A Mass of Particulars

...A slashing and single-minded attack, born of Bickel's frustration that Black's star had reached its zenith and lit the way for newer justices, The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress is far from even-tempered...

...He has studied newspapers, popular journals, scholarly writings, diaries and other material, and he has conducted interviews with relevant persons...

...Senator...

...In between, he proved his talents as a pugnacious county prosecutor and as an insistently inquisitive U.S...

...Moreover, his characterization of the work of other critics is questionable, as when he calls Alexander Bickel's study on the Warren Court dispassionate, a bloodless dissection...

...These deficiencies are aggravated by the technique...

...Unfortunately, Hugo Black and The Judicial Revolution can serve merely as a useful practical reference, not as a source of illumination...

...Further, by trying to draw on scholarly sources as background for a work written in a popular style, the author abbreviates difficult arguments about the evolution of judicial ideas and their complex relationships to social events...

...Reviewed by Lincoln Caplan Hugo Black began his career as a crafty and often courageous labor lawyer from Alabama...

...Justice Black, who first heard the sound of the trumpet . . ." Greater attention to argument, sensible paring and a survey of current commentary on his subject would have sharply enhanced the value of Dunne's effort...

...As a member of the High Court, Black's attitude toward the law was symbolized by the dog-eared copy of the Constitution he carried in his right-hand coat pocket...

...While his membership in the Ku Klux Klan cast some doubt on his faithfulness to the progressive ideals of the New Deal, that early allegiance was not discovered until after Black's confirmation and he kept his seat, emerging stronger from the crisis...

...Over that span of time, members of Black's inner circle, of his family, and his law clerks have chronicled his formative experiences and analyzed his judicial thoughts...

...On those occasions when Dunne exercises his prerogatives as a historian and critic, he does so in maddening ways...

...Better editing would have helped, not least with the overwritten prose...

...These are other nice touches: Dunne notes how much Walter White of the NAACP and Charles Houston, the association's general counsel, appreciated Black, whom they viewed as a supporter in the struggle for racial equality...

...Eventually, though, the Court moved past Black's immutable position, relying in its decision on principles he could not abide...

...Unfortunately, these useful facts are overshadowed by the book's failings, which are perhaps attributable to the grandriess of its aims...

...The chief strength of Dunne's volume is its thoroughness...

...Above all, Black believed in the Constitution's plain meaning, in its role as the source of American government, and in the responsibility of the Court to interpret its reach...

...Well-known bits of information are belabored, too: that Black was not invited to the 50th reunion of his law school class at Alabama...

...Thus, he closed his 34 years on the bench as he began them—a dissenter...

...Lewis wrote: "For Mr...

...The book is oddly organized, moving from an opening tribute to a prologue and a chapter on Black's Court nomination, then doubling back to his childhood and a discussion of his career...

...such words as syncretistic, logomachy and gradgrind are in the dictionary, but they hardly aid the narrative flow...

...Such a study would have been especially timely, since Black's thinking is a touchstone for a new generation of constitutional scholars seeking a doctrine to legitimize activist Federal judges and the accomplishments of the Warren Court...

...he ended it as the Supreme Court's senior member, seated to the Chief Justice's right...

...Dunne provides a useful catalogue of the Supreme Court's actions in the decades of change from the late '30s to the early '70s, and it is fascinating to observe through quoted diaries the clashes of personality between Robert Jackson and Black, Frankfurter and Black, even William Douglas and Black (who otherwise were a unit...

...His assertion that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the complete protection of the Bill of Rights to every citizen brought him early into the liberal vanguard and made him a part of the Warren Court majority in its first years...

...But no one has attempted the sweeping biographical and legal appraisal of Gerald Dunne's Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution—in the author's own words an "institutional history in the idiom of personal biography...

...All this, plus his knowledge of specific cases and general history, has resulted in a host of provocative details on the Justice's intellectual work, on key actors in the drama of politics and law making, and on Black's effect on the public affairs of this country...

...And instead of offering a coherent portrayal of Black and his achievements, stressing dominant themes and traits, the author merely gives us a mass of particulars without a clear overview...

...Scholars and others have added a second group of commentaries...

...Still, Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution is partly redeemed by the stuff of its detail...

...For what started as a case-by-case expression of sympathy for industrial workers and small businessmen and an antipathy toward concentrated economic power became, after being honed in debate with his colleagues, an articulated faith in the First Amendment, civil liberties and equal rights...

...He leaves to footnotes the mention of some figures?Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss, for example—whose inclusion would have furnished the text with the color and liveliness he is presumably striving for...

...The author also cites Anthony Lewis' inscription in the Justice's copy of Lewis' book Gideon's Trumpet, an examination of the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision, which granted the accused in all criminal prosecutions the right to counsel...

...The wealth of data required to document one man's contribution to the continuing changes of a major government institution creates problems of selection that Dunne does not handle successfully...

...Where the author's own assessments would have been preferable, he tends to rely on the opinions of periodicals like Time to prove his point...

...or that Felix Frankfurter's hard sell of Learned Hand to FDR as a Supreme Court appointee guaranteed Hand would not get the job...

...He tells how Hugo Black Jr.'s plans to run for Congress in Alabama in 1954 were dashed by the Supreme Court's unanimous desegregation ruling that year in Brown v. Board of Education, the son being made to bear the "sin" of the father...