William 0. Douglas: Knight of Human Freedom
KUTLER, STANLEY L
BOOKS William 0. Douglas: Knight of Human Freedom STANLEY I. KUTLER Autobiographies and memoirs are notoriously self-serving, especially in these days of instant history. Public figures often...
...It is now fashionable among some historians to criticize FDR for his failures, for his compromises, for his intellectual flabbiness, for his lack of ideological commitment...
...A deeply troubled people yearning for leadership and direction would be decisively aided in their quest if they had more—and, of course, younger— "threats" like Mr...
...The emerging school of psy-chohistorians probably can have a field day with this volume, particularly in view of Douglas's frank discussion of his own psychoanalysis...
...I hope," he writes, "that they will put their arms around this part of the wondrous planet, love it, care for it, and treat it as they would a precious and delicate child...
...He also is saddened that despair and disenchantment have run so deep that young Americans have burned their flag, a flag that for him is symbolic of "all civil liberties" our tradition honors...
...Yet one is left with an uneasy feeling that the suave Eastern gentleman too easily snowed the Western dude...
...He was alternately bemused and appalled by the simplistic minds of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson...
...not the venerated and widely celebrated techniques of legal education in Ivy League schools...
...While much of the early material condenses that autobiographical gem, Of Men and Mountains, published more than two decades ago, Go East, Young Man makes two superb contributions: It offers marvelous insights into the formative political, social, economic, and intellectual education of a Supreme Court justice...
...But that is not enough satisfaction for Douglas, and properly so...
...Perhaps so...
...And I am proud...
...This memoir unflinchingly reveals what seems to be the whole man, and a man who knows himself quite well...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt and Louis D. Brandeis (two distinctly different individuals) were personal, yet hardly remote, gods...
...John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Billy Graham, and Dean Acheson are special targets for Douglas's barbs...
...Although Douglas's enthusiasm for FDR runs deep, he is by no means uncritical...
...On both counts he was the most qualified in our long history...
...not even a President who claimed he had to bomb Cambodian peasants "whose only 'sin' is a desire for socialized medicine...
...Sacred cows have never overawed him: not John Foster Dulles interviewing him for a position in a prestigious law firm in the 1920s...
...not the powerful Wall Street investment bankers...
...Ultimately, Douglas's autobiography is significant for what it tells us about himself—a man prominent and active in American government for four decades, including the longest period of service of any Supreme Court justice in history...
...So is grand opera...
...He never reached the race problem...
...Most critically, Douglas charges that FDR "exploited the old liberal cliches, but he never touched the basic problems of the ghettos—the citadels of the bankers, real estate brokers, money lenders, and the city officials whom they control...
...Eisenhower seemed stumped for an answer, and then blurted out that it was the admission of Hawaii and Alaska as states...
...After he granted a stay of execution to the Rosenbergs in 1953, Senator William Langer offered Douglas some comfort and refuge from the bitter criticism that followed: "Douglas, they have thrown several buckets of shit over you...
...Douglas's enemies—those who need to wear flags in their lapels-—love to portray him as an eccentric, dangerous threat to the Republic...
...He multiplied agencies, but never aimed at permanent control of basic industries...
...He truly is at one with the American land and its spirit...
...For example, he vigorously condemns FDR's encouragement of bureaucratic growth, with all its stifling tendencies...
...But by God, none of it stuck...
...the powerful, entrenched financial institutions...
...From his childhood, Douglas reveals characteristics that anticipate the "loner" image he conveys in his public performances...
...Justice William O. Douglas...
...Douglas ranks Roosevelt as one of the greatest shaping forces (along with Robert Hutchins, Benjamin Cohen, Jerome Frank, Brandeis, and Hugo Black) on his legal career, and he is unabashed in his admiration for FDR as President...
...Douglas once asked Eisenhower to consider his greatest achievement as President...
...The latter forms a recurrent theme for this memoir...
