To Preserve Liberty
In Utah today, a think tank named for one of the four justices—George Sutherland—labors to make liberty and limited, constitutional government the lodestars of public policy in that state. Stan Rasmussen is the director of public affairs for the Sutherland Institute. He regards the organization’s namesake as a man who evolved into “a devoted protector of individual freedom.” Rasmussen is fond of quoting these words of Sutherland’s, spoken a year before his passing in 1942:
Good character does not consist in the mere ability to store away in the memory a collection of moral aphorisms that runs loosely off the tongue.… Character to be good must be stable—must have taken root. It is an acquisition of thought and conduct which have become habitual—so firmly fixed in the conscience, and indeed in the body itself, as to insure unhesitating rejection of an impulse to do wrong.
Perhaps it was Sutherland’s emphasis on the importance of character that led him to appreciate liberty, which, I’ve argued, is the other side of the same coin. In his dissenting opinion in the 1937 case that upheld extraordinary coercive powers for organized labor, he penned this eloquent appeal:
Do the people of this land … desire to preserve those [liberties] so carefully protected by the First Amendment: liberty of religious worship, freedom of speech and of the press, and the right as freemen peaceably to assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances? If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time [emphasis added].
George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, and Pierce Butler—four justices who endured ridicule from the highest places and from men far less principled—defended the Constitution as their oaths required. That’s rare enough to earn them hero status.
Lessons from the Four Justices
Defend the Constitution even when its provisions “pinch”: Some people felt that the Great Depression warranted drastic government measures, even if Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies might be unconstitutional (never mind that they were often of dubious economic value). But Supreme Court justices George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, and Pierce Butler refused to sanction a breach of the nation’s most important governing document for the sake of ideology or convenience.
Do the job you’re called to do: These four justices endured derision from FDR and his allies and even threats to their authority with Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme. But rather than succumbing to the political pressure, they honored their oaths and did their jobs according to their best judgment.
23
Katharine Atholl
A Modern-Day Cassandra
Some people can smell a rat a mile away. Others don’t notice even when the odor wafts right under their noses.
Olfactory proficiency by itself doesn’t make you a hero. But if you’re among the first to pick up the scent and warn others, and then you put your political future on the line to save society, you’ve got something that makes you heroic. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Magician’s Nephew, “What you see and hear [and smell] depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, combined courage and character with a great nose for rats. She warned the world about Soviet communism and Hitler years before most others had recognized the threats. She had principles and the guts to stand by them.
Exposing the “Ruthless” Soviet Regime
Born of Scottish noble blood in Edinburgh in 1874, Katharine “Kitty” Ramsay was an accomplished composer and pianist. She married John Stewart-Murray in 1899 and became the Duchess of Atholl when her husband succeeded his father as the Duke of Atholl in 1917. Author Lynne Olson, in her superb book Troublesome Young Men (about the Tory upstarts in the 1930s who challenged their elder and leader, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), describes her as a “diminutive woman with large, expressive blue eyes … cultured, diffident, and unworldly, with little interest in calling attention to herself.” For a time the duchess even opposed giving women the right to vote.
She was startled, then, when former prime minister David Lloyd George suggested she stand for a seat in Parliament. But with her husband’s support, she agreed to run, and in 1923 she won her race. She became just the third woman elected to the House of Commons, and the first from Scotland. Soon she became the first female Conservative member of Parliament to hold ministerial office: Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin appointed her to a junior post in education.
The men in government assumed that Atholl would be quiet and do the womanly thing: whatever she was told. Even Winston Churchill snubbed her at first, telling her, “I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom.” Churchill would come to appreciate her greatly.
Over time, Atholl’s principles deepened, and her courage blossomed. In 1935 she resigned from the leadership position of whip for the Conservative Party largely over the India Bill, believing that it did not provide adequate safeguards for peace and democracy in the subcontinent. She also spoke out against what she derisively labeled the government’s “national socialist tendencies” in its domestic agenda.
Words of Wisdom from Katharine Atholl
“[I stand] for a great cause, the particular essence of which rested on freedom and goodwill—freedom for the fullest possible development of private initiative and industry, as opposed to a system that would give the State control; freedom of career for the development of the individual as opposed to a system which would make for a rigid uniformity in all persons.”
The first big rat to catch Atholl’s attention was in Moscow. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet experiment attracted naive acolytes in the West. Reporter Lincoln Steffens famously wrote after his 1919 visit to the USSR, “I have seen the future, and it works.” One of the worst of the “useful idiots” was New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who, at the height of the Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine that killed millions, denied that there was a hunger problem.
The Duchess of Atholl was no such fool.
