There were two great Americans who bore the name Oliver Wendell Holmes. One was the famous New England poet, the physician called by men of his generation the autocrat of the breakfast table. His son was perhaps even greater. The story of the second Oliver Wendell Holmes is not so much the record of a man's life as the development of a man's mind. And it is this story of one of America's paramount legal philosophers and scholars that the cavalcade of America tells tonight. The late Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court. As an overture, Don Voorhees and the DuPont Cavalcade Orchestra play one of the loveliest of Jerome Kern's melody, The Touch of Your Hand. niin so well ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] I tried to find a meaning to the universe, to become a philosopher, but I decided that the universe is too great a swell to have a meaning. My career is in the law, to think, to make plainer the way from something to the whole of things, and so perhaps in some measure to make my universe more livable. Thus spoke Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom the law was something more than dry briefs and opinions. It was a human living thing, and his concept of it was his chief legacy to the men of his time. But Oliver Wendell Holmes left another legacy, one only a few men once his intimates would now remember. And it was but three short years ago that a curious footnote was written to the career that had just come to a close with the passing of Associate Justice Holmes. In the offices of a newspaper in Washington, D.C., a 70-year-old colored man found his way to the classified advertising desk. I'd like to put a piece in your paper about a kindly man who was a friend to me. He died a year ago today. A pituary, of course. Can I help you write it? That would be right kind of you, sir. All right. Now what shall we say? In memoriam? Yes. And what is the name of the deceased? Oliver Wendell Holmes. Did you know him? Well, no, not personally. I guess there's not many people left who did know him personally, but I did. I was his messenger when he was on the Supreme Court bench. Oh, I see. Mr. Holmes was the kindest, wisest human man that ever lived. I'd like to say something about that in the advertisement. Perhaps in memoriam is too formal, then. How about in remembrance? In sad remembrance. In sad remembrance of the late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yes, sir. Who passed two years' reward one year ago today, March 6, 1935. And I wrote down a little saying here. I'd like you to print that, too. Of course. Death is the gate to endless joy, but we dread to enter there. And I'd like for you to print my name printed like this, his old messenger Arthur A. Thomas. Arthur A. Thomas. Yes, sir. Did Mr. Holmes' family send you down to put this in? Mr. Holmes has no family, sir. All his kinfolk is dead. But I counted the days since he's gone, and this is the first anniversary since he died. He would have been 94 years old. In 1841, when Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, the dollar in Boston was still reckoned in shilling. Quill was being used instead of the fountain pen, and the canary yellow cultures of the Concord stage took two days to go from Boston to New York. The postage on the leather was 18 and three-fourths cents for a single sheet, and double that if there was an enclosure. Some Boston families still had slaves, but the abolitionist movement was already growing in New England, and the idea would have shocked the first Oliver Wendell Holmes, who March 9, 1841, sent out this announcement to his friends. Last evening between eight and nine, there appeared at number eight Montgomery place in Boston a little individual who may be hereafter addressed as O.W. Holmes, the squire, or the honorable O.W. Holmes, member of Congress, or His Excellency O.W. Holmes, President of the United States, but who for the present is content with scratching his face and sucking his right forefinger. At 16, young Oliver Wendell Holmes was reading Plato in Greek, and he would listen with rapt attention to the lofty discussions of his father's friends, the gentlemen who comprised the famed literary circle, the Saturday Club, out of which came the Atlantic Monthly Magazine. Numbered among them were Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier. Young Oliver's idol was Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Boston one day in the spring of 1857, Oliver was out walking with a young lady when the great Emerson rounded the corner. Oh, good afternoon, Dr. Emerson. Well, well, well. It's Fanny Dixwell and Master Holmes. How are your studies progressing, Master Holmes? Well, rather slower than I expected, sir. You see, I... I see you're out walking with a very charming young lady. Oh, but I don't interfere with Oliver's studies, Dr. Emerson. Oh, I was only joking, my dear. Of course, Master