...493 pp...
...James Forrestal, Spencer Tracy, Joseph Kennedy, Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, and Tom Whited, a country singer from Cle Elum, Washington, were or are close friends...
...What comes through as "news" in this work are the revelations that Douglas was a Presidential favorite and an "insider" prior to his judicial appointment, and beyond...
...We see how he enjoyed the freedom and glory of his beloved mountains and wilderness, and how he perceived them as a metaphor for the greatness and opportunities of this country...
...But Douglas is not simply an alienated, bitter man...
...This paladin of human freedom would give his critics the same rights he demands for himself and others...
...We see a child struggling against adversity—no father, near-poverty, and polio (which later gave him an unusual bond with FDR...
...Along with his own story Douglas has given us a homily on "Americanism" in the hope that the American people "will come truly to love this nation" as he does...
...Yet in the final analysis, Douglas mitigates his criticism, for he realizes the powerful countervailing forces working against whatever liberal aims Roosevelt had—the dominant, conservative Southerners in Congress...
...Douglas's anger and resentment toward what Aldo Leopold called the "impertinence of civilization" have no bounds...
...and, most of all, the essentially cautious and immature philosophic and economic beliefs of the American people...
...For good measure, he warmly portrays those associates he admires and respects...
...as an added bonus, it go east, young man...
...Public figures often write to establish future trends for historians, and their documents then form the basis of "court history...
...There are numerous references to speechwriting duties, to Potomac cruises, and to regular attendance at the President's poker parties...
...FDR," Douglas argues, "lacked neither the temperament nor the intelligence necessary for the Presidency...
...He informs us of his fears, his weaknesses, his personal and public failings, as well as his numerous achievements...
...A threat...
...This first autobiographical volume covers Douglas's life until his appointment to succeed Brandeis in 1939, although there are occasional observations on more recent events...
...In FDR's defense, however, Douglas believes that the President was painfully aware of his compromises, and that they bothered him immensely...
...We see a young man nourished on the optimism of religious faith but finally skeptical of organized religion...
...Random House...
...Furthermore, their recollections operate on a minimal level of personal discussion for fear that candor toward contemporaries will arouse the ire of some individuals or their partisans...
...And no doubt about it: Even after he "made it" to the Columbia and Yale law faculties, the SEC, and the Supreme Court, he has by choice remained the outsider—hard and suspicious toward the sinister interests and forces that he believes cynically manipulate our lives...
...He seems to hide little from us...
...The title of this autobiography—Go East, Young Man—reveals the man's honest ambitions, and Douglas frankly acknowledges his lifelong determination to stay in the mainstream of events...
...Mr...
...provides some fresh—and refreshing— recollections of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal...
...He is outraged at the despoliation of the American land and the American idea...
...It is easy to like Douglas for his enemies...
...with others, his criticisms are pointed and direct...
...The range of Douglas's personal likes and dislikes tells us much about the man...
...at the same time he saw the abuse of Indians, Wob-blies, hobos, prostitutes, migrant workers, and vagrants—all victims of what Douglas calls "the Establishment...
...As a conservationist devoted to preserving the wilderness, he views the Civilian Conservation Corps as a calamity (because it made the interior wilderness too "easily available to the masses"), and he is skeptical of the President's penchant for building dams and the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...Kutler is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin...
...Justice Douglas frankly acknowledges that FDR compromised fundamental, or "good," goals and that he often sacrificed principle for expediency...
...None of these offenses can be charged against Justice William O. Douglas...
...He has been ambitious in the best sense: to serve his fellow citizens in a positive, creative manner, to fulfill himself in ways that he finds personally satisfying, and, in Oliver Wendell Holmes's lovely phrase, "to touch the superlative in one's work...
...too easy, in fact...
...the hopeless ambivalence within the loose, liberal coalition of the Administration...
...the early years: the autobiography of william o. douglas...
Vol. 38 • June 1974 • No. 6
