The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas David G. Dalin (bio) The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade. By Samantha Barbas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 424 pp. Morris Ernst was one of the best-known liberal lawyers and most celebrated civil libertarians in America, serving for many years as chief legal counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and achieving fame as an opponent of literary censorship and representative of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. He was born in Uniontown, Alabama, in 1888, and moved to Manhattan with his family two years later. After attending the Horace Mann School, he graduated from Williams College and three years later from New York Law School, which he attended as a night student. In 1915, together with one of his Williams classmates, Ernst co-founded the New York City law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, with which he remained associated until his death in 1976. During the 1920s, influenced by the landmark free speech jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who would become his friend, Ernst began to add free speech cases to his growing legal practice. In 1927 Ernst joined the ACLU board and would remain one of the best known and most successful ACLU attorneys for the next forty years. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst became the "preeminent law firm for the left," as the law firm's "tremendous commercial practice allowed it to represent liberal causes at reduced rate or pro bono" (79). It "was also gaining a reputation as a literary law firm," becoming counsel for several major magazines … including the New Yorker and the Nation, which shared many board members with the ACLU" (79). As a civil liberties lawyer, Ernst achieved national prominence and notoriety in 1934 when he successfully defended James Joyce's highly controversial novel Ulysses against charges of obscenity. As Barbas notes, "Joyce's novel had a long history of suppression in the United States," with the post office confiscating and burning copies, though that did not stop Ulysses from being widely read (152). Ernst, a brilliantly flamboyant attorney whom Barbas describes as "a civil liberties lawyer who adored controversy," declared that Ulysses was the "only volume of literary importance still under a ban" in the country (1). He persuaded the judge that Ulysses was not obscene – that it would not corrupt even those members of society "whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (1). Following his 1934 court victory, Ulysses became [End Page 305] a best seller, and the case, while a triumph in the battle against literary and artistic censorship, also was personally enriching for Ernst, who had made a deal with Random House that if he won he would earn a royalty on every copy sold. A liberal Democrat, throughout his legal career Ernst received major political appointments from Democratic Party leaders, which enhanced his prominence and influence in American politics and public life. In 1929, Ernst, who was considered one of the state's outstanding insurance experts, was appointed by New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to the state insurance commission charged with regulating all insurance business in New York. Three years later, FDR appointed Ernst to the New York State Banking Board, a powerful board established in 1932 to set rules for the regulation of the state's financial institutions. By the late 1930s, Ernst was being mentioned by the columnist Drew Pearson as a candidate for mayor of New York. In 1946, Ernst was appointed by President Harry Truman to the newly established President's Commission on Civil Rights. Though Barbas claims that Ernst remained proud of his Jewish heritage, there is almost no discussion of it in this book. Ernst apparently followed in the footsteps of his parents who were mostly religiously nonobservant, and he became estranged from Judaism as a teenager, never again setting foot inside a synagogue and holding a lifelong conviction that religion was irrational. As Barbas discusses in the second part of this book, Ernst was a man of stark contradictions, waging an intensely personal battle against communism and publicly supporting FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's...