Author Spotlight: Rawn James Examines Truman’s Overlooked Impact on the Supreme Court
October 29, 2021
The D.C. Bar counts among its members many authors whose books and stories run the gamut. To celebrate October as National Book Month, the Bar is featuring some of these attorney-authors who have published works in a variety of genres.
Rawn James Jr.’s latest book, The Truman Court: Law and the Limits of Loyalty, transports readers to the presidency of Harry S. Truman in order to examine an often-overlooked aspect of the 33rd president’s administration: its impact on the U.S. Supreme Court. James, who has practiced law in the private sector, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, and the federal government, explores Truman’s appointments to the Court and his efforts to implement contentious policies expanding civil rights, managing labor union unrest, and more.
What was it about Truman and his appointees that drew your attention?
My initial interest sprang from researching my previous book, The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military. I had learned about the Truman Department of Justice’s involvement in advancing a civil rights agenda that the administration was unable to get through the U.S. Senate on account of a bloc of southern Democratic senators.
So, Truman went on the offense, using the Department of Justice to join forces with the NAACP in filing cases in federal courts. Truman used this strategy not only in civil rights, though that was where he was most successful, but in other areas of the law as well, including most notably civil liberties, with loyalty tests for federal employees and other programs that his administration enacted and were able to narrowly get through the Supreme Court, of which he had nominated four members.
Truman was the first president to do what we now expect presidents of both parties to do, and that is to use the judicial branch to advance his administration’s agenda.
Your book is full of descriptive language. How do you approach reconstructing the past for your readers?
My goal is to present an interesting, readable history of real-life people. That can be particularly difficult with legal history because it’s easy to get bogged down in legal jargon and common law. You can bore the reader to death with a technical discussion among the justices about whether or not the Bill of Rights applies to the states . . . so the trick is to try to avoid getting bogged down when presenting those battles and to involve the personalities of the individuals.
There are such dynamic personalities on the [Supreme] Court, on many courts actually, but on this Court particularly. When you combine President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointees [like] Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, you have some of the strongest personalities ever . . . and that’s putting aside their judicial minds. I’m talking just about their personalities, what they brought to the conference each week.
Combine them with Truman’s appointees, who were very much the opposite in temperament and personality — including Chief Justice Vinson and Justice Tom Clark, neither of whom would even profess to be among the greatest legal minds of their time, but whose personalities were much more easygoing . . . much more in touch with the common perceptions of the day than some of their brethren on the Court at the time. That personality conflict is interesting as these nine men try to work out some of the biggest issues of the day, reaching decisions that still shape the way you and I live our lives today in America.
In addition to prominent historical figures, you also provide a snapshot of the conditions and concerns of regular people impacted by their actions. How were you able to uncover these contemporaneous perspectives?
The Library of Congress is always a great resource, and I spent a lot of time there. But I have to give a big shout-out to the D.C. [Public] Library. I’ve never used a research assistant, and I did all the research on all three of my books at the D.C. Library. It’s an incredible treasure trove of news articles covering the entire 20th century.
They even have news articles from African American-owned papers, the Black press, that covered the same events but gave a perspective that was actively ignored by, say, the Washington Post at the time. These papers also sometimes [covered] events or cases that weren’t covered at all by the white press.
Truman’s unsuccessful attempt to seize steel production receives particular attention in your book. How is that event important and meaningful to contemporary audiences?
President Truman’s attempts to deal with the economic unrest that was unleashed upon the nation after World War II were controversial and divided the Court. It was a time very comparable to our current situation. The global pandemic is, I think, the first event since World War II to affect every single American. Even privilege and money haven’t insulated people. Everyone’s lives were impacted, testing the country in a way it hasn’t been since World War II.
Unions had foregone their raises. Across all industries . . . meat packing, steel, they all agreed not to take raises in order to support the war effort. Then, when we were victorious, the unions demanded wage increases, but the business owners wanted price increases, and everyone was saying, “I held off, but now I need to be paid.” That resulted in a series of strikes in 1946. At one point there were something like two major strikes being called a day. Here in Washington, D.C., the ladies who manned the telephone operating system went on strike. Anyone who could was going on strike after the war.
That’s similar to now. We no longer have that many unions in the United States, so instead of striking, people are just quitting. People feel that they aren’t getting what they are owed and that their lifestyle isn’t getting any better.
What lessons might we learn from the Truman administration’s struggles?
It’s important to recognize the emergence of a paradigmatic shift in American politics and consequently understand what can be done. For example, before Truman seized the steel mills, he had already seized several other industries. Franklin Roosevelt, before the war, seized several industries. He would just announce he was taking control of this or that business and did so. Woodrow Wilson had done it. They asked Wilson where he got the authority to do it and he said, “the Constitution,” and reporters accepted that response.
Harry Truman then said he’d seize the steel businesses, and the owners protested. There had been a paradigm shift, and it had happened under his feet while he was president. This built up to the steel seizure case, where these steel executives said they wouldn’t stand for a war effort appropriation of their businesses.
I don’t know what the shift is going to be today, but when there’s a paradigm shift, what becomes politically possible changes.
Despite the steel crisis, the Truman administration was successful in making some significant civil rights advances. Could our current situation produce similar outcomes?
Truman was able to make those advances with the assistance of the Supreme Court. The Court itself was, in many ways, following a path laid for it by the NAACP attorneys. A quick example of that is how the NAACP attorneys didn’t begin their campaign asking to desegregate American elementary schools. They knew that would be a complete disaster.
So, Charles Hamilton Houston set out the strategy to first desegregate graduate schools, where it was a bit less threatening in an environment of grown individuals, grown men and women, and slowly we would get to education desegregation. That allowed the Court to say yes, this 63-year-old man, George McLaurin, should be allowed to attend this graduate school course here at the University of Oklahoma [with his fellow students], whereas if the litigants had come in full-barrel it would have presented a more difficult situation for the administration and for the Court.
Right now, it’s difficult to tell. We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, and it’s hard to say how it will shake out. I think if anyone wishes they had a crystal ball it’s, first, of course, the president, but I think Chief Justice Roberts is not far behind in wanting to see the future.
It also has to be said that it was a different age in nominating and confirming Supreme Court justices. There were no confirmation hearings at the time. Justice Sherman Minton was invited to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend some of the comments he had made while he was a United States senator. He had been a federal judge for years and had been a very good federal judge, actually. But before that he was a New Deal senator and a firebrand New Deal Democrat. So, the Senate wanted to have him come and answer some questions, and he politely declined.
That’s something that, of course, could not happen today. It’s a whole other discussion what a mess our nomination hearings have become. That being said, there was some controversy when Truman nominated these men, particularly by the time he got to his third nomination, Tom Clark, and people said he appear[ed] to only be nominating his friends. Tom Clark was a really strong, strident attorney general. I think he did a lot of good things. A lot of people, when they think of Bobby Kennedy as attorney general, should also think of Tom Clark because he paved the way.
His fourth nominee, Minton, was eminently qualified, but by that point the punditry had clearly had enough of Truman nominating his friends, so Judge Minton got a tougher time than he maybe should have, certainly by the standards of the day, though he ended up getting confirmed.
How can people find this and other works by you?
All my books are available wherever books are sold, at your favorite brick-and-mortar or online seller. Folks can reach out to me at rawnjames.com.
