by Adam Cohen
“deeply cynical”: Herbert Hovenkamp, The Opening of American Law: Neoclassical Legal Thought, 1870–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4.
In March 1919: Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919); Terry Eastland, ed., Freedom of Expression in the Supreme Court: The Defining Cases (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 1.
Schenck had mailed: Schenck, 249 U.S. at 49–51.
protect “falsely shouting fire”: Id. at 52.
But Holmes considered: Yosal Rogat and James M. O’Fallon, “Mr. Justice Holmes: A Dissenting Opinion—The Speech Cases,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984): 1349, 1376.
In Frohwerk v. United States: Frohwerk v. United States, 249 U.S. 204 (1919) at 206–10.
In Debs v. United States: Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919) at 212–13.
As in the Frohwerk case:; Edgar J. McManus and Tara Helfman, Liberty and Union: A Constitutional History of the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014), 328
“I am beginning to get”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Frederick Pollock, April 5, 1919, in Holmes-Pollock Letters, 2:7; Martin Hickman, “Mr. Justice Holmes: A Reappraisal,” Western Political Quarterly (Mar. 1952): 76.
Holmes’s anti-speech rulings: McAuliffe, 155 Mass. 216.
The court heard: Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919) at 630.
A few years later: Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925).
“Freedom of Speech in War Time”: Snyder, “House That Built Holmes,” 680–81.
Another theory: Rogat and O’Fallon, “Dissenting Opinion,” 1378; see generally: Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).
The New Republic paid tribute: Snyder, “House That Built Holmes,” 684, 685.
“little basketful”: Novick, Honorable Justice, 337.
“we have no concern”: Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135, 158 (1921).
Warren G. Harding: Peter Renstrom, The Taft Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 39.
Taft, who had been: “Taft Gained Peaks in Unusual Career,” New York Times, March 9, 1930.
Holmes and Taft liked each other: Novick, Honorable Justice, 346.
In April 1923: Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923) at 562, 571.
A parochial school teacher: Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
“to acquire useful knowledge”: Id. at 399.
“We all agree”: Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U.S. 404, 412 (1923), containing dissent for Meyer v. Nebraska.
“to direct the upbringing”: Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 594 (1925).
His appearance that year: Time, Mar. 15, 1926.
“in every high court”: Snyder, “House That Built Holmes,” 705–6.
“the tender, wise and beautiful being”: Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 590.
important blow for defendants’ rights: Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920).
he would notably dissent: Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).
“We accept the judgment”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Harold Laski, Oct. 23, 1926, in Holmes-Laski Letters, 2:887–88; Richard Posner, Reflections on Judging (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 169.
Holmes’s approach to judging: Rogat, “Judge as Spectator,” 213, 230.
“I have little doubt”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Harold Laski, Mar. 4, 1920, in Holmes-Laski Letters, 1:194; David Burton, ed., Progressive Masks: Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Franklin Ford (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1982), 44.
“he didn’t care a straw”: Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 2:287, 289, cited in White, “Rise and Fall of Justice Holmes,” 70.
One critic observed: Hickman, “Reappraisal,” 67 (quoting Harold B. McKinnon, “The Secret of Mr. Justice Holmes,” American Bar Association Journal 36 (1950): 261, 344.
CHAPTER NINE: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Judges in New Jersey: William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6; Stephen A. Siegel, “Justice Holmes, Buck v. Bell, and the History of Equal Protection,” Minnesota Law Review 90 (2005): 121–22, 124.
The federal court: Davis v. Berry, 216 F. 413, 416–17 (S.D. Iowa 1914); Victoria Nourse, “Buck v. Bell: A Constitutional Tragedy from a Lost World,” Pepperdine Law Review 39 (2011): 103.
The New Jersey Supreme Court: Smith v. Board of Examiners, 88 A. 963, 966 (N.J. 1913); Nourse, “Constitutional Tragedy,” 103.
Dr. Walter E. Fernald: Joseph Wortis, Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1986), 109; Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 148.
Henry Goddard: Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 156.
gone over “to the enemy”: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 148.
Geneticists, who had initially said little: Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 123–25.
By 1927 scientists had made great strides: Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 315–17, cited in Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, 21.
In 1922 Walter Lippmann: Walter Lippmann, “The Mental Age of Americans,” New Republic, Oct. 25, 1922, 213, 215.
Clarence Darrow: Clarence Darrow, “The Eugenics Cult,” American Mercury, June 1926, 129, 137; Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 516; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 120.
Irving Whitehead and Aubrey Strode submitted legal briefs: Brief for Defendant in Error, Buck v. Bell, U.S. Supreme Court, Oct. term, 1926, available at http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=buckvbell and http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=buckvbell; Brief for Plaintiff in Error, Buck v. Bell, U.S. Supreme Court, Oct. term, 1926, available at http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=buckvbell.
