Vol. 2 No. 1 (January, 1992) pp. 16-20
THE CONSCIENCE OF A LAWYER: CLIFFORD J. DURR AND AMERICAN CIVIL
LIBERTIES, 1899-1975. By John A. Salmond. Tuscaloosa, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 1990. Pp. 265.
Reviewed by Deborah J. Barrow, Auburn University.
The magnitude of Clifford Durr's contributions to political and
social issues from 1933 until his death in 1975 were such that
scholarly works such as Peter Irons' NEW DEAL LAWYERS, or Ellen
Schrecker's account of red-baiting in the 40s and 50s in NO IVORY
TOWER, and even Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize-winning work on
the civil rights movement entitled PARTING THE WATERS, could
hardly fail to mention his crucial involvement in these
monumental events. However, for the first time John Salmond,
Professor of History at La Trobe University in Australia, has
masterfully crafted and compassionately told the life story of
this remarkable individual in THE CONSCIENCE OF A LAWYER. Salmond
takes us on nothing less than a roller coaster ride of the
personal trials and triumphs that Clifford Durr and his political
activist wife Virginia encountered as they moved from the small,
narrow world of Southern privilege and segregation to a public
life engulfed in political controversy brought on by their
sacrificial commitment to civil liberties.
The book's success rests with Salmond's analytic treatment of
Durr's multifaceted life. Through the chronicling of Durr's
public and private activities, Salmond demonstrates remarkably
well how the reformist ideals held by many of the New Dealers
were inextricably linked to the values that were the basis for
the stands taken on civil liberties during the Red Scare of the
40s and 50s and that ultimately formed the heart of the civil
rights movement.
The first third of the biography explains the path leading to
Durr's involvement in the New Deal and the development of his
concept of the public interest that made him into an ardent New
Dealer. Salmond discusses how the young Durr developed a penchant
for hard work during his rigidly formalistic years of private
education in Montgomery, Alabama. He endured those times for the
sake of the vacations that would take him to his greatest joy,
spending time on his grandfather's farm in Wetumpka, Alabama.
There he was exposed to a life of work and to individuals, many
of whom were his only black playmates; it was a world that
blissfully carried him far from his boarding school environment.
However, Durr would eventually be rewarded for the energy that he
devoted to his studies in those early years, and for his
distinguished performance later at the University of Alabama, by
earning a Rhodes Scholarship. The two years at Oxford
(1920-1922), while bringing moments of fun and adventure, were a
time that he described as his "period of exile" (p.32).
Though he performed well in his studies, even finishing ahead of
schedule, he was never quite comfortable in the Oxford
environment. He was unaccustomed to the loosely structured
instructional setting and was exposed for the first time to
individuals of different cultures. Rather than leading him to
shed his ethnocentricity, the experience merely reenforced his
awareness of his Southern roots and emphasized for the first time
his distinctiveness as an American.
Page 17 follows:
Upon his return to the states two events charted the course that
Clifford Durr's life would take: his joining a major law firm in
Birmingham in 1924, and his courtship and marriage to Virginia
Foster in 1926, who would be his wife of nearly 50 years. Both
experiences led directly to the role he played in effectuating
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Durr distinguished himself as a
corporate attorney in drafting legal documents for the firm's
primary client, Alabama Power Company, and through marriage he
gained a brother-in-law, Hugo Black, whom he adored and who
greatly influenced Clifford and Virginia's thinking on many
issues. It was a call from the young Senator Black to Durr in
1933 that would forever change the Durrs' life by bringing them
into a circle of committed social and economic reformists. Black
asked Durr to come to Washington for an interview with the chief
counsel of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Stanley Reed,
for a job in the agency whose responsibility would lie in the
recapitalization of banks and trusts, a key element in FDR's plan
for economic recovery. As Black predicted, Durr's expertise
quickly made him a vital member of a highly successful agency. By
1936 Durr had become a dedicated New Dealer, completely devoted
to FDR's policies and exhilarated by being a part of the great
social experiment that he saw occurring as the result of using
public funding for the public interest.
