Albany in the life trajectory of Robert H. Jackson.

• Author: Barrett, John Q.
• Position: Testimonial

We recall Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892-1954) for many reasons, but certainly a leading one is the striking contrast between his humble origins and his exalted destinations. Jackson's life began literally in the deep woods, on a family farm in the gorgeous rural isolation of Spring Creek Township in northwestern Pennsylvania's Warren County. He spent his boyhood and obtained his basic public school education in Frewsburg, a small town in southwestern New York State. While still a teenager, Jackson spent one additional year as a high school student in nearby Jamestown, New York, but he never received a day of college education. He prepared to become a lawyer principally by working as an apprentice for two years in a Jamestown law office.

From that background, Robert Jackson rose to make big marks--very big marks--on the biggest stages of his time, and in history. As a young lawyer, he became a great success in twenty years of private practice while also developing an identity, and some important connections, in Democratic Party politics in New York State. Jackson moved to Washington in 1934, joining the New Deal and becoming a true Roosevelt administration insider and a personal confidant and favorite of the President. (1) In ensuing years, Jackson became a leading government lawyer of national renown, a great and very successful Supreme Court advocate during his years as Assistant Attorney General and Solicitor General and, for eighteen months beginning in January 1940, Attorney General of the United States.

In July 1941, Robert Jackson was appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served for thirteen years and created a permanent legacy of independent thinking, judicial principle and restraint, and simply gorgeous writing that was authentically his own product.

By presidential appointment that took him away from the Supreme Court for the full 1945-1946 year, Justice Jackson also served, and he succeeded, in a legal position of unprecedented complexity and permanent historical importance: he was chief United States prosecutor of the major Nazi war criminals, and truly the principal architect of the legal proceedings that gave birth to modern international law, at Nuremberg, Germany.

That summary of Robert H. Jackson's amazing life journey covers a lot of ground, but it skips Albany. In Jackson's biography, "Albany" means the Albany Law School, where he was a student during the academic year 1911-1912. Jackson's "Albany" also encompasses, more broadly, his personal and professional ties to New York State's capital city during most of the first half of the twentieth century, when Albany was a leading site of American political and economic power and legal development.

In the study and appreciation of Robert H. Jackson's life and his enormous accomplishments, to skip Albany is to make a big mistake. As this article describes, Albany connected with who Jackson already was when he arrived in the capital city as an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old law apprentice, and Albany over the ensuing years contributed directly to the experiences and values that played major roles in all that he ultimately did and became. As young Robert Jackson observed closely and absorbed deeply, Albany's constituents, including its private law school, its governmental institutions and its people, especially its courts, judges and lawyers, employed rational capacities in practical efforts to address and improve individual and collective circumstances. They embodied the human reasoning process that Jackson came to see as the content of law itself, and that process became for him the hallmark of the justice-seeking, self-interest restraining work to which he dedicated his life in the legal profession. (2) Jackson's personal foundation, in other words, rested on the law as he came to understand it and began to work with it on Albany's soil, at its law school and in the legal environment of its state.

1. JACKSON COMES TO THE LAW

   Robert Jackson knew from his early youth that he wanted to be a lawyer. Although his family was far from wealthy, it was self-sufficient, literate and interested in ideas. The Jacksons and their extended family had books, including the Bible, some classics, poetry, histories, biographies and general information. His mother and other relatives read to young Robert, and he soon became a voracious reader on his own. Indeed, because his rural childhood included immersion in words, ideas, writing, reading and public speaking--in other words, the materials and methods that came to define his professional life--and because he took to it all quite naturally, he was on his career path long before he understood that he was being drawn to "the law."

