The Clerks of the Four Horsemen (Part I) BARRY CUSHMAN Recent years have witnessed a flowering of scholarship concerning the Supreme Court clerkship. Yet most ofthis literature focuses on the more modem Justices. And for the Justices who served in the years between Justice Horace Gray’s appointment in 1882, when the Supreme Court clerkship was created, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointment ofHugo Black in 1937, the literature leans heavily toward those generally thought to be “liberal”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis D. Brandeis , Harlan Fiske Stone, and Benjamin N. Cardozo. This tendency is not surprising for several reasons. First, Holmes, Brandeis, Stone, and Cardozo are of particular interest, as they are typically regarded as among the greatest Justices of the twentieth century. Second, the extensive biographical literature on each of them, as well as the large collection of private papers left by all but Cardozo, gives the researcher ample material with which to work. And third, there is a substantial remembrance literature generated by their former clerks. Law clerks to the early twentieth century Justices known collectively as the “Four Horsemen”—Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Pierce Butler—thus have received little attention. With the exception of Sutherland, these more “conservative” contemporaries of Holmes and Brandeis are typically rated as judicial “failures.”1 The biographical litera ture on each of them is not nearly as thick,2 and the remaining private papers are neither as extensive nor as revealing.3 And only two of the thirty-five young men who clerked for these Justices ever published a recollection of his time served in chambers. The more notable of these remembrances was that ofJohn Knox, who clerked for Justice McReynolds during the 1936 Term 4 Knox was bom in Des Moines, Iowa in 1907, and raised in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1930, his L.L.B. from Northwestern University in 1934, and an L.L.M. from Harvard in 1936. He had begun to write letters to Justice Holmes during his lonely and miserable adolescence, and started to favor other Justices with his correspondence during his years as a law student. Among these was Justice Van Devanter, and when McReynolds informed his colleague in late 1935 ofhis need LAW CLERKS TO VAN DEVANTER AND McREYNOLDS 387 for a clerk for the coming term, Van Devanter arranged an interview for his persistent young pen pal. Knox kept a diary of his experiences during his clerkship year, and between 1952 and 1963 converted the diary into a 978-page typewritten memoir. He tried without success to have the memoir published, and in 1978 deposited the manuscript with several libraries. There it languished in obscurity until 2002, when Professors Dennis Hutchinson and David Garrow brought out a splendid edition pub lished by the University of Chicago Press.5 Knox’s memoir is largely an expose of McReynolds’ tempestuous and cruel mistreat ment of his messenger, Harry Parker; of his maid and cook, Mary Diggs; and, ofcourse, of Knox himself. Knox reported that all of the employees of the “sadistically inclined” McReynolds “lived in a reign of terror and were crushed under foot without any hesita tion on his part.”6 By the end ofhis clerkship, Knox had concluded that McReynolds was “the most contemptible and mediocre man I ever came into contact with,” “unbe lievably stingy,” and “gravely unbalanced.” His “selfishness and vindictiveness” were “unbelievable.”7 There is good reason to believe that Knox’s unpleasant tour of duty clerking for McReynolds was representative of the Jus tice’s treatment of his other clerks.8 On the other hand, we can be reasonably confident that Knox’s experience was not representative of the experiences of those who clerked for Van Devanter, Sutherland, and Butler. For example, when Arthur Mattson, who clerked for Van Devanter for five years, was preparing to leave his post to pursue a legal career in New York, he wrote to his boss: You have been so good to me during the nearly five years I have been in your employment, and my associa tion with you has been such a...