By 1940, Durr would take the initiative in responding to FDR's
call for emergency preparedness by drafting the proposal for the
creation of a public corporation that Durr envisioned as
financing the expansion of defense-related industry either
through public or public-private cooperative ownership. An
important side benefit to the creation of the Defense Plant
Corporation would be the introduction of new firms into the
market that could compete with the monopolies that existed some
segments of industry, such as the aluminum industry. While the
DPC was easily embraced by the Congress and the President, Durr
as its director was quickly pitted against powerful industrial
owners and investors who did not share Durr's vision of the
public interest, much less that of trust busting. Despite the
success of the DPC, Durr increasingly found himself dissenting
from decisions concerning corporate agreements that were being
approved by the director of the RFC, DPC's parent agency. These
decisions not only strengthened industry's role in ownership and
monopolies, but worst of all for Durr, they permitted windfall
profits made from public funds and the nation's war effort. In
late 1941, Durr resigned from the DPC, ending his eight years of
public service as a federal loan administrator.
Something beyond his success as a federal administrator, however,
had happened to Clifford Durr. During these eight years he had
developed a concept of the public interest from an economic
viewpoint rooted in the ideals of the New Deal, and had become a
persuasive defender of the notion. Of equal importance was his
exposure to the social and political ideals of the Durrs' circle
of friends from the New Deal community, one "full of
vitality, shared ideals, and the sense of being part of something
bigger than oneself"(p.57). He was especially influenced on
such matters by Virginia Durr, whose commitment to racial
equality and voting rights as well as her association with the
"liberal left" was becoming more visible. Also during
this time, the Durrs met Jessica Mitford who would become one of
their dearest friends. The young Jessica married to Winston
Churchill's nephew, came to live with them in 1940 and remained
with them during the heyday of the New Deal community at Seminary
Hill. Their close association continued from that point forward,
and perhaps even
Page 18 follows:
became stronger as a result of the political attacks sustained by
Jessica Mitford for her increasingly notable leftist activities
and affliation with the Communist Party.
In the discussion of events from 1941 to 1954, Salmond presents
his most interesting and crucial analysis, one that provides an
understanding of the transition that Clifford Durr made from New
Dealer to steadfast defender of civil liberties. Upon leaving the
DPC, Durr was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission,
at a time when FDR was trying to revitalize the FCC's role in
regulating the power and monopoly in broadcasting which he
thought posed a major threat to New Deal policies. This was to be
Durr's most visible role in public service and his last. Armed
with two strong beliefs, a "distrust of unregulated
corporate powers"(p.75) and a growing need to advance the
public interest, Durr set out to open the broadcast industry's
doors to a more diverse and public voice, eventually achieving
his vision of setting aside frequencies for educational
broadcasting and drafting the official document of standards for
issuing licenses. In his pursuit to democratize the airways, Durr
increasingly found that he had to take stands on the free speech
and associational rights of colleagues and license applicants
suspected of leftist associations such as the Hollywood Radio
Group. Consequently, he was drawn into a succession of battles
with the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar
Hoover, finally resigning the FCC in 1948 after drafting a
thirteen page dissent on the FCC's adoption of Truman's Loyalty
Program.
In later years, Durr's FBI file, obtained by Virginia Durr
through the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that he had been
placed under surveillance in 1942 as a direct result of his early
defense of a colleague accused of belonging to left-wing groups
(to which the likes of Thomas Dewey and Chief Justice Hughes
belonged), and remained under FBI surveillance with periodic,
harassing visits until 1965. The FBI scrutiny intensified when
Durr left the FCC and joined the National Lawyers Guild in 1949.
At the urging of his close friend and Yale Law Professor, Thomas
Emerson, he became the Guild's president, primarily so he could
have a platform from which to speak against the fear mongering
tactics increasingly used by the HUAC and the FBI. By then,
however, as Salmond so poignantly notes, Durr himself had become
"a victim of the procedures he opposed so
vehemently"(p.139).
Durr returned to private life in 1948, by reluctantly opening a
legal practice in Washington. Immediately his office was flooded
by a stream of clients who as jobless victims of the loyalty
program purge could find but only a handful of lawyers who would
touch their cases and but one who would take on their cause
without remuneration, Clifford Durr. At this point in the book,
Salmond very subtly gives us an important clue to understanding
the level of dedication that Durr had come to have for issues of
individual rights, one that sets the stage for the role that he
would play in Montgomery from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties.
