington was one of them. when I was a field hand, Ralph Snyder was close to bankruptcy. his lands were heavily mortgaged, he was paying at least 8% interest at the bakes, the price of wheat was up and down, making the business extremely hazardous, as the  costs were fixed.

years passed and I did not see Ralph. finally, in the 40s, we met at my log cabin up the Lostine River in the Wallowas Mountains of eastern Oregon. Ralph was then prosperous. his mortgages had been

346 refinanced at an interest rate of about 3%. there was a floor under his wheat. he had tens of thousands of dollars in the bank.  yet for the first half-hour he did nothing but curse FDR.

'how can you be so critical? I asked.  'you are one of the beneficiaries of FDRs farm program. you should be praising him and all you do is denounce him.

he though awhile and then gave a most revealing answer. 'it is true I am much better off. but let me ask you something - did you ever meet the rancher down the road from me? well, he's no good - lazy, shiftless, a poor manager. I'd call him worthless. what's happened to him? he's on easy street. he never had it so good. this Roosevelt program makes a no-good guy rich. how can we expect america to be strong if men who couldn't make it on their own are hoisted up by government ?

this same attitude prevailed against practically all New Deal measures. the guarantee of bank deposits is another good example: the banks had closed during the Depression, and some never reopened.  the federal guarantee of deposits was to cover a 100% of the  first $10,000 of deposits, 75% of the next $40,000,  and 50% of all deposits over $50,000. men white with rage argued the merits of this proposal:
it will weaken the character of bankers, making them less efficient because they will know that their mistakes will be underwritten by Uncle Sam;
it will make people more and more dependent on government, when what is needed is strong and independent men;
it is a form of socialism that is dangerous;
free enterprise cannot remain free if its mistakes are underwritten by a government;
the harsh economic issues sweeping the world will then move in and take over.
this was the essence of the hard-core reaction against FDR.

one New Deal reform that was basically liberal gave labor the power of collective bargaining. up to that time strikes by laborers had been illegal under a rule created by judges, who rather enthusiastically extended the Sherman Act to cover labor. thus the Pullman strike was broken in 1894. in time judges revised the  rule to allow strikes called either to raise wages or to reduce hours of work they often disallowed strikes to unionize a shop or strikes that were secondary boycotts aimed at products made by firms engaged in unfair labor practices. in 1914 Congress attempted to change these judge-made rules through the Clayton Act. thought the language of that Act was broad and seemingly all inclusive, judges, in construing it, once more read their antilabor prejudices into the Act and applied it narrowly. by 1933, when FDR 

347  took office, one of the main ingredients of industrial strife was the  failure of industry to recognize and utilize the theory and practice of collective bargaining.
collective bargaining was therefore included, even if temporarily, within the codes for fair competition authorized by the  NRA.  and collective bargaining was permanently included in the Wagner labor Relations Act creating the National Labor Relations Board in 1935.

the power of industry to fix prices was well established. the power of labor to negotiate for wages somewhat restored the balance. the other liberal reform of the New Deal involved the transfer of the financial center of the US from Wall Street to Washington. Wilson had warned in 1911, 'The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly'. the Pujo committee, dating from 1912, concluded that the great danger was 'the  control  of credit' by private groups.

the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 remedied part of the problem by establishing the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. as FDR said when he dedicated the lovely Federal Reserve Building in 1937, that board, a governmental, not a private, agency exerts 'a powerful influence upon the expansion and contraction in the flow  of money through the channels of agriculture, trade and industry'. 

but the board did not solve the entire problem. Brandeis discussed the mater in his study, Other People's Money, published in 1913:

the dominant element in our financial oligarchy is the investment banker. associated banks, trust companies and life insurance companies are his tools. controlled railroads, public service and industrial corporations are his subjects. though properly but middlemen, these bankers bestride as masters America's business world, so that practically no large enterprise can be undertaken successfully without their participation or approval. these bankers are, of course, able men possessed of large fortunes;  but the  most potent factor in their control of business is not the possession of extraordinary ability or huge wealth. the key to their power is Combination - concentration intensive and comprehensive...
it was this citadel that the SEC assaulted. our basic laws - the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Public Utility Holding Company act of 1935 - helped move the power away from the investment bankers.

348  the transfer of financial power was both painful and exciting. the Federal Reserve Board, with its able chairman, Marriner Eccles, who advocated deficit spending, raised alarming specters in the financial community. I saw another example of this alarm when in 1938 i went to Chicago to address the Chicago Bond Club. after the speech i was followed from the room by an irate investment banker, who kept shouting, 'why are you trying to destroy America?

my answers did not satisfy him, so as we passed through an ornate room on our way to the elevator, i stopped and pointing to the paintings on the walls, said, 'we are doing nothing more destructive to America than would be done to this room if we moved the pictures around. 

trembling with anger, my questioner shouted, 'Why in hell do you want to move the  pictures around?

the PWA (Public Works Administration)  was the most visible embodiment of the new economic program. men were at work raking leaves, digging ditches, building roads, planting trees, paving streets, erecting buildings and so on. there they were - the miserable unemployed people - at long last back on a payroll. some of them were undoubtedly shiftless; some may have been freeloaders; but many were engineers, salesmen, and clerks temporarily out of work. they were a motley lot and at the cocktail hour in those days they were the customary subject of conversation. I recall one predinner reception in New York where I was to speak. 
a banker of prestige, power and great physical presence fairly bellowed at me, as if i were Harry Hopkins, head of PWA, 'Do you know what i saw?  PWA men on a job. what were they doing? leaning on their shovels. how do you justify spending public money to let worthless men lean on shovels? if they want to lean, i say take them off the payroll of the public and let them lean against a building.
the Puritan ethic, which holds that a sound society requires a nation of people who work, soon won out. FDR viewed federal relief as only a temporary expedient. he had created, as part of the NRA, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and out of it spun CWA (Civil works Administration) to employ people. in order to do so, work had to be created. public buildings were constructed or renovated, thousands of miles of roads and 100,000 bridges and viaducts were built. unemployed writers were put to work cataloguing the contents of American archives, researching the history of various monuments and writing historical tomes. I knew some of them and was proud of

349  their work.  teachers were employed to teach new skills. actors were employed to man improvised theaters.
the story of the  work of these authors and artists is told in Jerry Mangione's book, The Dream and The Deal, the Federal Writers Project, 1935-1954. the entire project cost 27,000,000 dollars - a sum not large enough to buy the bombs necessary to reduce even a small nation to the Stone Age. applicants had first to be certified as paupers; starving people had to live in a city a prescribed length of time before they could be so certified. but those who got work cards escaped the scrap heap of the unemployed and were transfigured, since the Depression began, many people had been earning only  a few dollars a week. with a work card they received the munificent (def - extremely liberal in giving) salary of $100 a month.
exciting chronicles were written, though some were never finished. somewhere in the labyrinths of Washington, DC,  those manuscripts are stored, unfortunately still unpublished. critics charged that the Reds controlled the project. Middle America conceived of it as boon-doggling. (def - work of little or no value done merely to look or be busy) political pressures caused writers to be dropped and sit-in  strikes followed, headed by unions the press denounced as left-wing or Red. there were bloody affairs in the wake of the seemingly innocuous effort to put starving members of the fourth estate (def - journalistic profession or those outside the 3 central powers of state) to work. these people had a song:
Roosevelt! You're my man.
when the time comes
I ain't got a cent
You buy my groceries
and pay my rent
Mr. Roosevelt, you're my man.

a guide to each state was produced, including the state's most interesting historic figures. accounts of minorities were published, as were some thousand pamphlets, brochures and books. across the land other publishers, especially in the south and in New England, became interested. state historical societies published some manuscripts. 
the Writers' Project was laughed at, booed and denounced, but it did produce a lot of interesting Americana. while the communist-oriented writers were talking bout this ugly earthly existence and the good times coming, these starving writers wrote about the greatness of America and its future and at the same time they unfrocked phony figures, promoted racial understanding and made articulate the lower third of this society.
this was a time when fear stalked thee land. as some brokers and bankers were driven to suicide, so were penniless writers who were deprived of their work cards. throughout the country there was a haunting fear of the loss of jobs. never in American history had the total collapse of employment, of confidence, of hope been so complete. only one who lived close to the edge in those days could ever appreciate the powerful impact in FDR's words spoken at his first inaugural in 1933;  'all we have to fear is fear itself'.

350   well before the time of FDR's election in 1932, people were suffering badly. unemployment figures were mounting. in the East there were men and women on street corners selling apples, with the hope of getting enough profit to buy some milk for their children. people were being fed at fire stations and public schools and at any available feeding stations. the cities, largely restricted to property taxes for revenue, were unable to meet the financial need. begging increased; Salvation Army refuges were full; states were getting into relief work but complaining that they did not have the money to meet the demanded. and they certainly did not, in light of their existing tax structure. they clamored for federal assistance. Hoover came out against the 'dole'; (def - dealing out and distributing, especially in charity) and dole became an  ugly four-letter word. Will rogers said of FDR during the worst of the Depression,  'If he burned down the Capitol we would cheer and say, 'Well,we at least got a fire started, anyhow'.
the Democrats had carried the House in 1930 and the Senate was evenly split. Robert F. Wagner of New York introduced legislation in 1931 which called for one billion dollars for federal public works and federal employment service. the bill passed Congress, but Hoover vetoed it. Wagner's proposal for unemployment insurance also was voted down by the Senate. Robert la Follette and Edward Costigan in the Senate introduced a bill calling for a federal grant of some millions of dollars to the  states for unemployment relief. it, too, was voted down by the Senate. even Hugo Black, then a senator from alabama voted against it, speaking at length before the vote was taken. he was strongly in favor of federal money being used to feed and clothe people but he was opposed to the creation of a new bureaucracy to do so.  he was only against the creation of a federal agency to disburse the funds. he thought existing state machinery should be used. 

many other people thought relief was a state, not a federal, matter. FDR, who at that time was the  governor of New York, led the way by

351  establishing a state program to supplement local relief funds and by the end of 1932 24 states were providing some money to local agencies for relief.

