Given By Sandra Day O’Connor
Associate Justice Supreme Court of the United States
This is a wonderful occasion for Jamestown. We are remembering a product of this community and of its public schools. The most treasured honor is one that comes from one’s hometown – from those who knew the honoree first and best. So it is today. Robert Jackson – one of the finest Justices ever to sit on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States – grew up on a farm close to Jamestown. It was here in Jamestown that he attended elementary and high school, married, had children, and practiced law. It was here that he spoke in 1935 at the dedication of a new Jamestown High School building. He said then:
If you believe, as I believe, that democracy is the form of government best adapted to our people, then you must regard the public school as the most fundamental concern of our society…Democracy will always call most of its leaders from the ranks of humble men, and to equip them it must provide free education to the sons and daughters of disadvantaged home.
Robert H. Jackson was born in Pennsylvania in 1892. Early in his life the family moved to this area. His father – a farmer, lumberman, and stock breeder – advised him to become a doctor, but Robert chose a different path. On graduation from Jamestown High, Jackson read law in a local office, spent one year in Albany Law School, and was admitted to the New York Bar at twenty-one.
Jackson was a voracious reader of the classics, biography, and history. He practiced law successfully in Jamestown and married Irene Alice Gerhardt of nearby Kingston. They had two children, a son, William, who became a lawyer, and a daughter, Mary Margaret. Jackson served as president of the Jamestown Bar Association and chairman of the National Conference of American Bar Association Delegates. President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded a reluctant Jackson to leave Jamestown for Washington, D.C., as General Counsel to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He subsequently served in the Department of Justice as head of the Tax Division and then of the Antitrust Division.
In 1938, President Roosevelt appointed Jackson to serve as Solicitor General of the United States, and in that capacity Jackson argued many cases successfully before the Supreme Court. Justice Brandeis so admired Jackson’s work as Solicitor General that he is reported to have told one of his colleagues that Jackson “should be Solicitor General for life.” The President appointed Jackson Attorney General in 1940, and in 1941 nominated him to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served in that capacity for thirteen year, until the year of his death in 1954.
For a lawyer or a judge, reading Jackson’s Supreme Court opinions is a special treat. He wrote always with clarity, style, and persuasion. His opinions are studded with wonderful and enduring passages. For example, of the Court he once wrote that “(w)e are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”
Yet Justice Jackson’s opinions reveal more than his skill with words; they reveal a man of ideas and firm conviction. He wrote strongly in support of individual liberties and in opposition to arbitrary government action. In his opinion for the Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, which held that a school child cannot be compelled against his will to recite the pledge of allegiance, he wrote that “(t)he very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials.” In the Korematsu case upholding the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans in relocation camps, Justice Jackson dissented, writing: “Now if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.”
President Roosevelt had promised to nominate Justice Jackson as Chief Justice upon the retirement of Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. But it never came to pass. President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by President Truman, who asked Justice Jackson to serve as chief prosecutor of the leaders of Nazi Germany in Nuremberg in 1945. Defying the wishes of his colleagues on the Court, Jackson agreed. The other Justices thought that his absence left the Court shorthanded and that a sitting member should not accept another assignment. But Justice Jackson recognized the enormous importance of a successful effort to collect evidence and to expose to the world the extent and enormity of the Holocaust. Jackson hoped to create a precedent that would make explicit that “to persecute, oppress, or do violence to individuals or minorities on political, racial or religious grounds…is an international crime.” He believed that the long months he spent in Nuremberg were “the most important, enduring, and constructive” of his life.
In his words, Nuremberg at that time was “in terrible shape, there being no telephone communications, the streets full of rubble, with some twenty thousand dead bodies reported still in it and the smell of death hovering over it, no public transportation of any kind, no shops, no commerce, no lights.” After more than ten months and 17,000 transcript pages, nineteen of twenty-two defendants were convicted and sentenced. As Jackson put it, the evidence was there “with such authenticity and in such detail that there can be no responsible denial of these crimes in the future and no tradition of martyrdom of the Nazi leaders can arise among informed people.”
Today more than fifty years later, we re witnessing an attempt to apply the precedent established at Nuremberg in new war crimes tribunals in The Hague and in Tanzania. In searching for the voice of human decency after unspeakable atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Rwanda, we are following the path beaten by Robert Jackson for the protection of basic human liberties.
Robert Jackson is a product of this wonderful community – of its soil, its people, its public schools. It was here that he gained his curiosity for knowledge, sought self-improvement through hard work, and developed the courage to take responsibility. He knew that education was not limited to formal years of study, but was, rather, a lifelong process. With your statue of this great man you will inspire others to strive for self-improvement and to live a life of learning. Congratulations.