Hugo L. Black and the Challenges of Judicial Biography

Abstract

Hugo L. Black and the Challenges of Judicial Biography R. B. Bernstein Writing a judge’s life poses uniquely vexing challenges for the biographer.1 The most daunt­ ing of these is the need to strike a balance between a judge’s life and the evolution of his legal thought. The issue ofbalance becomes most acute for those rarejudges who led dramatic and tumultuous lives and who also played pivotal roles in legal and constitutional development. Hugo L. Black of Alabama, who served on the Supreme Court from 1937 until 1971, was such ajudge. His eighty-five years (1886-1971) constitute one of the truly remarkable lives of the twentieth century. Black pursued three dis­ tinct yet overlapping careers — as a lawyer, a politician, and a jurist — each of which would have justified scholarly attention. Taken as a whole, Hugo Black’s life is a subject so rich in detail and historical importance that it more than justifies the growing number of books devoted to his life and thought. Before examining the book under review, therefore, we must begin with a survey of Black’s life. I. Hugo L. Black was bom in Harlan, Alabama, February 27, 1886. After struggling to gain an education and to decide on his goals in life, Black began his first career. He was a shrewd and for­ midable trial lawyer, winning fame for his skill with juries, his talent for polite yet devastating cross-examination, and his consistent support for small plaintiffs against wealthy, corporate defen­ dants. When he was twenty-five, he accepted with reluctance a temporary appointment as a police-court judge; serving for a year, he car­ ried out his duties with professionalism and efficiency, traits that also pervaded his sec­ ond public office — that of prosecutor for Jefferson County, Alabama. These offices gradually drew Black into his second career. An aggressive and combative prosecutor, he also was a committed heir to the Populist tradition; he regularly challenged the state’s political establishment in defense of the great body of the people. Throughout his life a devoted member of the Alabama Democratic party, Black was a skilled politician. He was notable for his grasp of strategy and tactics — for example, he was among the first American politicians to grasp the possibilities of using advertising and new technologies of communi­ cation and transportation to campaign. In the traditional political sphere, too, he had a remark­ able talent for connecting with ordinary voters, either one by one or en masse. Like many politicians, Black was an inveter­ ate “joiner” who used memberships in organiza­ tions as a means to build political support. He therefore joined a host of civic, professional, social, and political organizations — including the Ku Klux Kian. Black’s membership in the 148 1995 JOURNAL Kian was an open secret in Alabama. Through­ out the 1920s and 1930s, Kian leaders in Ala­ bama placed their members at his service; at the same time, in keeping with the organization’s devotion to secrecy and its grasp of political realities, they also offered him what modern poli­ ticians would call deniability along with their political support. Even so, friends and foes throughout Alabama knew that Black had served as a Kian official in the 1920s and owed a con­ siderable part of his political success to Kian support. In 1926 Black won election to the United States Senate, as the clear winner (and not merely the survivor) of a hotly contested four-candidate race. Black was an unusually active freshman Senator, often taking the floor in defense of his vision of Jeffersonian democracy and Populism and against expanding federal power. Winning a second term in 1932, Black was aghast at the Great Depression’s devastation of the lives of ordinary Alabamians and other Americans. What he saw and heard not only strengthened his Populist sympathies — he shifted his politi­ cal thinking away from conventional states’ rights pieties toward a vigorous use of govern­ ment power at all levels, including the federal level, to combat the abuses that led to the Depression and the human costs it exacted. Black thus became an ardent New Dealer, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s key senatorial support...