Justice Holmes and His Hecklers

Abstract

WESTBROOK Pegler, only man who ever made living out of sort of stuff that small boys scrawl on back walls and fences, has recently turned his dirty-name attack against Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, of course, has been dead these sixteen years and so Pegler, with his customary gallantry and courage, feels free to spit at Justice's memory some of choicer epithets in his vocabulary of vulgar invective. As Pegler puts it, Holmes was cynical and senile brutalitarian; he was the God of an evil cult; he was a brutal old faker; and he no more morals than pig. The owner of these lovable traits was responsible, according to limpid Peglerian logic of guilt-by-association run backwards, for subsequent sins of Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, and scores of unnamed others who made up maze of perfidy which developed in bureaucracy soon after Roosevelt came to power-all this by direct pipe-line, through Harvard Law Review and Felix Frankfurter, straight back to arch-villain, Holmes. (Does Westbrook, I wonder, lie awake nights wishing Franklin Roosevelt had gone to Harvard Law School instead of Columbia?) Taken by itself, picture of Pegler trying to bring Holmes down (the phrase is Pegler's) is essentially comic picture. It is as though worm with delusions of grandeur were to pick on giant. For Holmes was one of finest minds and greatest spirits that American civilization has produced. And only man so bumpkin-ignorant that he thinks he need pretend ignorance in his writings could fail to recognize Holmes' stature and be little humble before it. Indeed, no one would have laughed more heartily and unmaliciously than Holmes himself at Pegler's temper tantrum in print, despite its distribution to millions of comic-book lip-readers who make up Pegler's audience and who probably confused his target-for-the-day with an outfielder, also named Holmes, formerly on Boston Braves. But Pegler's attack on Holmes unfortunately cannot be taken by itself and therefore cannot be laughed off and forgotten. Pegler, who probably never read word Holmes wrote in his life, got his lead elsewhere. He got his lead from group of men more responsible and thoughtful than he, most of whom would doubtless deplore Pegler's blast for its vulgarity and its vicious stupidity-but most of whom should recognize in what Pegler wrote reaffirmation, however offensively phrased, of their own ideas about Holmes and his philosophy of law and life.