U.S. Marshals' 175th

The television image of the U.S. marshal is still the tall, lean figure of Wyatt Earp tossing hot lead in Dodge City.

In the real world the civil rights revolution has changed everything. Though he cannot ride a horse, rarely packs his .38 pistol and admits to raising petunias, broken-nosed ("I got it in the amatoors") Chief U.S. Marshal James Joseph Patrick McShane, 55, has out-Earped Earp while leading his 821 men to war in Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa and Oxford. Never before has the nation's senior law-enforcement agency -- just 175 years old -- looked less like a refuge for political grifters and more like the strong right arm of the nation's 393 federal courts.

Slaves & Skin Lotion. The origin of U.S. marshals goes back to medieval England, where the Old French word mareschal (groom) came to mean a sort of royal sheriff in charge of collaring witnesses for the King. In the U.S., when the 1789 Judiciary Act created the 13 original federal district courts, it also provided for 13 marshals to carry out court orders. Appointed by the President, those marshals were at first responsible for everything from census taking to courts-martial and taking custody of prize vessels. In the 1850s they chased fugitive slaves all over the North, much as they personally loathed that part of their job. Put under the Attorney General in 1861, they took such risks in taming the wild West that the Justice Department was soon fretting that "no other occupation is so dangerous as a faithful performance of duty by U.S. marshals." The rise of other federal agencies, such as the FBI (founded in 1908), has lightened the load, but U.S. marshals are far from underemployed. They keep order in all federal courts, disburse U.S.

judicial funds, including the pay of all federal judges and Government law yers. They transport federal prisoners (79,000 last year), serve all federal court papers, from jury notices to Supreme Court orders -- a chore that often takes wit and wile. To slap a desegregation injunction on Alabama's well-guarded George Wallace, for example, one deputy marshal stowed away in the men's room aboard the Governor's plane. Marshals have been called upon to seize entire businesses, not to mention stolen art works and such other oddments as a shipment of "Helene Curtis Magic Secret Wrinkle-Smoothing Skin Lotion."

Zest for Battle. Political patronage is still a problem. The country's 92 U.S. marshals (pay: up to $17,000 a year) serve only by favor of the party in power, go out when a new party comes in. Even so, they leave behind their own increasingly career-minded appointees: the 729 deputy and chief deputy marshals, nearly all seasoned ex-policemen, who stay on the job under civil service regulations. Training has sharply improved ever since the Little Rock crisis of 1957 moved the service to learn a great deal more about riot tactics and weapons. And in Chief Marshal McShane, a Kennedy appointee in 1961, the service got a much-decorated (Medal of Honor, 13 citations) New York City detective with all the raw courage and all the Irish zest that was needed to lead his deputies through bullets and tear gas at the University of Mississippi in 1962. ,

Nothing made McShane prouder of his men in that crisis than the fact that though many of them were pro-segregationist Southerners, not a single one failed to live up to his oath and 100 were injured. As for McShane himself, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach calls him "typecast" for the job. "I have never seen him falter under any kind of fire," says Katzenbach. "I always have the feeling about Jim that he takes his oath of office all over every morning."

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