With the recent controversies coming from the Supreme Court, such as the legalization on a national level of sodomy and the end of capitol punishment for minors, it may be instructive to look into the past for a guide to the present.
Today is the 164th anniversary of the birth of one of the most distinguished jurists in American history: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Born to a literary family, his father was the author of the then-famous “Autocrat at the Breakfast Table” Holmes made his way to Harvard and then to war.
Serving as a First Lieutenant with the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, he proved to be a fearless soldier who refused to shy away from the battlefield regardless of how hot the fighting was. Wounded three times, including a gunshot wound to the neck at Sharpsburg, he ended the war as a Lieutenant Colonel.
After the war, Holmes turned to the study of law, despite having been named, as his father before him, class poet. Thus began one of the most storied careers in American judicial history.
Spanning from 1866 to 1932, his career was legendary. After all, how many Justices from the Supreme Court get their lives portrayed in a movie?
Even more than his great contribution to American jurisprudence, which will be discussed later on, is the example he provides for youth today.
Though he came from a privileged background, Justice Holmes was not the sort of man to act as if being born on third base was the equivalent to hitting a triple.
To continue with the baseball analogy, he stole home, and then returned to the plate later in the inning to hit a grand slam.
First appointed to the Court, after a distinguished early career as a law professor and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes quickly became famous for his well written opinions, mostly dissenting from the traditionally- conservative Court of his time. Indeed, Holmes has given much to the English language, perhaps as much as he gave to the law, with such sayings as “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic” in the case of Schenck v. U.S., in which Holmes elucidated the idea of “Clear and Present Danger” as a means to limit speech in those situations.
Though he has come down to us as a progressive in many ways, no less a libertarian than another of the great towering figures of the age, H.L. Mencken attacked him as being no friend of liberty.
Indeed, one of his most infamous decisions concerns the case of Buck v. Bell, in which he wrote for the court upholding Virginia’s sterilization law for the mentally retarded. Indeed, after his line concerning the limits of free speech, his statement that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” must certainly rank up there as one of the very few things people are likely to have heard about Justice Holmes.
I can hardly do justice, no pun intended, to the breadth and depth of Holmes’ scholarship.
Regardless of how one views his political stances (he later reversed himself on his slightly restrictive view on the First Amendment in his opinion with Justice Brandeis in the case Whitney v. California, though he never became a full-fledged absolutist along the lines of William O. Douglas) Holmes remains one of the great figures in our national pantheon. He was the last veteran of the War Between the States to hold high office, and was born before the United States reached the Pacific.
He was a soldier, a scholar, a judge and a man of immense character, as well as a brilliant moustache. Today, one can read his letters to colleagues or to strangers and see a sort of light that exists only rarely in public figures — that of a man who is always burning, always in search of some truth and of a new way to understand. It may be said truly that this man actually lived his life.