Schuler Presents THE STEEL BAR to ACC

Reposted from Ingots:

Ron Schuler, Member in Charge of the Pittsburgh office, recently gave a presentation on “The Steel Bar: ‘In-House Lawyers’ in Pittsburgh – History and Ethics,” with special guest Jerry Richey, general counsel of the University of Pittsburgh, to the Pittsburgh chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

Schuler’s talk, which was a preview of his book-in-progress, The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of Modern America, focused on episodes from the book involving in-house lawyers, with sidebar discussions about ethical issues with Richey.

Schuler discussed the development of the concept of an in-house lawyer in Pittsburgh – “a job that didn’t exist in 1800” – through George Westinghouse’s pioneering appointment of Pittsburgh patent lawyer George Christy as Vice President and general counsel of Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1873, to the creation of the “in-house law firm” by Alcoa general counsel Leon Hickman in the 1950s. Schuler also commented on the role of the in-house lawyer in the conflict between Carnegie and Frick that led to the “World’s Greatest Lawsuit” and the role of big company GCs — such as Alcoa’s Hickman, PPG’s Leland Hazard and Mellon’s Arthur Van Buskirk — in driving Pittsburgh’s Renaissance civic improvement projects during the 1940s and 50s.

The Steel Bar, Schuler explains, is not just a history of the legal profession in Pittsburgh, but a book about important aspects of American history. “It is about the ways that Pittsburgh lawyers have been engaged in important American issues at the highest levels” – for example, in defining the limits of dissent under a new constitution during the Whiskey Rebellion, improvising the legal inner-workings of American corporate ownership, management and control during Pittsburgh’s great industrial revolution of the 19th century, and working at the center of the crises that defined American labor-management relations, from the 1877 Railroad Riots, to the battle between Carnegie Steel and the steelworkers at Homestead in 1892, to the creation of the NLRB in the 1930s. The book also shows Pittsburgh lawyers and their unique experiences during important national trends and periods, such as the McCarthy Era, machine politics and the rackets, the fight for civil rights during the 1960s, and the ongoing challenges of achieving diversity within the profession. The Steel Bar is expected to be completed in early 2015.

Jerry Richey, who was named general counsel of the University of Pittsburgh in 2013, previously served as general counsel and chief legal officer at CONSOL Energy from 2005 to 2013, and prior to that served as a shareholder and ethics counsel to the firm of Buchanan Ingersoll. Richey is also known to track and field fans as a world-class miler who ran a sub-4-minute mile in the 1968 U.S. Olympic Trials, and still holds the record at the University of Pittsburgh for the 3200 meter race, with a time of 8:39.44.

To learn more about The Steel Bar, click here.

That Time When a Pittsburgh Lawyer Governed Part of Ukraine

Gregory Zatkovich was born in Austria-Hungary and "immigrated to Pennsylvania with his parents at age 2.  His father was the editor of an activist journal supporting Rusyn-Americans, an ethnic group from Carpathian Ruthenia, an area now within Slovakia and western Ukraine.  Zatkovich grew up in Pittsburgh, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907, and earned his law degree there three years later.  He entered the Pittsburgh bar in October 1910.  In July 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was on the verge of collapse, Rusyn-Americans began to agitate for the independence of Carpathian Ruthenia.  As a leader of the Rusyn movement, however, Zatkovich was convinced by members of the Wilson administration that merging Carpathian Ruthenia into a new Czech state was the only viable option, and he was convinced to sign the “Philadelphia Agreement” with Czech president Tomas Masaryk, upon the promise that Carpathian Ruthenia would be granted autonomy within the new Czech state.  Masaryk appointed Zatkovich governor of the province on April 20, 1920.  He served for a little less than a year, resigning on April 17, 1921 over disagreements on the border with Slovakia, and returned to his practice in Pittsburgh."  

"He has the distinction of being the only American citizen to have presided as governor over a province that would later become a part of the U.S.S.R."  

Zatkovich later served as Pittsburgh city solicitor during the administration of Mayor William McNair in the 1930s.

From THE STEEL BAR: PITTSBURGH LAWYERS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA

Jacob Margolis: Pittsburgh lawyer, Anarcho-Syndicalist

         Chairman:  Just how would you describe yourself?

         Margolis:  First, syndicalist; I put the syndicalist first, because it is an important thing; syndicalist-anarchist would be my position.

