Gaddis on Kennan: Insight into a Key Figure of the 20th Century

The first half of the 20th Century was terrible, including two world wars. The second half was much better. “Who developed the ideas that made the second half of the 20th century better that the first half?” Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis asked in an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Wednesday.

“I don’t mean to say that George Kennan did all of that,” Gaddis said, answering the question. “But if I were to pick one central idea that was key to making the second half of the 20th century more peaceful than the first half, I think it was the idea of containment, I think it was the idea that you could deal with the Soviet Union without having a new world war with them on the one hand and without appeasing them on the other hand. And that really was George Kennan’s idea. So I would say if we back off and look at big ideas and big consequences, this man is extraordinarily influential.”

Kennan, a Milwaukee native, was the subject of Gaddis’ biography, “George F. Kennan: An American Life,” which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in April. Gaddis came to Milwaukee at the invitation of the Law School. He spoke with Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, before an audience of about 200.

Gaddis painted a picture of Kennan as a brilliant, but complex person who had great, almost prophetic insights into global issues, but who was almost never happy with himself or how things were going in the world. He was “one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century,” Gaddis said (Kennan won two Pulitzer prizes for memoirs he wrote) but “he was one of those people who was incapable of self-congratulation.”

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People Who Have Shaped the Teaching Careers of Our Faculty—Part 3: Lessons Learned from Professor Jim Colliton

The editors of the blog asked several law school faculty to write about the people who have been the most formative figures in their careers as legal educators. This submission, the third in the series, is by Professor Vada Waters Lindsey.

When I enrolled in law school, my goal was to become a lobbyist. I majored in Political Science as an undergraduate student, worked for a state senator as a legislative aide and believed that a law degree would help me reach my professional goals. Upon enrolling in law school, my interests immediately shifted. I loved the law school environment. Before the end of my first year, I decided that my future was in the legal academy. Upon reaching the epiphany that altered the course of my professional career, I began to study my professors’ teaching styles so that I could emulate them when I entered the academy.

Several of my law school professors have been formative figures in my career as a legal educator. I learned the importance of consistency from Professor Jeffrey Shaman. I found Professor Wayne Lewis to be the most proficient professor in using the Socratic Method. Professor Jerold Friedland became a lifelong friend and mentor. But, the professor who had the most profound impact on my career as a legal educator was the late Professor James “Jim” Colliton. I followed his footsteps by working at the Chief Counsel’s Office of the Internal Revenue Service upon graduating from law school, earning my LL.M. in Taxation from Georgetown and becoming a tax professor. I took only one class with Professor Colliton – Estate and Gift Taxation. However, Professor Colliton’s impact on my professional life had little to do with the estate and gift tax principles such as the unified credit, marital deduction and Crummey trusts. Undoubtedly, Professor Colliton did an amazing job teaching those principles. What distinguished Professor Colliton from many other professors was his innate ability to connect with students both inside and outside of the classroom. Simply stated, Professor Colliton was one of the most supportive, helpful and caring faculty members that I have ever met. I graduated from law school over 20 years ago, but he remained a mentor and became one of my closest friends until he lost his courageous battle with cancer a few years ago.

As professors, our primary responsibility is to train future lawyers. I learned from Professor Colliton that that responsibility extended beyond the classroom. Excellent instruction is an absolute necessity. Professor Colliton was an outstanding in-class instructor, but he was also a tremendous mentor to students, including mentoring students who had never enrolled in any of his classes. I spent many hours in Professor Colliton’s office discussing careers in tax law. Therefore, I learned that law professors must not neglect the mentoring responsibility to law students. While the demands of scholarship, committee work, class preparation and other responsibilities are daunting at times, students should feel comfortable stopping by a professor’s office not only to discuss coursework but also to seek career advice, particularly during these weak economic times. Finally, I learned from Professor Colliton that the responsibility to our students continues after they graduate. When I decided it was time for me to enter the academy six years after graduating from law school, I sought Professor Colliton’s advice. He encouraged me to pursue my goals and was instrumental in helping me secure a position by guiding me through the whole process.

I have been in academia now for many years, and I know that the lessons I learned from Professor Colliton will last a lifetime.

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Black Lawyers in the 1930s

African-American lawyers were a scarce commodity in 1930.

A recent post on the ConLawBlog posed the question of how many African-American lawyers there were in the United States in 1930.  This is a subject that I have been studying for some time, and thanks to a heads up from Professor Idleman, I was able to answer the question.

According to the U.S. Census, in 1930, there were only 1247 black lawyers in the entire United States in 1930, out of a total number of 160,605 lawyers.  Of the 1247, 1223 were male and only 24 were female.

Even though the Great Migration had begun after World War I, the bulk of the African-American population still lived in the South in 1930. However, thanks to racial prejudice and limited economic opportunities below the Mason-Dixon line, a significant majority of black lawyers lived outside the South.

The largest concentrations of black male lawyers was in Illinois, which had 187 male African-American attorneys.

Other states with significant numbers were New York (117); Ohio (94); Michigan (63); and Indiana (62). The only Southern jurisdictions with comparable numbers were the District of Columbia (94); and Virginia (57).

Complete state-by-state breakdowns for the 24 females are not provided in the published Census Reports for 1930.  The largest number of black female lawyers appears to have been in the District of Columbia, where there were four.

As a percentage of total lawyers, black male lawyers accounted for more than 2% of total male lawyers only in the District of Columbia (2.8%) and Virginia (2.4%). If female lawyers are included — and the number of female lawyers in those two jurisdictions is available — the percentage of black lawyers in each of those two jurisdictions actually goes up slightly, but was still less than 3%.

Nowhere was the absence of black lawyers in 1930 more shocking than in the Deep South.  In spite of the large black population, proportionately much larger than it is today, Alabama had only 4 black lawyers, while Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida had only 6, 8, and 10, respectively.  The totals for Georgia and South Carolina were just 14 and 13.

Black lawyers were more numerous in the other former Confederate states, but only slightly: North Carolina (27), Tennessee (26), Arkansas (16), and Texas (20).

Not surprisingly, given the small pre-World War II black population of Wisconsin, black lawyers were scarce in the Badger State.  According to the 1930 Census, there were only three black male lawyers in Wisconsin in 1930, although there was also at least one black female attorney, former Marquette law student Mabel Raimey.  (The three black male lawyers included law partners George Heriot DeReef, A.B. Nutt, and James Weston Dorsey, and Ambrose B. Nutt, all of Milwaukee.)

By way of comparison, Minnesota had 11 black lawyers in 1930, while Iowa had 7.  North and South Dakota had none.

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