The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. — for Today

Last updated on: March 26, 2017 at 2:28 pm by Carl Gregg

The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. — for Today 2017-03-26T14:28:52-04:00 Carl Gregg

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My tradition of Unitarian Universalism has a habit of making lists of famous UUs. As the saying goes, “We believe in deeds not creeds,” which can prompt us to lift up the lives of our most exemplary ancestors. (Yes, there’s some pride in there as well about all the famous people from history who were Unitarians or Universalists.) So occasionally, I like to invite us to take a closer look at one of those names and consider just how UU were they? And what insights might their life have for us today regardless of whether one is UU? Drawing from Liva Baker’s biography The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Harper Collins, 1991), I would like to invite us to reflect on the life and legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Holmes lived to be almost ninety-four years old. He was born on March 8, 1841 (two decades before the Civil War) and died on March 6, 1935 (a few years before the start of the Second World War). He is most famous for being a Supreme Court justice. On his ninetieth birthday—a little less than a year before he finally resigned his seat on the high court—he was hailed as “America’s most respected man of the law” and “the best company in Washington” (3).

And although in his day he became the Supreme Court justice whom a random citizen on the street might be most likely to remember the name of, it is interesting to note that, “Few Americans of stature have had less contact with the public. He was in fact a snob…. He did not participate in popular causes, and after he took his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, he rarely made a public speech” (7). Part of what made him famous were memorable sayings like, “I really like paying taxes. It is buying civilization” (8). (Keep that pro-tax saying in mind. We’ll come back to it in my next post.)

For now, allow me to turn back the clock, trace some of the path that led to his renown—and consider some lessons we might learn along the way. From a UU perspective, it is interesting to note that Holmes’s grandfather, The Rev. Abiel Holmes, was a strict Calvinist who strongly disapproved of Unitarianism. Indeed, in 1829, First Church Cambridge, Massachusetts, fired him for refusing to exchange pulpits with theologically liberal preachers (29). Adding insult to injury, around that time, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (the father of the justice) had become a member of King’s Chapel in Boston, a Unitarian congregation that became famous in 1785 for removing all the trinitarian references to the Book of Common Prayer (31).

The father-son conflict between Abiel and Holmes, Sr. carried on into the next generation. When Holmes, Jr. said he was going to law school, his father told him “A lawyer cannot be a great man” (6). Later in life, when he was receiving all those ninetieth birthday honors, he still recalled the sting of those and other harsh remarks from his father and said, “I wish that my father could have listened tonight for only two or three minutes. Then I could have thumbed my nose at him” (7). (As the saying goes, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words…can really hurt me.”)

Holmes, Sr. was a professor at Harvard Medical School and a well-known poet. His literary connections meant that his son grew up around such luminaries as Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville (15). (As the saying goes, “Alexander the Great may have accomplished a lot, but he did have Aristotle as his tutor!”) In Holmes’s case, “It mattered that his great-grandfather was Judge Oliver Wendell, his grandfathers were Judge Charles Jackson and the Reverend Abiel Holmes, and that his father was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes” (45). Indeed, it was Holmes, Sr. who literally coined the phrase “Boston Brahmin” (That’s how Boston elite they were!) All that being said, Holmes, Jr. was brought up to be a privileged Boston Brahmin in every way but one: his family of origin was not wealthy, but they did leverage their historic name and connections to provide cultural, educational, and vocational opportunities for the family (48).

My favorite story from Holmes’s childhood is that when he was enjoying all that praise at age ninety, “The daughter of a former neighbor recalled how her mother had disliked the ‘little Holmes boy’ because he hid behind trees, jumped out, and yelled ‘boo’ at her” (49). (The lesson here is watch what you do because people may remember it more than eight decades later!)

The young Holmes, of course, went to college at Harvard (72). But the first major turning point came when he was twenty. The Civil War started and he enlisted as a private in the Union Army (97). Fanny Dixon, who knew him before the war and was later married to him for nearly sixty years, said that his experience as a solider saved him from being a “coxcomb,” meaning “a vain and conceited man”—what was then called a “dandy” (105). Holmes fought in “most of the major campaigns in and around Virginia and Maryland except Gettysburg and was wounded three times, once almost mortally” (106). The number of casualties he saw impacted his lifelong work ethic and ambition. He said that, the “real anguish” is not hard work, but “never to have your opportunity” (160).

Turning to the question of just how Unitarian was this famous UU ancestor, both his family and Fanny’s family were at least nominally Unitarian. His parents had been married at the Unitarian King’s Chapel (39), and he had also been christened there as a child (47). But he and Fanny were marred in Christ Episcopal Church, Cambridge, which may have been because First Unitarian was in between ministers at the time (222). More tellingly, Fanny was known to have said, “In Boston one has to be something and Unitarian is the least you can be” (77).

In reading about Holmes’s life, the place where I see a UU perspective is much less in theology than in his willingness to take an unorthodox approach to the law. Three brief excerpts give a taste of his perspectives:

“It is revolting to have no better reasons for a law than that it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.” (The Path of the Law,” 1897)
“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.” (“Natural Law,” 1918)
“An ideal system of law should draw its postulates and its legislative justification from science. As it is now, we rely upon tradition, or vague sentiment, or the fact that we never thought of any other way of doing things, as our only warrant for rules which we enforce with as much confidence as if they embodied revealed wisdom.” (“Learning and Science,” 1895)

He first began to articulate his jurisprudence in his landmark book The Common Law, which has been continuously in print since it was first published in 1881 (253).

After serving as a lawyer, Holmes was a professor at Harvard Law School for only a few months in 1883, when the opportunity to pursue his true ambition presented itself: a vacancy on the Massachusetts Supreme Court (265). As a judge, among his pet peeves were longwinded lawyers and judges who wrote lengthy opinions. His own opinions were often surprisingly concise. And if after a few minutes he had gotten the essence of a lawyer’s argument, he might seem to the lawyer to still be taking notes on the case when in fact he may well have begun writing a personal letter (274). Here you see traces of both his brilliance and his arrogance. That being said, “of 1,290 opinions he wrote for the count majority over the next twenty years; only one was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.” So maybe he was paying enough attention!

(In my next post on “What Legacy Are We Leaving? Reflections on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,” I will write about the legacy of Holmes’s time on the U.S. Supreme Court.)

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles

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