in 1931 Congress overrode a Hoover veto and passed an Act giving the RFC (Reconstruction Finance corporation) power to lend $300,000,000 to the states to supplement local relief funds.  but that sum was barely a token:  the Senate hearings before its Committee on Manufactures tell the gripping human story. my friend Frank Murphy, then the mayor of Detroit, testified that his city had run out of money and cut off 1200 families from welfare. within a few months 300 of them could not be found; they apparently had quit the city in desperation. from 1931-2, 150,000 people left Detroit. the fate of the group which had been deprived of relief was related by Murphy:
'we found 270 of the families were cared for by their next-door neighbors in the block; that 170 were cared for by relatives; that 56% of them were in arrears in everything - all their bills, groceries, rent, light and so forth;  that there were a few suicides; that 40 families had separated, either sent their children to some home and the husband went one way and the wife another, and that they average income of the family was $1.56 per week per person for the family. having in mind that the standard of wages in Detroit, prior to the Depression, was $7 per day, you may see what that means.'

relief in those days was only for 'survival'.  a single adult got $2 a week, an adult couple $3.60;  a child under 16 got 75c a week and 3.5 quarts of milk; a child 16 and over got $1.25 a week.

economic conditions were so bad that by the time of FDR's First Inaugural, many banks in the country had closed, which led him to say 'the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization'.  I heard this particular speech on the radio in New Haven and I felt that I was one with the president on his social program for taking care of the needy.

a host of legislation was hammered through Congress in the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration to provide at least temporary relief. most of the funds went not to breadlines, soup kitchens or food stamps, but was apportioned among projects that were designed to create 'work'. of the four billion dollars of 'emergency relief' authorized in 1935,  the allocation was as follows:  *highways and grade crossings, $800,000,000
*rural relief, water diversion, irrigation and reclamation, $500,000,000
*rural relief,water diversion, irrigation and reclamation, $500,000,000
*rural electrification, $1,100,000,000
*housing, $450,000,000
*assistance for education, professional and clerical persons, $300,000,000
*Civilian Conservation Corps, $600,000,000
*loans or grants to local agencies for  self-liquidating (def - capable of being sold and converted into cash within  a short period of time or before the date on which the supplier must be paid...?) projects $900,000,000
* sanitation, erosion, flood control, reforestation, $350,000,000

352  *  rural electrification, $11,000,000
* housing, $450,000,000
* assistance for education, professional and clerical persons, $300,000,000
* Civilian Conservation Corps, $600,000,000
* loans or grants to local agencies for self-liquidating projects, $900,000,000
* sanitation, erosion, flood control, reforestation, $350,000,000

overall, the federal government paid about 70% of all relief during that 3-year period. Harry Hopkins, as the administrator of the Emergency Relief Act, was a good social worker, but was largely ignorant of broader national needs and  and knew very little about the rest of the world. he made a study of workers on relief in 79 cities, and found that on the average, they had been unemployed for more than 2 years. but Hopkins, sensing FDR's opposition to direct payments, parroted the view that only work, not handouts, gave men dignity. he was wont to say that 'his' WPA workers looked with disdain on those who received relief.
by the time I reached Washington, in 1934, WPA could provide jobs for only about one in 4. the situation worsened when federal direct relief was withdrawn and the unemployed were forced back on state and local agencies.
WPA was only one 'work relief' project. the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) was another. it provided jobs largely in national forests at subsistence wages, but it could give work to only 250,000  of the 15,000,000 unemployed. I saw these CCC boys at work in the woods, and the exposure of a lad from the Bronx to the wilderness had a permanent effect on him. but what they did to the forests was largely a calamity. they made the interior of the wilderness areas - the sacred sanctuaries, in my mind - easily available to the masses. and that was a curse which was to follow us into the 70s. I told FDR as much, and he understood what I was saying. his response was an expression of his desire to put everyone to work, if possible. 'work is a wonderful therapy, he said. and of course I had to agree.  'Cutting down all the shade trees in Hyde Park or in Yakima is also work,  I said.  'But it would be destructive of other values.
let's see what we can do about it, he answered, turning to more pressing things.

the NRA,  as noted, had in it a provision for collective bargaining. Industry tried to capture that clause by forming company unions and as a result, labor became inflamed.  by 1934 ugly strikes were sweeping

353  the nation. bloody battles ensued - strikers against  the police, strikers against the National Guard.
FDR,  stood behind labor and collective bargaining, and that really spelled the end of his desired alliance with business and finance.  the alienation was accentuated by his promotion of the Securities Exchange Act in 1934. business had tasted its 'oats' in NRA and say in labor relations and the increase in federal regulation the twin forces which it must destroy.

by the time the 1934 Congressional election took place, the FDR business-and-financial alliance was dead. of the 35 Senate  seats contested,  25 were won by Democrats. in the House, the Democrats increased their number from 312 to 322.
FDR, who always had a keen ear and eye for the grassroots, asked for work relief, rather than direct relief, rather than direct relief. the unemployed, he said, should be preserved not only from 'destitution' but also should work for their 'self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination'.  at the same time he proposed a social security measure, which in due course was enacted and sustained in 1937 by a Court decision written by Mr. Justice Cardozo (301 US548).

the 'work' relief was denounced by the financial world as a menace to private enterprise, which claimed, first, that it invaded fields traditionally reserved for business. even ditchdigging, some said, was such an invasion and certainly road and bridge building and all construction work. second, it was said, all relief should be local - a revival of the old cry of states' rights.

a farmer wrote FDR: 'I wouldn't plow nobody's mule from sunrise to sunset for 50c a day, when I could get $1.50 for pretending to work on a ditch. protests from the privileged were numerous. Henry Ford got into the act, talking about the boys who rode the rods,  how good it was for them. 'Why, it's the best education in the world for these boys, traveling around.

I had been on the rods dozens of times and wondered what Henry would have said or done had he been my companion.
those criticisms had an impact on FDR,  who had not yet gorged the political alliance that was to thrive for a time between the liberals of the North and the Democrats of the South. the 1936 election, whoever,  was a landslide;  only Maine and Vermont went Republican. the Social Security Act had been a target of the Republican party, which claimed that it was the end of the workingman's individuality; henceforth

354  they said, the worker would have not a name but 'a New Deal number'. during the campaign FDR had said, in a radio speech, that business and finance were 'unanimous' in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it  said in my first administration that in  its forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like  to have it said in my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.

Jim Landis and his wife, Estelle, had invited me to their home in Virginia to listen to the broadcast. the room was filled, most everyone sitting on the floor. they all cheered and applauded. I did not cheer nor did I applaud. I sat in silence and shortly left. I loved FDR, but i thought his boast that he would be the 'master' did not fit America.  I thought then - and still think - that America is a complex and diverse pluralistic society and that there is room for everyone, even the brokers and dealers, who, I had discovered, were a species of leeches in the economy. Capitalism, I thought, was better than socialism, a conviction that was strengthened when I started my world travels. for in a socialist state such as Russia there was a suffocating bureaucracy, no First Amendment, no right to protest, no right to strike, no right to denounce the President, the Congress, or the Court. one who was a 'master' of business and finance, like one who was a 'master' of labor, read the group he 'mastered' out of society. later, I realized that FDR, of course, was using only a figure of speech and did not literally mean what he said. he was 'master' in the adroit political way, not 'master' in the sense i feared.

despite FDR's great popularity  there were powerful forces of rebellion working in the years preceding the election in Nov. 1936. Father Charles I. Coughlin was one; he would broadcast on the radio from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Detroit. I never met him, but I listened to him regularly. he said the contest for world domination was between Christ and communism, yet he also denounced capitalism and the international bankers.  he thought the government should own the baking system. FDR knew Coughlin and had Frank Murphy and Joe Kennedy act as intermediaries for him in seeking political friendship. at times they brought Coughlin to the White House. he generally approved FDR'S program  in 1933 and 1934 and testified before committees of the Congress on some measures, supporting them. yet while he might support the President one week, he denounced him the next. he was for assistance to business one day, against competition the next day, for government ownership another time. as I listened to him week

355  after week, I decided he was at heart a fascist.  what FDR felt, I never quite knew. his tactics were to placate Coughlin, never to antagonize him and to leave the White house door open to accommodate the man.
a second force of some moment - yet milder and of a completely different character than Coughlin's was Francis E. Townsend, a doctor in California who became incensed at seeing hungry old people going through garbage cans looking for morsels. he was a tall, thin man without the dynamic force that motivated Coughlin. I knew him only slightly and heard hi speak infrequently. his plan was to give every citizen over 60 years old a pension of $200  a month, provided he or she not be gainfully employed and provided also that he or she spent the money in 30 days. the latter condition was a gimmick of the times, stressing the importance  of spreading money around to grocers, clothiers, and other merchants. the first condition was to placate the business group. Townsend Clubs seemed to spring up like mushrooms and as I read the papers and listened to the radio, the movement seemed to be shaping up as a major political force. but when i talked with FDR about it, he would smile and seem unperturbed - which was, from his position, a good political stance.

at about this time a right-wing organization, the American Liberty League, was formed,. I was sick at heart because one of my heroes - the great Alfred E. Smith -  was a founding member. i admired S, who was governor of New york when I was at law school. I would go downtown to hear him speak and later, when he was running for President, I made campaign speeches for him. Al smith, a Catholic, was defeated for the Presidency by a bigoted america. I always thought that a man whether Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Hindu, should be judged on his merits.

another force concerned FDR greatly: Huey Long of Louisiana.  the kingfish had been governor of Lou and used politics with a vengeance. he built magnificent hospitals and schools; his road-building program was very ambitious. but on my visits to his state I would see a new concrete highway end at a county line, pick up again only at the far side of the county. in between one would bog down in muddy ruts and miserable dirt roads. the reason was that the interim county had voted against the Kingfish in the last election.
Long supported FDR in 1932 and for a part of 1933. thereafter he was on and off, for and against. Long was law-trained and according to Senator Frank Maloney, as a senator, was the ablest man on the Hill. I saw Huey Long in action in the Senate, but never knew him. Hugo

356   Black  though Long was a powerful politician, a great debater, and a terrific filibusterer. late in 1933 Long announced a share the Wealth program under which every family would be guaranteed an annual income of $5,000.  like the Townsend Plan, the program seemed to spread like a prairie fire, though this seeming popularity was in large part Long's propaganda.

