Peter S. Canellos

5756. The Great Dissenter The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero, by Peter S. Canellos (read 12 Sep 2021) This biography, published in 2021, is carefully researched and tells, with adulation, the life of Harlan, who was born in Kentucky on 1 June 1833, appointed in 1877 to the U. S. Supreme Court, and served thereon till his death on 14 Oct 1911. The book tells of his great dissents in Plessy v. Ferguson and other cases--which dissents eventually came, years later, to be accepted as good law. I found the early part of the book not too gripping but once he was on the Supreme Court the book became absorbing--even telling me some things I had never heard of, such as te case of U.S, . Sipp, which is the only case ever tried in the first instance in the Supreme Court itself--which I thought Marbury v. Madison made impossible, since I thought Marbury said the Supreme Court was a court of appellate jurisdiction except as the Constitution said otherwise. Though I don't think the author of the book is a lawyer, he does a good job telling of the cases Harlan dissented in.… (més)

Author and journalist Peter Canellos has chosen an excellent moment for a biography of the Supreme Court jurist John Marshall Harlan, whose intellectual evolution and eventual dedication to civil rights is not only inspirational, but more relevant than ever.

The author’s aim is to describe how Harlan went from being a slave-owner in Kentucky to one of the greatest advocates of minority rights of all time during his service on the U.S. Supreme Court. As the author writes:

“Among powerful white officials, one person’s voice rang out. He reminded the nation that the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution promised equal protection under the law. He advocated eloquently for Black rights, along with the health and safety of immigrant industrial workers and the rights of people in places such as Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines, which were ruled by the United States in a time of imperialism.”

One relatively unknown aspect of Harlan’s background is the fact that a Black man and former slave, Robert Harlan, was brought up in Harlan’s house and treated like a brother. There is speculation that Robert was in fact a half-brother of John Marshall Harlan. Robert’s story is also covered by this book, with the author weaving back and forth between the lives of the two men.

Harlan served on the Supreme Court for thirty-four years, from 1877 to 1911. He was appointed to the court by President Rutherford B. Hayes “as a kind of human olive branch to the South,” since the rest of the court was made up of privileged Northerners. Harlan was the only one of the court to have graduated from law school. He was also, as mentioned above, a former slave owner, notwithstanding the unusual status afforded to Robert Harlan.

Thus it is most interesting to see how Harlan come to occupy his position as a liberal bastion among his peers. Notable were his dissents on three infamous civil liberties cases that came before the Court: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Lochner v. New York (1905), and The Civil Rights Cases (1883).

The author writes: “In case after case, he laid out a framework for what would become the twentieth-century civil rights movement.”

Canellos evinces a fine understanding of the legal issues at stake, which he explains clearly for lay readers. But Harlan’s own words, quoted liberally within the book, are also clear as well as inspirational:

For example, in “The Civil Rights Cases of 1883,” Harlan wrote:

“I cannot resist the conclusion that the substance and spirit of the recent amendments to the Constitution [the 13th, 14th, and 15th] have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism. It is not the words of the law but the internal sense of it that makes the law; the letter of the law is the body; the sense and reason of the law are the soul.”

Thus, he argued that the majority of the Court was ignoring the plain meaning and intent of the newest amendments, and that their position revealed racial double standards.

[Here one can clearly see the echoes of his criticism when contemplating the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts when striking down an important section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).]

The country however, now, after Shelby, and in Harlan’s time, as the author writes, looked to the Court’s majority who gave them security in and protection for their right to discriminate.

Frederick Douglass later wrote of Harlan:

“…I was wont to console myself with what seemed to many a transcendental idea, that one man with God is a majority; that if such a man does not represent what is, he does represent what ought to be, and what ultimately will be.”

This is an excellent description of the importance of John Marshall Harlan, his moral integrity, and of his continuing relevance today.

This double biography - of John and Robert Harlan - will introduce to most readers two unique characters whose stories are fascinating, and representative of the state of the union at the time. It is a book well worth reading!… (més)

Very close to a hagiography, this book was written or compiled by several Boston Globe journalists. There’s plenty of information presented about Ted and the family. However, the writing is choppy and repetitive, and the reverence felt toward Teddy by the authors is obvious. The first two hundred or so pages went quickly, but the last half of the book became tiresome at best.
Kennedy was an effective senator for Massachusetts and a man who genuinely cared about people. But he didn’t accomplish his senatorial goals without a lot more hard politics than is reflected here.… (més)