December 31, 2006
The Reign of Iron Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:40 PM EST Christine Gibson’s lead article on this website today, “The Brief, World-Changing Life of the Monitor,” begins with Admiral John Dahlgren’s tersely eloquent prediction about the future of naval warfare: “Now comes the reign of iron.” The duel between the Monitor and the Merrimack was the first clash between steam-powered ironclads, and everyone who pondered it reached the same conclusion: The wooden walls, the ships that had saved both Athens and England, were now obsolete. When I was a boy this was depicted as a bolt from the blue. Americans built the first ironclads, and everyone suddenly realized that the world would never be the same again. Any state bidding for world power had to have ships like the Monitor or the battleships that descended from her. Does history endorse that judgment about our revolutionary status? Not quite. Christine Gibson points out that a Korean ironclad fought in 1592. That ship in fact fought another ironclad, the Japanese Nihon Maru, part of an ironclad fleet the warlord Nobunaga had built in 1576 and first used in 1578. The doom of wooden-hulled warships was foretold in 1824, when guns firing Henri-Joseph Paixhans’s explosive shells over flat trajectories incinerated a wooden ship in a trial, and was clear as early as 1853, when Russian warships armed with the new Paixhans guns incinerated a Turkish fleet at the battle of Sinope. Paixhans guns had in fact been used in naval combat a few years earlier, in 1849, during the Danish-Prussian War. The race to build steam-powered ironclads began in 1859, when the French launched La Gloire, and the British replied the following year with the Warrior, not an ironclad but a true iron-hulled warship. But the Monitor and the Merrimack fought the first engagement between such ships and are justly famed for it. They also fought one of the few crucial engagements that ever occurred between such ships, although no one knew it at the time or would realize it for the century during which iron reigned. Warship design evolved very rapidly over the second half of the nineteenth century, and there was a race between steadily improving armor, better guns, and better marine engines, but naval battles between gun-armed armored surface combatants became extremely rare, so the history that the Monitor and Merrimack seemed to predict almost never happened. History allows us to learn from experience, but because ships fought so rarely, there was little history to ponder and small chance to see what would actually work in combat. When the Austrians won the Battle of Lissa, on July 20, 1866, by ramming their enemies, naval designers made sure that warships had rams for the next 50 years, although to the best of my knowledge the only ships lost to rams over that period were lost in accidental collisions. The greatest naval race in history, between Great Britain and Imperial Germany, produced a single fleet engagement, one usually described as inconclusive, and the great naval battles of the Second World War almost never saw the descendents of the Monitor and the Merrimack clash directly. War at sea when it really mattered—when it seemed to decide the victory or defeat of nation states—seemed to turn on submarines or aircraft carriers. So while fantastic sums were spent on building fleets descended from the Monitor, those fleets are often described as having decided nothing, and the sums were long assumed to have been ludicrously squandered. The relevant lesson of naval history seemed to hold that by the middle of the nineteenth century the importance of conventional sea power was fantastically overrated, and that the most influential theorist of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had written, vastly misleadingly, only after the day of the battleship had irrevocably passed. An intriguing current revisionist wave, however, holds that this is nonsense. British battleships enforced the blockade of Imperial Germany, which in the long run helped starve Germany into submission, while ensuring that Britain imported the food and munitions it needed to prevail. The most recent historical work holds that it was the Royal Navy, not the Royal Air Force, that made it impossible for Hitler to invade Britain in 1940. Surface combatants were the first antisubmarine warfare weapons and held the line against German submarines in both World Wars, before air power was deployed to do the trick. Sea power allowed the United States to supply Britain and ferry millions of soldiers across oceans in two world wars. Sea power subtly shaped the Cold War, toward the end of which it was again described as vastly overrated. Sometimes the history that didn’t happen is more instructive than we realize about the necessary contours of the history that did happen. The Monitor’s descendents almost never fought, but the powers that accumulated more of them won the vastly important wars they did fight. As a friend once observed, the odd thing about getting old is the realization that a fair amount of the stuff you believed when you were in your teens turns out to be true.
