The Court Years 1939 1975

The Birth of the Modern Constitution recounts the history of the United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually overlooked years between the constitutional revolution in the 1930s and Warren-Court judicial activism in the 1950s. 1941-1953 marked the emergence of legal liberalism, in the divergent activist efforts of Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. The Stone/Vinson Courts consolidated the revolutionary accomplishments of the New Deal and affirmed the repudiation of classical legal thought, but proved unable to provide a substitute for that powerful legitimating explanatory paradigm of law. Hence the period bracketed by the dramatic moments of 1937 and 1954, written off as a forgotten time of failure and futility, was in reality the first phase of modern struggles to define the constitutional order that will dominate the twenty-first century.

William O. Douglas was one of that rare mix of man that helped define America, a judge of the supreme court and also a lifelong outdoorsman. This is his story in his words and conveys the joy he felt for the wild untouched vastness of the great forests and the high snow capped peaks which he pitted himself against. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

William Orville Douglas was both the most accomplished and the most controversial justice ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. He emerged from isolated Yakima, Washington, to be dubbed, by the age of thirty, “the most outstanding law professor in the nation”; at age thirty-eight, he was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, cleaning up a corrupt Wall Street during the Great Depression; by the age of forty, he was the second youngest Supreme Court justice in American history, going on to serve longer—and to write more opinions and dissents—than any other justice. In evolving from a pro-government advocate in the 1940s to an icon of liberalism in the 1960s, Douglas became a champion for the rights of privacy, free speech, and the environment. While doing so, “Wild Bill” lived up to his nickname by racking up more marriages, more divorces, and more impeachment attempts aimed against him than any other member of the Court. But it was what Douglas did not accomplish that haunted him: He never fulfilled his mother’s ambition for him to become president of the United States. Douglas’s life was the stuff of novels, but with his eye on his public image and his potential electability to the White House, the truth was not good enough for him. Using what he called “literary license,” he wrote three memoirs in which the American public was led to believe that he had suffered from polio as an infant and was raised by an impoverished, widowed mother whose life savings were stolen by the family attorney. He further chronicled his time as a poverty-stricken student sleeping in a tent while attending Whitman College, serving as a private in the army during World War I, and “riding the rods” like a hobo to attend Columbia Law School. Relying on fifteen years of exhaustive research in eighty-six manuscript collections, revealing long-hidden documents, and interviews conducted with more than one hundred people, many sharing their recollections for the first time, Bruce Allen Murphy reveals the truth behind Douglas’s carefully constructed image. While William O. Douglas wrote fiction in the form of memoir, Murphy presents the truth with a narrative flair that reads like a novel.

" ... brings together piercing analyses of the American presidency - dealing with both current issues and historical events. The compendia consists of the combined and rearranged issues of [the journal] "White House Studies" with the addition of a comprehensive subject index."--Preface.

The politics of division and distraction, conservatives’ claims of liberalism’s dangers, the wisdom of amoral foreign policy, a partisan challenge to a Supreme Court justice, and threats to the constitutionally mandated balance between the three branches of government: however of the moment these matters might seem, they are clearly presaged in events chronicled by Joshua E. Kastenberg in this book, the first in-depth account of a campaign to impeach Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas nearly fifty years ago. On April 15, 1970, at President Richard Nixon’s behest, Republican House Minority Leader Gerald Ford brazenly called for the impeachment of Douglas, the nation’s leading liberal judge—and the House Judiciary Committee responded with a six-month investigation, while the Senate awaited a potential trial that never occurred. Ford’s actions against Douglas mirrored the anger that millions of Americans, then as now, harbored toward changing social, economic, and moral norms, and a federal government seemingly unconcerned with the lives of everyday working white Americans. Those actions also reflected, as this book reveals, what came to be known as the Republicans’ “southern strategy,” a cynical attempt to exploit the hostility of white southern voters toward the civil rights movement. Kastenberg describes the political actors, ambitions, alliances, and maneuvers behind the move to impeach Douglas—including the Nixon administration’s vain hope of deflecting attention from a surprisingly unpopular invasion of Cambodia—and follows the ill-advised effort to its ignominious conclusion, with consequences that resonate to this day. Marking a turning point in American politics, The Campaign to Impeach Justice William O. Douglas is a sobering, cautionary tale, a critical chapter in the history of constitutional malfeasance, and a reminder of the importance of judicial independence in a politically polarized age.

Presents an alphabetical listing of Supreme Court justices with a short biography on each person.