Jacob Margolis, a Pittsburgh lawyer who represented the IWW during the 1919 Steel Strike, told Senator William Kenyon of Iowa that he was an anarchist during a Senate investigation of the Steel Strike.  When he returned home to Pittsburgh, he found that the Allegheny County Bar Association was moving to have him disbarred.  During the legal battle that followed, the ACBA was fed information from the FBI.  Margolis lost his license to practice law in 1920 following arguments before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but was reinstated within the bar in 1928.  He spent most of the rest of his career as a writer and lecturer, retiring to Santa Barbara, California during the 1940s.

See The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of Modern America.

NOTE: Photo is not available for republication.

Natural Gas is King in Pittsburgh – Deja vu All Over Again?

I was reading an article from the New York Times the other day, and the first line of the article was, “Natural gas is King in Pittsburgh.”

The article described how much natural gas development is under way in the region; that with respect to overall enterprise cost, “gas is far cheaper as fuel than coal,” especially for manufacturing; that it is reinvigorating the economy of Pittsburgh, and attracting capital to the region; and finally, that natural gas is a clean fuel.

The date of this article was October 18, 1885.

Read more here.

103 Year-Old Pittsburgh Lawyer Reflects on Career

[In the course of my research for my upcoming book, I get to interview some pretty interesting folks. Some notes from my interview of Reuben Fingold, a 103-year old retired lawyer living with his wife in Pittsburgh, were published in the July 17 edition of the "Lawyers Journal," a publication of the Allegheny County Bar Association.]

Reuben Fingold, a 103 year-old Shadyside resident who was admitted to the Allegheny County Bar in 1930 and joined the Allegheny County Bar Association in 1933, was honored by the Board of Governors of the ACBA on June 2 for achieving the status of the oldest member of our Bar, and for “his Seventy Six years of service to the Allegheny County Bar Association and the legal community.”

At his side for the occasion was Mr. Fingold’s wife Helen, who is only a few years his junior. “[The inscription on the plaque] is really lovely,” she says, beaming with pride. 

Mr. Fingold’s recollections from his youth and his early years as a practitioner in Pittsburgh are like a time capsule from a bygone era. When he began his law practice, Herbert Hoover was in the White House. Fingold was 22 years old before movies had sound, and his family’s first radio was one that he put together himself from spare parts that he bought at a plumber’s shop in East Liberty. 

His parents lived in McKeesport when they were first married, where his father made men’s suits, drawing patterns for them on large rolls of green paper. “My mother used to tell us how she’d put the two [oldest] babies in a carriage, wheel them down to the wharf in McKeesport, and push the carriage onto a boat” that would take them along the Monongahela River to Pittsburgh, where they would visit his mother’s sister. Eventually, the Fingolds moved to the Hill District, where Reuben Fingold spent his earliest years, and then to Shadyside. 

“One of the things I remember,” Mr. Fingold says, “was when the newspaper came in and it said ‘TITANIC SUNK!’” The year was 1912. “My mother sat down and cried. I was pretty young then, and I didn’t know what the Titanic was, but my mother had come over from Europe” aboard an ocean ship, Fingold explains, and she instantly knew what the passengers on the Titanic must have experienced.

Mr. Fingold’s older brother, A.S. “Abe” Fingold, entered the Bar in 1926; but even before then, Mr. Fingold was fairly certain that he, too, would become an attorney, since he always had a penchant for “asking people all kind of questions.” After undergraduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Mr. Fingold enrolled in the Law School at Duquesne. In his first year, he had to take oral final exams, facing the entire Duquesne faculty – which consisted entirely of full-time practicing lawyers at the time – and fielding questions on each of the courses he had studied that year. His would be the last class of Duquesne law students to have to endure the oral exam gauntlet.

On the day Mr. Fingold found out he had passed the Bar, he and his brother Abe happened upon an Allegheny County judge while walking downtown. Abe Fingold greeted the judge and introduced him to his brother, announcing that Reuben had just passed the Bar. Mr. Fingold showed the judge his notification letter, whereupon the judge instructed Mr. Fingold to raise his right hand. “He swore me into the Bar, right then and there on the sidewalk,” Mr. Fingold explains, although he later formalized the event by signing the County registry.

