By Jeremiah Griffey
Six heroic moments in the life of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson
were highlighted Wednesday during a talk in the Chautauqua Institution’s
Hall of Philosophy. John Q. Barrett, a Harvard graduate, was the featured
speaker.
Barrett, a St. John’s University professor, told the crowd Jackson,
who lived most of his young life in Jamestown, visited the Institution in
1908 to hear William Jennings Bryan speak. He returned in 1917, at the age
of 24, to give a speech for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The speech came
just three years after joining the bar at the earliest age possible.
Jackson returned to Chautauqua twice for speeches by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Once in Roosevelt’s entourage while the soon-to-be-president was New
York governor, and later, at his side, while the President delivering his
famous “I Hate War” speech. Jackson’s career as an orator
came full circle when he spoke at the Institution following the Nuremberg
War Crimes trials.
The first tale of heroism Barrett discussed involved the 20-year old Jackson
successfully defending labor rioters in Jamestown, before he passed the bar
exam which he was not old enough to take. Jackson never attended college but
he did complete two years worth of law school in just one year at Albany Law
School.
Barrett then discussed how Jackson, who worked more often as a prosecutor
in his career, took on Andrew Mellon for tax evasion and fought to a settlement.
At the time Jackson headed what I snow known as the Internal Revenue Service
and was appointed by Roosevelt to the prosecutor. “What’s interesting
is a joke comes out of this,” Barrett said. “You may know that
the Mellon art collection today is the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C. That donation was made by Mellon spontaneously, directly to FDR as this
tax case was being resolved in 1937. And of course, quid pro quo, perish the
thought that a serious tax matter be resolved by something like an art donation
to the nation.”
“But, cutting through all that was the joke between FDR and Bob Jackson
– as they sat together at the ribbon cutting in 1941 that opened what’s
now the west wing of the National Gallery of Art – there must have been
a smile exchanged,” he continued. “Correspondence showed that
for his lifetime, FDR referred to that place as ‘Bob’s Museum.’
Roosevelt created a stir with his “Court Packing Plan” which would
have allowed the president to add a Supreme Court justice for every justice
that did not step down within six months of their 70th birthday. At the time,
most of the justices were more than 70 years old, and they stood in the way
of many of Roosevelt’s New Deal plans. Barrett said the president made
a mistake arguing that this plan was need because the justices were too old
and the court needed younger, more virile justices to take off some of the
workload. Jackson, not surprisingly, took a different approach and almost
pulled out a victory for the president. “He testified in late March
of 1937 to the truth of the plan,” Barrett said. “The Supreme
Court was standing in the way of the Democratic will in the name of an overly
restrictive reading of the Constitution. The argument that Jackson makes,
and the argument that almost turns the debate, is an argument about judicial
restraint. More judges on the Supreme Court, diluting these nine, will restrain
the court and will stop the court from getting in the way and invalidating
the program that you, the people, have voted for,” Barrett said, taking
on the character of Jackson.
Barrett did not discuss the Nuremberg trial at length because of how well
documented it is, but said Jackson did not succumb to pressure to get certain
Nazi officials to testify against others. Instead he fought the case against
the Nazis using their own documentation. However, Barrett did focus on Jackson’s
struggles with race relations, and if it was the place of the court to take
a stand on race, or if society, the president and Congress should step in.
Jackson, Barrett, said, dissented in one of the Supreme Court’s “darker
moments,” when they ruled in favor of the Japanese internment camps
during World War II.
Perhaps in an even more symbolic statement of his beliefs, Jackson, despite
being hospitalized for treatment of a heart attack, made sure he was back
in the court in time to take part in the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education
case, which ended segregation in schools. “He directly leaves his hospital
bed to be back on the bench to be physically part of the unanimous court on
May 17, 1954,” Barrett said. “I’ve heard from people who
were there that when the justices stepped through the velvet drapes and the
press corps, the lawyers, etc., saw Jackson, they knew what was happening.”
Greg Peterson, president of the Robert H. Jackson Center and an area attorney,
introduced Barrett and spoke about the Center’s progress, as well as
the man for which it was named. “The atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia
happening in the past ten years caused the United Nations to establish ad-hoc
tribunals to indict and prosecute those responsible for crimes against humanity,”
Peterson said. “The principles of Nuremberg, which were made and solidified
by Robert Jackson, are being utilized today, including the upcoming trial
of Slobodan Milosevic.”
Peterson thanked the late Daniel Bratton for his help in contacting U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has helped the Center’s
museum obtain artifacts from the Library of Congress. “She reached under
her desk, handed him a pad, and said, ‘Here’s what we’re
going to do for your project in Jamestown,’ which she proceeded to outline,”
Peterson said, recalling a conversation he had with Bratton. “Try to
visualize Dan Bratton, president of Chautauqua Institution for 16 years, acting
as a secretary to Justice O’Connor.”