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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview L-0064-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is the first interview in a nine-part series of interviews with civil
liberties lawyer Daniel H. Pollitt. Pollitt begins the interview with a
discussion of his family history. Born in 1921, Pollitt was the son of World War
I veteran and lawyer Basil Hubbard Pollitt and Mima Riddiford Pollitt. After
describing his father's career as a professor and lawyer, Pollitt
explains his mother's pursuit of her own legal career. In 1938,
Pollitt's mother earned her law degree and went to work for the
Justice Department. Shortly thereafter, she divorced Pollitt's father
and became the sole provider for her family, working as a civil liberties lawyer
well into her eighties. Pollitt describes how he met his wife, Jean Ann
Rutledge, and offers a brief overview of her family history, noting that both
Jean Ann and her father were lawyers, as well. Pollitt then turns his attention
to his own decision to pursue a degree in law. After serving in World War II,
Pollitt—though not initially drawn to the legal
profession—earned a law degree at Cornell University in 1949.
Following his graduation, Pollitt worked for the law firm MacFarland and Sellers
for one year, where he helped to represent the National Association of
Manufacturers. In 1950, Pollitt went to clerk for Judge Henry Edgerton at the
United States Court of Appeals, hoping to establish credentials appropriate for
the pursuit of a career in legal education. After his clerkship, Pollitt went to
work with Joseph Rauh, head of Americans for Democratic Action, and spent the
next several years defending liberals accused by the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) of having communist ties. Pollitt devotes
considerable time to a series of lively anecdotes regarding the loyalty and
security cases he worked on during the early McCarthy era. In particular, he
describes his work in defending the Brooklyn Eagle (a
newspaper that HUAC accused of communist affiliations), playwright Lillian
Hellman, and the United Auto Workers, and he briefly outlines the
"passport hearings" of former communist Max Shachtman. The
interview concludes with Pollitt's discussion of his decision to
become a professor at the University of Arkansas in the mid-1950s, at which time
he joined the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and also
became involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). In 1955, Pollitt refused to sign the state's required
loyalty oath for educators because it asked teachers and professors to disclose
involvement in groups like the NAACP.
This is the first interview in a nine-part series of interviews with civil liberties lawyer Daniel H. Pollitt. In this interview, Pollitt discusses his family history, his early legal career, his work in defending liberals against the House Un-American Activities Committee during the early McCarthy years, and his brief tenure as a law professor at the University of Arkansas.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview of Dan Pollitt being conducted on Tuesday November 27 at the Law School in his office. The interviewer is Ann McColl and this is the first in a series of interviews with Professor Pollitt.
Professor Pollitt if you would start first by telling me something about your family; your parents and some of their background.
Okay. My father was born in Kentucky and his father, my grandfather, was a Methodist minister. He went to college and Divinity School which set him apart in that time. I think he had been the president of something called Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and I don't know how you edit a Bible, but he edited a Bible. My grandmother was a woman named Daisy Hubbard who was the sister of Elbert Hubbard who was a prominent writer and craftsman and whatever of the day.
What time period was this?
We're talking about the turn of the century. She was the vice president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and was active. So, my father was born in Frankfurt and went to the University of Cincinnati where he met my mother who was a student there. Her father was English and had immigrated to America with his wife, my mother's mother and my mother's grandmother. So that was the family. He was an alcoholic.
Your grandfather?
Yes. He recovered and then operated a mission down on the waterfront in
Cincinnati. But he died when my mother was
What year was that?
1921. I had an older brother who is eighteen months older and
he'd been born in Huntington, West Virginia where my
He was quite successful wasn't he in his law firm practice?
Yes. But then he decided to teach. So we were living on Staten Island and
he was on Wall Street and Rutgers, which is in Newark, offered him a job
teaching law. So we moved to Montclair, New Jersey and he joined the
faculty at Rutgers. That's where we were. Then my father got
encephalitis which is like Parkinson's disease with the
tremor and the voice problem. He got a year's leave of
absence and we went to Arizona to live in the warm sunshine and see if
that wouldn't do anything. But it didn't. He got a
Fellowship at Harvard Law School and so we went to Harvard and lived in
Cambridge while he got an advanced degree of some sort. Then the New
Deal came. My father had taken a seminar with Frankfort and so Frankfort
got him a job in the Department of Justice. My father had been an expert
in bankruptcy. There's a book on Coca-Cola cases. I
don't know what that's about. But in any event, we
moved to Washington again and the tremor didn't mind so much.
He wrote the Reorganization Act for the railroads. They were all
bankrupt so
How old were you during this time?