Mr. Fingold set himself up as a sole practitioner in the Jones Law Building, sharing offices with his brother Abe and several more senior lawyers, including W.C. McClure and the John Metzes, father and son. The year 1930, amid the turmoil the Great Depression, was a difficult time to establish a new practice, but Mr. Fingold managed to earn a small living by doing title searches for other lawyers for $10 a search – sometimes accepting even less. “The [deed] books weighed almost as much as me,” he remembers. 

At the age of 36, Mr. Fingold left his Pittsburgh practice behind briefly and volunteered for World War II duty, attaining the rank of Major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and serving in the Judge Advocate General Department. He also designed a few inventions during this period, including some patented improvements to mason jar lids and electrical switches, and a bag holder for blood and plasma that he proposed to Army doctors during the War. 

Before his retirement from the law in the late 1970s, Mr. Fingold had built a comfortable general practice that included a few clients who paid him an annual retainer. Sometimes his job as a lawyer, however, would be merely to convince the right official to pay attention to a problem. One of his clients complained about garbage being thrown down a hillside owned by the client’s aunt; while it was fresh on his mind, Mr. Fingold happened to spot Mayor David L. Lawrence waiting for a streetcar, and he explained the situation to him. The Mayor made a note of the lawyer’s concerns, and the next morning, city maintenance men came and cleaned up the hillside. “Anybody could see David Lawrence,” Fingold remembers. “And he cleaned the city up.”

Reuben Fingold’s experiences recall a time when Pittsburgh was smaller, when streetcars could take you anywhere, and it only cost 15 cents a day if you wanted to park a car downtown. His unheralded career is another illustration of some of the simple virtues that were important to Pittsburgh’s lawyers during the first half of the 20th century, when both life and practice were filled with face-to-face, hands-on experiences – the arts of greeting, conversation, casual persuasion and straight-forward problem-solving, in broad daylight.

Pittsburgh's First Woman Lawyer

"Miss Agnes Fraser Watson's marriage Thursday evening to Herbert Lee Stitt of Pittsburgh, which took place at her mother's residence on Locust Street, Allegheny, was a pretty little ceremony, witnessed by about 50 guests and solemnized by Rev. Henry D. Lindsay, pastor of the North Presbyterian Church. There were but a two flower children in attendance, little Helen Barnes, a niece of the groom, and Harold Watson, a small nephew of the bride. The floral decorations were exceedingly handsome throughout the house. White azaleas, palms and maidenhair fern were used in the drawing room, white carnations in the dining room and all the other apartments were done in pink tulips and spring flowers. The bride wore a wedding gown of white pearl-tinted satin trimmed with duchess lace, in her hair she wore a white aigrette and plume, and she carried a bouquet of white carnations, her favorite flowers."

Sounds like it happened yesterday - but actually it was March 30, 1899, a very important event in the history of Pittsburgh lawyers. The groom was an inspector for the Schoen Pressed Steel Company in Blairsville and the bride . . . was the first woman to enter the bar in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

Agnes Fraser Watson, born in Pittsburgh in September 1866 to a Scottish immigrant and his second wife. Agnes lost her father when she was 10, whereupon she and her brother became wards of John Hood. When Agnes was still a toddler, the newspapers headlines were full of the trials and tribulations of pioneers like Myra Bradwell and Arabella Mansfield, the first woman lawyers in the U.S. In 1886, Carrie Kilgore of Philadelphia became the first woman lawyer in Pennsylvania, but only after the same kind of protracted litigation to secure the right of women to practice, that Myra Bradwell and Arabella Mansfield had gone through. Pittsburgh remained closed to all but white men, and there were still only handfuls of women lawyers throughout the U.S. around 1893 when Agnes entered the University of Michigan Law School, one of the earliest law schools in the nation to support the education of women as lawyers.

The buzz around Pittsburgh started slowly, but the press saw Agnes coming. She quietly applied to take the bar exam in the fall of 1895, and was accepted for the exam by N.W. Shafer of the examination board. He was a free thinker and a curmudgeon, and he knew the law was on women's side after the Kilgore case, even if the gentlemen of the Pittsburgh Bar weren't ready for Miss Watson.

The Pittsburgh Post headline on September 14, 1895 was simply "Miss Watson Passes." Out of 26 applicants, only 10 passed the Bar exam -- nine young men and 29-year old Agnes Fraser Watson. "The Plucky Western Girl," as the papers called her, showed them and passed the test.