FDR was very concerned about Huey Long, but he never denounced the man, even in private conversation with me. he spoke of him gently, praising his political skills. everyone has always said that Roosevelt was a very astute politician. it seems to me that one of the best bits of evidence is that he never once, in my presence, said anything against his political opponents. about Huey Long he might say, 'Well, the man is certainly fervent' or 'He is a really forceful speaker'. FDR was a clever politician, but he never practiced the politics of destruction.

FDR was consumed with curiosity as to what Long would do next. his counter to the Kingfish Share the wealth plan was to ask for an increase in inheritance and income taxes, coupled with a program for social security.
when Huey Long was assassinated in Louisiana in the fall of 1935,  I sensed that FDR felt relieved. Huey had been planning to run for the Presidency in 1936, and no one knows whether or not he would have made a formidable race. he was, however, the only opponent that FDR saw on the scene. in retrospect it seems obvious that it wasn't the assassin's bullet that eliminated the Kingfish as a real political threat to FDR -it was FDR's cool and calculated moves to counteract Long's proposals.

Harry Hopkins thought the WPA project or programs like  it had become a permanent fixture by 1936, that the clock would not be turned back; he expressed that view in his book Spending to Save:  the Complete Story of Relief. but Harry's book was hardly out before WPA rolls were drastically reduced. the agency picked up again when a new recession hit the nation in 1938 , but in 1939 congress required that anyone who had been on WPA for 18 consecutive months should be removed. yet only a small percentage of those laid off - never more than about 12% - were able to get private jobs.
WPA did not suit Middle America, nor did direct relief by the federal government. Federal relief would under mine the very low wage structure that existed in some areas. particularly the South. moreover, as we have discussed, states' rights was a rallying point: if the local agencies

357  lost their control. the Blacks might get on relief. and think how terrible that would be in an area that had a caste system!
this was kind of infighting that took place in the mid-thirties, and it became a matter of conversation at the White House and on social occasions. many a time, when I was talking with FDR alone or with others, Eleanor Roosevelt would come in, having just returned from a trip.

'Franklin, she'd say, I have just returned from (say, North Carolina) and I have discovered something you should know about.
then she would give him advice. sometimes it was about racial discrimination. at other times it concerned the inadequacies of local relief and the need for federal standards.  again it might be the use of local relief to keep the Blacks out of the breadlines.

FDR would always listen patiently and with interest, and he would always thank her. then she would usually say, 'Franklin, you must do something about it.
He would smile and say, 'We'll see what can be done.
In spite of FDR's efforts, the social security system which emerged from legislation covered only the 'impotent poor',  a Priven and Cloward, in Regulating the Poor, called them. they were the old, the blind and the orphaned. the able-bodied poor who could not find employment were left out. potential workers were kept in the labor pool, though they were starving. though unemployment insurance was eventually enacted, it was not until 1961 that the Social Security Act was amended to give federal grants-in-aid to the states for families with unemployed fathers. even so, because of the strict eligibility restrictions few such families got relief under this provision.

in the thirties, federal funds actually subsidized the operation of sweatshops, which could keep their wages at $@ or $3 a week because local agencies refused relief to anyone who would not take such a job. under FDR's leadership, minimum wage laws eventually raised such salaries, but one inheritance of that system was the practice of deducting from relief clients any money they earned. the hearings before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Manufactures in 1933 unearthed, for instance, the following: a man in Pennsylvania on relief was getting $3.50 a week. his wife got a job in a factory, where she worked 54 hours a week, for which she received $1.60. the local board deducted the $1.60 from the husband's relief payment, so the wife quit her job and his check went back to $3.50 that pattern has continued to this day. the welfare system

358  in America in practical effect, if not in design, is to keep the poor people poor.

business that gets a federal subsidy is not penalized if it makes huge profits. farmers who are paid not to plant certain crops are not penalized for making as much money  on the side as they can. only the poor are penalized. and the same policy extends to social security paid to those under 72 years of age, whose payments are also reduced in proportion to their earnings.

FDR'S administration left behind a program that never did fit the Jeffersonian design for america. i refer to the policies of the AAA (Agricultual Adjustment Act), sired by Henry Wallace and Rex Tugwell. land was taken out of production and FARMERS WERE SUBSIDIZED FOR NOT GROWING CROPS. I have summarized in my book, Points of Rebellion, how the agro-business units get public largesse, while the poor and hungry get little or nothing; the agro-business unit also gets  vast tax advantages that the small farmer does not enjoy. the error of AAA was in limiting  production of food in a nation and in a world of starving people. the aim should have been the creation of means of the distribution of food to the needy until normal purchasing power would take up the slack. moreover, the processors were not being regulated and they were the ones mulcting (def - to deprive someone of something,  as by fraud, extortion, etc.;  swindle) the public.

another evil of AAA is its disregard of the sharecropper. when land was taken out of production, it was the sharecropper  who usually was the first to be affected. that often meant the Blacks. FDR was not color-blind, nor did he have a streak of racism in him. but his political alliance with the liberals of the North and the southern Democrats made him freeze when it came to taking positive measures for the Black sharecroppers. FDR could not overrule his leader in the Senate, Joe Robinson of Arkansas.

the sharecropper problem was made worse when benefits were paid out in exchange for plowed acreage. the question of division of the payment between landlord and sharecropper remained, with the planters receiving about 90%  of the subsidy. landlords were anxious to get rid of sharecroppers and since landlords dominated administration of the Act (it was euphemistically called, 'grassroots democracy' by Tugwell),  the displacement of sharecroppers continued.

it was around the processors and the sharecroppers that Jerome Frank and others in the Department of Agriculture made their fight and they lost on both issues.  as to the tenants or sharecroppers, the Farm Security

359  Administration worked hard to render help. but in Washington DC, such help was considered 'relief', while payments to the planters were 'business'.  'it was the Hoover philosophy of the RFC applied in the South by the dominant planter-political caste',  said Denis W. Brogan in The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt. by 1938 sharecroppers were included in the definition of 'farmers' in the instructions for holding referenda on cotton and tobacco marketing quotas and they have been referenda on cotton and tobacco marketing quotas and they have been included since that time in all the crops - rice and peanuts as well s tobacco and cotton.
Jerome Frank helped write an opinion for AAA, which provided that during the life of a contract with a producer, the same individuals as tenants during the life of the contract. that memo or opinion went out to the industry when Chester Davis, director of AAA, was out of town. Davis was outraged when he returned and demanded that Frank and his group be discharged.Wallace discharged them and FDR stood behind Wallace. Jerome Frank also lost out in his fight for regulation of the processors. thus AAA truly enthroned the business interests in agriculture and perpetuated the producer-politician caste that has plagued the country ever since.
the most devastating weapon of the New Deal was the RFC. this agency was Hoover's creation and an inheritance that FDR greatly exploited. under Jesse Jones, it bailed out distressed corporations and in its day did a commendable job, free of suspicion of taint or fraud. but the conceptions that it exploited grew and flourished. business and finance, which were opposed to relief for the poor or even the  modest and largely ineffectual WPA, quickly learned that the public trough was an attractive place to wallow. the policy spread and many other agencies in time became dispensers of the public purse for the rich. by the 1960s and 1970s 'socialism for the rich' seemed to have become our way of life.
there are some of my generation who say in retrospect that business in the 1930s was 'the enemy'. business was, of course, mainly aligned against FDR in his political campaigns and big business fought tooth and nail against most New Deal legislation. but business was not the enemy from the point of view of those of us who were the regulators. the Stock Exchange, for example, was cleaned up, but its destruction as an institution was never in our discussions. nor had we arrived at a

360  point where any talk of its 'nationalization' took place. such talk - when it did occur - was not aimed at business generally but at select key industries such as steel. the few of us who urged FDR in that direction were thinking in terms that the British labour party later espoused. but we had not advanced as far in our thinking as  the late Hugh Gaitskell when he proposed 'controlled , stock ownership rather than complete nationalization. our ideas concerning nationalization were indeed embrionic and we never interested FDR to the point where he said, 'Let's have a memo on it.

deficit spending was a recurring topic of conversation in the New Deal days. I, too, was a Keynesian to the extent that I thought government spending was the only practical political course FDR and I talked about it. the idea of deficit spending was a worry that kept revisiting him and when he expressed his concern and asked what i thought, I gave him my views. I told him I thought it was hard to beat the American free-enterprise system because it turned loose the genius and energy of hundreds of thousands of people in a frenzy of economic and technological activity. but the concentration of power was a matter of concern (it was then not nearly as ominous as it is now.) Steel, I pointed out, was even then the fulcrum; automobiles were becoming secondarily critical. my idea was that the federal government would have to sit at the controls at least over steel. How? not by regulation, for steel would soon run the regulators. the federal government would have to own steel or own a controlling interest in it, so that production would be geared to the public need and not to profit alone.
moreover, in my view, deficit spending should be used to develop  the public sector.  we all grew up on - or were fed - the mythology that the private sector was adequate to produce full employment if left alone. business needed 'confidence'. businessmen should not be hampered in their planning. they needed protection from rapacious competition and from the overbearing demands of labor. I felt this business mythology was false.
though FDR engaged in deficit spending, it had little effect on unemployment. while there were over seven million unemployed in 1931 and nearly 12 million in 1933, there were still approximately 10 million in 1938, nine million in 1939 and 7 million in 1940. the percentage of unemployed among the national work force varied up