I was fourteen or fifteen. I left out a stage. When my father got his degree at Harvard, then we went to Florida. We moved outside of Miami to Coconut Grove hoping again that this would help my father's illness, but it didn't. But then he got the job in the Department of Justice. So we moved to Washington from Florida. I was in junior high at that time. I went to Gordon Junior High and was put in the dumb section because I was from Florida. So I was with the good dummies. We had a good time. So that's where I stayed in essence. And then my father did not get better and he had emotional problems and was committed to the mental institution. He stayed there for about ten years. My mother had committed him and he was angry with my mother and divorced my mother and went back to Florida where he met a woman he used to date at the University of Cincinnati who was a good friend of my mother's. So he married her and she was my step mother and we were very close. We'd go to Florida until he died.
Did he ever recover?
He never recovered from the tremor and the voice. It was difficult
because he had a very large vocabulary and he would use it. One of his
adjectives was "egregious". Now a lot of people if
they hear "egregious" will have no idea what the
person is saying and if someone with encephalitis says it, they have a
much more difficult time understanding. But it was difficult to Remington on Bankruptcy and they were connected to
disability.
When my father was teaching law at Rutgers and we were maybe in the first grade or something, she started to take courses at Rutgers. Then when we went to Arizona she didn't and then we went to Boston and she enrolled in Yale Law School somehow and took courses at Yale. Then when we went to Washington, she went to G.W. and got her law degree from G.W. When my father got sick she got a job as first a librarian at the Department of Justice. They all knew her. Then she passed the Bar and became a lawyer.
What year was that?
Well, I don't know. This was 1937 or '38 when she went to work at the Department of Justice as a librarian, but she used to say that she passed every part of the D.C. Bar eight times, but never could get them all together at the same time. So it took her eight times to pass the Bar. She kept trying it and didn't give up.
She must have been one of the first women lawyers.
She was a very early lawyer. I think there four or five women lawyers in
the Department of Justice and they were all in the Lands Division which
is eminent domain things, not considered fit for men's work
or something. Then she went to the Department of Interior where she was
assigned to writing the book on Indian law. A man named Felix Cohen was
the solicitor or the Chief Counsel at the Department of Interior. And
this was when Harold Ickes was the Secretary of Interior. They decided
to compile a book on Indian law, so they did. It's called Cohen on Indian Law and in the beginning he
acknowledges two or three people including my mother. So she spent a
couple of years on that. Then when World War II came along, she went to
the War Relocation Authority which was when they interned the Japanese
and so there was a small complement of people. They were mostly social
workers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work to
take care of the Japanese in their internment. There was a small handful
of lawyers including my mother. So she would go to the various camps and
talk to the people who had legal problems. So, she was the spokesperson
for the Japanese and their wants.
You've written about this since then. Did you become interested in it because of your mother's work?
Well, yes, because by that time I was in the Marine Corps in the Pacific and was fighting the Japanese. I'd get the letters from all these remote places and my mother would be telling me what a horrible life the Japanese had. They'd take one family of five and put them in a one room place and destroy their dignity. I'd get these letters and I'd write back and say, "Gee, it's tough." So that's what she did. Then when the war was over, she went back to work at the Department of Interior. She did tort work. Whenever there is a Department of Interior agent of instrumentality causes damage and it's under five thousand dollars, you file an administrative claim and it went to my mother. If she thought that there was fault or negligence she would void the thing. So she would write opinions. People would be bitten by the squirrels at the White House or I remember when the canoe turned over in Monmouth Cave. But mostly it was Department of Interior trucks would hit somebody.
So she was like an administrative law judge?
Yes. Then she fell down in the bathtub one night. It was when Eisenhower
took office and they brought in some young lawyer to share her office
who didn't do anything except watch her. All the lawyers in
her area, the General Counsels, suddenly were given a roommate. So they
figured as soon as the roommate caught on they were going to be fired,
because they had no security as lawyers then. She fell down and hurt her
head and they gave her physical retirement. So she retired and practiced
How old was she when she died?
She was eighty-eight or something.
So, she continued to practice law into her eighties?
Yes. She had all sorts of cases like. For a while we lived in an
apartment in Georgetown. She'd call me up and say,
"The janitor's having trouble. He wants to get a
divorce so he can marry his wife." And I said, "What
do you mean?" "Well, he had never divorced his wife of
twenty years ago and wanted to marry the woman he had been living with
ever since." So I would do that or she would do it. People
would get hit by cars. The first negligence case that recovered against
Georgetown Hospital when a doctor cut off the wrong leg. He actually
did. It was a neighbor and my mother sued. At that time doctors would
not testify against other doctors and there were really no malpractice
cases. She did that
My father was the law professor. My step mother was very nice. Inez. She
was a nurse and very good and a widow. She had three children who I am
very close to. My brother, my older brother was bright. We
didn't have much money, but he got the Harvard scholarship
when he was sixteen. So he went to Harvard and graduated at nineteen or
something and went to work at the War
What was your brother's name?