December 29, 2006
The Romneys of Michigan II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:10 PM EST Joshua Zeitz points out that while George Romney’s religion (Mormonism) received minimal discussion when he sought the 1968 Republican nomination for President (before his brainwashing remark knocked him effectively out of contention), today his son’s religion (likewise Mormonism) is a subject of much discussion as the son prepares to run for the nomination himself. Mr. Zeitz wonders if this is a step backwards. I don’t doubt that George Romney’s religion received little attention. I certainly don’t remember any discussion at all (and I do remember much discussion as to whether his having been born in Mexico disqualified him). One reason for this, perhaps, was that this was only a few years after John F. Kennedy had tackled the Catholic question head on and proved that it was no impediment to gaining the White House. In 1968, I think, even bringing up the subject of religion in politics was considered déclassé among the commentariat. But I wonder (I don’t know the answer), just exactly who is continually bringing up the subject of Mitt Romney’s religion today? Is it the religious right or commentators on the right? Or is it liberal commentators (atheists or at least agnostics to a man and many of them profoundly theologically ignorant) assuming, as usual, that the “religious right” is a monolithic group of intolerant bigots, who will reject anyone who is not one of them? After all, Mormon theology—at least the theology of the dominant sect headquartered in Salt Lake City to which the Romneys belong—is pretty mainstream conservative Christian these days. Mormons don’t drink or smoke and are very family oriented. They tithe and devote much time and effort to missionary work. The theologically wild and woolly days of Mormonism—plural marriage, for instance—are long, long in the past. It seems to me that if the “religious right” is going to object to a candidate’s particular Christian sect, it is candidates who adhere to the Episcopal Church (drinking okay, smoking okay, plural marriage okay—at least plural marriage conducted serially—gay bishops okay, etc., etc.) who had better have their answers regarding religion carefully prepared when wooing the “religious right.”
December 29, 2006
Gerald Ford and Eastern Europe II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:45 PM EST On Wednesday, after watching the coverage of Gerald Ford’s death, Josh Zeitz posted about Ford’s once-notorious remark in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, when Ford stated, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” This remark was seen at the time, and since, as idiotic, and is generally thought to have been one of the factors that cost Ford a very close election. Josh seeks to rehabilitate this remark, pointing out that given a chance to clarify it, Ford asserted that “I don’t believe . . . that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of these countries is independent, autonomous, it has its own territorial integrity, and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.” Josh asks, “Was Ford wrong? Not necessarily. . . . Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, maintained a stubborn independence of Moscow. Under Ceausescu, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact nation to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six Day War and to criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Similarly, under the leadership of Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia effectively maintained a neutral stance during the Cold War. . . . I know less about Poland. . . . But I imagine Ford had something specific in mind when he singled out Warsaw for its independence of the Kremlin.” Josh generously defers to what he takes to be my more specialized training in Eastern European history, and asks what Ford might have been thinking about in the Polish case. The short answer is, I can’t imagine. Communist Poland was a case of despotism tempered by riot, but the degree to which riot tempered despotism was unpredictable and always limited. There had been substantial riots in 1956 and 1970, crushed by military and paramilitary force, but also leading to some softening of Communist rule. Following the 1970 riots, in which the Army and militia killed at least 40 people and wounded another thousand or so, the Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had risen to power as a response to the riots of 1956, fell in his turn. The Soviet Union is thought to have vetoed his replacement by what it apparently took to be the excessive nationalism of the peculiarly anti-Semitic Mieczyslaw Moczar; in the event, Edward Gierek got the job. Signatories of the Warsaw Pact had pledged not to interfere in any Pact member’s internal affairs and to respect one another’s sovereignty and independence, but Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also members of the Pact; those provisions of the Pact were garbage. So it seems absolutely right to say that the Soviet Union dominated Poland, as well as