361      and down from 22.71% in 1932 to 16.33% in 1939 and 13.08 in 1940. it took world War II to change the picture.
FDR's refusal to create an economic public sector made the New Deal only a makeshift, compromising arrangement. there was, of course, a big difference under the  New Deal in that people no longer starved. they were fed and temporary jobs were created. but no public sector was permanently created and FDR never entertained the idea seriously. 
neither FDR nor any President who followed him really faced up to the critical problem of unemployment, which has always been part of the American economy except during periods of war. it is, however, a sorry reflection on any society which builds its affluence upon the 4 to 20%  of the population which is, at various stages,out of work.
only through a public sector can self-reliance and hard work be assured, as the Peking regime eloquently illustrates. we must develop a public sector to operate alongside a private sector; and that public sector must include the  professions - law, medicine and the arts - as well as industry and its allied skills.
the dimensions of the New Deal soon became clear. it was not a program that was in any sense radical. rather it was a collection of make-shift devices to shore up the capitalistic system. FDR expressed over and again to me as well as publicly, his amazement at the charges of business that he was its enemy, that he was out to 'sovietize' the US and so on. he truly thought that he was capitalism's best friend,  pointing out the way for its survival. that was indeed the narrow area in which he worked. Rex Tugwell's dream of an America living under a cartel (def - a coalition of political or special interest groups having a common cause, as to encourage the passage of a common cause) system was in a sense  a 'planned society' and FDR was 'sold' on it in a superficial way. his immediate reaction was to express criticism of the Court that struck the NRA down. but he soon seemed relieved that Hugh Johnson, the agency's administrator and his Blue Eagle had been swept out. the new targets became the acute problems such as unemployment insurance, minimum wages and hours of work.
the radicals were disappointed, but in the long run they for the most part accepted the narrow range of choice of New Deal reforms that Middle America would accept.  though more extreme measures were tendered by communists on the left and fascists on the right, the radicals. I knew, wanted basic reforms to come about by constitutional

362   amendments. they never merited the scary headlines they often received.

there were many conservative influences in the New Deal.
Dean Acheson, who served briefly, was one. 
Bernard Baruch - famous as a Wall Street operator - was another. Bar nursed his fortune during the Depression and knowing FDR,  came to Washington, where he held court every morning in Jackson Park, which faces the White House. Bar was free and easy with his advice to anyone who would listen. he took a kindly liking to me and was less vain and more able than most conservatives who took a hand in New Deal affairs. but Bernie was not an idea man, only one who would give you a tranquilizer so that you could see industry or high finance through rosy and sympathetic spectacles.

Lewis Douglas, another friend of mine, had been elected to Congress from Arizona 4 times and was in Congress when FDR took office. FDR made him Director of the Budget on Mar. 4, 1933, with the aim of soliciting conservative support for his program. Lew lasted only until Aug., 1934, when he resigned in protest to FDR's 'pump priming' program. he was out supporting Willkie in 1940. but by the time of WW II, Lew was back in various posts overseas, administering parts of our foreign aid policies, and Truman in 1947 made him ambassador to England. 

there were many, many others who lasted through these long years fighting the New Deal from the inside. the forthright, outgoing reformers did not last long.

Republican Fiorello La Guardia had been in Congress until 1932,  but in that election he was swept out in the Roosevelt  landslide. he was soon to become mayor of New York, where his voice would still be heard over the land. in Washington, DC, La Guardia had been a George Norris type of radical - the George Norris that I came to love. he and Norris got the famous Norris-La Guardia Act (47 Stat. 70) through Congress, outlawing the yellow-dog contract (def - a contract between a worker and an employer in which, as a condition of employment, the worker agrees not to remain in or join the union).  La Guardia called  for public works, unemployment insurance, protection of farmers against foreclosures, public power, the 40 hour week. I knew La Guardia and admired him greatly. he was a fiery speaker, flamboyant, smart and capable of being a demagogue,  (def - one who is good at arousing emotions, passions and prejudices of the people in order to gain political or other power)  which he plainly was at times.
my main contact with the radical group in the mid-thirties was Maury Maverick of San Antonio, a lawyer who served in the House as a congressman from texas from 1935-9. Maury was short and stocky,
363  in that respect very much like La Guardia. Maury also employed the same platform antics - he was flamboyant, cocky, witty and pugnacious depending on the need of the situation. he was a radical not a socialist -  and far from being a communist, Mau had his heroes, and they were mine too: Norris and La Follette. he tried to state his radicalism in their idiom. he formed a group of some 30 radicals in the House, one of whom, Mon Wallgren, was from my state, Washington.  Mon would mouth Maury's words and ideas, but he soon wilted carrying the reform banner for only a short time.

Mau admired Huey Long, not for his vicious streak, but for the human causes he championed. Mau used to defend Long, saying the forces he denounced were 'the gods of oil and sulphur'.  as Long's list of gods to be denounced grew and grew,  so did Maury's.
Maury Maverick used to tell me his theory of American radicalism:  'We Americans want to talk, pray,  think as we please - and eat regular.
I suppose I clung to Mau essentially because my own radicalism, if such it could be called, was precisely of his brand.  in 1935,  when business and finance turned against FDR,  it was Mau and his group who told the president that they knew all along that reform could not be based on business support.
Once FDR got that message, he moved ahead with Senator Bob Wagner's labor bill, which guaranteed collective bargaining and established the nature of unfair labor practices; with the Public Utility Holding Company Act; with social security, with unemployment insurance promoted by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins;l with the Banking Act promoted by Marriner Eccles; and with other related bills putting segments of business under regulation.

I often thought that the real driving force behind this legislation was Hugo Black,  who as chairman of a special Senate committee to investigate lobbying  (1935-6), and as head of a special Senate committee investigating ship subsidies and airline subsidies (1933-4),  did more than research historical facts. he used the Congressional hearing as it had never been used before, making it an instrument to achieve reform. he
*pursued financial CHICANERY, (def - trickery  or deception by quibbling (use of ambiguous, Prevaricating *create an incorrect impression/ or irrelevant language or arguments to evade a point at issue) or Sophistry (a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning.)
* helped to quicken the conscience of America and
*to mold public opinion to the need for reforms.
He expended an intensity of effort seldom seen.

Black dug deep for facts and was as relentless as a terrier pursuing a rat. he was charged with being unfair, but he never trafficked in innuendos and slurs, as did some Senate and House investigators who followed
364  him. his standards were high, as they always had been. he did not emerge from Alabama through the usual hierarchy of politics. he announced what he stood for and campaigned relentlessly for it Hugo Black never tried to destroy a man or a woman, only ideas. and through his investigative committees he exposed ideas that he thought were hostile to democratic principles. it was largely Black who made possible FDR's reforms in the financial world.

as Professor Gerald T. Dunne wrote in an article, Hugo Black almost got his 30 hour bill through congress during FDR'S Hundred Day legislative drive. had he succeeded, it might well have aborted Tugwell's unconstitutional NRA, which parceled lawmaking out to those who were supposed to be regulated.

22 - The Witch Hunt in the New Deal

in the 1930s we had come to a crossroads. my IWW friends of the earlier Yakima years had not gone the Russian way. they may have been misguided and they did some ugly things, but most Wobblies were patriots who fought for justice within the framework of our system. now we were faced with competition from an entirely different way of life.

Communists had been active in Washington, DC in the aftermath of the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt did not bring them there; the country, racked with economic problems, had collapsed and gone temporarily to the edge of the abyss. hungry, bitter people joined all sorts of causes. after recognition of the Soviet union, Russian agents operated more freely and when innocent Americans joined groups or committees to promote friendship between the 2 nations, communists sometimes infiltrated them.
some Americans joined the Communist party; I was certain that a few people I knew had done so., though i had no proof of it. their interest, as far as I could tell, was not in bloody overthrow, but in select phases of the Russian experiment such as medical care, collective farms and social security. in this country individual members of our political parties do not always endorse all the plans and precepts of the party of
376  their choice. the same was true - I thought then and still do - of those who joined the Communist party.

23  International Outlook

396  FDR's greatness lay in understanding the social and economic formula for America's domestic survival as well as in his realization of her increasing responsibilities as a member of the world community. his greatness lay also in knowing how to implement abstract programs in terms of practical politics.
in the 1920's and 1930s we were predominantly isolationist. our preoccupation was with internal affairs. my friend, Jerome Franke, who
397 I think had the most creative legal mind of anyone in our time, epitomized that isolationist view in his book Save America First.  later he retracted, as did many Americans. the turning point for the majority was probably Roosevelt's Quarantine Speech delivered in Chicago. in the heartland of isolationism, on Oct. 5, 1937. Roosevelt said:
'it is true that the moral consciousness of the world must recognize the importance of removing injustices and well-founded grievances, but at the same time it must be aroused to the cardinal necessity of honoring sanctity of treaties, of respecting the rights and liberties of others and of putting an end to acts of international aggression. it seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. when an epidemic of physical  disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.
that 'disease',  some thought, was communism. yet I knew by then that there were many diseases: Nazism, anti-Semitism, anti-IWW, anti-Black, anti-Chinese. how would we find the wisdom to avoid false trails? would America in time see the world  as Yakima did the IWW'S?