Basil. So that's what he did. And my younger sister is maybe four years younger. It's sort of interesting. When she went to Western High School in Washington, which we all did, she was the president or vice president of her class. But she would always take off in the winter months and go to Florida and live with my father. And she was the vice president or something of her class at Ponce de Leon down there, so she was a class officer of two classes in two different high schools. She got the Vassar scholarship when she was sixteen, so she graduated from Vassar at age nineteen as a math major and went to work for IBM in their pre-computer stuff. She stayed with them until she married my brother's best friend who was a Navy officer. They live out in San Rafael, California across the bay from San Francisco.
So she's not a lawyer.
She's not a lawyer. She went to law school. She went to George Washington Law School at night when she was working for IBM to be a lawyer. But then she got married and her husband was in the Navy. He was a Navy aviator and they lived up and down and around and about. I have seven nephews and nieces and they were all born in a different state. She has seven children. So that sort of ended the law degree. So that's where she is.
Well, that's understandable.
So that's that family. My wife was the daughter of Wiley Rutledge who was a Supreme Court Justice and his father was a Baptist minister in Kentucky.
So both of you have ministers as your grandparents?
Yes. His father remarried while he was sixteen or seventeen and he was
sort of thrown out or ignored. So he went to a small little college in
Tennessee near Knoxville. Maryville College which is a denominational
college where he met his wife who was on the faculty. She taught
classics, Latin and Greek. They got married and then he went to
Wisconsin to finish his college. So he graduated from the University of
Wisconsin. Then he got TB. There's a TB sanitarium near
Asheville and he went there and lived for a while. He married his wife
while he was in the TB sanitarium. Then they went to Albuquerque, New
Mexico with a high, dry climate and so on where he taught mathematics at
a high school. She taught classics, Latin and Greek at the high schools.
Then he took a correspondence course in law and liked it. So then he got
a scholarship at the University of Colorado which is next to New Mexico
and graduated from there and was
Did you get to meet him?
Yes. When I was in law school I went to see him for a job.
And this was before you knew your wife?
This was before I knew my wife
You were asking him for a job when he was on the Supreme Court?
Yes. And we had a very nice chat. He told me he was going to hire the younger brother of a former clerk who did know my wife at that time. But he called Murphy to say that he had me in the office and Murphy might want to talk to me. Murphy already had a clerk. And then he called Black. So I went around to see Black and Black told me that he only hired people from the South. I said, "Well, I'm from the District of Columbia." He said that he wanted people from the South. Then as I was leaving, young Hugo Black who was the son of the judge, came in. We had lived about two blocks from the Blacks and I'd had the newspaper route. It was the "Evening Star" and you'd get a wagon to carry them all. When I quit the route, Hugo, Jr. took over the route and he had my Star wagon. Now this is when we were in high school and we are now with college and World War II and law school behind us, so he said, "Hey Dan, I still got that Star wagon." And his father said, "Oh, do you know each other?" And he said, "Yes, Dan used to deliver us the Star and he said, "Well, come on back in the office." So he said he did have this Southerner, but he'd call Douglas. So I went to see Douglas and Douglas told me he only hired people from the West Coast and I could not qualify for that. So I saw Wiley Rutledge and Black and Douglas all in one afternoon. I went home and told my mother none of them would hire me.
When did you meet your wife?
I did get a job for Judge Edgerton who was on the Court
So your wife was a lawyer and your mother and father were lawyers and your older brother was a lawyer?
Yes. And Jane's younger brother, Neil. I knew Neil. Jane grew
up in an area of Washington called Spring Valley and I grew up in an
area called Wesley Heights and they were both developed by the same real
estate people and they were adjacent. We all had one football team and
all that. But when I went to work for Judge Edgerton, Neil Rutledge went
to work for Charlie Fayhe who was also a judge on that court. And at
that time each judge had one law clerk. There were nine judges and nine
law clerks and we had lunch regularly, daily. So it was a close little
community. So I knew Neil pretty well. I think he's one of my
best friends today. We are very close. Then he went on to clerk for Hugo
Black and then he went to Los Alamos for awhile and then he went to
Florida and worked for Senator Pepper. Then Senator Pepper got elected
to the House and Neil stayed in Florida for a number of years. He
represented most of the unions in Florida. He represented the Railroad
Brotherhoods during a long bitter strike of the East Coast Railroad. He
represented
Did you talk about your unions?