East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. There were unclear but real limits to permissible change; if you went too far, you risked invasion, “invited” by a political rival of the reforming leadership so in theory not a violation of the Warsaw Pact. The perceived certainty of this response encouraged local Communists to use force against reformers or revolutionaries; they could claim that they were avoiding the greater savagery of a Soviet invasion, as in Hungary in 1956 and to a much lesser extent in East Germany in 1953. This is what happened in Poland in 1981, when Wojciech Jaruzelski used the Army against Solidarity: Jaruzelski claimed he was avoiding a Soviet invasion, but some evidence suggests that Jaruzelski was refused the use of the Soviet troops that he had himself requested. Still, the Soviets clearly dominated Poland, and the Red Army was the final guarantor of Communist power in all Warsaw Pact states. It seems absurd to think that Brezhnev, unwilling to see Communism overthrown in Afghanistan, would have allowed that outcome in Poland. What about Ceausescu’s Romania? Ceausescu, like his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been opposed to Soviet control because he did not want to de-Stalinize. Romanian autonomy in foreign policy may have been tolerated because Romanian domestic arrangements, which were extremely repressive by European Communists standards, were no threat to the legitimacy of Communist rule in any other Warsaw Pact state. Had Romania coupled democratization to occasional and rather modest provocations in foreign policy, my guess is that Moscow would have intervened quite violently. Tito’s Yugoslavia was a genuinely different case. Tito’s Communists had come to power both on the backs of Russian tanks, and as a result a partisan campaign, waged by forces that by the end of the war may have amounted to 800,000 combatants. When the Red Army withdrew, Tito’s own army was sufficient to maintain control of the country, which they did, killing what may have amounted to a couple of hundred thousand opponents in the process. After his rift with Stalin in 1948, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a truly independent state, although no one was sure its independence would survive Tito’s death; in the 1960s and 1970s, NATO frequently modeled World War III as an outcome of a Yugoslavian succession crisis, with Warsaw Pact forces called in by one of the contenders for power. Tito’s independence had several causes, the most important being Tito’s command of a real and victorious army, but another probable cause being a border with a NATO state, and a coast along which military reinforcements could have landed. So on balance, Ford’s remarks in that 1976 debate were nonsense. Whether the United States conceded it or not, most European Communists states were under Soviet domination. So why did Ford make that absurd remark? Partly, I think, because he had signed the Helsinki Accords, which for the first time acknowledged Soviet postwar territorial gains in Europe, and which were widely taken to acknowledge the permanence of Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact satellites, and to grant that control a degree of legitimacy. The Helsinki Accords were criticized by Americans from both the left and the right. No one then realized how great a contribution the civil rights provisions of Helsinki would make to the erosion of Soviet rule. Détente—the easing of tensions with the Communist world—may have been a prudent policy, but lower tensions achieved at the price of people’s hopes for liberty grated a bit on many Americans, and not least on voters with relatives in Warsaw Pact states. So Ford did what most Kissingerian “realists” do when called upon to acknowledge some of the uglier parts of their creed in public. He lied. In his defense, I freely acknowledge that he may have been lying to himself, along with the rest of us; he was in that respect a much more decent man than most Kissingerian “realists” tend to be. One lesson of this is that Americans do not consistently like Kissingerian “realism,” and they can exact an electoral price when politicians too nakedly endorse such a doctrine. We have what is often mocked or otherwise stigmatized as a Wilsonian streak, or some other sort of local idealism, which comes and goes, and when it comes a cropper, we get sour about its advocates and skeptical about their motives. This may be such a moment. On the other hand, when that idealism shows up and doesn’t come a cropper, it can do things like destroy slavery, or defend the independence of China in the face of savage Japanese militarism, or set up a democracy in Japan, or put our cities at risk to maintain democracy in Western Europe, and we are periodically proud of such achievements. John Quincy Adams memorably declared that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” which is usually true but not always, and even when it is true, Americans can be uneasy about the uglier implications of that doctrine. We can be particularly uneasy about people who will not call monsters by their proper name.