In 1931 Atholl published The Conscription of a People, a blistering, well-documented indictment of the savage collectivization of life in the Soviet Union. She wrote:
Russia has carried through revolution on a scale which knows no parallel, and which, even after thirteen years, is as ruthless as in its early days. She has undermined marriage and is rapidly breaking up family life. She wages ceaseless war on all religion. She is responsible for the most comprehensive and continuous experiment in the nationalization of industry, banking and trade that has ever been seen.
Atholl’s book was one of the earliest and most detailed critiques of the communist regime from a high-level British official. Forced labor, the liquidation of the kulaks, mass seizures of property, an extensive secret police network, and an unprecedented diversion of resources to the military meant one thing: the Bolsheviks were a menace to their own people and a growing threat to world peace.
The duchess decried the British government’s extension of credit to Moscow. “Can those in any country who value liberty regard such a position with equanimity?” she asked. “Are the citizens of the United Kingdom in particular to tolerate any longer the guaranteeing by taxpayers’ money of a system so utterly repugnant to British traditions?”
The rats in Moscow were alarmed at Atholl’s denunciations. Who was this Scottish Cassandra who dared so publicly to question the subsidies coming their way from the government of her own party? (In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy but was cursed never to be believed. In The Fall of Troy, by Quintus Smyrnaeus, Cassandra desperately tried to warn the Trojan people about the peril of a certain large wooden horse.)
Denouncing Appeasement
After 1933, Atholl’s wra
th turned against the rats in Berlin. When she read Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1935, she entertained no illusions about where the führer was headed. “Never can a modern statesman have made so startlingly clear to his reader his ambitions,” she later said.
In Lynne Olson’s words, this formerly “diffident” woman was becoming “the boldest Tory rebel of all.” Many now think of Winston Churchill as the sage who opposed Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, but Atholl helped stiffen his spine. She sent Churchill both the original German edition of Mein Kampf and the English translation. The translation, she showed him, was a whitewash—barely a third the length of the German original, cutting out what Olson calls “Hitler’s most inflammatory statements, particularly his expressions of hatred for Jews.” Atholl sent Churchill similar passages from Hitler’s speeches that had not been reported outside Germany.
Those “troublesome young men” in Chamberlain’s Conservative Party—including Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan—did oppose appeasement, but at first they focused exclusively on Hitler. They sought to placate Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain. Atholl saw all fascist dictators the same way she saw all communist dictators: as evil men not to be trusted, let alone subsidized. She was a constant thorn in the side of men in power who wanted to cut deals with unsavory thugs. Biographer Sheila Hetherington notes that by 1935, Atholl “had become seriously worried not only about Britain’s defences, but about the attitude of mind of the country’s leaders: their supineness, their complacency, their willingness to overlook the brutality of fascism and, while making public speeches deploring the actions of the dictators, making no move to deter them and even making friendly overtures to them.”
Chamberlain’s September 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler has become synonymous with appeasement: it allowed Hitler to incorporate forcibly the Sudetenland (a Czech region along the border with Germany) into the Third Reich. But when Chamberlain waved the agreement on the tarmac on returning to London and declared, “Peace in our time,” much of the world breathed a sigh of relief. War seemed to have been averted. Atholl’s husband and others strongly advised her to endorse the Munich accord. The duchess not only refused to do so; she also wrote and widely distributed a pamphlet that castigated the agreement.
Prime Minister Chamberlain reacted furiously. He strong-armed the local Conservative Party officials in Scotland to select a new candidate for Parliament to replace Atholl. She resigned from the party and announced she would run as an Independent in the special by-election set for December 1938. The country’s attention was riveted by the fierce campaign that ensued. The prime minister saw to it that Atholl’s opponent received showers of cash and endorsements, and he employed every trick possible to stop the duchess. In the words of one historian, it was “one of the dirtiest by-election campaigns of modern times.”
Facing threats from Chamberlain and the party whip, even anti-appeasement Conservatives wouldn’t go to Scotland to campaign for the duchess. Churchill first accepted an invitation to speak on her behalf but then, under pressure, rescinded. As Olson reports in her book, he instead sent a letter of endorsement that she distributed before the voting. Churchill wrote:
You are no doubt opposed by many Conservatives as loyal and patriotic as yourself, but the fact remains that outside our island, your defeat at this moment would be relished by the enemies of Britain and of freedom in every part of the world. It would be widely accepted as another sign that Great Britain … no longer has the spirit and willpower to confront the tyrannies and cruel persecutions which have darkened this age.