No. I was in Washington representing the unions because I went to work for Rale and Deevy. Our chief client was the Auto Workers. We also represented the Shoe Workers and the Farm Workers and Timber Workers out in the far West. Neil was representing the unions down in Florida. Occasionally, there would be a CIO lawyers' convention or something. We'd see each other fairly regularly. Then as a matter of fact, he decided he wanted to go into teaching. I interviewed him up here. They didn't like him or they didn't have any room for him. But I think it was because they would have brought him in at a higher level. So I called Ken Pie who was the Dean at Duke. I told him that Neil Rutledge was here and he said, "Send him over. Bring him over." So he was hired on the spot over there at Duke. So he moved up from Florida to Durham and taught there for three years, I guess. They had a change of deans and they had a very conservative dean and Neil didn't get along too well with him and he decided to leave. He went to his law school roommate who started a law firm and had a big law firm, so Neil went up there to be the Chief Litigator. So he went to a big Washington, D.C. law firm where they represent the bums…. the corporate interests of America.
You went from unions to…
To teaching. And he taught a course in Georgetown at night, you know, in labor law I think.
Now this wasn't during the same time that you were teaching at George Washington in the summer, is it?
I taught at Georgetown, too, so we overlapped a little bit. We'd go up every summer and we lived two blocks apart.
So you grew up in Washington from when you were about…
Junior high. We lived there when I was a baby; a couple of years. Then we moved back when I was in junior high and we stayed there. Then I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut for college.
Why did you choose to go there?
I didn't get a scholarship for anyplace at the age sixteen. I
graduated at a normal age and had no scholarships and I had no
special…. I didn't want to go to Harvard where my
brother was. All through high school I had all the teachers
he'd had, you know: "Oh you're
Basil's brother. We expect great things of you."
I'd show them, boy. They'll be getting great
things out of me.
Well, when you were young did you always think you'd be a lawyer?
No. I did not want to be a lawyer.
Why didn't you want to be a lawyer?
Well, all the family friends were lawyers. We had roomers. We lived in a very fashionable area of town in a fairly large old Victorian house without much income. There was my father's disability and my mother's librarianship, you know. So we'd have roomers. We always had two roomers; we had two bedrooms. And they'd always be young lawyers from the Department of Justice who just arrived looking for a place to live. And so we were just filled with…. And they'd always eat there and have breakfast. So all our friends were lawyers, all the family friends. I got back from the war and I didn't know what to do particularly. I thought I'd really like to be a newspaper person, so I went to Florida. Miami. My father got me a job on the "Miami Daily News". He was always an active Unitarian and the editor of the "Daily News" was a Unitarian. I got a job there for a short while and I didn't like living with my father. I mean, I'd been in the war.
How old were you at this time?
I was twenty-five or something like that and so I thought if I wanted a beer I could have a beer. "Liquor is the curse of the veterans," my father would say. So I went to Washington and got a job on the "Post", not a very important job; a copy boy on the Post where I met Pete Williams who later became the senator from New Jersey. We started the Georgetown American Veterans Committee group and so on. Then after about a year I thought I'd go to law school.
What made you change your mind?
Well, I was sort of hanging around and not doing much and my mother thought I ought to go and my brother was enjoying it and my sister was going to George Washington at night. I was sort of hanging around the house, so I thought I'd go and give it a try. I didn't like it.
You didn't like law school?
Not the first time. I didn't know what they were talking about and I decided I would not quit before I got my grades and then I would leave with my colors flying. I would work real hard and get at least a C average and quit. So the grades came out. The semester ended in January and we didn't get the grades until May or March. I was number one in the class at that time, so it was too late to quit. So I stayed the next six weeks and that one year, which I did. And then I went to my sister and I went to Europe to the Academy of International Law in Holland.
For the summer?
For the summer. And then we toured around. We lived in Paris for awhile. I ran into a guy I'd known at college who was working for the Paris edition of the "Herald Tribune". So I thought, "I'll get a job on the Trib and stay over here and enjoy life in France for awhile."
And just not go back to law school?
Yes. And so I did. I got a job on the Trib. And there were about three
people like me; New England colleges and out of the war. I had been the
editor of our college literary magazine and they had, too. And then all
of them decided to go
And so you got back in for the spring semester?
No. I asked all my friends, I said, "What have I missed? Can I
borrow your notes?" And they all said, "We
haven't taken any notes. Nothing has happened the first month
and a half of law school."
What did you like about it?
Well, you do your own research and so on. It's not just
reading cases and taking notes. You are participating. You are a
participant rather than a recipient. I liked that. And then when I
graduated…. I still had a year left on the GI bill so I
thought I'd go somewhere. Most people in my class wanted to
work for the U.N. This was '49 and everybody in my class was
a veteran and most of them had seen combat and wanted to work for World
Peace. So we all went to the U.N. and we all got rejected because we
were Americans and there are too many Americans.
