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CURRENT BIOGRAPHY [3 nical incompetence and went on further to say that Black's legal training and experience had been revealed as painfully unequal toe his position on the nation’s highest tribunal. Fis opinions, he stated, often had to be rephrased by colleagues to conform to Court standards. He himself had been unable to carry his share of routine work; his presence had been “an acute discomfort and embarrassment” to the other justices. Raymond Clapper collab- orated this in his newspaper colina, and the Daily News went so jar as to say that Se- preme Court members “had hitched up their tudicial robes and in dignified fashion were in the process af putting the slug on their colleague.” Denials then flooded the pages of newspapers, iiagaziies, law periodicals. Walton Hamilton, professor of Jaw at Yale, said Black had “courage almost to the point of audacity,” praised his “eminently lawyer- like opinions" and = prophesied that Black would be “an outstanding firure im the his- tory of the court,” for he “brings a breath of fresh air into a rather musty courtroom.’ Harold C. Havishurst of Northwestern Uni- versity supported Hamilton, insisting with him that the dominant distinction between Black and his fellow jurists was his “insistence upon reality.” The controversy died down it the course of time, even though in 1941 Justice Black is still a frequent dissenter. Some of Iris decisions have been notable: in February 1940 he delivered a decision, freeing four Negroes wie under torture had confessed to crimes, which was ecallknd “far and away the most direct, sweeping and brilliantly written application of the 14th Amendment te hu- man fights that has come from our highest Court”; for this and for another denouncing the exclusion of Negroes from trial jury panels Black's name was added fo the Honor Roll of Race Relations by the Schomburz Collection of Negro Literature in the New York Public Library in 1941. Later, in April 1941, he voted that Negroes had a right to receive oeqnai fram accommodations with whites. Tn February 1941 Black had the trump: of participating in a Supreme Court decision certifying the constitutionality of the child labor provisions of the Wages and Hours Law which he had helped to get passed. Tn that same month he vigorously protested a Felix Frankfurter (see sketch June issue) decision upholding the right of state courts to issue injunciions agaiTest picketing “set in a background of violence.” Somewhat re- moved from these cases was his opinion in March 1941 outlawing agreements by which manufacturers of hats and dresses sought to eliminate style “piracy'’ by registering new creations and penalizing anyone copying the designs. There are many today who believe that Black is a “legislator among judges’; many who now agree with Walton Hamilton’s sum- ming up of his decisions: “There is no verbal dispiay of priestcrait, no struiting of the higher pyrotechnics, no triumphant victory over difficulties of the jurist's own creation. _Instead a recitation of the facts, a sharp def- inition of the issue, an argument that turns hot to right or left but marches straight to its goal—and the trick is done. All the CASES are disposed of deftly, simply, certainly, in accordance with justice and commun sense,” Black, who was onee a great joiner, former Grand Chancellor of the Knights of Pythias of Alabama and member (to his later sorrow) of almost every organization that asked him to join, doesn't go out much now except on family jaunts with Mrs. Black and their three children or to spend an occasional evening with a fellow justice or an Administration i He distke. games and drinking and is S repotte d to be happiest when reading works on history and economics at home. References Atlan 163 :667-74 My 739 Newsweek 2:17 N 1b °33 per: 7:21 Mr i+ "30 por; 10:7-9 Ag 21°37 pours R of Rs 89:18-20+ Ap '34 por Scholastic 24 19 My 5 ‘34 por; 27:25 S 21 '35 p Time 26: 14. i Ag 26°33 por (cover): 30:10-11 S 27°37 por Univ Chicago Law R 8:20-41 1) ‘40 Lierner, MM. Ideas Are Weapons p254-66 1939 Who's Who in America Who's Who in Gevernment Who's Who in Law Who's Who in the Nation’, Capital lrouzes, STEPHEN (hdls} Tune 23, 1872 —Tuly § 1941 Repoldican Representative in Congress from Wiscousin; foe of New Deal and the La Follettes: veteran newspaper edi- tor who had been a journalist since 1890. R av eferciices Who's Whe in America Who’s Who in Journalism Obituaries oY Times p21 Jl 9 41 por leowers. CLAUDE G(ERNADE) (ban'- érz}) Now, 20, IR7R8C7)- United States Am- bassader to Chile; historian Address: Department of State, Washington, ae In the fall of 1939, when Claude G. Rowers sailed for Chile to become United States Aim- bassador there, it was with the hope that he would “be able further to centribute toward the mutual understanding and growing feel ing ef our friendship not only with Chile but all South American republics." " Ambas- sador Bowers is far from being the usual eareer diplamat, Until 1933, when he was appainted Ambassador to the Spanish Re- public, he had been knewn as a “newspaper- man, editorial writer, historian and speech maker.” An authority on Jefferson and on Jackson, he has also been called “the greatest jiving practitioner of what for want of a