Holmes, in these times, one needs a good deal more than book learning. Yes. Did you read the Supreme Court decision on the Dred Scott case, sir? Yes. Yes, I read it. Dr. Emerson, don't you think there must be something wrong with the law if it reduces a human being to slavery? Well, laws are what men make them, Oliver. It isn't a law that must be changed. Men must change themselves. Yes, I... I never thought of it in just that way, sir. I don't suppose the Dred Scott decision is going to change what the North and the South think about slavery. I think I'll write an essay on that subject, Dr. Emerson. Good. I'd like to see it when you've finished it. Will you help me look up the history, Miss Fanny? Why, yes, Oliver, I'd love to. But if we're going to that lecture... Oh, bother the lecture. The essay is much more important. Come on, let's go to the library. We'll see you at tea Saturday, Dr. Emerson. All right. Goodbye. Goodbye, Miss Fanny. Goodbye, Dr. Emerson. Come on, Miss Fanny. Hurry. You shouldn't have been so abrupt with Dr. Emerson, Oliver. But the essay was his idea. Or was it? Come to think of it, I believe it was mine. The Civil War marks the turning point in the development of the mind of Oliver Wendell Holmes. From the sheltered bookish Boston environment of his childhood, he was thrust into a world of violent action. Commissioned as a First Lieutenant, he marched down Boston Common to the song that was on the lips of all New England, the song that had burgeoned there after the raid on Harper's Ferry to become the battle song of the North in the War of the Rebellion. John Brown the body. Glory, glory, hallelujah. They went down to Washington in cattle cars, and young Lieutenant Holmes could hardly wait to get into the fighting. You could already hear the rebel yells drifting across the Potomac. When you're going to Richmond, Yankee, and the reply, the day you go to Washington, Johnny Reb. But by the time Oliver Wendell Holmes had gone to Leesburg, he knew what war was about. At Bald Bluff, a mini ball passed the breast of Lieutenant Holmes. Then a month later at Chancellorsville, thrice wounded Oliver Wendell Holmes, a captain now, reported to General H.G. Wright. Captain Holmes, I'm assigning you to lighter duty from now on. I think you've stopped enough bullets for your chair. Lighter duty, sir? Yes, there's an important visitor from Washington in camp this afternoon. You ought to show him around. Oh, yes, sir. Of course, sir. Attention! Here he is now. Carry on, sir. I, oh, gentlemen, at ease if you please. This is Captain Holmes, Mr. President, assigned to show you around the camp. Pleased to meet you, Captain Holmes. Yes, sir. I mean, thank you, sir. Shall we start the rounds, Captain? Yes, sir, at once. A few minutes later, young Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking more easily with a tall, amiable visitor from Washington. For the angular, stovepipe-hatted man he was assigned to show about the camp was Abraham Lincoln. How long have you been in the service, Captain Holmes? About three years, actual fighting, Mr. President. It's a terrible thing, all this bloodshed. I pray God we won't see much more of it. It's strange, you know, sir. When it's quiet like this, it's hard to believe that it's still going on. Oh, listen, they're bringing up the artillery over there now. Does that mean fighting tonight? They're closer than I thought. You'd better duck down, Mr. President. Down, hurry. I'm afraid I didn't quite catch what you said, Captain. Down, down on your belly, you fool. Freeze. Well, I guess that's the last salvo for a while. There I am. There I get up now. I imagine it's safe now, Mr. President. I'm sorry about speaking that way. You understand, I didn't mean to be rude. On the contrary, Captain Holmes. I'm glad to see you know how to talk to a civilian. When young Captain Holmes was mustered out of the 20th Massachusetts, his mind, wetted with three years of excitement, cast about in search of a field where it might grow to the stature of his ambition. When he took his degree at the Harvard Law School, his incisive mind had already won him recognition in his own right. But his restless mind was looking for something more. And his search took him to England. There he met two young men, Frederick Pollock and Frederick Maitland, who would have become his fast friend, and were to do for English law what Holmes did for American law. Night after night, Oliver would sit with them, talking far into the morning. The trouble with the law in America is your creaking Constitution, Holmes. Here in England there's some hope. Yes, Maitland means you've got it all on a piece of paper written sometime in the 18th century. How can you help to progress over there? Well, gentlemen, take the Dred Scott decision. Rather make it plain that the Constitution is what the judges say it is. Here in England the Constitution is what Parliament says it is. Which is the more democratic one? I don't know. It seems to me that you, Maitland, and I are driving at more or less the same thing. We've got to fit it into different systems, that's all. But how is it to be done? What, by sitting in our law chambers over in the temple and hanging out those little shingles? Indeed not, no. But I am reasonably sure of this. No one can cut out new paths in company. He does that alone. Maybe when we've done that and have turned our misgivings into success, we will be masters of ourselves. Perhaps that is the secret of achievement. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Of the profession he adopted and which became his lifelong career, Olive Wendell Holmes later wrote, When I started out on the ocean of law, I found myself plunged in a thick fog of details, in a black and frozen night in which there were no flowers, no spring, no easy joy. Voices of authority warned that in the crush of that ice any craft might sink. And yet, one said to oneself, law is human. It is a part of man and of one world with all the rest. There must be a drift if one will go prepared and have patience, which will bring one out to daylight and a worthy end. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Oliver Wendell Holmes returned to America, and in his thirties had already lived as fully as many men have at sixty. But his legal career was just beginning. A junior member of a Boston law firm teaching in the Harvard Law School, he spent his evenings poring over histories and commentaries of the law, getting the fullness of knowledge that must be his. And it was patient Fanny Dixwell, his boyhood sweetheart, who helped make tolerable the solitude he'd chosen to endure. Sometimes he'd take his books around to the little house in Cambridge, where Fanny Dixwell lived with her father, and they'd sit there quietly, side by side, he reading, she sewing. Fanny. Yes, Oliver? Something just occurred to me. Yes, Oliver? Russian came into the office today. Oh? He said that in the middle class of Russia there were specialists. In the upper class there were civilized men. He thought America was terrible, didn't like it here at all. But why? Because he's only a civilized man. Oliver, I didn't follow that at all. But don't you see, a civilized man who's nothing else wouldn't like it here. But if a man is a specialist, like say a lawyer, well, he has to be civilized too. Does he? I mean, he has to have at least a knowledge of the essentials of all the other arts and sciences. That gives him tolerance. Trouble with a fellow like this Russian, he's not in it, looks down on it all, like most judges. You know, Oliver, I think that would make a good lecture for your class at law school. You really think so? Yes, I think it's an exciting idea. Then I'll use it. I don't see how I'm ever going to get all this done this week, this lecture, Stephen's case. And I promise to finish that paper on common law for the review. Oh, and I just happened to think of something really terrible. What is it, Oliver? I've been so busy, I clean forgot to ask you to marry me. I know, Oliver, but perhaps it's not too late. You mean you will marry me? Of course I will, Oliver. When Oliver Wendell Holmes married Fanny Dixwell, America was coming of age. A liberal philosophy and jurisprudence began to illumine our punctilious legal scene, as with penetrating clarity the mind of Oliver Wendell Holmes led him to write his great commentary, The Common Law. Led him at 41 to ascend the bench of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. For in clear, unemotional terms, Oliver Wendell Holmes was creating a new conception of the law and expressing his legal philosophy in clarion words. A word is not crystal, transparent, unchanged. It is the skin of human thought. It is the same with the law. Law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, neither is it purpose to shackle. Laws are made by men and not the reverse, as is all too often supposed. As the legal stature of Oliver Wendell Holmes attracted nationwide attention, one day after the turn of the century to the chamber of the United States Senate went a presidential note. I nominate for Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes of Massachusetts, signed Theodore Roosevelt. Such was the highest recognition a people could give to one whose career had been the law. But the story of Oliver Wendell Holmes from the battlefield to the Civil War, to the revered little red brick house on the Washington side street, in which the old justice lived out the last chapter of his fruitful life, and lives best in his own words, the opinion which at first shocked men of his profession, because they were not written in complicated legal language, but which survived to become a tradition in American jurisprudence, the interpretation of the Constitution as a living human document, and of which he wrote, If there is one principle