"It's too bad you're not
Indonesian," or whatever. So that was what I really wanted to
do. Then I thought I'd go abroad for a year and use up my GI
bill and go to some London School of Economics or someplace. So I
applied to the London School of Economics and was rejected. They said
there were too many Englishmen and people in the Empire who wanted to go
and they weren't taking outsiders. So I thought
I'd look for a job
Is to not want it?
Not want one. And I'd go, "What do you do in this firm," you know, "Do you have fun?" I got offered everyplace I went I got a job offer. I took one with a small law firm, McFarland and Sellers. There were seven in the firm and they both had been Assistant Attorney Generals during the Roosevelt years and the others had been the head of Anti-Trust Division or something.
Did you at this point have a strong sense of what it is you wanted to be doing with your legal career?
This was really corporate in the sense we represented the National Association of Manufacturers. Mr. Sellers, who was a partner, had been the war Food Administrator during World War II and he had administered all the food, so we represented the Cotton Seed Association and the Soy Bean Association and the American Stock Yard Association. So we had all these trade associations. The Milk Producers of America. And they would have litigation…
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Then we had some important litigation. It was a Supreme Court litigating firm and we had a couple of Supreme Court cases.
Do you remember any of the names of them?
Yes. Whether the Lobbying Act applies to the NAM. That was NAM against
Clark who was then the Attorney General. We sued the Attorney General.
We won, but not really. And then we had a
There were seven partners?
Yes. So the firm broke up. And Mr. McFarland, who was the senior partner,
had been from Montana and they offered him the Presidency of the
University of Montana. He was the head of the Alumni Association and one
of their successful alumni and he had gone back in the summers to teach
at the Law School. Mr. Wilkinson had been the same at Brigham Young, so
they offered him the Presidency of Brigham Young. So they went there and
one guy went to be the General Counsel of the National Association of
Manufacturers. Another guy went over to Germany to head up the
Why did you decide to go work for a judge instead of continuing in law firms?
Well, Mr. McFarland, my boss, taught administrative law at Virginia at the same time. He'd go down on Saturdays and teach on Saturdays. I drove him down and graded the papers and so on and I thought I'd like to teach administrative law at the University of Virginia which I thought this was great. So Mr. McFarland told me it would be good if I had been a clerk.
So you clerked with the idea of being a teacher?
Of being a teacher. But in any event, it was the greatest experience you can get in the District of Columbia where you get all the suits against the government. We had loyalties, security cases, McCarthy and passport cases. All the exciting social drama.
What years were you there?
I was there in 1950 and then when I left I went with Joe Rauh who was the head of the Americans for Democratic Action and the General Counsel for the United Auto Workers and a very personal friend of Walter Luther. So we represented all the liberal elements and their Washington problems.
Did you pick the final cause of that?
Oh, yes. I was not going go back to a firm that…. I spent a lot of time working for the National Association of Manufacturers and preferred bond holders and I thought that's a waste of my life. I wanted to do something that to me would be far more meaningful, which it was. And I did a lot of loyalty security cases. At that time there was a loyalty program and they were firing people for…
Sort of the McCarthy era?
The McCarthy era. And I think I had forty or fifty of those people and
then they were deporting people for past membership in the Communist
Party. There were a lot of them in the United Auto Workers and we
represented them. Then the House Committee on Unamerican Activities was
looking into things and I went up before the Congressional committees
with people who would plead the Fifth Amendment. It was a harrowing
experience. Jean Ann, my wife, and I had a nice little apartment in
Georgetown and Georgetown was filled with recent Ivy League graduates.
There'd be a cocktail party every Saturday afternoon
somewhere in the neighborhood. So if you wanted to get to the bar all
you have to say is, "I was before
This was Vice President Nixon?
Yes. So the Democrats were in control of the Senate and Senator Johnson
from South Carolina had the appropriate committee on post office and
civil service or something, so he had some hearings and they
couldn't get many people to come and testify about what went
on. I got a chance. They asked me and I did. I was, I guess, the
lead-off witness and I had a fifteen point program for improving things.
I had represented the only Communist in the State Department who had
ever been fired for being a Communist. He was a mail messenger; a black
mail messenger who didn't know the difference between the
union and the Communist Party. In any event, I had my picture in the
paper and so on. It was "Pollitt testifies" about
something or other. Then I got a phone call from the the Dean at
American University who asked me if I would like to teach a course in
securities starting in a couple of weeks. He was short-handed. I thought
this came about from the picture in the paper and he was talking about
the loyalty security programs and I thought, "Yes, I think I
could work something up." You know. Sales and Secure Transactions or something which I
had not taken in law school. It was miserable.