I later saw other diseases, such as feudalism in South America and the Middle East; the absence of medical care and schools in Vietnam; the absence of jobs in India;  the absence of consumer credit institutions in the Philippines, Peru, Chile and Bolivia;  the absence of representative government and of fair trials in Iran and Brazil. I learned in the Middle East and in Asia in the forties and fifties that affluent America was not on the same wavelength as the people of the slums of the world.

in 1954 I visited Morocco at a time when that country was still a colony of France. before leaving Washington, DC and also in Madrid, Spain, where I stopped off en route, I met some of the non-communist underground working in and out of Morocco. from these people, I learned the names of the Moroccan nationalists who were imprisoned in their own country by the French. then, while in Morocco itself, I found out that three of these nationalists were being held in the large prison in the capital, Rabat.
during my visit, the French high commissioner, who served under

398  my friend Mendes-France, expressed his eagerness to help me in any way he could. the favor i finally asked of him was to be allowed to see these prisoners. the man became almost apoplectic (def - intense enough to cause a stoke) with rage and could hardly talk. all he did was shout,  'Communists, communists!' but according to my information, the men were not communists, nor had they committed any crimes. their only offense was that they clamoured for the independence of their country.
after leaving the high commissioner, I went to a confectionery shop and bought 3 boxes of candies and pastries. I took them at once to the prison, where I knocked on a huge wooden door. there was much creaking of hinges as the door swung slowly open and when I walked in, a French soldier promptly pressed a bayonet against my belly. so escorted, I entered and was taken to the prison inspector, who, learning my mission, fairly hopped about with anger and threatened to lock me up. I encouraged him in his project, saying it would make interesting headlines in Paris and in Washington if he were to imprison a US Supreme Court justice. the inspector kept me there an hour and when i departed I left the 3 boxes for the 3 political prisoners - gifts that I am sure they never received.

the grapevine within the prison was so effective, however, that every man in every cell soon knew I had been there.  by the time I reached Tangier, preparatory to my return to this country, the French had stirred up our State Department, whose people in Tangier soundly criticized me and said it was time I went home.
to be sure, I was not making friends of the French, but i was making new friends of the Moroccans, who, after ousting the French, were soon to have their own government.

had I denounced the nationalist during my stay in Morocco, our State Department, which supported the French, would have been happy. there was nothing I had done there that was inconsistent with any of my judicial functions. but for one to exercise his First Amendment rights and disagree with the State Department amounted almost to treason. this happened in 1954, when Eisenhower was President, but Truman's State Department and LBJ's and Nixon's were not any more tolerant of dissent.
before WWII, I met Jimmie Yen, the dedicated Chinese who had founded the Mass education Movement. I joined his board. we worked on the mainland of China until driven out in 1948; then we

399  worked in Formosa and later in the Philippines, Columbia, Guatemala, Thailand,  South Korea and Kenya. our program was to work through and with local groups on 5 fronts:
improving the livelihood of the peasant
bringing medical care to the villages;
introducing modern agriculture;
providing schools  and eliminating illiteracy
introducing representative government at the village level.

but the State Department and AID never welcomed Jimmie Yen. as the Pentagon became more and more dominant in our policies, THE UNITED STATES CAME TO  (foreign counties)LOOK FOR MILITARY RATHER THAN POLITICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS TO OVERSEAS PROBLEMS.
for many, many years, I had tried to think in terms that offered alternatives to war, such as cooperative world systems. though never an expert, I had my dreams of a peaceful world order. I mad speeches to this effect and attended conferences.  my concept, I felt, would lead not to communism, but to cooperative projects that would enable a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-ideological world to survive.
as early as the thirties, people were saying that FDR's  big mistake was being friendly with Moscow.  even then, everything communist was considered evil. most people, in their ignorance, knew little about the Soviets, Soviet history, or the impact of communism on that ancient land. FDR himself was certainly not a student of Russia, but he did know what Alexis de Tocqueville  had predicted a century earlier - that Russia and the US would emerge as the two foremost nations on earth and could perhaps, face each other in a gigantic power struggle.  Churchill thought that part of the strategy of WW II should have been to contain Russia. FDR felt differently. it was his theory that the peace of the world would depend on the degree to which Moscow and Washington collaborated and worked in harmony. that is why from 1933 on he sought every possible occasion to build bridges of understanding between the 2 nations. that is why, contrary to the advice of some of his own inner circle, he never 'unloaded' on stalin or 'took out after' him. shortly before FDR's death the rumors were that Stalin had been sending him insulting messages, that Stalin was intractable, that FDR would soon have to air publicly the mounting differences between them. the President denied these rumors to me in private, admitting, however, that Stalin was a difficult man. the test of the new world that would emerge after WW II would be its ability to reconcile the new, deep-seated ideological conflicts and not let the emotions behind the strident voices drown out the needs for collaboration and accommodation.

400  on Oct. 21, 1944, shortly before his death, FDR spoke of Soviet-American relations:

'In 1933 a certain lady - who sits at this table in front of me - came back from a trip on which she had attended the opening of a schoolhouse. she had gone to the history and geography class with children 8,9 or 10,  and she told me that she had seen there a map of the world with a great big white space upon it - no name - no information. the teacher told her that it was blank, with no name, because the school board wouldn't let her say anything about that big blank space. Oh, there were only 180  to 200,000,000 people in that space, which was called Soviet Russia.  and there were a lot of children and they were told that the teacher was forbidden by the school board even to put the name of that blank space on the map.
for 16 years before then, the American people and the Russian people had no practical means of communicating with each other. we reestablished those means. and today we are fighting with the Russians against common foes - and we Know that the Russian contribution to victory had been and will continue to be, gigantic. 
FDR had the political genius to call the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and in the fall of 1944, over tremendous opposition, launch the United Nations.  I talked with him about that strategy many times and we discussed the errors made by Woodrow Wilson regarding the League of Nations which I as a youth had fervently supported. knowing those mistakes, FDR attempted to to avoid their repetition. he felt that Wilson's main problem was that he had not prepared the country Before the fact. he said that 'the American people have to be brought along slowly.
Roosevelt was a political realist who did not think much of legal technicalities. he talked about the proposal to give veto power to the member nations of the UN Security Council that would render that agency impotent to act unless the vote were unanimous. that veto proposal, by the way, was not a Soviet one, as is commonly imagined; rather, it was American in origin.

FDR shrugged it off as unimportant one way or the other:  'if the US and Russia can work together, the UN will be\401  be a success. if they cannot work together, the UN will fail - veto or no veto.

one of our last talks relating to the UN concerned where its site should be - in the States or in another country. he felt that it should not be located in Geneva, as that place was associated with the ill-fated League of Nations; he was determined that the UN should have its headquarters in this country. 'where in this country?' he asked me one day.
I suggested Kansas.
'Alf  Landon's state? he asked.
I said that a spot in the wide-open spaces of Kansas should be selected and an international community built on it. I pointed out that if the UN offices were located in a metropolitan center, the Black delegates could have severe housing difficulties. also, in a large city, the delegates would tend to disperse at day's end, while in a secluded Kansas spot they would be together around the clock, getting to know each other, hopefully on  a more understanding basis. FDR liked the idea but thought it was not 'politically feasible'; he was probably right.

it is, of course, impossible to predict what FDR'S management of our Asian policy would have been had he lived. it is, however, very doubtful that he would have agreed to a return of Indochina to the French. he knew something of the strength of the underground and its nationalistic overtones. he talked with me about this.
HoChi Minh was part of that underground and so was Ngo Dinh Diem. they wee ideologically opposed,  but that opposition had not surfaced. FDR would, I believe, have worked out a formula for the independence from foreign domination of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. that was the direction of his thinking. moreover, he had grave doubts about the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek. when he died, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai were on the ascendancy. 

our Asian specialists leaned toward support of Mao. FDR  was moving cautiously. had he lived, i believe he would have met with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, taken a measure of the  men and charted his course.
the reason why FDR recognized Russia was a good clue as to why he would have cast in his lot with Mao. he knew that Chiang Kai-shek had been a dismal failure, that China was one of the great powers to reckon with and that world peach necessitated harmonious collaboration between the US, Russia and China. perhaps my wish dictates this conclusion. as I say, it is quite conjectural.

402  the whispered justification for the 'war' in Vietnam was to countercheck China. FDR would never have swallowed that. moreover, those of us who knew Asia knew that the vietnam conflict was doomed from the start. FDR would, I think, have known as much. moreover, he knew enough about Asia to have more than a premonition that Chiang Kai-shek represented not the wave of the future, but a past that had failed.
unhappily, the broad outlook that FDR advocated passed with his death. America, in its actions abroad, became more 'imperialistic' than the British at their worst. Truman, Acheson and the Pentagon - and Johnson and Nixon - became the architects of that new American  foreign policy. the slogans of american imperialism made good politics at home and we were soon saturated with fears of communism. the Cold War made anti-communism as easy program to follow blindly. the blueprint drawn in the fifties became the inspiration for disastrous overseas operations in the 1960s and 1970s.

America became quickly regimented and we lost our perspective in world affairs. by the 1960s and 1970s we were 'policing' the world; we had become the great moralists, using our Army and Air Force and Navy  to let the people of the world know the kind of government we thought they Should Not have.  the pundits in Washington, DC, said we had inherited the role of the British and were now keeping the world 'safe'. FDR would turn in his grave at the thought of it.

25  Brandeis and Black

439 the time came when I had to tell FDR that I was resigning my SEC position. my salary was $10,000, but with a young family, it cost nearly $15,000 a year to live in Washington. I had been there 5 years and owed $25,000,  largely on my insurance policies. Yale wanted me to return and be dean of the Law School, beginning in the fall of 1939. there was nothing I would have liked more, except one thing, and that was being Solicitor General - the lawyer's lawyer. but the list of aspirants for that position was long, and I could not afford to wait it out in Washington. so I  gave up any thought of the S.G. job and accepted the deanship at Yale.
the day i told FDR that i would have to leave by June, 1939,  he said rather wist full, 'We'll see.  our relationship was such that i knew he would have the final word and would probably come up with some distasteful assignment which I should have difficulty declining. I had not the slightest idea I would ever be on the Court. it never was a part of my dreams. I had visited the Court, as I liked to watch it in operation, but never once in all my life did it even cross my mind that I might one day sit there.
on occasion I would go across town to hear a case of SEC interest argued. Holmes, whom I last saw as a shriveled, hunched old man, was
 440  now gone. there was the Jovian Hughes, the easygoing Roberts, the lean, sour McReynolds, the reserved Sutherland, the professorial Stone, and the bulldog Brandeis.

I visited Stone - my first law professor - regularly at his home, which he had built at 24th Street and Wyoming Avenue, N.W. , where he had a spacious office.