December 29, 2006
The Romneys of Michigan Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:10 PM EST In the Department of Tenuous Segues: Speaking of Gerald Ford, who represented Michigan in the House of Representatives for 25 years, how about Mitt Romney, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts and current GOP presidential hopeful? His father, George Romney, served as governor of Michigan in the 1960s and launched an abortive campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. George Romney’s candidacy hit an insurmountable roadblock in 1967, when the governor told a Michigan television audience that “when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” What he meant to say was that his recent fact-finding tour had left him deeply skeptical of claims by administration officials and military leaders that America was turning the corner in southeast Asia. To most pundits, however, it sounded simply as though the would-be commander-in-chief had admitted to being brainwashed. In response, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, widely known for his acerbic wit, quipped that “a light rinse would have been sufficient.” Jokes aside, the damage was done, and Romney withdrew from the race. I conducted a quick electronic search of major newspapers (The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and found that Romney’s religion (he was a Mormon, as is his son) provoked minimal discussion in 1967, when he was the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Insomuch as anyone suggested that a Mormon might be unqualified for high office, critics pointed to the church’s shoddy record on race relations and demanded of Romney an ironclad assurance that he would enforce America’s new civil rights laws. As a Washington Post article dated March 26, 1967, explained, “Romney is beginning to feel the heat of religious differences, perhaps not primarily directed at the Mormon Church of which he is a devout member, but bearing on the Mormon doctrine, which prevents Negroes from serving in the higher echelons of the priesthood.” More widely debated was Romney’s legal standing as a presidential aspirant. His parents were U.S. citizens who crossed the Mexican border to flee religious persecution in their native Arizona. George Romney was born in Mexico but returned to the United States as a young boy. Consequently, political commentators in 1967 wondered if he qualified as a “natural born citizen.” Fast-forward to 2006. No one has seriously suggested that Mitt Romney is unqualified to serve as President because he is a Mormon, but there has been rampant speculation that his religion might turn off a sufficient number of voters—especially evangelical Protestants, whose support is crucial for GOP primary candidates—to cost him the election. At first glance, it seems odd that religious difference is a matter of greater speculation today than it was 40 years ago. To take a Whiggish view of American history, we should be on a straight path to perfection. I suspect that the rise of the “religious right”—that loose confederation of orthodox religious groups that since the 1970s have stridently pressed their agenda in America’s courts, media, and political arena—has made religion more important in the twenty-first century than it was in the mid-twentieth. For all the public fawning that religious conservatives demand and receive, from Republicans and Democrats alike, it may just be that their influence is every bit as invidious as it is salutary. After all, what can one say of a country that didn’t bat an eyelash at the prospect of a Mormon President in 1967 but that hotly debates the prospect in 2007? Sometimes history moves in a backwards direction.
December 28, 2006
Ford and Schlesinger Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:40 PM EST In virtually all the responses I’ve read to the passing of Gerald Ford, the thirty-eighth President has been described as a decent and kind man, whose upright character helped heal a wounded nation. I have no doubt that there is much truth to these portraits. While it is ultimately a minor piece of Ford’s career, his good-natured response to Saturday Night Live’s mockery also says a lot about the man’s sense of humor and self-effacing patience. I think one can learn at least as much about Ford from a moment in which he lost his patience, though, as from the many in which he tolerated disappointments around him. During the autumn of 1975, Ford’s administration was coming increasingly into conflict with the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. After Nixon’s resignation and their blowout victory in the 1974 midterms, Democrats were becoming bolder in their opposition to the White House’s defense policies. As the month of October wore on, friction continued growing between Congress and the administration over the size of the military budget. Then on October 20, after a contentious hearing in the House of Representatives, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger held a press conference to blast congressional leaders for “deep, savage and arbitrary cuts” in the Pentagon budget. A particular target of Schlesinger’s wrath was the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, George Mahon. Unfortunately for Schlesinger, Mahon was a dear friend of Gerald Ford’s—according to The New York Times, one of his “oldest and closest confidants in Congress.” President Ford and Secretary Schlesinger had never gotten along terribly well. Where Ford was a modest and hard-working man, Schlesinger was a comparatively blustery and arrogant official. He had some reason for this arrogance, having risen from a relatively obscure budgetary job to the office of Defense Secretary in only four years. But his personal comportment and management style clashed with Ford’s, and when Ford assumed the Presidency it seemed likely that the two were headed for a collision. Schlesinger’s attack on Mahon brought his differences with the President to a breaking point. In the first days of November, Ford fired Schlesinger as part of an administration-wide defense shakeup. The President also dismissed CIA Director William Colby, and relieved Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of his dual function as National Security Adviser. The brunt of his frustration, though, was directed at the defense secretary. Ford even took uncharacteristic pleasure in firing Schlesinger. As I heard the story told by a close aide to Ford, the President informed his senior staff of his intention to dismiss Schlesinger the night before doing so. Many of those he informed accepted the President’s decision but expected him to change his mind by the next day. The next morning, when the President arrived in the Oval Office, a number of his staff were waiting for him, and one of them asked whether he had reconsidered his decision about Schlesinger. “No,” he replied, reportedly with a smile on his face, “I’m really looking forward to firing that guy.” Some interpreted Ford’s personnel decisions as an attempt to run to the political right in anticipation of a stiff primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. Democratic Senator Henry Jackson declared that Schlesinger’s firing “indicated that the Administration cannot tolerate different views and honest advice.” When Ford replaced Schlesinger with White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and named the diplomat and former Representative George H. W. Bush to the job of CIA director, it did little to quiet complaints that this shakeup was politically motivated. But Ford’s most immediate motivations had little to do with the 1976 elections. Instead, they stemmed from an insistence on civil discourse, a deep-seated respect for the legislature, and a loyalty to his friends. Ford deserves all the recognition he’s receiving for these qualities, and his treatment of Schlesinger shows them in full color.