Whitehead’s brief: Brief for Plaintiff in Error, Buck v. Bell, U.S. Supreme Court, Oct. term, 1926, 11–17; Smith, 88 A. 963; In re Thomson, 169 N.Y.S. 638 (Sup. Ct. 1918), aff’d Osborn v. Thomson, 171 N.Y.S. 1094 (App. Div. 1918); Haynes v. Lapeer Circuit Judge, 201 Mich. 138, 166 N.W. 938 (1918); State Bd. of Eugenics v. Cline, No. 15,442 (Or. Cir. Ct. Dec. 13, 1921); Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Library of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 440.
Whitehead also argued: Brief for Plaintiff in Error, Buck v. Bell, 1926, 9–11.
Munn v. Illinois: Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113, 123 (1876).
In Meyer: Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923); Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).
a variety of classical sources: Brief for Plaintiff in Error, Buck v. Bell, 1926, 7–8.
not barbaric or outlandish: Davis, 216 F. at 416–17; Nourse, “Constitutional Tragedy,” 103.
Brandeis submitted a brief: Melvin Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 216; Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908).
It could have quoted: Walter Lippmann, “The Mental Age of Americans,” 213; Lombardo, Three Generations, 143; Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society, 123–25.
“reign of doctors”: Brief for Plaintiff in Error, Buck v. Bell, 1926, 17–18.
Strode’s brief: Ibid., 4–5.
Strode quot
ed extensively: Ibid., 7, 10.
“police power”: Ibid., 30–34.
The statute was “part of a general plan”: Brief for Defendant in Error, Buck v. Bell, 1926, 26, 37–38.
“Poor the Commonwealth”: Ibid., 37.
“The question before the Court”: Ibid., 48.
“lived as a member of the household”: Ibid., 5.
Strode was passing: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100” (2009), 97, Buck v. Bell Documents, Paper 32, http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/32.
William Howard Taft: Philip Secor, Chief Justice Profiles (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013), 54.
Taft attended Yale: Robert Weir, ed., Class in America: An Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 3:774.
After graduating from: Frank Freidel, The Presidents of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House Historical Association, 1999), 58; Roger Newman, ed., The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 535; Secor, Chief Justice Profiles, 54.
“plate the right side up”: Freidel, Presidents of the United States of America, 58.
Taft was elected handily: Ibid.
“unscrupulous” and a “muckraker”: Jonathan Lurie, William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
“an office which by both temperament and training”: “Taft Gained Peaks in Unusual Career,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 1930; Lurie, William Howard Taft, 192–93.
He traveled to England: Alpheus Thomas Mason, William Howard Taft: Chief Justice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 194, 286–87, 291.
The new law: Del Dickson, ed., The Supreme Court in Conference (1940–1985): The Private Discussions Behind Nearly 300 Supreme Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 74.
It was a major change: Peter G. Renstrom, The Taft Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 184.
Several new appointments: Ibid., 183.
Taft wrote a strong pro-business opinion: Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, 259 U.S. 20 (1922).
Life Extension Institute: Ruth C. Engs, The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 204; Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1916), iv, 293.
It advocated “sterilization”: Fisher and Fisk, How to Live, iv, 323.
Louis Brandeis: Urofsky, Brandeis, 8, 38–42, 216, 220–22.
In January 1916: Ibid., 434–35.
Adding to the anti-Brandeis sentiment: Ibid., 438–40, 445.
It “was a misfortune”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Lady Castletown, June 20, 1916, in Oliver Wendell Holmes Papers, Harvard Law School (hereafter cited as OWH Papers), box 26, file 14, quoted in Sheldon Novick, Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 316.
Despite the opposition: Urofsky, Brandeis, 458.
He generally supported civil rights plaintiffs: Ibid., 639.
Brandeis joined the majority: Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927).
Nevertheless, Stone was sympathetic: Robert Cynkar, “Buck v. Bell: ‘Felt Necessities’ v. Fundamental Values?,” Columbia Law Review 81 (1981): 1418, 1451, 1451n186; William Wiecek, The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941–1953, vol.6 of History of the Supreme Court of the United States, ed. John R. Shook (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 48–52; The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers (Bristol, England: Thoemmes, 2005), 883–84.
He was also mean-spirited: Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 75.
When Brandeis spoke: Urofsky, Brandeis, 479.
George Sutherland: Timothy L. Hall, Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Infobase, 2001), 280.
Sutherland moved on: Ibid.; Clare Cushman, ed., Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789-2012 (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2013), 314–15.