I also came to know Brandies intimately.
I was too modest to search Justice Brandies out when i went to Washington, though our interests in financial as well as in other matters were so similar. but I  had not long to wait to meet him. one day he called  - not through a secretary, for he had none. Mrs. Brandeis handled all correspondence that he could not manage by longhand. this call was one he made personally and in his high resonant voice he asked if i could come by his apartment and see him the next Sunday at 4 o'clock. he lived on California Street, right off Connecticut and his apartment, while neat, seemed threadbare. 

nevertheless the Brandeis home was radiant with friendship. the evening meal. when guests were present, was usually soup, followed by boiled chicken from which the soup had been made and capped with a fruit dessert. the party was over by about 10, since the Brandeis working day started at 5 in the morning.
in those days the Court sat in the old room under the dome of the Capitol there was no Supreme Court Building, so the Justices worked at home. for his office, Brandeis had an apartment in the same building, on the floor above his residence.
after that first day in 1934, I was with Brandeis about once a week. he drew me to him to find out what was going on. my work interested him above that of anyone in the city, for I dealt in high finance, the subject that had absorbed him in his early days. he commented over and again on the parallelism between my investigation and the one made by the Pujo Committee in 1912 to 1913, with which he had been closely connected. he asked me searching questions, making me recite chapter by chapter what I had discovered. he was fascinated with the anatomy of high finance and commented that the sons of those he had investigated were apparently no better than their fathers had been.

 in his early days Brandeis had looked into the affairs of he New Haven Railroad and followed the machinations that seemed to plague that road. he exacted a promise from me:  that when I finished work at the SEC and returned to Yale, I would write a book exposing the  anatomy of the complex money matters of the New Haven. it was a
441   promise I asked him to relieve me of when I was confirmed for the Court and he did so. that sad chapter in American finance was never written.
I learned about Zionism from Brandeis and caught some of his zeal for the  establishment of a jewish state. Brandeis belonged to a different school of thought than that of those who eventually created the State of Israel. chaim weizmann, the Zionist leader, in time became Brandeis' chief opponent. Brandeis, born in america, was not a product of European ghettos and was not steeped in Jewish culture. his commitment to Israel was intellectual rather than emotional. he thought of building a state based on economic and social measures, with the aid of businessmen, whether they were Zionists or not. the Weizmann school eventually prevailed, based on the principle that israel should be composed of ardent keepers of the faith. although Brandeis withdrew from active participation in Israeli matters, the pull of Zionism (worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel 1895-1900) was evident in every talk he had with me.

Brandeis thought that the area of Palestine should be developed for Jews and non-Jews alike. he was not caught up in what inspired some of the other Zionists - the  desperate necessity to save the remnants of the Jewish European community. modernization, the use of technicians and engineers,  creation of a society not restricted to Jews - these were his concerns. I suppose one might say that he was less nationalistic and less concerned with religious matters than other supporters of a Jewish state.
he remained, however, an ardent supporter of the Zionist cause despite criticism of him from other people in the movement. Felix Frankfurter, likewise, was enormously involved in these were his concerns. I suppose one might say that he was less nationalistic and less concerned with religious matters than other supporters of a jewish state.
he remained, however, an ardent supporter of the Zionist cause despite criticism of him from other people in the movement. Felix Frankfurter, likewise, was enormously involved in these matters.

I was with Brandeis the day Hitler invaded Poland. he saw his people facing new and horrible ordeals under the Nazis. he paced his apartment, old and bowed, his hands behind his back, whispering 'Will england fight?'  the Chamberlain motif 'Peace in our time. he knew to be a phony and he wondered when the world would wake up .
Brandeis was not a philosopher lie Cardozo or a salesman like Frankfurter. Brandeis was a modern isaiah. he was a mighty man of action who, having found the facts and determined the nature and contours of the problem, moved at once. he admired Jefferson and talked to me often about him, not only about Jefferson's interest in the First Amendment but also about his inventive genius in creating useful articles. Brandeis also admired Jefferson's philosophy concerning private ownership, small units of business and agriculture and an  active democracy.

442  while still in law practice, Brandeis became interested in the promotion of state minimum-wage and maximum-hour legislation. Oregon had passed a law prohibiting women from working more than 10 hours a day in factories and laundries. Brandeis wrote an amicus brief in support of the  Oregon law when it came before the Supreme Court in 1908.  the brief became famous overnight, for it contained not a single citation of legal precedent, only citations to social and economic treatises dealing with the subject.
Brandeis was intent on educating judges as to the facts of life - as to why doctors, social workers, and others thought the maximum-hour legislation was essential to the well-being of the workers and of the legislation was essential to the well-being of the workers and of the community where they lived. why, he asked, should the ultimate wisdom of judges be found in dusty lawbooks? why should not judges be abreast of life? that type of brief  - revolutionary as it was in 1908 - came in time to be known as a 'Brandeis brief'.
while practicing in Boston, Brandeis gave much of his time to public service without payment of a fee - preserving the subway system, devising a sliding scale for the gas system and promoting the savings-bank life-insurance plan. his investigations into high finance led him to Wall Street and he teamed up for a while with Samuel Untermeyer to help expose the exploitative power of the money trust. out of these sorties came his books, The Money Trust and Other People's Money.  he was retained by the  interstate Commerce Commission (ICC),  as special counsel to help it pass on the application of Eastern roads to put into effect a horizontal 5% increase of freight rates (31 ICC 351).

Brandeis' role as arbiter in the garment industry led to his creation of the famous 'protocaol' for a permanent government of labor relations in the industry and his promotion of the preferential union shop.
Brandeis' role as arbiter in the garment industry led to his creation of the famous 'protocol' for a permanent government of labor relations in the industry and his promotion of the preferential union shop.
Brandeis' various activities aroused the ire of the Establishment. so when Woodrow Wilson sent his name to the Senate for a seat on the Supreme Court, the powers-that-be moved in to defeat him. hearings started Feb. 9, 1916, lasted until Mar. 15, 1916 and resumed again May 12, 1916. Brandeis was finally confirmed June 1, 1916; 47 yeas, 22 nays and 27 not voting

Brandeis made many notable contributions to the Bar and to the Bench. one of these has gone largely unnoticed. after he took his seat on the Court, Brandeis began to review petitions for certiorari.  (Certiorari is a writ to correct errors in a lower court and, in the Federal

443  system, is discretionary, four of nine Justices being necessary for a grant.

many of these petitions for certiorari raised racial questions. such questions may involve only state law  - as when a state anti discrimination measure is enforced and state law questions are governed by the state courts. federal questions are the only issues in state litigation which are reviewable by the Supreme Court.  but in order to be reviewed, they must be raised. thus a federal problem involved in state litigation cannot be reviewed by the Supreme Court unless it has been raised in a state trial, preserved on appeal through the hierarchy of state courts and then presented to the Supreme Court of the  United States. Brandeis soon discovered that many important federal questions presented with clarity and persuasion before our Court had not been properly raised in lower courts and therefore could not be considered.
this failure was explicable on the grounds that the Black lawyer had not been as well trained as his white opponent, since education in the Black law schools of that day was not what it should have been.  so Brandeis got hold of Charles H. Houston, a Black Washington, DC lawyer who was one of the best ever to appear before our Court and whose legal training had been at the Harvard Law School.
this was in the late twenties, when Houston was vice-dean of the Howard Law School. while Howard offered no course in Federal Jurisdiction until about 10  years later, the Brandeis proposal won instant approval. Houston  put the students in his course on constitutional law to work on specific problems, presenting the  question as to how to raise, in a trial court, the precise federal constitutional question that would challenge a housing code, or voting barrier, or other racist measure, and how to preserve it on appeal.
Brandeis, lie all judges, received a lot of mail asking help in getting a job, pleading that he intervene in some agency proceeding to protect a person and the like. Brandeis would write on these letters 'J.P.P. and they are so marked in the collection of his papers at the  University of Louisville. 'J.P.P.' meant 'Judicial Proprieties prohibit'  and Brandeis would pen a letter in his own hand to that effect and send in back to the person who had asked for help.
Brandeis was not unique in being a man of rectitude, but he became more and more unusual as a man who felt that a public office was a public trust and not a position to exploit for private gain.

Brandeis was not unique in being a man of rectitude, but he became more and more unusual as a man who felt that a public office was a public trust and not a position to exploit for private gain.

Brandeis said in the Olmstead case in 1928, 'decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the

444  same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.  in a government of laws, existence of the  government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. for good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. crime is contagious. if the  government becomes a lawbreaker,  it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy' (277 US438,485).

since that time government has been recurringly lawless as respects entrapment (an agent inciting a crime); wiretaps, where no appropriate warrant is obtained; pilfering of public monies; flouting of election was;  the circulation of scurrilous (def - grossly or obscenely abusive) literature concerning political opponents and even the burglarizing of private files for political purposes. lying an deception have grown as practices of government officials - practices that do more to undermine us than the 'subversion' against which we have long inveighed.
in american history, lawlessness by government and the great decline in public morality are not new. they have recurred throughout our history. in the last century and in this one the public treasury has been dipped into through direct as well as devious means. Teapot Dome was the high-water mark of this type of corruption.
ever since WW I our government has been increasingly lawless as it caters to popular fears and indeed generates them by cries of 'subversion' and 'un-Americanism'.  such manufactured fears have led to constitutional shortcuts of great dimensions. what Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General for Wilson, did to hapless foreigners in new England in the 1920s was a lasting scar, because it flouted constitutional government to a government subject to the will of the politicians in power. a notorious example of this neglect of the Constitution is found in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial.

slowly but perceptibly the end came to justify the means. government agents incited weak people to commit crimes which were then tolerated by the courts because 'deceit' was deemed necessary for effective law enforcement. the persistence with which the third degree has survived is another example.  electronic surveillance has evolved from crude eavesdropping to sophisticated technology.

it is this kind of lawlessness that Brandeis feared the most. Brandeis can be understood not in terms of conservatism or liberalism, but in terms of morality:  the end never justifies the means.  in the area of law

445  enforcement he included government as well as individuals in pleading for the exercise of moral judgments.
every official in every branch of government is responsible to the law and to the Constitution. the higher he is, the more important it is that he represent the finest of our constitutional traditions.

to give an example of the wariness a public official must exercise:  in 1948, the year Thomas Dewey was running for the Presidency, I was invited to Portland to address the Oregon State Bar Association, which put me up at the Benson Hotel. when i checked out of the hotel, I was told that the bill had been taken care of by the association. 
by october of that year I was back in Washington for the opening of Court. the Presidential campaign was getting hotter and hotter and one day I received a telephone call from a friend, Lindsay C. Warren,  the Comptroller General of the United States. he told me had had learned that I had been a guest of the Oregon Bar Association at the Benson Hotel in Portland and that they association had not paid the bill but had routed it to a shipbuilding company that had a contract with the US Navy. the contractor had in fact paid the hotel bill.
the Comptroller knew about the incident because one of Dewey's own men had been tipped off and this man checked with Lindsay Warren  to make sure the facts were correct. the Comptroller looked into the matter, reported to Dewey that it was all true and promptly called me. i phoned the Benson hotel to get the  amount of the bill and immediately sent off a check in payment.  I also wrote a letter excoriating the president of the Oregon Bar for doing anything that would link a member of the Court with such a highly unethical practice. although the bill, as I recall, was not much over $50, that story would have made headlines in all the papers. it would even, perhaps, have hurt Truman(who had tried to get me to be his running mate), not because i  had done anything immoral but because it could be made to appear that I had. this was politics capitalizing on deceit.