December 28, 2006
The Duke Lacrosse Boys Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST I have heard that there was a famous experiment in animal cognition where a chimpanzee was put in a room alone. Hanging from the ceiling, just out of the chimp’s reach, was a bunch of bananas. There was also a footstool in the room, but it was only when the footstool and the bananas happened to line up in the frustrated chimp’s line of sight that the light bulb went off in his head and he dragged the footstool over, climbed up, and grabbed the bananas. Yesterday, reading Ellen Feldman’s most interesting post about the part played by a Lionel train set in the second trial of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama in the early 1930s, I suddenly felt like the chimp. If Ms. Feldman’s article was the footstool, the bunch of bananas was an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the Duke “rape” case that is now disgracing the state of North Carolina. Put the two cases—separated by 70 years and a profound social revolution—together and they make a historically fruitful combination. For the two cases are remarkably similar in both form and substance, indicating just how far the pendulum has swung. Both cases took place in states of the old Confederacy. In both cases, young men were charged with the terrible crime of rape on no evidence other than the testimony of the accusers. In both cases the accusers had little if any real credibility and the rapes almost certainly never in fact took place. In both cases there was an immediate public outcry demanding action against the accused. In both cases the prosecution acted purely for political reasons. In both cases exculpatory evidence was suppressed or ignored. The difference between the two cases, of course, is that they are racial mirror images of each other. In the Scottsboro case, nine young black men (and boys—one was only 12) were charged with raping two white girls on a freight train. In the Duke case three young white men on the Duke lacrosse team were charged with raping a black woman hired to be a stripper at a team party. Another difference between the cases, of course, is that the Scottsboro Boys were uneducated and destitute, quite unable to secure adequate counsel, although when they finally did secure it, it didn’t help. The result was a gross miscarriage of justice that resulted in convictions and long periods spent in jail (although, despite numerous death sentences, none were executed). The Duke lacrosse players, however, are upper-middle-class, and their families immediately hired first-rate legal talent who have blown the case apart. The rape charges have already been dropped, and the other charges—sexual assault and kidnapping—will almost surely be dropped or dismissed soon. While the three accused young men have been through hell over the last 10 months and their parents have had to spend large sums of money, none has spent even a night in jail for their nonexistent crimes. Once the case does totally collapse, one can only hope that the North Carolina legal establishment will do justice by throwing the book at the prosecutor who put his own reelection as district attorney—by flagrantly appealing for black votes in a case he knew to be without real evidence—above his sworn duty to do justice and to follow the law himself. And Duke University’s president and many of the faculty will owe the Duke students a profound apology. Like the white citizens of 1930s Alabama, they did no more than look at the race of the accuser and the accused and decide guilt on the basis of it.
December 27, 2006
Gerald Ford and Eastern Europe Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 PM EST In watching PBS’s coverage on NewsHour of Gerald Ford’s death, it occurred to me that history has been unfair to the late President on at least one count. In 1976 Ford attracted considerable criticism for claiming in his debate with Jimmy Carter, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” To millions of stunned television viewers, Ford’s assertion seemed unforgivably daft. Was the President really so stupid as to believe, more than 30 years after the Yalta Conference, that Eastern Europe was still up for grabs? Few sources quote the rest of Ford’s statement, in which he specifically pointed to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland as examples of Eastern European countries not under Moscow’s paw. Was Ford wrong? Not necessarily. In the mid-1970s all three states were certainly part of the Communist bloc, insomuch as there was a united Communist bloc. But Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, maintained a stubborn independence of Moscow. Under Ceausescu, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact nation to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six Day War and to criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Similarly, under the leadership of Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia effectively maintained a neutral stance during the Cold War, continuing to enjoy reasonably friendly diplomatic relations with the United States and its NATO allies. I know less about Poland in the 1970s and would defer to my colleague Fred Smoler, whose training in European history is far superior to mine. But I imagine Ford had something specific in mind when he singled out Warsaw for its independence of the Kremlin. To be sure, Ford didn’t convey his idea clearly, and ultimately politicians should be skilled communicators. On the other hand, journalists shouldn’t confuse themselves with stenographers. They should act as informed professionals who mediate between elected officials and the general public. Ford’s argument was valid, and in an ideal world, it would have inspired a nuanced debate about the realities of Cold War–era geopolitics. It’s a small point, all these years later. But as John Steele Gordon pointed out in today’s feature article, Ford was a supremely decent man and a devoted public servant. It’s worth remembering that he was also a good deal smarter than many people assumed, then and now.