“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: Hall, Supreme Court Justices, 279; Cushman, Supreme Court Justices 333.
Willis Van Devanter: Hall, Supreme Court Justices, 253–54; Rebecca Shoemaker, The White Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 76–81.
When Taft joined him: Hall, Supreme Court Justices, 254–55.
During the New Deal: Ibid.
Edward T. Sanford: Ibid., 287–88.
In 1923 he dissented: Melvin Urofsky, ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court: The Lives and Legal Philosophies of the Justices (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), 449; Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923).
Bill of Rights applied to the states: Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925); David Schultz, The Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court (New York: Infobase, 2005), 184.
Pierce Butler: Urofsky, Supreme Court Justices, 105.
He began his career: Ibid.; Cushman, ed., Supreme Court Justices, 318–20; Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, 14; Hall, Supreme Court Justices, 284.
“afflict the Court with another Jew”: Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, The Nine Old Men (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1937), 225.
Butler was a strong believer: Urofsky, Supreme Court Justices, 82.
“taking in hand life”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Richard Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 122; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions, ed. Max Lerner (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989), 391; Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, 18.
“to improve the quality”: G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Law and Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 572n135.
As the court’s senior: Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 9–11.
Taft spoke for the court: David Burton, Taft, Holmes, and the 1920s Court: An Appraisal (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), 126.
Before Taft took over: Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 73.
He liked unanimous rulings: Ibid., 74–75.
Taft made it a practice: Ibid., 74.
“Some of the brethren”: White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 404–5.
Holmes’s first book: Albert Alschuler, Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 85.
His Lochner opinion: Alfred Knight, The Wizards of Washington: Triumphs and Travesties of the United States Supreme Court (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006), 10n4; Alschuler, Law Without Values, 62.
One critic spoke for a vast consensus: Nourse, “Constitutional Tragedy,” 101.
The opinion began: Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 205 (1927).
He did not read newspapers: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Frederick Pollock, Aug. 27, 1921, in Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932, ed. Mark deWolfe Howe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 2:77–78.
“I never know any facts”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Frederick Pollock and Lady Pollock, Sept. 24, 1904, in Holmes-Pollock Letters, 1:118.
Holmes began by stating: Buck, 274 U.S. at 205.
Holmes’s good friend: Lippmann, “Mental Age of Americans,” New Republic, Oct. 25, 1922, 213, 215.
Both of these assessments: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100,” 58–59, 83.
It was an excessively generous description: “Continued Notes,” box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers, Library of Virginia.
“if now discharged”: Buck, 274 U.S. at 205–6.
“Experience has shown”: Id. at 206.
Holmes mad
e no reference: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 148; Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society, 123–25; Lombardo, Three Generations, 156.
The court could: Arthur Best, Evidence: Examples & Explanations (New York: Aspen, 2009), 237.
Holmes similarly presented: Ibid.
“alarming tone”: Catharine Pierce Wells, “Reinventing Holmes: The Hidden, Inner, Life of a Cynical, Ambitious, Detached, and Fascistic Old Judge Without Values,” Tulsa Law Review 37 (2002): 801, 810.
“to prevent our being swamped”: Buck, 274 U.S. at 207.
“It is better for all the world”: Id.
In fact, criminologists: Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 140.
“Three generations”: Buck, 274 U.S. at 207.
The colony had recorded: “History and Clinical Notes,” June 4, 1924, box 11, Carrie Buck file, Library of Virginia; J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson, The Sterilization of Carrie Buck: Was She Feebleminded or Society’s Pawn? (Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press, 1989), 44.
The U.S. Department of Commerce: William Estabrook Chancellor, “The Measurement of Human Ability,” Journal of Education 77, no. 16 (April 17, 1913): 425–26; U.S. Department of Commerce, Feeble-minded and Epileptics in State Institutions and Epileptics, vol. 3 (1926): 14.
Emma had also tested as a moron: Lombardo, Three Generations, 106.
There was also considerable doubt: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 145–46, 148; Diane Paul and Hamish Spencer, “Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?,” in Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives, ed. Rama S. Singh et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 105; Carol Isaacson Barash, Just Genes: The Ethics of Genetic Technologies (New York: Praeger, 2008).
The most striking thing: Walter Berns, “Buck v. Bell: Due Process of Law?,” Western Political Quarterly 6, no. 4 (Dec. 1953): 763.
A mean-spirited ethos: Buck, 274 U.S. at 205–7; Wells, “Reinventing Holmes,” 810n57.
Holmes said he was “amused”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Harold Laski, April 29, 1927, in Holmes-Laski Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 2:938–39.