   Jackson's direct interest in law was shaped in part by his father's side of the family. (3) One important influence was his great uncle William Miles Jackson, who was a bachelor and lived with Jackson's parents and him on the Spring Creek farm during Robert's early years at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, "Uncle William," who was in his high seventies, babysat the boy while his parents were busy with farm work. The old man and young boy walked together all over the sizable farm, with Uncle William pointing out sights, teaching Robert about different kinds of trees and telling him stories about animals and people. William M. Jackson was knowledgeable about many topics, in part because he was a great reader. He also had served since 1863 as Spring Creek's commissioned justice of the peace, and thus he was familiar with the way the law worked in that rural community. Years later, Justice Jackson identified his great uncle as probably the source of "the first vague ideas I ever got about law." (4) Young Robert also spent lots of time, during his boyhood and as a teenager, with his grandfather Robert Rutherford Jackson. The old man, who lived on farms in Warren County and then just two houses from his son's family in Frewsburg, always subscribed to a New York City newspaper, and he engaged his grandson in regular discussions of politics and current affairs.

   Jackson also learned, as a boy, that he had deep ancestral ties to the law through his paternal grandmother and her English family, the Eldreds. Jackson's great-grandfather George F. Eldred, who emigrated to the United States from London and settled in Spring Creek in 1819, had been born literally in London's Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court to which lawyers have been called to practice since at least the fourteenth century; George's father William Eldred was an English lawyer and Middle Temple's under treasurer.

   In Frewsburg, Robert Jackson excelled in his school work. He also was involved in debating and in a literary society, and he participated in public recitations of poems, orations, dialogues and little plays. Jackson also attended a Baptist Sunday school that he later described as "something of a debating group which took up various scriptural lessons and free speech was allowed to everybody. Matters were questioned and answered. Considering the strictness of the denomination it was an exceedingly liberal thinking group." (5) He also attended public lectures and went to hear political candidates speak--he could hear local candidates (most of whom were lawyers) speak in Frewsburg, but he had to, and did, travel north to Jamestown to hear candidates who were running for statewide office. Political loyalties in the Jackson family ran to the Democratic Party, and Robert Jackson in boyhood heard William Jennings Bryan, for example, speak in southwestern New York on two or three occasions. Jackson enjoyed all of these experiences, and he recognized that they were pointing him toward the working life of a lawyer.

   After Jackson graduated from Frewsburg High School in 1909, he spent the next year commuting by trolley to Jamestown and attending its high school as a post-graduate student. At Jamestown High School, he became a protege of an elderly maiden teacher, Mary R. Willard. (6) Jackson took Miss Willard's courses in English and English History, and he spent many evenings with her and her sister in their home, sharing dinner, listening to opera and other fine music on their victrola, and reading Shakespeare, Shaw and other writers. Mary Willard encouraged Jackson to study the law. His other key Jamestown High School mentor was the principal, Milton J. Fletcher. (7) Jackson took his American history course and, when no economics class was being offered, he persuaded Mr. Fletcher to give him a private tutorial in that subject. Fletcher also encouraged Robert Jackson to become a lawyer. Many years later, Jackson remembered that on one occasion he found himself with Mr. Fletcher on a street car, and that during the ride they discussed the previous evening's performance by a violin artist who had earned quite a large fee. Fletcher then told his pupil, "Bob, you study law and tend to your business, do as you can with it, and you'll get a $500 fee some day." (8)

   With all of that as environmental background and encouragement, the influential lawyer who actually started Jackson on his career path was Frank Henry Mott of Jamestown. Mott was a step-cousin of Jackson's mother her maternal step-grandmother, whom she had known from her very young girlhood, was Mott's paternal grandmother. (9) Mott was someone who Jackson knew well as he grew up, and his year at Jamestown High School led him to spend even more time with him, for Mott lived and practiced law in Jamestown.

   Following Jackson's second high school graduation, Frank Mott invited him to become an apprentice in his law office, and Jackson accepted. He took this step notwithstanding his father William Eldred (Will) Jackson's very low opinion of lawyers. Will Jackson's friends included one or two lawyers, and he did think well of them, but his anti-lawyer comments to Robert...