So did you teach the class?
I taught the class and it was sort of fun because we met on Friday night
for two hours or three hours and there were
Did you do that?
I did that and I did that twice. The second time I learned how I'd gotten payees and payors confused the first time around.
Can you talk some more about basic loyalty and security cases and the Congressional hearings? I mean what was it like to represent them? What did they do?
It was tough. The sequence would go like this. They would find somebody who had been a member of a Communist study group or like…
Who would be finding these?
Well, I represented some people from the "Brooklyn
Eagle" and there had been a group of young people in the
What senator was this?
It was the senator from Idaho. At the time I thought this was disgusting. So we went back in and we pleaded the fifth and then they say, "Okay, you pleaded the fifth. You're not going to cooperate. We're now going to put you in the public session." So we go into the public session and there are the lights and the television and they always have a big audience. There's somebody in town; the Women's Club from something.
And this was sort of a sort of a sport to come in and watch this?
Yes. It was a big thing to go down and watch HUAC and so on. So then you
plead the fifth and they say, one guy said, "Are you now or
have you ever been a member of the Communist Party."
"On the advice of counsel I refuse to answer that question on
the grounds that it will incriminate me." "Well, would
it incriminate you…. Did you ever engage in espionage? Will a
truthful answer to that incriminate you?" And then,
"On advice of counsel…." Then
they'd say, "Were you ever a member of a Communist
group?" "On the advice of
counsel…." And then they'd say,
"Was so and so in your group?" And they'd
name his boss who had never been in the group. Now what's the
guy going to say? Fifth Amendment? "You mean to tell me that
answering an honest question about your boss would incriminate
you?" See, if you answer anything you open the door and you
waive your rights. So that was their trick. So I had some people from
Harvard Medical School and they asked him, "Is
The playwright?
The playwright. We represented a lot of big shots as well. What's her name? Marilyn Monroe. She was married to Arthur Miller.
Lillian Hellman.
Lillian Hellman. She was great. The story with Lillian Hellman is that
she sort of had a crush on my boss, Joe Rauh. It's like a
doctor, you know. You are emotionally at the lowest ebb possible and
you're seeking support and here's a big, tall,
strong man who knows what he's doing and you can cry on his
shoulder. Well, he didn't particularly like her. So we went
in and Lillian Hellman said a very famous thing. "I will not
cut my fashions to meet this year's something or
other," you know. So we left there in a taxi cab and Lillian
says to Joe Rauh, "I'd like a drink. Why
don't we stop at the Statler?" which is a block from
the office. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. And Joe
says, "Okay, Dan will take you in and I'll go to the
office and see about phone calls. Then I'll join
you." So he stopped at the Statler and Lillian and I go in and
I said, "I don't know whether he's coming
back or not. I sure hope he
And so they were left with the tab?
They were left with it, but he's a millionaire and a
billionaire so it was all right. But that was Lillian Hellman. But the
serious part was that she got called because somebody had named her. She
was willing to tell all about herself and deny that she'd
ever been a Communist. But she, in actor's classes or
whatever, Screen Writers Guild, had known some that were. But she was
not going to name them. She wrote a letter to the committee saying,
"I will tell you all about myself waiving my rights to the
Fifth Amendment if you will agree not to ask me about anybody else. And
if you want information how it all worked, I'll tell you all
about me." But we didn't get a reply so we got into
the committee room and it was packed. It's a great big room.
There were five hundred people there to see Lillian Hellman and they
said, "Are you now or have you ever been
So the horror of what happened to people in the committee is that it wasn't the committee so much. It was just the publicity of being…
There were 120 congressmen who wanted to be on HUAC one year and every
one of them that was on went up to the Senate. Richard Nixon was one of
them. So you get your picture in the paper every day. You get somebody
famous and badger them and you know, say how patriotic you are and why
don't they be patriotic
Was the whole point of these hearings to get the names?
Yes, the whole point was to get publicity for the members. That's about it. Well, I think we've done enough for tonight.
Sure.
One time we represented about four United Auto Workers, organizers, and
they had been in the Farm Equipment Workers Union which was a left wing
union and then it merged with the United Auto Workers. And they made
farm tractors and things in the quiet city of Iowa and Illinois. They
were subpoenaed. One of them, a very nice guy decided that none of them
are going to name names. They were all going to plead the fifth. And one
of them said that his daughter was…. It was the night of the
high school prom and he didn't want to be on the 6:00 news
back in his home town where his daughter is going to the prom that
night. And could we do something about that? So I called up the council
for the committee and said, "You've got the four
subpoenaed. Three of them will be there, but the fourth has a personal
problem and would like to come next week if it's possible.
