Hesperian Trivia #5

An attorney general whose legacy has been reduced to ashes.

[Apologies for being tardy. “Real life” sometimes gets in the way, and my free time has also been cut short by hours spent deleting emails and text messages from political campaigns. (Why, oh why, does Jon Tester waste pixels sending me messages from James Carville?) Deo gratias the deluge will end soon. Though not soon enough. Much as I deplore Daylight Savings Time, I wish that it would end a week later this year. “Falling back” on the Sunday before the last day of Voting Season adds an extra hour to our torment.]

Question: Which attorney general and future judge’s widely admired advice on the role of prosecutors was tossed into the trash bin by a later attorney general and former judge?

Hint #1: He attended law school for only one year and didn’t earn a law degree.

Hint #2: Although he never held elective public office, FDR boosted him as a candidate for governor of New York or even President.

Hint #3: He was the lead prosecutor in two of FDR’s most conspicuous “revenge” cases, losing one and winning a meritless appellate decision in the other. He was less amenable to Harry Truman’s exercise of executive authority.

Hint #4: One of his cross-examinations has become famous, although it didn’t go very well.

Hint #5: A feud with a fellow Justice may have sunk both of their chances of becoming Chief Justice.

Hint #6: [added belatedly] Justice Scalia opined that he (not Scalia) was the best writer among 20th Century Supreme Court Justices.

Last week’s question and answer:

What early American statesman’s best known (though possibly apocryphal) quotation comparing two forms of government was plagiarized two centuries later by a grifting Speaker of the House?

FISHER AMES

And I hear the chorus of “Who?” Fisher Ames was well known enough in his lifetime to be burned in effigy (in the distinguished company of William Pitt the Younger, Benedict Arnold and Satan) by an anti-British mob and to be held up as a model orator by ante bellum schoolmasters. (See Hint #4.) Thirty-six years after his death, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Politics”, saw no need to gloss who Ames was: “Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”

None of Ames’s extant speeches or writings contains that passage, but it has never been attributed to anyone else, and it is unlikely that Emerson, had he invented the quotation, would have given the credit to someone else. Rep. Jim Wright (D—Texas), Speaker of the House from 1986 through 1989, claimed it as his own in a non-book titled Reflections of a Public Man, a cheaply produced volume that seekers after his favor were “encouraged” to purchase in bulk. Wright received a royalty of 55 percent of the cover price. A combative young Congressman named Newt Gingrich exposed that dubious practice. After an investigation by the House Ethics Committee and under threat of another by the IRS, Wright resigned from Congress. Plagiarism was, of course, far from his only sin.

Hint #1: Although he was second only to Alexander Hamilton as a Federalist Party theoretician and polemicist, his brother led the Democrat-Republican Party in their home town.

As a member of the House of Representatives in the first four Congresses, Ames was an active spokesman for Hamilton’s economic policies, a sharp critic of the French revolutionary doctrines that were gaining a foothold in America, and a leading advocate of neutrality in the European wars. He was one of the key figures in the ultra-Federalist “Essex Junto” (though he died before its War of 1812 secessionist activities) and, like Hamilton, never forgave John Adams for negotiating an end to the Quasi-War with France.

In Dedham, Massachusetts, Ames’s home town, opinion was divided between Federalists, Ames most prominent among them, and Democrat-Republicans, whose leading figure was Nathaniel Ames, Fisher’s younger brother and polar opposite in habits, temperament and opinions. The brothers lived next door to each other but not in brotherly harmony. They quarreled about both politics and the disposition of their father’s estate. Even after the elder brother died, the feud lived on; Nathaniel and local Federalists organized competing funerals.

Hint #2: The collection of his speeches, essays and letters edited by his son, which a later editor expanded to over 1,500 pages, is still in print.

Shortly after Ames died, friends published a small book containing some of his speeches and writings. His son Seth, later a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, published an expanded selection in 1854. In 1983, an enlarged, definitive edition appeared under the auspices of the Liberty Fund. It remains in print at the astonishingly low price of $18.00 and totals 1,571 pages, not counting introductory matter and the index.

Hint #3: In his first election to the House of Representatives, he defeated a hero of the American Revolution. He served four terms, but his career was cut short by tuberculosis. He died at age 50 on the Fourth of July.

Ames entered the contest for a seat in the First Congress, representing Suffolk County, just two weeks before election day. The most formidable of the fourteen other candidates was Samuel Adams, who campaigned as an anti-Federalist. Ames’s eloquence and the popularity of the new Constitution in Massachusetts carried him to a narrow victory.

He was reelected in 1790, 1792 and 1794. During the Fourth Congress, he fell ill with “consumption” (probably tuberculosis but perhaps lung cancer). He promised his doctors that he would limit his activity in the House but put aside that resolution at a crucial moment. (See Hint #4.) After retiring from Congress, he returned to Dedham, where he practiced law, managed his farm and wrote voluminously in defense of Federalism. In 1805, Harvard College offered him its presidency, but the state of his health made it impossible for him to accept. He died on July 4, 1808.

Hint #4: His first public speech exposed the folly of wage and price controls. His last, successfully opposing Democrat-Republican congressmen’s attempts to torpedo the Jay Treaty by refusing the appropriations needed to implement it, was regarded by contemporaries as the first great speech delivered in the House of Representatives. Abraham Lincoln could recite large sections from memory.

In 1779, Ames, only 21 years old, was a delegate to a Massachusetts convention tasked with finding a remedy for rampaging inflation. The convention adopted a system of wage and price controls. After prices continued to rise and shortages grew worse, the delegates convened again, and young Ames delivered what a contemporary described as “a lucid and impressive speech, shewing the futility of attempting to establish by power the value of things, which depended solely on consent”.

Near the end of his Congressional career, he made his last great speech, in which he defended the Jay Treaty, by which the United States avoided war with Britain. The treaty was excoriated by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other Democrat-Republicans, who favored throwing the new nation’s (very inconsiderable) weight into the balance on the side of France. The Senate approved the treaty, but its opponents in the House believed that they could effectively veto the ratification by refusing to appropriate funds to carry out the obligations imposed on the United States. Debate in the House began on March 1, 1796. On April 28, 1796, disregarding his doctors’ advice, Ames took the floor to refute the treaty opponents’ rationale and defend making peace with the former enemy. Contemporaries judged that his intervention was the decisive blow in the debate. It is a sign of how much the world has changed over the past two centuries that this oration, covering forty pages in print, was memorized by schoolboys as part of their instruction in rhetoric. Aside from Lincoln, Daniel Webster was another who learned it by heart.

Hint #5: The town in which he was born and where he passed his entire life was, 119 years after his death, the site of one of America’s most controversial murder trials. He would very likely have approved of the verdict. [Erratum: As shown below, I miscalculated the interval.]

On April 14, 1921, a jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, convicted Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti of two murders committed in the course of an armed robbery in nearby Braintree. They were sentenced to death and, after a prolonged appellate process, executed on August 23, 1927. The trial has been controversial ever since, although the fact that the fatal bullets were fired from Sacco’s gun seems to me rather damning. There’s not much doubt that Fisher Ames would have agreed. I note that Sacco and Vanzetti’s defenders have moved over the years from declaring them innocent to saying that their trial was marred by irregularities.