Asa Kowals-Rose | Blog for RFILP

These chapters detailed the history of the Supreme Court from the late 1930s through the 1960s. This era saw the Court deal with several First Amendment cases, as well as important civil rights cases, most notably Brown v. Board of Education. One topic that I found especially interesting was the supposed politicization of the Court with regard to the Brown decision. I agree with the point Irons makes on page 396, where he writes, “The Court has always been a political body. Its historic opinions—in Marbury, in Dred Scott, in Lochner, in West Coast Hotel, in Brown—have all been legislative decisions; they ‘made’ new law to replace old laws.” The contention that certain government institutions are too “political” always seems to be made for political reasons, rather than a genuine concern for the integrity of the institution. It’s important to recognize that the Supreme Court can never be apolitical. Even the strictest adherence to the Constitution is not a rejection of politics, but rather a preference for the political leanings of the founders.

Nitpicking time: From whose ass did Irons pull his World War II death count? On page 363 he writes, “Around the world, some twenty million people—including six million Jews in Europe—perished in the global battle between the Allies and the Axis.” While an exact count is impossible to ascertain, twenty million is an outrageous understatement by any standard. According the National WWII Museum, the war had a global death toll of approximately sixty million, three-quarters of which were civilians. Irons’ number would perhaps be a plausible description of combat deaths, but his explicit mention of Holocaust victims makes it clear that he means to include civilians as well. When non-combatants are included, more than twenty million died in the Soviet Union alone. I cannot fathom how such an egregious factual error would be published in a BuzzFeed article, let alone a history book. I expect this kind of lowballing from contestants on The Price is Right, not Harvard-educated legal scholars.

Irons also glosses over an incredibly significant event in American presidential history. On page 364, he writes that Henry A. Wallace was removed from the Democratic ticket because he “had become a political liability for Roosevelt.” This oversimplifies one of the most outrageous episodes of partisan skullduggery in American history. Henry Wallace was not a political liability in the sense that he was unpopular among the Democratic base or the American public, but rather that he was considered too progressive by a number of Democratic Party elites. This pro-business cabal settled on Harry Truman as an alternate pick for Vice President, fearing that a Wallace Presidency following Roosevelt’s death would be inhospitable to their interests. Going into the 1944 Democratic National Convention, Wallace was favored to stay on the ticket, but the party bosses backing Truman delayed the nomination for Vice President, and used the delay to sway delegates in the latter’s favor. Had this conspiracy not taken place, Wallace would have succeeded Roosevelt in 1945. One can assume that the incredibly significant decisions made under the Truman administration, like the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, would have been handled differently by Wallace. It’s also likely that his appointments to the Supreme Court would have been at least somewhat more impactful than Truman’s “Four Horsemen of Mediocrity.”