Brandeis thought that people in the public service should be selfless. and so they should be. but there seem to be very few of that breed today. by the time of LBJ personal aggrandizement had become the style. it was, I fear, a part of the return of the heard to a primitive selfishness that could destroy us.

Brandeis would have been appalled to see the use of leverage by a congressman of senator to get a radio or TV license for himself or his family. he would, I  think, be appalled at the practice I have mentioned
446  before whereby Pentagon officers step out of their uniforms into positions with private companies doing business with the pentagon. he would have asked this searching question:  'How can an officer who had supervised procurement be a good watchdog for the  public if on retirement his reward is going to be a nice, fat job with one of the  companies making millions out of government largesse?
Brandeis would also have been shocked f he had lived to know that William H. Tucker, the man who in 1968 was chairman of the ICC, which  approved the Penn-Central merger, shortly resigned and became head of the old New Haven, which was required by the ICC decision to become an integral part of Penn-Central.
Mergers depressed him because they turned entrepreneurs into clerks, independent businessmen into
faceless lackeys serving some faceless business bureaucracy. the gravitation of power to the center depressed Brandeis for the same reason. States' rights to him had a very special meaning- they were not to be used as an excuse for the Establishment to keep a minority enslaved. a state was a sovereign political entity, as a member of which, the common man had a chance to be heard and to make his views effective.
the computer world would have depressed Brandeis. he saw the forces of disintegration gathering early in this century and it made him sad. the automobile was part of what he disliked. he spoke to me many times about the transformation it was making  - not in urban sprawl alone,  but in the character of people.  an automobile desensitized the driver, making the polite person crude and aggressive. it is the same with any machine. one person in a bomber high above the earth can wipe out thousands of people without sight of blood and without hearing a child's whimper.

man become transformed when a machine separates him from his fellow man.  man is at his best when he stands on his own feet - accountable to family, to neighbores, to employers, to God. man is at his worst running with the heard, for then individual responsibility is ignored and individual achievement is not put to the test.
the small men who followed Brandeis in economic affairs mostly ridiculed him for wanting to turn back the clock. but Brandeis' idea was different: he wanted to put the individual and the individual's privacy first and to establish only the controls that would keep the individual from being regimented. (def - to form into an organized group, usually for the purpose of rigid or complete control.)

this line of thought ran through all of Brandeis' opinions, through all his papers, through all his talk. Brandeis had spiritual links with
447  Jeffersonas he did with Isaiah, and he lived every day by the faith he acquired from them.

he would be saddened to death if he could see what happened to his dream for this nation.

there is in Brandeis a universal note.  we can reahce the moon and top all secrets of the universe and yet not survive if  we do not serve the soul of man. we serve the soul of man only when we honor individual achievements and respect individual idiosyncrasies. we serve the  soul of man only when a man's worth - not his race, creed or ideology - becomes our basic value.

the nation or the world can be smothered and controlled by a military-industrial complex or by a socialist regime or by some other totalitarian group. but in time the indivdual will rebel. man, though presently enmeshed, will seek freedom just as he does today in Russia and in Czechoslovakia and just as he did in the Watts area of Los Angeles. the struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself on the one hand and on the other, the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience. at some desperate moment in history, a great effort is made once more for the  renewal of individual dignity. and so it will be from now to eternity.

these ideas of freedom did not of course originate with Brandeis.  but through his opinions as well as the example of his life, he articulated them and showed they could be practical. that is why Brandeis will always remain a revolutionary symbol.
when I learned, after the event, that Brandeis had gone to FDR and asked that I be named to take his place on the Court when he retired on Feb.  13, 1939,  I was the proudest human alive.

I , of course, never served on the Court with Brandeis, but Hugo Black did. for some reason I do not understand, Black and Brandeis were never close. Brandeis came from a more priviliged background than either Hugo or i. we 2 had been exposed to raw-boned  experiences. Brandeis did not grow up with policemen shooting at him.  whether that happened in freight yards or in a ghetto, the experience leaves its mark on a man.
Brandeis and Black served together on the Court from Oct., 1937. to Feb. 1939.  and perhaps something happened during that time that affected Black's attitudes. whatever it was, Black kept it to himself.
yet so far as due process in criminal trials was concerned and the constitutional impossibility of government ever to play an ignoble role,

448   Black and Brandeis thought pretty much alike. Brandeis probably gave a more robust content to the Fourth Amendment that did Black's construction, but that was a minor difference. they stood together on the First Amendment and on the Fifth.
Hugo Black was fiercely intent on every point of law he presented. he was emphatic, concise and clear. there was no mistaking where he stood. but there was no fierceness directed to his opposition - only to their ideas. I never heard him say an unkind word about any Justice, no matter how deeply opposed the 2 were. he never indulged in any personal aspersions, no matter how heated the arguments. I think perhaps Bob Jackson at times thought Hugo was personally insulting, but such was never his purpose - and he had only the highest respect for Bob. 

when I was rolled on by a horse and sent to Tucson, Arizona, for a long convalescence, Hugo came out to see me, staying a week. he played tennis each day at the university and loafed with me the rest of the time. i came to have a very close relationship with him as a result of that experience.

Hugo loved company and long conversations. his spacious garden in his exquisite Alexandria home was ideal for that purpose during spring and summer. he loved to entertain there; and when, during  the Korean War, the Court held on June 2, 1952, that Truman's seizure of the steel mills was unconstitutional, Hugo asked me what I thought of his idea of inviting Truman to his home for an evening after the decision came down. I thought it a capital idea. so in 2 weeks Hugo  extended  the invitation and Truman accepted. it was a stag (def - men only) and only Truman and members of the Court were present. Truman was gracious though a bit  testy at the beginning of the evening. but after the bourbon and canapes were passed, he turned to Hugo and said, 'Hugo, I don't much care for your law but, by golly, this bourbon is good. the evening was a great step froward in human relations, and to Hugo Black, good human relations were the secret of successful government.

for years Hugo took off for Florida during the winter recess, as he loved the sun on his back. he loved Washington, DC, in the summer  - even its humidity; and he seldom left the city when vacation time came. he read avidly, marking the pages of books with which he disagreed  - a practice that misled the minister who preached Hugo's funeral service. finding passages concerning the virtues of 'natural law'
449  all marked in Hugo's books, the minister assumed that 'natural law' was Hugo's dish. natural law, however, was anathema to him,  for he felt that it was the source of the judge-made law concerning substantive due process that the olod Court had inflicted on the nation between 1882 and 1937.

Clay County, Alabama, his home county, was very close to Hugo's heart. so was the state of Alabama, where he had practiced law, served as prosecutor and run for the Senate. the dominant opinion in Alabama favored school segregation, as a matter of constitutional law, Hugo was against it - being one of the four, the others being Burton, Minton and I , who voted to reverse when
Brown v. Board of Education  ( 347US. 483) was first argued in Dec. 1952.

but Alabama rejected that view. when Hugo Black's law class at the  university failed to invite him (the outstanding member of the class) to its 50th reunion in 1956, Hugo was crushed. he read with tolerant eyes everything his state did, except those matters that seemed to him to Trench On (def - encroach or infringe on) constitutional rights. then he was very upset, but never rancorous or bitter.

Hugo Black was probably the best storyteller of my time. I regret I never took the time to make notes and work the jokes into a brochure. like the following joke, they usually pertained to Clay County customs or Clay County law practice.
it seems that a sharecropper was charged with the crime of stealing the mule of the landlord. the latter was rich and domineering, without may friends among the common people. the evidence against the defendant was overwhelming, so much so that he did not take the stand. the judge charged the jury, laying down the law meticulously. in 5 minutes the jury returned.

'have you reached a verdict, Mr. Foreman? asked the judge.
'we have, Your Honor.
'then hand it to the clerk.
the clerk put on his glasses, took the paper, unfolded it, cleared his throat and said, 'we the jury find the defendant not guilty, provided that he returns the mule.
the judge brought his gavel down sharply, saying, 'there is no such verdict in the law. the defendant is either guilty or not guilty. after giving the charge all over again the judge told the jury to retire and come back with a lawful verdict.
the jury returned in 5 minute and the judge asked the foreman,  'Have you reached a verdict?