She lost by a heartbreakingly slim margin. Chamberlain was delighted, even if the razor-thin margin of victory hardly counted as a ringing endorsement of his appeasement policy.
When Hitler invaded Poland less than nine months later, Kitty Atholl was vindicated. A humiliated Chamberlain sulked through the remaining few months of his tenure.
Sounding the Alarm
The Duchess of Atholl never returned to government. She spent the war years working mightily to relieve the awful conditions of European refugees. She died in 1960 at age eighty-five.
Hardly remembered today, Katharine Atholl smelled danger and said so, years before the elite of her own political party mustered similar courage. She took brave stands for principle and for her nation’s security even when those positions threatened her career.
How different might history have been if there were more people like her?
Lessons from Katharine Atholl
See something, say something: Katharine Atholl never harbored any illusions as to what the world was facing from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. She had the courage to speak out about the threats even when doing so threatened her own career. Putting your principles ahead of your self-interest is easier said than done; Atholl models how to put principles into practice.
Enlist allies in your cause: Winston Churchill is honored today as an implacable foe of Hitler and of appeasement. Atholl, now little remembered, was ahead even of Churchill in this regard, and she was wise enough to enlist him and others in the cause of decrying the Nazi threat. The copies of Mein Kampf she sent him proved eye-opening for Churchill.
24
Jesse Owens
“Character Makes the Difference When It’s Close”
James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens famously won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. But he did more than win races: this son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave fought a lifelong struggle against racism in his own country and almost single-handedly exploded the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy.
At the time of Owens’s death in 1980 at age sixty-six, President Jimmy Carter paid this tribute to him:
Perhaps no athlete better symbolized the human struggle against tyranny, poverty, and racial bigotry. His personal triumphs as a world-class athlete and record holder were the prelude to a career devoted to helping others. His work with young athletes, as an unofficial ambassador overseas, and a spokesman for freedom are a rich legacy to his fellow Americans.
Carter’s words were especially fitting in light of an unfortunate fact in Owens’s life: unforgivably, a previous American president had given him the brush-off.
Dedication and Determination
Born in Alabama in 1913, James Owens at the age of nine moved with his family to the town in Ohio that bore his middle name, Cleveland. His first school teacher there asked him his name. With a deep southern twang he replied, “J. C. Owens.” She heard “Jesse,” so that’s what she wrote down. The name stuck for the next fifty-seven years.
Owens displayed his talent for track and field early on. He broke junior high school records in the high jump and broad jump. In high school he won every major track event in which he competed, tying or breaking world records in the 100-yard and 220-yard dashes and setting a new world record in the broad jump. Universities showered him with scholarship offers, but he turned them all down and chose Ohio State, which wasn’t extending track scholarships at the time. Owens loved Ohio, the state that had been his home since age nine, and his junior and senior high school coaches helped sell him on Ohio State.
Imagine it. You come from a relatively poor family. You could go to any number of colleges for next to nothing, but you pick one you have to pay for. At twenty-one, you have a wife to support as well. So what do you do? If you are Jesse Owens, you work your way through school as a gas station attendant, a waiter, a night elevator operator, a library assistant, even a page in the Ohio legislature.
Owens was the living embodiment of advice he gave others: “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”
Words of Wisdom from Jesse Owens
“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”
At Ohio State he not only had to juggle his work, studie
s, on-field practice, and family; he also needed to battle racial discrimination. Ohio in the mid-1930s wasn’t a paradise of racial equality. The university required Owens and other black athletes to live together off campus. They had to order carry out or eat at “black-only” restaurants and stay in segregated hotels when traveling with the team.
Through it all he continued to set records. In fact, during the 1935 Big Ten Championships, he set or tied four world records in only forty-five minutes. And he did it with an injured back; he had to lobby his coach just to be able to compete.
A little more than a year later, Owens would become internationally famous for his exploits at the Berlin Olympics. But that spectacular day at the Big Ten Championships endures as well. Sports Illustrated called it “the greatest single-day performance in athletic history,” saying that Owens’s achievements that May afternoon have “no parallel” in any sport.
Triumph at Berlin
The eyes of the world were focused on Berlin in early August 1936. Five years earlier—before the Nazis came to power—the German capital had been selected as the site for the 1936 Summer Olympics. An effort to boycott them because of Hitler’s racism fizzled. It would be a few more years before events convinced the world of the socialist dictator’s evil intentions.
Jesse Owens entered the competition with Americans thrilled at his prospects but wondering how Hitler would react if “Aryan superiority” fell short of his expectations. But Owens didn’t go to Berlin with a political axe to grind. “I wanted no part of politics,” he said. “And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago …, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.”
Real Heroes Page 15