Now what would happen at the swearing-in ceremony?

The Post reported: "Miss Agnes F. Watson, the first woman who has ever passed the final examination for admission to the Allegheny County bar, was admitted to practice in the various courts of the county yesterday … in Common Pleas No. 1, the nine young men were sworn in first, and then Miss Watson was called up. Mr. Shafer moved for her admission."

Judge Edwin Stowe leaned forward over the bench to study Miss Watson. "Mr. Shafer," he inquired, "has the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decided the right of women to be admitted to practice?"

"Why, yes Your Honor," said Mr. Shafer, "it had been decided in the case of Miss Kilgore of Philadelphia."

Judge Stowe sat back in his chair, his expression unchanged.

"I want to say if the Supreme Court had not decided the question, I would not consent to any women practicing law in this court. But if women want to practice law and ride bicycles, I suppose it is none of my business. Let her be sworn."

Women practicing law and riding bicycles. On the same day the Post announced Miss Watson's admission, in separate stories it reported that a woman postmistress was appointed at Kennon, Ohio, that it was decided that women would be allowed to attend the national conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, that women would now be admitted to the Catholic University of Washington, and among a few column inches of filler, the following statement: "A woman lawyer is a woman still, and when the right petitioner comes to court with a good case he will get a favorable decision." Something rather obvious that someone felt needed to be said.

Agnes Watson set up her office at 413 Fourth Avenue downtown, and as far as we know, she practiced by herself for a little over 3 years. Sadly, we know nothing of the details of her practice. All we know for sure is that a few weeks before her pretty wedding to Herbert Stitt on Locust Street in Allegheny, she closed the doors of her practice; and as the papers reported it, following the wedding, she spent weekdays in Blairsville and took carriage rides back to Allegheny on Saturdays to be with her mother, and "all her interests were devoted to homemaking." After 1899, Miss Watson, then Mrs. Stitt, disappears from the stage of history. Did she have children? Did she ever return to professional life? We just don't know, not yet. It appears that by 1930, though, she and her husband were living in the Edgewood, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

In a little over 3 years, her career as a Pittsburgh lawyer was over. By the time the next woman was admitted to the Bar in Allegheny County in 1900, Agnes Watson had already retired.

See The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of Modern America.

Miss America, 1935

Henrietta Leaver, better known as Miss America 1935, was born Henrietta Applegate on this day in 1916 in Monongahela, Pennsylvania.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, way back in 1854, that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Over the course of the last century, that famous remark should probably have been amended to state that "The mass of men and women lead lives of quiet desperation." It's probably as true today as it was in 1854; however, with another new reality TV show hitting the airwaves every day it seems, one could also add to Thoreau's sentiment, "The mass of men and women lead lives of quiet desperation -- punctuated, in some cases, by 15-minute fits of fame."

Henrietta Leaver grew up in a quietly desperate setting. Her mother, Celia, was just 15 years old when she and young George Applegate, an itinerant steel mill hand, eloped to Wellsburg, West Virginia. Where Henrietta was born not a year later, said reporter Evelyn Burke, "there wasn't a silver spoon anywhere near her clothesbasket bassinet." Applegate skipped out on the little family shortly after Henrietta was born, and within the year Celia had remarried, to George Leaver, a steel mill die caster. Little Hen was provided with his name, and dancing lessons when the family could afford them.

Over the next several years, as George Leaver followed the work, the family moved from Monongahela to Cleveland to Washington, Pennsylvania to Charleroi and back again to Monongahela. In between, following the birth of her sisters Betty (who died at age 2) and Norma Jean, Henrietta occasionally stayed with her grandmother and step-grandfather in Sarasota. By the time Henrietta was 15, the Leavers divorced, and Celia Leaver and her two girls moved in with Celia's mother, who had returned to Monongahela.

With the family in rough financial straits, Henrietta Leaver dropped out of McKeesport High School after her sophomore year to take a job in a 5-and-dime store. The Depression was on, however, and Henrietta soon found herself a victim of "downsizing," only able to count on a weekend's work here and there at the store.

Her family now on the welfare rolls, she took the advice of a family friend in August 1935 and entered a "Miss McKeesport" bathing beauty competition at a local movie theatre, wearing a borrowed polka dot one-piece. To her authentic astonishment, she won, prompting her to enter, the following week, the "Miss Pittsburgh" competition at Pittsburgh's Sky Club. Beating out 33 other girls who vied for the title, Henrietta's prizes included a new bathing suit and all expenses paid to attend and compete in that grand-old forerunner to today's reality show, Atlantic City's annual Miss America contest.

