The Young Apollo and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  I had to chuckle at this further evidence that, despite a lifetime of experiencing the disastrous folly of her clan, she would still take the word of a crazy old Slavic dowager over that of her brilliant spouse.

  "So you see the guillotine being erected in Times Square for the likes of us?"

  "Well, I suppose it would be better than being thrown down a mineshaft like the poor dear Grand Duchess Elizabeth. I'm not thinking only of myself, Langdon. I've been through all that. I'm thinking of you."

  "And I appreciate it, my dear. But if there should be a revolution, I doubt they'd want our lives. Our money should satisfy them. Though it won't do them much good after it's been spread around, as your former countrymen have already discovered. And you and I can go down to Virginia and hole up in what's left of the family mansion. Actually, it's not in too bad shape. I've kept it up. As a matter of fact we might both rather like it. In my end is my beginning."

  "Oh, Langdon, do you think we really could do that?" Irina's voice took on a note of enthusiasm that was new to me. "It might be like the Ukraine! Why don't we go now? Do we have to wait for a revolution?"

  I had a sudden picture of Irina in the wide field behind the back of the old house, gazing at the distant blue hills. She would belong there!

  3

  Well, we didn't have a revolution. We had the New Deal instead. And in lieu of losing my money, I made a pot of gold out of it. I became in the early nineteen thirties one of the principal proponents, in the federal courts, especially the supreme, of the unconstitutionality of FDR's social legislation. I saw myself as the champion of the individual against the government. Of course, my opponents maintained that I was the champion of the giant corporation against the government, which brought our conflict into sharp focus, for indeed I tended, and still tend, to identify the corporation with the individual. What is it, legally and even morally, but a person? And why should it not be entitled to the same rights and privileges? The child has grown into a man and should not be forever subject to a hovering nurse.

  In this respect I should mention an experience that happened in the year 1907 which very much accentuated my early faith in the individual citizen as opposed to his democratically elected representative. It was the year of the panic, and one of my clients, a banker, took me with him to the library of the great J. P. Morgan, where we waited patiently, even reverently, for our turn to pass into the vast, high-ceilinged office hung with Renaissance masterpieces and gleaming with silver and gold, and submit our proposal of how to deal with the financial crisis. Never can I forget the sight of the silent tycoon, with his great glaring eyes and misshapen nose, bending over the game of solitaire that, listening without comment to my client's proposition. He did not cease to play, simply dismissing us with a grunt when we had finished. He did not adopt my client's plan, but he did adopt another one suggested on that same day, and chaos was averted. President Teddy Roosevelt complained that Morgan treated him as an equal. TR was wrong! Morgan, quite correctly, treated him as his inferior.

  By the nineteen thirties, however, the pendulum had swung in the other direction. The great Teddy's distant cousin was now distinctly in the driver's seat. But for a time, a blessed time, five of the nine justices on our highest court shared my constitutional philosophy, and in some exhilarating battles with Uncle Sam's menials we threw out socialist law after socialist law. These were the great days of my legal career. I was fighting for the rights of free men to make their own contracts, fix their own wages and hours of labor in their own businesses, to hire non-union workers if they chose—in short, to manage their own affairs. I believed that the men who had made America a world power could be counted on to keep it one, as opposed to ward politicians with their dirty hands in the public trough. I wanted to be the white knight who kept the commerce clause from becoming a despot's tool and due process from turning into the noose that would strangle the liberty of the individual.

  There were plenty of big men behind me, too, men who saw in my struggle a modern crusade. Some of them helped to swell my already impressive list of corporate clients, for they would be so inflamed by my briefs that they would feel it was almost unpatriotic to limit their retainer of my firm to constitutional problems.

  Well, of course, it all ended when FDR was at last able to stack his court. It had never occurred to me that he would have a third term, let alone a fourth. I had even had reason to suppose that Wendell Willkie, if elected, might appoint me to the supreme bench. I am sure that my son, Philip, though he never says so, attributes what he calls my bitterness against the New Deal to my disappointment over this. And I suppose there might be some truth in his supposition, though I think my animosity to the sweeping socialization of the times would have survived any appointment.