Put him on next week." And the guy said,
"What's his problem?" And I said,
"Well, it's a personal problem." And he
said, "What is it?" And I said, "Well, his
daughter is graduating from high
In the whole room?
Not the whole room. They had the head lights, but not the T.V. lights. So
he pulled the damn plug out and says, "We're not
coming." And he says, "Put your handkerchief on your
face." We all did, you know.
END OF INTERVIEW ON NOVEMBER 27
START OF INTERVIEW ON NOVEMBER 28
Let's start with your telling me about your passport hearings.
I thought of the guy's name. Max Shackman. And Max Shackman
had been an original member of the American Communist Party and he was
expelled in 1928 or thereabouts and started his own splinter group. It
was either the Socialists' Labor Party or the Socialist
Workers' Party. I could never keep them apart. He had applied
for a passport. He wanted to go visit in Spain. There was a branch of
his party and also in Burma and that's about it. But he
wanted to go to Spain to make contact with his party and they
wouldn't give it to him. So he appealed from the initial
decision. And there was a board within the State Department. And Mr.
Nicklaus was the chair of that board. And we got there and Mr. Nicklaus
opened up with the comment that, "It has come to the attention
of the State Department that you are the head of an organization that
describes itself as being revolutionary and wants to overthrow the
entire political and social structure of the United States."
Words to that effect. To which Mr. Shackman said, "Mr.
Nicklaus, if that has not come to the attention of the State Department,
my life's work has been in vain." So we
didn't get the passport, but we did go to court
Were those less frequent than the things you were telling me about yesterday?
Yes, there weren't so many of those. What happened, we were
across the street from a law firm. It was a two man law firm with a
couple of associates and they represented General Electric in big
matters. And sometimes a General Electric scientist or something, or an
engineer would have to go somewhere abroad and couldn't get a
passport because when they had been in college they had done something
and the firm that represented GE didn't want to dirty their
hands with this stuff so they slammed
You were telling me yesterday about the loyalty security type cases that there were only about nine lawyers or law firms that did it. Is that also true for the passports?
Yes. Same people. We had a guy who I knew socially; he was a good friend of a good friend and we'd meet on Saturday nights at parties and stuff. But he became the head of the Republican Party in the District of Columbia. He was interviewed by Tony Lewis. Anthony Lewis of the "Times". He was then a young reporter on the "Washington Daily News" which was a tabloid thing. He did a series of articles on the loyalty security program and got a Haywood Brune award or something. But in his articles he saw this Republican and said, "Would you take a loyalty case?" And he said somebody came in and said they had a loyalty security case. "Would you take it?" And he said, "Oh, no. I couldn't take it. I've got a reputation." And then they said, "What would you do? Would you refer him to somebody else?" And he said, "Oh, no. I wouldn't do that because the person I referred him to might think that I think he has Communist leanings or something." So that captured the atmosphere of the day.
Did you feel any social repercussions from your involvement?
No. Not as far as…. You know, you never know, but I was fairly
recently out of Cornell and there were maybe
And you did all these cases while you were with Joe Rauh?
Yes.
Was the name of the law firm then Rauh and Silard?
No it was Rauh and Levy. They had been clerks together a long time ago. Joe had worked for Cardoza and Irv Levy had worked with Brandeis. Irv Levy had been the Chief Counsel for the Department of Labor and then after World War II he and Joe Rauh got together and opened a law firm. Walter Luther was about the first client. So he did labor unions. It was primarily a labor union clientele.
You left them in 1955. Why did you decide to leave the firm?
Well, my father had been a law teacher and my father-in-law had been a law teacher and I'd always thought I'd like to be a law teacher and I'd had five years of practice. I'd been teaching nights at American University.
Those were your sales and securities classes?
Yes. I figured if I liked to teach security transactions it would be really great to teach something fun.
What did you end up teaching? Did you have specific courses in mind that you wanted to be able to teach?
Yes. I wanted to teach administrative law because we'd done a lot of that and I wanted to teach Constitutional law, but I taught a number of things.
And so this is when you went to Arkansas?
Arkansas, yes.
And how did you wind up getting a job in Arkansas?
A friend of a friend. I just told people I was sort of interested in teaching and a friend of mine who was really a friend of a family friend was teaching at Arkansas and ran into my mother. My mother said, "Why don't you ask Dan?" So he asked me and I thought it would be fun to go to Arkansas.
So was it?