'we have, Your Honor.
'then hand it to the clerk.
the clerk put on his glasses, unfolded the paper, cleared his throat, and read:  'We the jury find the defendant not guilty. he can keep the mule.
Hugo Black, like Felix Frankfurter and Harlan Stone, was an ardent proselytizer of his constitutional views, seeking to convert any 'way ward' Brother on the Court. in his later years that aspect of his character waned, perhaps due to lack of energy. but in his prime there was no more fervent evangelist than Hugo Black.
he had been a Sunday School  teacher for years in Alabama and that background kept surfacing all his life. he had been an active Democrat and his personal  support of the  old historic characters in that party was whole-hearted. thus he was offended when i told him that in my view William Jennings Bryan was a bag of wind. it was not only his party fealty that made him react in that way. he never had an unkind or uncharitable thing to say about anyone he had ever known in public life. in each of the - Democrat, Republican, Socialist - there was some good and it was the good that he always mentioned.  that is one reason those who knew him well invariably loved him. and those who loved him, as I did, would have gone to the very end of the road for him.

when I came on the Court Hugo Black talked to me about his idea of having every vote on every case made public. in cases taken and argued, the vote of each Justice was eventually known. but in cases where appeals were dismissed out of hand or certiorari denied, no votes were recorded publicly.  i thought his idea an excellent one and backed it when he proposed to the conference that it be adopted. but the requisite votes were not available then or subsequently. as a result he and I started to note our dissents from denials of certiorari and dismissal of appeal in important cases. gradually the practice spread to a few other Justices; and finally I ended up in the 60s  noting my vote in all cases where dismissals or denials were contrary to my convictions.
when Hugo was 81 he had some cataracts removed and seemed to be in good health. he hit tennis balls one hot day with his wife, Elizabeth, and had a very slight stroke doing so, but when the 1970 term of Court started, he seemed fit. in May, 1971, we had a conference and no one noted that he looked ill. his knees, however, buckled when he was returning to his chambers, and he was put to bed with a high fever. but by the time the Pentagon Papers case was argued on June 26, 1971, he seemed to have regained his old 

451   strength and fevor, pouring all of it into one of the best opinions he ever wrote.  (403 US at 714) shortly there after he was in Bethesda Naval Hospital with temporal arteritis, from which he died on Septl  25, 1971
both Black and I were one with Brandeis in his insight into the corporate world and its chicanery. (def - 'to arrange', deception by trickery or deception) we also stood with Brandeis  in his passion to protect small and medium-sized companies and for participatory democracy in which all classes took part.
Brandeis was Wilson's spokesman in support of the  Clayton Act. his testimony before Congress on that measure should be required reading in government courses. the Sherman Act had been used by the judiciary to break the Pullman strike and ultimately to put Eugene Debs in jail. the Clayton Act took labor out from under the antitrust laws, declaring, 'the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.
the other major provision  promoted by Brandeis was the prohibition of an acquisition of stock of one corporation by another where the effect 'may be to substantially lessen competition' or 'tend top create a monopoly in any line of commerce.
the  hole that Brandeis and the Clayton Act did not succeed in plugging up was to prohibit the acquisition of assets of one company by another, thus producing a like effect. that was not done until the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950.
but Black and Brandeis saw eye to eye on that problem. they were indeed brothers under the skin. I have written this account only to state why it is that though all my personal associations on the Court have been warm, congenial and enduring,  I was ideologically closer to Brandeis and to Black than to any others.

26  Appointment to the Court

ambition can be a gnawing, warping, destructive force.  I knew several men whose one ambition was to be on the US Supreme Court. each would have made a fine Justice. none of them, however, made it. and each was bitter about it. those running for office can make their campaigns and sell themselves to a constituency. but a Supreme Court appointment is a Presidential prerogative and precedents usually have their won ideas about major appointments of that character. those who receive an appointment from a President must still clear the Senate and that is not always an easy hurdle, as our statistics show. from between 1787 and 1973, 22 appointees to the Court were rejected by the Senate.

...I never even dreamed of being there. I did dream of being Chief Forester. I dreamed of being a professor of English literature and, later,
453  dean of the Yale Law School. I dreamed of being simultaneously a professor both at the Harvard Business School and at the Yale Law School.  I dreamed of being Solicitor General. I dreamed of being an advocate like Hiram Johnson, William Borah, Louis D. Brandeis.

Mother always wanted me to be a minister and follow in Father's steps. but my reaction to that was always instant and adverse; it got so that I asked Mother please never to mention it again.

I never had a yen for public office - not even for the position of may or congressman, let alone governor or senator. indeed, I grew up holding all such offices in disrespect, as I thought that most officeholders were either corrupt or represented some special, selfish interest. it was not until I was at the SEC and worked with Congress that I came to regard the majority of congressmen and senators as worthy public servants...

454  ...I thought FDR had sacrificed principle for expediency in the Court packing plan. the principle was the maintenance of an independent judiciary. to e sure, the rulings of the Court had been setbacks to the President's political program. but we had only to read the mortality tables to know that new judges would soon take the place of the old ones and perhaps judges of a different vintage would view the problems differently.  I said 'perhaps' because, in at least the instance of the invalidation of the NRA,  the Court was plainly right and FDR plainly wrong. 

when it came to the Court, FDR had an Oedipus complex, as Draper once put it. to many people the Court is a father symbol and as such, it is either loved or hated. that is why so much discussion of the Court throughout history has been  emotional rather than rational. that was one of FDR's blind spots, of which he was never fully conscious...
456  ...the next retirement was Brandeis, who sent his notice to FDR on Feb. 13. 1939. though I was close to Brandeis, I had no inkling he was going to retire. nor did I know that he had been in touch with FDR, urging that I be named to take his place. nor did news of his retirement reach me at the SEC  that day. the first I knew of it was when I reached my friend Edmund Pavenstadt's place in Georgetown for cocktails that evening. it was a stag affair, and when I walked in, Pavy

457  called for quiet, saying that Arthur Krock of the New York Times had an announcement to make. Arthur raised his glass and said, 'To the next Justice of the Supreme Court.

'Who had retired? I asked.
'Brandeis.
'And to whom are we drinking?
'To you, of course, said Arthur.
...I shrugged the whole thing off and gave no serious thought to it..

460   ...(a) March day I was playing with my SEC associates and had reached the ningth hole, when a breathless caddy ran up and said the White House wanted me. I went into the clubhouse and telephoned, to learn that FDR wanted to see me at once. so I cleaned up  and drove to the White House, where I was ushered into the Oval Office.

I felt in my bones that FDR was going to offer me another job. as I have said, I had told him I was leaving in June  to be dean at Yale and I felt he would try to keep me in Washington a while longer. I knew  he had other tough jobs and that my days at the SEC  were numbered, even if i did not return to Yale. there was, for example, a vacancy in the chairmanship of the FCC. that agency had been rocked, not with scandal, but with inefficiency and i had heard the President say he would clean it up. there were other things around town tha needed doing. but somehow or other the FCC  job was the one I felt I'd be saddled with. all the way in from the Manor Club, I figured and figured how I could turn the Old Man down. the FCC  was the last thing in town I wanted. yet if I were 'drafted', what could I do?
these were my thoughts as I walked into the Oval Room to receive his hearty greeting. my worst fears were confirmed. 
'I have a new job for you.  he pased to let the words sink in.
'It's a mean job, a dirty job, a thankless job.
my heart aank, as that described the FCC  perfectly.
'It's a job you won't like.
I was sure he was right.
'It's a job you'll detest.
I was in silent agreement as he lit a cigarette.
then looking up and smiling, he said, 'this job is something like being in jail.
then I knew it was not the FCC. But I could not figure out what else he had in mind. even than the Supreme Court never crossed my mind.
finally he said,  'Tomorrow I am sending your name to the Senate as Louis Brandeis' successor.
I was dumfounded.  and I walked in a daze until the following noon, when my name went to the Senate. the first thing I did was to send a note to Bandeis by messenger, telling him how proud I was. but even  then I did not know that Brandeis had told FDR that I was his candidate for his seat.

463  ...I took my seat on April 17, 1939...

464  the tradition had been that Justices never even voted in public elections. Brandeis stressed the importance of a Justice being aloof from life. in the long past some Justices may have voted, but by the 1930's most of them followed the Brandeis precept. I took a different course. since i would be paying as heavy an income tax as my neighbor, I decided to participate in local, state and national affairs, except and unless a particular issue was likely to get into the court and unless the activity was plainly political or partisan. that meant I would register and vote;p that I would fight to raise the level of the public schools back home in Yakima County; that I would become immersed in conservation, opposing river pollution, advocating wildlife protection and the like; that I would travel and speak out on foreign affairs. i would not , of course,l campaign, nor would I become involved in activities of the Executive branch. but i would exercise the rights of first-class citizenship to the fullest extent possible.
and so I increased my civic activities and decided to write and speak on public issues. I traveled widely, visiting most nations in the world;  i wrote books and articles about them, their people and their problems.  I traveled at home, giving some lectures and expressing my views on our foreign policies.
I attended international conferences. I became absorbed with the idea of developing Rules of Law for nations - since law is the only alternative to force that man has devised and force is now far too dangerous to use.
I was among the first to suggest that a world agency control the manufacture and use of atomic energy. I helped to draft the 1946 resolution to that effect at the Rollins college Conference.

conservation was my second interest. I hiked, rode horseback and took canoe trips through all parts of the US and often related my experiences in public. I became increasingly alarmed at the pollution of our rivers, at the darkening skies due to smog, at the silting of rivers due to overgrazing and reckless logging practices. I saw our beaches despoiled by industry and Lake Erie turning into a cesspool I saw highways destroying wilderness areas. I was shocked at the manner in which 'development' programs were ruining the wilderness recreational potential of the nation.

I wrote, spoke, and debated these subjects. I joined conservation

465   groups. I marched, hiked and protested against the despoilers and their tactics.

I did indeed try to be a first-class citizen to the fullest extent compatible with my judicial duties. 

a person who follows my course is bound to be criticized. anyone in public life who deals with controversial issues makes enemies and an enemy is eager to cut one down for any reason, great or small. as it happened, some of my travels produced writings and statements that inflamed some people.
...even attending a reception at the Soviet Embassy often brought down the wrath of the press and of others who voiced anti-communist sentiment. going to Soviet Russia, which I did in 1955, aroused the lions.
many people assume that a Supreme Court Justice should be remote and aloof from life and should play no part even in community affairs. but if Justices are to enjoy First Amendment rights, they should not be relegated to the promotion of innocuous (def - not harmful or injurious) ideas...

it is all right with the press for a Justice to be associated with an institution (ie. a university) that deals with staid ideas, but not with one that explores all ideas, whether staid or explosive. the press Justices with the status quo, not with forces of change...
in another area , it seems to me that rules for disclosure of outside interests by federal judges are quite capricious. although judicial codes of ethics have rather continuously imporved over the years, the present code, adopted by the American Bar Association and approved by the Judicial Conference, provides for no disclosure by a judge of his income from investments but does require diclosure of his income from writing, lecturing, teaching and speaking. thus the amount of book

466   royalties muct be made public but not the amount of interest on bonds and dividends on stock (Canon 6) ...
the prejudices or predilections of a judge may be greatly influenced by his investments...