In Atlantic City, the 19-year old high school dropout and 5-and-dime-store salesgirl beat a field of 53 hopefuls, singing "Living in a Great Big Way" and doing a tap dance in the pageant's first-ever talent competition. At her post-competition press conference, the blue-eyed, brown-curled girl breathlessly told the reporters, "Please don't say anything about finding a million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store. All I want is a job!"

The newspapers were captivated by this living Cinderella, whispering that a Hollywood film contract could be on her horizon. Henrietta got herself a manager, George Tyson, and began to cash in modestly with endorsements and public appearances.

It turns out, however, that Vanessa Williams was not the first Miss America to engender controversy through a display of public nudity. The pride of McKeesport returned to Pittsburgh to pose, wearing a bathing suit, for a sculpture by noted area sculptor Frank Vittor (the same fellow who rendered the larger-than-life statue of Honus Wagner now located outside PNC Park in Pittsburgh), and was shocked to find at its unveiling that Vittor had rendered her in the nude. As Williams would later do, Leaver immediately protested her unexpected exposure while sponsors and guardians of morality expressed their disapproval; but since Vittor was known for sculpting presidents and not for publishing a smut 'zine (here the comparisons with the Williams affair break down a bit), he had the artistic community on his side. An international panel of artists and critics scrutinized Vittor's sculpture of Miss Leaver, entitled "American Venus," and pronounced it a "true and beautiful work of art."

Miss Leaver ultimately withdrew her objections, and was shortly thereafter also named "Miss American Model of 1936" by a group of 200 retail store buyers convening in Los Angeles.

From her moment in the sun, she returned to circumstances that may also be described as quietly desperate -- quietly desperate on a day-to-day basis, by all accounts, though probably happy enough on the whole.

It is possible that her notoriety made her slightly uncomfortable, as she forfeited her Miss America title before the end of her one-year reign when she eloped with her teen sweetheart, John Mustacchio. She divorced Mustacchio in 1944, testifying that he treated her like a "beautiful piece of furniture," subsequently remarrying twice (to Messrs. Nesser and Thomason) and settling into obscurity. She did, however, maintain her 36-25-36 figure well into her 50s, a point of pride that no doubt enabled the one-time beauty queen to reflect upon her fifteen minutes of fame with some confidence as the years wore on. She passed away, a beloved mother and grandmother, in September 1993.

Honus

"He was a gentle, kind man, a storyteller, supportive of rookies, patient with fans, cheerful in hard times, careful of the example that he set for youth, a hard worker, a man who had no enemies and who never forgot his friends. He was the most beloved man in baseball before Ruth." -- Bill James

Baseball legend Honus Wagner, known as the "Flying Dutchman," was born on this day in 1874 in Chartiers, Pennsylvania.

Wagner was the most unlikely-looking of shortstops, even when he began to play professional baseball in the Atlantic League in 1895: he stood 5' 11", weighing 200 pounds; and he was barrel-chested, thick-necked, long-waisted and noticeably bow-legged, with orangutanian arms that enabled him, said Lefty Gomez, to tie his big shoes with his thick hands without bending down.

Yet without question he was one of the great athletes and best all-around ballplayers of his time, and in 21 seasons in the major leagues (3 with the Louisville Colonels, the rest with the Pittsburgh Pirates) he was to dominate National League batting statistics the way Ty Cobb dominated the American League, leading the league in batting 8 times, slugging 6 times and stolen bases 5 times. He was also an exceptional fielder; contemporaries liked to describe his fielding abilities in terms usually reserved for steam-shovels.

By way of contrast to Cobb, however, Wagner was as sunny and likeable a fellow as one could imagine. He was also mindful of his influence on children, and since he did not like the idea of children being lured to smoke cigarettes, he halted the use of his picture on cards sold by the American Tobacco Co. in 1910, with the result that only about 20 American Tobacco Honus Wagner cards were known to exist in the 1990s, making it among the rarest of old baseball cards. In 1991, the now-beleaguered hockey star Wayne Gretzky purchased one of these Wagner cards at auction for $451,000.

