The Blue & the Grey

Under the leadership of Chief Justice Warren, the Supreme Court has aggrieved a great many Americans. Its civil rights decisions are anathema to Southern segregationists; its careful attention toward civil liberties encourages the far right to call for Warren's impeachment.

Well aware of the dissension, Warren last week made a moving appeal for national unity. Speaking at the 175th anniversary celebration of Washington's Georgetown University, which adopted the colors of blue and grey shortly after the Civil War as a sign of national reconciliation, Warren recalled the career of a famed Georgetown alumnus: Edward Douglass White, class of 1863, Chief Justice of the U.S. from 1910 to 1921.

A Louisianian, White fought for the Confederacy, was taken prisoner and released on parole. Gravely ill, he collapsed at the side of the road while trying to make his way home. He might have died had a Union soldier not stopped and helped him by covering him with a Union overcoat. It was then, said Warren, that White "decided to devote his energies to a reconciliation between the North and the South."

After the war, White became a lawyer, a judge, a U.S. Senator, an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller died in 1910, the other Associate Justices paid White a magnificent tribute: they petitioned President Taft to appoint him to head the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was on the court at that time, had been wounded five times while serving in the Union forces, said Warren. Yet Holmes and White formed "an abiding friendship." In 1915, in Guinn v. U.S., the White court considered an Oklahoma amendment that discriminated against Negroes by requiring a literacy test of anyone whose ancestors had not been eligible to vote prior to 1866, the year after the slavery-prohibiting 13th Amendment went into effect. It was Chief Justice White who wrote the opinion declaring such "grandfather clauses" unconstitutional.

White's "most important contribution," said Warren, "was the spirit of unity which he engendered on the court and the reconciliation which he fostered throughout his long public career. We need that spirit of unity and reconciliation now," said the Chief Justice, "as much as we did in his day."

. . .

The day after his call for unity, Warren went to Manhattan to accept an honorary membership in the New York City Bar Association. He found a band of jeering Birchist pickets waiting to heave placards at him. Said Warren: "It is a great thing that they can do this in this country."

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