Mr. Justice Black
Douglas, William O.
Mr. Justice Black WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS I knew Justice Hugo Black before he was appointed to the U.S. Su- preme Court only as the public knew him. As a Senator from Alabama, he achieved prominence...
...So were religious dissidents and even those accused of being "Communists...
...He valiantly pursued miscreants under the antitrust laws...
...Hugo Black's philosophy was the antithesis of "Com- munism...
...I was then chairman of the Securities and Ex- change Commission, with no thought of ever being a justice...
...But when it was disclosed that he had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a great torrent of criticism descended upon him...
...Though his membership in the Klan was nominal and fleeting (albeit foolish), he was pictured as a devil incarnate...
...He was tenacious in his view that the constitutional principle of equality protected all people, no matter what their color, their creed, or their ideology...
...Great debates have taken place over the constitutional interpretations he favored...
...By the time he retired, thirty-four years later, he was one of the most revered men who had ever sat on the Court...
...Opposed was the notion that judges should "balance" a particular guarantee of freedom against a particular grant of power to regulate...
...but he knew no constititional way to suppress that kind of publication...
...and he was vigorous in his pro- motion of laws protecting the rights of labor...
...In Black's view the judicial task was to maintain the original constitutional protection of the freedom of the indi- vidual against the constitutional grant of power to regulate...
...Hugo Black honored all phrases and paragraphs of the Constitution...
...This legislative and political record made him the symbol of the populist, Wilsonian, Rooseveltian Left...
...Yet he saw no constitutional way—short of an amendment—to censor or punish so-called "obscene" literature...
...He traveled the country extensively on political campaigns...
...And after the First Amendment became applicable to the states by reason of the Fourteenth, he could see no logical way in which the states could escape the same restraint...
...When President Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black to the Court, he was promptly confirmed by the Senate largely be- cause he was a fellow Senator...
...Hugo Black made certain that those at lower levels of society were also included among the law's benefi- ciaries...
...His charity toward his detractors contributed to his growth in stature and dignity...
...but the greatest of these is charity...
...Hugo Black was deeply religious and ab- horred the sacrilegious...
...Hugo Black searched the rec- ord in every case that charged over- reaching to make certain that officials had acted responsibly and within the bounds of the Constitution...
...While he was a law- and-order man, he demanded that sheriffs and the police, as well as the people, obey the law of the land...
...In Black's view, that process created a new ad hoc constitution for each decision and short of amendment performs a function that only the framers of the Constitution could have undertaken...
...533) holding that the modern insurance business was "commerce" within the meaning of the Constitution and the antitrust laws...
...But Hugo Black's dissent in this case so moved me that I wrote him a congratulatory letter...
...He knew that the framers designed the Constitution to make it difficult for government to do as it pleased with the citizen...
...The result was a campaign of invective unequalled, I think, in our Court's history...
...Justice Black WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS I knew Justice Hugo Black before he was appointed to the U.S...
...In times past the beneficiaries of the law had been only the corporations and the elite...
...In his judicial work he sought to main- tain that structure...
...Hugo Black knew that the Constitu- tion sought to strike a lasting balance between the individual and govern- ment, one that would guarantee that the nation was both strong and free...
...The market place of ideas was to him a political reality...
...The original design of the Constitu- tion was to keep lines of communica- tion and ideas open, the hope being that, in time, experience would help produce a mature people...
...As a Senator from Alabama, he achieved prominence in investigating the lobby that was seeking a defeat of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, an experience which I suspect gave him certain predilections concerning the Fourth Amendment [searches and seizures...
...Hugo Black abhorred vulgarity...
...77), stating that in his view a corporation was not a "person" within the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment...
...As time passed he filed other dissents or separate opinions which sig- naled other breaks with judicial prec- edents at the constitutional level...
...It was to him a venerable but living doc- ument under which the noblest experiment in government had been launched...
...Early in 1938, Justice Black filed a lone dissent (303 U.S...
...Of- ten those opinions were very upsetting to the established interests, as was his opinion (322 U.S...
...No one on the hustings in my time was a more effective pleader for human rights...
...In reflecting on that period, he once referred me to I Corinthians, 13: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three...
...But measured by the Constitu- tion he was, I think, a conservative...
...He would neither cut it down nor expand it to fit his own per- sonal tastes and inclinations...
...The mosaic formed by his decisions is too intricate to present here...
...But he believed with all his heart and mind that when the First Amendment said "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press," it meant what it said...
...Most people called Hugo Black a liberal, and he was such in the popular sense...
...A pow- erful speaker and advocate, he was in great demand...
...When President Franklin D. Roose- velt proposed that the Supreme Court be enlarged, in the interests of further- ing his social welfare program, Hugo Black was in the forefront of the endorsers of that ill-fated plan...
...Yet so far as beliefs, speech, or publications were concerned, he saw no constitutional way to punish or suppress its advocates...
...There was not a drop of racism in Hugo Black...
...When it came to the construction of laws, as distinguished from the pro- visions of the Constitution, Hugo Black usually came down on the side of free- dom of the individual...
...The animus or drive behind that deluge of abuse was not really inspired by distrust of his civil rights record but rather by fear of the economic issues which Hugo Black had sponsored...
...He took Jefferson and Madison literally and he felt deeply and sincerely that the real secret of our security and suc- cess was the maintenance of a Society of the Dialogue...
...The legal reports are replete with Hugo Black's view that it was im- possible for him to read the First Amendment as if it said "Congress may make some laws . . . abridging the free- dom of speech or of the press...
...In the generalities of some of its clauses, he found a choice of interpretations...
...In cases involv- ing the First Amendment that task was easy: since "no" law was permissible which abridged freedom of speech or of the press, there was no constitutional authority for judges to decide that some speech or some publications ran against the grain of public approval...
...Racial minorities were his concern...
...His central theme was certainly the First Amendment...
...For he was a "strict constructionist" who read the Constitution quite liter- ally...
...That choice led him to strict applications of the anti- trust laws, to liberal construction of laws applicable to laborers, and to what some called expansive readings of civil rights legislation...
Vol. 35 • November 1971 • No. 11