When Wagner retired in 1917 (with a lifetime batting average of .327), he had amassed more hits, runs, total bases, runs batted in and stolen bases than any player up to that time.

He later served as a coach for the Pirates -- some say more as a mascot -- and lent his name to a Pittsburgh sporting goods store which still thrives today, his garrulous caricature appearing on the storefront. A developer was recently rebuffed by the Carnegie, Pennsylvania zoning hearing board in its attempts to turn Wagner's old home there into a bed-and-breakfast in time for the All-Star Game, which this year will be played in Pittsburgh's PNC Park. To these "memorials" one must also add the heroic larger-than-life statue of him by Frank Vittor that stands outside PNC Park, a reminder to today's fans that giants used to walk the Earth.

Wagner was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with the elite inaugural class in 1936. He died on December 6, 1955 in Carnegie.

Categories: Baseball, PNC-Park, Pittsburghiana

Charles Owen Rice, 1908-2005

Monsignor Charles Owen Rice, known as "Pittsburgh's Labor Priest," died Sunday in nearby McCandless Township at the age of 96, and I regret that I didn't get a chance to meet him.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, Msgr. Rice battled injustice -- not simply in the worker-vs.-bosses steel mill fights during the heyday of organized labor in Pittsburgh -- but against racism, intolerance and violence.

During the Depression, like Father Coughlin, Rice gave fiery radio sermons that mesmerized his parishoners -- but there the resemblance ended, for Rice's mission was to open his listeners' minds to grace rather than to inspire fear and distrust. Rice (whose Irish brogue was authentic, trained during his childhood in Ireland, where he lived from ages 4 to 11) not only used the radio pulpit to advance his cause, but was a front-line soldier whenever he believed the cause was just -- he marched in the picket lines; gave pep talks in the rain during strike rallies; urged the U.S. to aid England in its struggle against the Nazis; linked arms with Martin Luther King and marched with him to the United Nations in 1967; marched on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War; and stood on the barricades as the steel plants were shut down in the 1980s. During much of that time, he also ran St. Joseph's House of Hopsitality, a Hill District shelter for the poor and homeless.

His columns for the Pittsburgh Catholic drew more mail than any other feature, much of it negative. One doesn't need to agree with Rice's advocacy of the union movement, however, to recognize the truth and integrity of his beliefs. His was the rare muscular moral voice of the Left, something today's Democrats still seem to struggle over finding for themselves:

'The Dynamite of the Encyclicals'


Last month some of the good Catholic people of Pittsburgh were startled to hear that a group of priests had been interested in organizing, of all things, a Catholic Radical Alliance. There was a general lifting of the eyebrows all along the line at the idea of Catholic Radicals . . . It might be reasonable to inquire, whom are we following? What prominent Catholics are radicals in this sense? Well, off hand, the first name that comes to my mind is that of Pope Pius XI, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, visible head of the Church. This program, by the way, is commemorating a radical document that he issued six years ago this very day; and it is commemorating another radical document that was issued forty years before that again: The Encyclical "On the Condition of Labor" by Leo XIII . . . The Popes issued these documents to the entire world, one of them forty-six years ago, and the other six years ago; but it is an annoying fact that the principles in them have not gotten around. Outside her fold the Church has the reputation, unfortunately, among all too many of being reactionary -- the friend of the rich rather than the poor; the friend of the bosses rather than the masses. And yet, if the plain facts of Christian principles and practice were known, it is just the opposite. The Church is the Church of the poor and must be. She is the friend of the oppressed against the oppressor . . . To be brutally frank, there are Catholics, many by no means obscure, who act not like followers of Christ, but like followers of the devil in their dealing with and attitude toward the problems of social justice . . .


Rice, PITTSBURGH CATHOLIC, May 20, 1937


'The Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor! So should we.'


. . . Actually, there is a class war raging in this country, but it is being waged not by the poor, but against them. Those who would deny government relief to the poor but demand they find jobs, when all the jobs are hard to find and decent ones impossible, are waging class war.


Rice, PITTSBURGH CATHOLIC, July 14, 1995

More about Charles Owen Rice can be found in Fighter with a Heart: Writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh Labor Priest, edited by Charles McCollester.

Rebel Lawyers

Last week I gave my 4th annual “Whiskey Rebellion” speech for the local chapter of the Federal Bar Association.