Durr, he notes, not only defended those who had been falsely
accused, but unlike other civil liberties lawyers of this period
also defended individuals who actually were or had been members
of the Communist Party as well as those in close association with
those ideals. With this Salmond takes us to the final stages of
controversy that resulted from Durr's commitment to individual
rights.
Page 19 follows:
Ultimately, unable to make a living from the parade of loyalty
cases, Durr left Washington in hopes of settling down to a
quieter life and one in which he could provide better for his
family. Instead, however, the Durrs found that not only was
Clifford's reputation quick to follow them, but Virginia's
long-term involvement with the Southern Conference for Human
Welfare and the National Committee for the Abolition of the Poll
Tax, as well as her past membership in the Progressive Party also
had been and would increasingly become the focus of suspicion.
Indeed it caused Clifford Durr to resign a job with the National
Farmers Union in Colorado within a year of taking the position.
Beset by ill health and financial devastation, the Durrs packed
up and returned to Montgomery in 1951 to be in the comfort and
support of family and friends. The respite was to be a brief one.
Against the backdrop of the U.S. Supreme Court's soon to be
announced BROWN decision, Clifford and Virginia Durr became
targets for any politician trying to discredit the Court or its
liberal members such as Hugo Black. In 1954, Clifford Durr would
have to take on the most difficult of all his defenses, that of
his wife, Virginia, and the Durr's long-time companion, Aubrey
Williams, both of whom were subpoenaed to appear in New Orleans
before Senator Eastland's Senate Subcommittee on Internal
Security. Durr, with the aid of his and Virginia's long-time
friend, Lyndon Johnson, successfully resisted Eastland and
discredited the entire hearing, but not without considerable
costs. The ordeal and its surrounding publicity worsened
Clifford's health, fatally damaged his fledgling law practice,
and increased the FBI's intrusion into their lives.
Durr returned to Montgomery to a practice very different from the
one he initially attempted to build. This time he became involved
exclusively with cases concerning the violation of individual
rights among the black citizens of Montgomery, who Durr believed
were suffering violations of liberties and freedoms similar to
those he had witnessed in Washington. Though this practice was
being held together only by a financial thread, Durr found the
new work rewarding, especially his relationship with a young
black attorney, Fred Gray. Resigned by now that his struggle to
protect civil liberties was one for life, Durr and Gray took on
the entire region and nation when they together fashioned the
case and appeals for Mrs. Rosa Parks whose refusal to give up her
seat to whites on a bus in Montgomery would launch the modern
civil rights movement.
Reminiscent of the time in Washington of clients who were being
purged, Durr's practice as well as his and Virginia's personal
lives from 1956 through 1964 would be filled with the events and
personalities of protest as the civil rights movement unfolded.
Clifford Durr's law office as well as the Durr's home became a
haven for many of the prominent and those not so noted who came
to aid the South and the country through this transition.
Clifford Durr's ability to push forward in the legal battle for
civil rights was aided substantially by financial support from
liberal philanthropists throughout the country, perhaps none of
which was more important to the Durr's personally than that
provided by Jessica Mitford. But still under surveillance and
with a clientele in desperate need of a lawyer who would defend
their civil liberties but who rarely had the money to pay for the
services, he eventually made a financial decision to close his
law practice in 1964.
Page 20 follows:
During the next several years, Clifford Durr took tremendous
pleasure in being invited to give lectures at some of the more
prestigious universities in the United States and abroad. He was
especially moved by the reception he received as a guest lecturer
at Oxford, returning as a distinquished alumnus and humanitarian
some 40 years after his graduation from the school. He also had
returned to the great solace in his life in 1969, his
grandfather's farm where, aside the periodic travels to lecture,
he would live out the remainder of his years.
John Salmond is to be commended not just for chronicling the
events in Clifford Durr's life in such an interesting manner, but
for an absolutely superb job in explaining why Clifford Durr took
the stands that he did. For this reason, every student of
politics or history, including those who may be familiar with the
episodes and personalities involved in this story, will find this
a highly thought-provoking read.
Copyright 1992