“Calm Command: U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller in His Times, 1888-1910” by Douglas Rooks; Maine Authors Publishing, Thomaston, Maine, 2024; 480 pages, paperback, $24.95.
Late one night in February 2022, a statue of Melville Fuller, the Augusta native who served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1888-1910, was quietly removed from its spot on the grounds of the Kennebec County Courthouse where it had stood for nearly nine years.
Everyone who’d been paying attention knew what this was about.
Fuller was presiding over the court in 1896 when the Plessy v. Ferguson case was decided. He voted with the 7-1 majority ruling against Homer Plessy’s case arguing he should have been allowed to use a railroad car designated for white people. Plessy had a black ancestor, but could easily pass for white. The ruling upheld the practice of separate but equal facilities for different races of people.
One hundred twenty-eight years and the overruling of the separate but equal principle in Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, we think we have a pretty clear picture of good vs. evil in America’s sorry, bloody racial history. Fuller voted to uphold a principle that would underpin oppressive Jim Crow laws for decades. So his statue must come down.
We learn in Douglas Rooks’ new book about Fuller’s life, “Calm Command,” that reality is nowhere near so simple.
Fuller was born in Augusta in 1833 and participated, like others in his family, in Maine politics. He moved to Chicago in his 20s, established a successful law practice, and became an important figure in Illinois politics. Although a Democrat, he supported Lincoln’s position in the election of 1860, which was not to end the practice of slavery, but to limit its expansion into Western states. In keeping with that aim, Fuller backed the effort through the Civil War to keep the union together but, like many at the time, thought the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a political mistake.
Rooks details how Fuller’s integrity, universally praised good nature, and keen knowledge of law won him many allies in Washington. In 1888, President Grover Cleveland persuaded him to fill the vacancy for chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Fuller did not write the majority opinion in the Plessy case, which at the time, Rooks explains, was not considered by anyone to be of much consequence. Several similar cases had been decided similarly. Justice Henry Billings Brown spelled out the persuading issues for the majority in the 7-1 decision (one justice was absent for the case). While agreeing that the Constitution and the laws following from it grant the government oversight of civil and political rights, Brown wrote, trying to legislate social rights would be extremely problematic.
Separate but equal accommodations for the races seemed fair to the justices as well as many, if not most people who opposed slavery following the Civil War. As expressed in the Plessy opinion, Rooks says, “Brown’s bland assurance that there was something natural about racial prejudice, or that one race could be ‘inferior,’ offends us today but was widely accepted then.”
Here in the 21st century, we know that the conclusions in Plessy were used to underpin oppressive Jim Crow segregation laws, but the justices had no way of knowing that in 1896. What they did know, because they’d all lived through it, was that a horrific war had been fought over slavery. Deferring to states’ rights on social issues seemed the more hopeful route to justice. We now know that hope was severely misguided. But Rooks quotes Supreme Court Justice David Souter in 2010 reflecting that “members of the court in Plessy remembered the day when human slavery was the law of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress.”
Rooks’ clearly written, meticulously researched book gives the background of Fuller’s life and of the Plessy case, and also the historical backdrop of the Constitution and the political and social machineries of the 19th century, in tandem with discussions of cases in constitutional, labor, and maritime law. A point that returns again and again is that Fuller was viewed as an extraordinarily capable administrator who shepherded the federal court system through a major, necessary overhaul and expansion. There are reasons why we may want to remember Fuller favorably, despite a serious mistake rooted in the ethos of his time rather than the individual himself.
Moral values are rarely crystal clear in their particulars, especially amid turmoil. Socrates demonstrated this time and again 2,400 years ago. In our time, we view our political advocates for environmental protection as champions of a profound moral crisis. But I wonder if 128 years from now, when the worst effects of human-induced climate change have devastated ecosystems and economies, historians will wonder what those advocates — and the rest of us — were thinking when we kept on with our lives basically as we had since it was first known in the 1970s that carbon emissions were wreaking havoc on the planet. Twenty-second century activists may want to remove a hypothetical statue of Sen. Angus King from some flooded public park because he kept driving cars and flying in jets.
“Calm Command” is a careful, well-written book that throws light on not only Melville Fuller, but the boiling history he helped guide the U.S. through, for better and worse.
Central Maine newspapers opinion columnist Douglas Rooks lives in Augusta. His books include “First Franco: Albert Beliveau in Law, Politics, and Love” and “Rise, Decline and Renewal: The Democratic Party in Maine,” and “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible.” “Calm Command” is available through local and online book sellers.
Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.
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