The Whiskey Rebellion, in case you’ve forgotten the American history you were never taught anyway, was an insurrection in 1794 by settlers in the Monongahela Valley in Western Pennsylvania who fought against a federal tax on whiskey by tarring-and-feathering revenue collectors and conducting other mischief. President Washington led 13,000 soldiers to quell the insurrection – which was the first and only time a sitting president led troops into battle.

It turns out to have been a very important, if almost forgotten event, in American history, because it was the first dramatic opportunity for the United States government to prove its legitimacy to its own people, and to impose the will of the federal government upon the contrary desires of a state or local constituency. It was also an important test of the limits and protocols of dissent within the infant Republic, the ability to disagree with the policies of the government without being branded as a traitor.

Of all the truly interesting things I could have discussed concerning the Whiskey Rebellion, unfortunately I had to focus on the activities of lawyers during the Rebellion, because people were actually paying to listen to me so that they could obtain Continuing Legal Education “Ethics” credit for the year.

There were two lawyers who played major roles in the Rebellion. One was Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Princeton-educated pro-federal carpetbagger and Pittsburgh’s first-ever lawyer, who campaigned against the whiskey excise tax but stopped short of urging rebellion. The other was David Bradford, an allegedly mentally unstable country lawyer, the deputy attorney general of Washington County who was to be branded as a traitor, a thief and a ringleader of the insurrection for giving violent speeches and rousing the public outcry.

Both lawyers ended up as losers in the conflict -- but both found redemption, after a fashion.

Brackenridge’s pamphlets and articles condemning the excise tax became well known among the politicians in Congress and in President Washington’s cabinet – so much so that Washington’s soldiers chanted anti-Brackenridge epithets on their way to quell the insurrection. But to his fellow Pittsburghers, Brackenridge was a traitor to the cause because he would not support armed resistance against the feds. He ended up losing the trust of his neighbors as an advocate, until he was finally elevated to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. (This is sometimes what happens when no one else will have you.)

David Bradford had a warrant out for his arrest, and he ended up escaping South to New Orleans, and then to the fringes of Spanish West Florida, before being pardoned by President John Adams. Then, strange as it may seem, President Thomas Jefferson, who was having troubles with Spanish Florida during his term, actually sought out Bradford to help him with the situation, recalling how well Bradford was able to stir up the residents of Western Pennsylvania during the Whiskey Rebellion. I think it says something about the young Republic's willingness to forgive and forget an honest mistake that Bradford might be asked by his president to serve his country once again. After all, it was only a few years before that some of the English-speaking inhabitants of North America had decided to throw off the yoke of the only apparent authority which then existed -- that of the British crown. They claimed that they were being taxed without representation, and they claimed that they had a God-given right to govern themselves. Who could blame Bradford for thinking he might have had the colorable authority to do the same a scant few years after the last time it was done?

And therein lies the gist of my message to the lawyers assembled (in case you missed the speech itself). In a free society, lawyers are given a wide berth when it comes to challenging the existing legal order without being branded as traitors. Although “precedent” is a powerful element in our system, even John Roberts, in his recent confirmation hearings, had to admit that it was not inviolable; the ability to break precedent is, for example, what moved us from the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson to the integration imperative in Brown v. Board of Education. And yet, procedural and ethical rules seem to place limits on a lawyer’s ability to launch arguments that are not grounded in current law – as evidenced by the sanctions that can be imposed against lawyers for “frivolous” claims, for example. So – how is a lawyer to know when he or he has gone too far? What are the limits of a lawyer’s working dissent?

It is part of a lawyer’s job to exercise our independent judgment -- not only about the advice we give to our clients, but about the advice we give to ourselves. We are always, at some level, consciously or unconsciously, asking ourselves: where there are no outright prohibitions and no black-letter rules to guide us, do we have an argument that this is legal? And if it is found to be illegal, what's the magnitude of the consequences? David Bradford obviously got a break, because this was, after all, a first test for the federals. The next guy no doubt took his lumps.

The profession urges us to be men and women of our time – it urges us to be wide-awake and practical, using our wits and our experience and our street sense as we go about our duties. And this applies, I think, to the advice we give ourselves as much as it does to the advice we give others. We take measure of our actions in the context of our times -- and whether we are laboring to maintain the status quo or to effect radical change in society, if we still have our dignity by the end of it all, then it seems to me we’re on the right track.