The Warren Court in American Fiction

Abstract

The Warren Court in American Fiction Maxwell Bloomfield Since the days ofthe early RepublicAmeri­ cans have tended to view their highest judicial body — the Supreme Court ofthe United States ~ with a mixture ofawe and suspicion. Thewellpublicized debates that preceded the ratifica­ tion ofthe Constitution implanted some endur­ ingjudicial stereotypes in the public conscious­ ness. Proponents of a strong national govern­ ment assured newspaper readers that the new federaljudiciarywould be the “least dangerous branch” of the government, since the Court would have no control over the nation’s fi­ nances or military forces. In The Federalist Papers (1787-1788) Alexander Hamilton fur­ ther defended the life-tenure and salary provi­ sions of the Constitution as essential devices to protect a body of skilled jurists from the en­ croachments of Congress and the President.1 Opponents of the Court, on the other hand, charged that, with its independence of popular control, it might easilybecome a despotic agency bent upon its own aggrandizement. In Pennsyl­ vania the anonymous author of the Letter of a Democratic Federalist (1787) predicted that the Court would collaborate with Congress to establish a dangerously consolidated govern­ ment, in which citizens might have to travel hundredsofmiles toprosecute alawsuit.2These archetypal images ofthe Court-a group ofPla­ tonic guardiansvs. a conspiratorial political ca­ bal—have persisted, and continue to provide a point of departure for creative writers. Few nineteenth-century novelists mentioned the Court in their works, and none sought to portray the effects of a major Court decision upon American society. In part their lack of interest reflected the realities of antebellum federalism. Prior to the Civil War Americans lived under a state-centered federal system, in which the power of the national government seldom intruded upon their daily lives. Most writers, moreover, agreed with Hamilton that the Justices were merely passive oracles of the law, and had no hand in shaping important publicpolicies. EvenJames Fenimore Cooper, a major critic of American institutions, could find nothing much to say about the Court. In The Monikins (1835), an otherwise biting at­ tack on the excesses ofJacksonian Democracy, Cooper simply introduced the Justices as the “Supreme Arbiters” of the country of “Leaplow ,” whose functions were “to revise the acts of the other three agents of the people, and to decide whether they are or are not in confor­ mity with the recognized principles of the Sacred Allegory.”3 Such noncommittal treatment of Like many other writers of the early nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper refrained from attackingthe Su­ preme Court in his criticisms of American institutions. FICTION AND THE WARREN COURT 87 the Courtwas inkeepingwith the generallyrev­ erent tone adopted by other early writers.4 With the rise of the modern regulatory state, however, a more critical view of the Jus­ tices soon became popular. Turn-of-the-century authors, reflecting the reformist concerns of the Populist and Progressive eras, depicted the Court as a politicized body that promoted the interests of Big Business at the expense of the general welfare. Some popular novelists, including Robert Herrick, followed Charles Beard and other scholars in blaming socioeco­ nomic conditioning for the Court’s hostility toward economic regulation. Herrick’s A Life for a Life (1910) presented the Justices as an­ cient logic-machines, who had been programmed to respond only to the legal formulae of a pre­ industrial age. Other writers espoused a cruder vision of class conflict. In Reginald Wright Kauffman’s Socialist novel, The Spider’s Web (1913), the Justices are little more than hired employees of a sinister “Money Power.” Such negative appraisals of the Court persisted into the 1930s, as writers emphasized the Justices’ power to obstruct national economic recovery by striking down important New Deal meas­ ures. Judicial intransigence eventually led to Franklin Roosevelt’s abortive Court-packing planof1937, which openedanewchapter inthe literary history of the high bench. After 1937 the Justices accepted the legiti­ macyof federal and state economic regulation, andturnedtheir attentionincreasinglytoissues of civil liberties and civil rights. Through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amend­ ment they gradually applied the guarantees of the Bill ofRights for the first time to the states. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969) this trend accelerated, bringing to...