of the United States Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought. Not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate. One afternoon in January 1932, at the end of the day's business, 90-year-old Mr. Justice Holmes gathers up his briefs and follows the Chief Justice in the gray walls and marble pillars of the chamber of the United States Supreme Court. In his office a few minutes later, he nods to his clerks and his personal attendant, Arthur Thomas. Let me help you with the room, Mr. Holmes. Thank you, Arthur. And one thing more. Yes, sir. I shall want to take home those books between the ends there, the Plato and the two Latin volumes. Yes, sir. Oh, Mr. Holmes, I just stopped to say good night. Oh, good night, sir. Good night, Mr. Holmes. Good night, gentlemen. Good night. Will you be wanting anything else, Mr. Holmes? No, Arthur. I'll be going along now. And goodbye, boy. I won't be down tomorrow. So into retirement passed the black-gown figure of a great jurist. But the scholarship and philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes have left their imprint on American law and the nation he served. And to the men of our time and of all time, the venerable old justice has left this deathless message. I say to you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts, you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone, when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will, then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thoughts. And now here's Basil Rysdale speaking for the DuPont Company and bringing us another story from the wonder world of chemistry. The other day after a friend of mine parked his car at the New York World's Fair, I called his attention to the rainbow of bright and handsome colors on the cars in that vast parking space. That's a good sign, he said. And then he told me why. Automobile manufacturers find that brightly colored cars gain in popularity in prosperous years. That interesting bit of information was a new one for me. But I was able to show him a lot of amazing things about paints and finishes by taking him over to the wonder world of chemistry building. One of the many fascinating sites there is a demonstration of tests given to finishes such as those used on cars. The thin film of protection created by finishing materials put on a car is really quite a sturdy suit of protection. It's sufficient for the life of your car under ordinary usage and given a reasonable amount of care. I wonder if you've ever thought of the punishment the paint on a car takes from dust and gravel, rain, snow, ice, and hot sunshine. At the finishes laboratory in DuPont's exhibit at the fair, chemists show you how they make sure that finishes can take such punishment and come back for more. The astounding tests performed there before your very eyes tell why modern cars continue to look so well after thousands of miles of hard travel. A real tribute to the chemists who developed modern finishes. Twenty-five years ago it took three weeks to paint a car and required many coats of slow drying paint. In spite of this slow, expensive process, the finish didn't last. Even as recently as 1922, painting a car took as long as ten days. Then DuPont chemists perfected Duco lacquer and revolutionized finishing methods. Today it's a matter of a few hours to paint a car and the finish lasts for years. This increase in the speed of painting and drying was a big factor in lowering the cost of automobiles. Most modern automobile finishes are put on with spray gun and the whole job has been reduced to a quick, efficient science. New finishes on old cars are applied by the same methods as used in the factory. In fact, authorized refinishers are able to give you the best possible finish. Authorized refinishers are able to give you an exact match for the color that came on your car when it was new. DuPont chemists manufacture over 570 different shades, which make it possible to satisfy any color preference. After one visit to the world of chemistry at the New York World's Fair, you'll be bubbling over with remarkable facts just as I am. About finishes for home and industrial uses, about plastics and rayon, cellulose films, dyes and perfume, and dozens of other miracles that come out of the chemist's test tube. Wonderworld is a good name for it, and the DuPont pledge is a good slogan for it. Better things for better living through chemistry. Next week, the cavalcade of America presents the story of a glamorous lady of the America of the early 19th century, Dolly Madden. On tonight's program, the part of Oliver Wendell Holmes was played by William Adams. Till next week, then, at the same time, Mrs. Thomas Chalmers saying good night, best wishes from DuPont. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System. The Columbia Broadcasting System is a production of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