  Philip and I had worked out a kind of modus vivendi that worked moderately well, even after he accepted a job in the Justice Department and actually argued a case against me. He married a dear girl, and I was unable to resist her efforts to keep the peace between her husband and me. She prevailed in her insistence that politics not be discussed at family meetings. Irina, who detested political discussion in any case, helped in this.

  And so time slid by, as did the Second World War, in which Philip, thank God, was too old and his children too young to engage. And finally it could be said of myself, as Anatole France said of his protagonist in The Procurator of Judea, "It was in the midst of such works and in meditating the principles of Epicurus that, with a faint surprise and a mild chagrin, he met the advent of old age."

  But at eighty I was still in active charge of my firm. I had become a legend in downtown Manhattan. Philip had left the government to become a partner in a well-known Washington firm specializing in civil liberties. He was kind and dutiful as ever and came up regularly to see me, but I always felt that he regarded me as the respected relic of a past that had been largely and happily superseded. I might have been a Holbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell in a gallery of modern art.

  Irina had aged, but, as one might have suspected, serenely. She had memory lapses, and she made increasing references to persons of her Russian past of whom I had never even heard her speak. But she seemed content to stay on in the Long Island house, even in the winter months when I had moved to town, and take little walks in the woodland paths and across the fields. She seemed to have found a kind of peace there. A Russian peace, no doubt.

  Such was my situation in 1954, when the great desegregation case arose. Of course at first I had no connection with it. Jimmy Byrnes, the South Carolina governor, for whom I had not only friendship but the profoundest respect, had, very appropriately enlisted the aid of John W. Davis to carry the banner for those who wished to uphold the old and tried ways. I had no notion that Davis was inadequate for the case, but I thought it might be helpful to rally as many school districts as we could behind him and file as many briefs as should be allowed. To me it was a question of showing a united front to a nation divided by radicals.

  When Philip had notice of what I was doing, he made a special trip to New York to plead with me. He angered me by talking to some of my partners without my permission, and it hardly improved my temper to have him tell me that almost all of them had thoroughly agreed with him and deplored my taking so unpopular a public position and what it might do to the firm.

  "Dad," he insisted, "even you must admit that the separate but equal doctrine for the treatment of black students and white is not practical. Black schools in the South are never going to be on a par with white."

  "I admit they are not at present," I had to concede. "But that's no reason they can't be. The money's there for it, or could be furnished by Uncle Sam, who, God knows, seems willing enough to pay for things. I'd go even further. Averse as you know me to be to federal interference with state matters, I would endorse a program to compel the southern states to provide equal treatment. Anything rather than force poor white parents to controvert their passionate belief that the races should not be obliged to mingle!
"

  "Dad, you're fighting the future. Don't you know you're bound to lose?"

  "No, I do not. And if I am, the nation loses."

  I had no particular feeling about Negroes. Northerners know very little about the subject. They worship Thomas Jefferson, for example, who not only chased after his escaped slaves but had them soundly whipped when caught. He may even have slept with female slaves, though that interests me less. Who knows? The women may have liked it. But I certainly don't believe that I would ever have beaten a slave, and I am convinced that my father never did. Had the North not been intoxicated by abolitionists and shown a little patience, slavery, already doomed abroad, might have died a natural death. Certainly the blacks in the Reconstruction years were not much better off than they had been.

  Justice Holmes put it well when he defined freedom of speech as the right of a fool to drool. We are fast approaching the point where only the fool will be allowed to drool, where the thinking sort will have to hold their tongues for fear of offending some screeching minority. Why should I care? I won't live to see it.

  Irina, at any rate, has the odd virtue of always having the last word. This is often true of people who don't give a damn. When she saw how dejected I was by the unanimous ruling of the court that condemned desegregation in public schools, she evidently thought it incumbent upon a wife to offer some brand of consolation. Here is what she brought: "Isn't it possible, my poor Langdon, that this tribunal you so excoriate has been saving us from just the sort of dreadful uprising that swept away my family and its whole generation?"

  I knew there was no point getting into an argument with Irina on that subject. But I shall still die unreconstructed.