Yes. It was a great little place. We got there. We had two children then, very young. There were several things…. I'd wanted very much to write up my experience representing people who take the fifth amendment. I'd seen the Ford Foundation which was then under Hutchins and they told me that they would sponsor it and they'd give me twenty-five thousand. They were going to get somebody to do the publicity who could write something up in the New Yorker. It was sort of a managed thing, but they had to give it to somebody scholarly like the Bar Association. I went to the AAUP.
What does that stand for?
The American Association of University Professors, because I knew the
Executive Director who was named Ralph Foushe. And I said to them,
"You know a lot of professors are pleading the Fifth Amendment
these days and I have this money and I need a
So when you got there, they knew that this is what you wanted to do?
Yes. And they decided that maybe we ought to get the Arkansas Bar Association involved. They were not interested and then the University was not interested. I never did get the twenty thousand, but I did it anyway. It was published in the Pennsylvania Law Review. Griswold of Harvard, when he read it, I didn't sent it to him. He'd read it and he stole from it, too, in his book on the Fifth Amendment. But he wrote Henry Brandeis who was a dean here, because it came out when I was here. And Henry went over to the administration and showed them the letter from the Dean of the Harvard Law School, so I got a five hundred dollar raise or something, which was a lot because I hear I got seven thousand. But in any event, we went to Arkansas and it was a delightful. It's up in the mountains. It was then a small law school.
How many students did they have?
I don't know, but I had to teach sales again. I had six in my
class. And I taught administrative law and that was my first thing I was
to teach. I worked hard on my first lecture. I went in there and there
were five people. I went over and did the shades and was waiting for the
rest to come and nobody else
So there weren't more than a hundred in the whole law school if that. And there were seven faculty members. So it was a very close-knit small group. It was a very nice pleasant group. So we enjoyed it, but it was '55 and Brown against school board was '54 and '55. They had the school integration problems and what they'd been doing…. This was Fayetteville, Arkansas. They didn't have a black high school. They'd driven the black high school students to Fort Smith which was about sixty miles away and you have to go up and over some mountains and things. So the school bus would leave for Fort Smith at 6:30 or something and get back around 6:30 and then the bus broke down or something, so they figured instead of repairing the bus, they'd just integrate. So the blacks students came into the white high school. There was a black primary and a white primary school and they just said, "Everybody on this side of town goes here and the other side of town goes to the other." But our first year there, which was 1955, a young black kid went out for the football team.
At the high school?
At the high school. And he made the squad, but he didn't make the team. He weighed about 130 pounds. So the traditional Thanksgiving day game was with Springdale, if I'm right, which was twenty miles up the road. They wouldn't play unless we left the black kid at home. The team voted not to go. The kid is on the squad. He goes where they go. And if they don't like it…. So they cancelled the traditional Thanksgiving day high school game, so I was very proud of that. But then things got tough in Arkansas and I got active in NAACP affairs. There were a couple of school integration problems which were pretty ugly.
With violence?
Well, we had a lawyer's meeting and we'd met in the
guy's basement and we came at fifteen minute intervals or
something. There were five of us. So nobody would know we were there.
And then came Faubus. Governor Faubus was elected. He was a liberal. He
did a complete turn about once he got elected governor. Arkansas then
was a liberal state. The governor was Sid McMath and he was a fairly
young Marine major veteran who had been a lawyer and head of the Young
Democrats. He went off to World War II and came back with a lot of
decorations. He became the DA in Hot Springs which is where they have
hot springs and they had gambling there. He drove out the gamblers. So
he was honest and clean and young and a veteran and a lawyer, so he ran
for governor and got elected. And the coalition that really put him
there was organized later. And the NAACP and the REA, the Rural
Electrical Association, that was the coalition that made
There was a case on that wasn't there?
Yes, it went to the Supreme Court. But Little Rock was the big thing. So
what they did was, the Legislature…. Again, this is crazy.
Right after World War II a number of states passed loyalty oath laws
which were disclaimer laws and you had to swear that you were not a
member of any organization on the Attorney General's list.
And the Attorney General of the United States had compiled a list of
subversive organizations so called, to be used in connection with the
loyalty security hearings for government employees. So a number of
states had passed these. There had been a state senator from Little Rock
who was a plumbing contractor or something and he had introduced these
bills whenever the Legislature met and they'd always been
denied. They'd always voted them down. Well, then at about
the time that they started to integrate Central High School and Faubus
was going crazy, this guy had a heart attack and he went to the hospital
and they thought he would die. So his fellow legislators said,
"Gee, you know, we ought to pass his bill as a final mark and
show of affection or something." So they passed his bill. So
that required all state employees, including me, to swear that we were
not a member of any organization on the Attorney General's
list. Then at the same time, or a little bit
Is this the one that required you to say about the NAACP or the state one?
Well, both. I wasn't going to sign anything.
END OF INTERVIEW