December 27, 2006
A Lionel Train in the Courtroom Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:10 PM EST The current issue of American Heritage magazine has a delightful article by David Lander on Lionel trains, as American as mom and apple pie, as Christmasy as Santa Claus himself. The piece reminded me of my intense envy of my best childhood friend, who had a brother and therefore access, if only grudgingly, to a set of spiffy Lionel rolling stock, tracks, and accessories. The third of three girls, I had no such wonderment running around my basement. I was, however, surprised to learn from the article that in 1959 the founder of the company sold his interest to a great-nephew, Roy Cohn, the notorious legal aide to the heinous Senator Joseph McCarthy. The information reminded me of another unfortunate association in Lionel lore. In 1933, the criminal attorney Samuel Leibowitz, who defended Al Capone twice and was known as the next Clarence Darrow, agreed to represent the Scottsboro boys in the second round of trials in Decatur, Alabama. (The previous November, the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed the convictions of the nine young African-American men, who had been taken off a freight train in 1931 and charged with a rape that never occurred.) Leibowitz, who had wanted to be an actor during his undergraduate days at Cornell, was a flamboyant courtroom presence. He got Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll off from a charge of killing a baby with what became known as the Eskimo Pie defense, when he gave the judge, jury, and prosecutors ice cream popsicles to eat while he unmasked the chief witness, a police stooge, who claimed to be an Eskimo Pie vendor but turned out to know absolutely nothing about his product. He used the Christian Fish defense to get off a cop killer, who said he worked in a fish store but could not identify a single fish the prosecution brought into the courtroom, by pointing out that the fish market in question was in a Jewish neighborhood and the state’s attorney had not shown the defendant a single fish that went into gefilte fish. Leibowitz won acquittals in 77 of 78 first-degree murderer cases, with one hung jury, but he did not owe his success to courtroom high jinks alone. He liked to say he was not a great lawyer, only a thorough one. He crammed ballistics information to undermine the testimony of revolver experts, and read volumes on medicine and surgery to defend a doctor on charges of alleged malpractice. He was equally thorough in his preparation of the Scottsboro defense. In addition to studying the records of the earlier trials exhaustively and exposing mistakes and falsifications in the testimony, Leibowitz, who was paying his own expenses in the case, arranged to have the Lionel company build a miniature replica of the Alabama Great Southern freight train on which the rape was alleged to have taken place. The same cars were arranged in the same order they had been in on the original train, and the details were accurate down to the brass fittings. When Leibowitz brought his miniature train into court, even the hostile Southern jury and spectators were taken with it. Who does not love a model train? Then Leibowitz began his cross-examination of Victoria Price, one of the two young women who had cried rape. He was determined to use the replica to demonstrate that the incident could not have happened as she described it. The cross examination should have been a piece of cake. Leibowitz was a skilled trial lawyer. Price was an uneducated mill worker. But she was also a canny actor who knew how to play to the crowd of Southerners, eager to believe the accusations of a white woman against a group of black men. When Leibowitz asked if the Lionel train was a fair replication of the one she was on, she answered that it was different. “In what way?” he inquired. “That is not the train I was on,” Price answered. “Of course, you were not on this miniature train. I asked you if this is a fair representation.” “Just a little bit.” The sparring continued for some time as Price feigned stupidity and Leibowitz became more frustrated. Finally, Price administered the coup de grâce. “It was bigger, lots bigger. That is a toy.” The spectators loved it. The cards were stacked against the nine young men taken off a freight train on March 25, 1931. Neither the Lionel train nor the holes Leibowitz tore in the prosecution’s case, nor demonstrations across the country and around the world, could save them. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty with a death sentence, and the case dragged on for almost five decades and continues to reverberate today. Meanwhile the Lionel train remains on view at Cornell University Law School, a handsome tribute to America’s playful ingenuity and unconscionable injustice.
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