Funding for this film has been generously provided by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. Citizenship is every person's highest calling. I'm Dan Harris in Signers Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
We hardly think of it this way today, but to these men, this was an experiment. Starting a new type of government for a new country they were going to call the United States of America. Not only was there no guarantee that it would work, but history pretty much told them it wouldn't.
In their day, nations were run by rulers, not rules. Kings and emperors told everyone else what to do. A government run by the people themselves?
That was an old idea, but it had never quite worked. People fight with each other. It's human nature.
People are messy. They have their own interests. They disagree. All rulers knew that it took armies to keep the people under control. But these men believed it took a constitution, that they could create institutions that would let conflict occur, deal with it, and that people would accept the outcome.
That's what they believed. And in the spring of 1787, it was time to deliver. But they weren't sure that they could. The constitution was written in a time of crisis. They knew that if they failed at that moment, their country would fail.
They responded by starting a nation in one room with just a handful of ideas and a small group of men. I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. Films like this really kind of miss the point. Protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Oh boy, they play right into the myth. A lot of the image that we have of the founding fathers comes in part from 19th century historians who actually wrote that God handed down the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was a founding father.
He was the one who wrote the Declaration of Independence. He called the men who wrote the Constitution demigods. So what did that make him? They're the closest thing we have to the Greek gods or royalty.
So they've been transformed into larger-than-life figures. For 200 years, we've written books about them, we've cast them in bronze, carved them. them from marble dr benjamin franklin we've made awful educational films about them and you james madison our children's children will remember you and the average school child in america America is taught to speak of these men in kind of hushed whispers. They were all heroic figures who were going to be whisked directly up to heaven. In fact, everyday visitors to the nation's capital can walk into the heart of the Rotunda, look up to the ceiling of the dome, and see a painting called The Apotheosis of Washington.
In other words, George Washington becoming a god. These were real men who faced real challenges. They knew they weren't gods. Gods have special powers that men don't. They didn't trust any man who wanted the power of a god or say a king.
Many of them would blush or be embarrassed by the way we look up to them now. Well, some of them would anyway. We should admire them, not because they're superhuman, not because they're Superman, but because they're ordinary people. And that's what makes the real story so much more remarkable than the myth.
Okay, for the record, Ben Franklin thought the Constitution would last, oh, about ten years. Franklin and some of these men were actually brilliant, but they really didn't know what they were getting themselves into. The point was they were trying to get out of a long, seemingly endless cycle of conflict. Let's go back for a minute. I'll make this quick.
150 years before the Constitution, we were separate colonies of Britain. We were ruled as the king saw fit. He could throw us in jail, make us pay unfair taxes, take our land. His word was the last word. That caused some conflict.
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson and 55 other men risked their lives by signing the Declaration of Independence, telling Britain and the world that they weren't going to obey the king anymore. We fought a war to win our independence and started our own government in 1781, the Articles of Confederation. And the Articles of Confederation turned out to be a recipe for more conflict. The first Constitution of the United States was a failure. The Articles of Confederation really did not bind the new states together into one nation.
The Articles of Confederation were actually called a League of Friendship. What kind of a nation calls itself a League of Friendship? Remember that the colonists were revolting against England.
They were revolting against a monarchy, and they were revolting against a parliament. That had total power. What they wanted to do was to prevent anybody, or any group of people, any institution in this country, from having that kind of power over their lives.
You had groups of people who had existed for a fairly long time, and identified themselves as Virginians, or as people from Maryland, or people from Massachusetts. North Carolina, where the wonders never cease. Delaware, it's good being first. They want what later would be called states'rights, state sovereignty. The states saw themselves as essentially sovereign nations that had kind of agreed to kind of maybe work together, maybe kind of, sorta.
And things fall apart so quickly that it's really kind of dazzling. One of the biggest, if not the biggest problems was that there was no power of taxation. Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government was flat broke.
It couldn't afford to protect ships on the Atlantic from pirates, and it couldn't protect citizens on the western borders either. Each state printed its own money. Even more dramatically, New York State, which has the great port of New York City, is charging Connecticut and New Jersey an arm and a leg for everything that comes into their port.
And so Connecticut and New Jersey are meeting. To plan a united military attack on New York. But the breaking point for the Articles of Confederation came when veterans of the Revolutionary War, mostly farmers, staged a revolt against the state of Massachusetts. And in this scene, against the basic principles of acting.
We're here to get justice. As Daniel says, you are in contempt of court. I will see you jailed for this.
Oh no! You're not going to judge me or any other man in this county. You want to join this court? I will clear you out.
Shays'Rebellion sends fear through every state. What it represents is a breakdown of law and order. And all their rhetoric is the rhetoric of the revolution.
This is a tyrannical government. This is a government that's not looking out for the interests of the people. When Washington hears about Shays'Rebellion, I think for him this is the low point of the whole Confederation period.
General Washington, another such outbreak is this Massachusetts affair and we shall have anarchy. He said it's a triumph for our enemies that we are incapable of governing ourselves. We can't even win the loyalty of our own citizens. Something has to be done.
But what? Everyone knew this government needed to be fixed, but the big question was how? A convention was called in Philadelphia to fix the Articles of Confederation, but...
Just look around this room. These were the people who were coming to fix this mess? Just months before, this state was going to war with this state. Delaware came in saying they'd leave before they gave up any power.
This delegation was arguing with itself over whether or not to commit to a stronger central government. And him? He was drunk.
Only James Madison of Virginia came with a clear plan. Madison was a brilliant strategist. but he wasn't popular enough to get all these men to follow him. Poor James Madison, he arrives, nobody even notices him.
They think he's a minister. He wakes up one morning and he hears church bells ringing and crowds cheering, and he knows right away, he says, Washington has arrived. George Washington was the indispensable person when it came to 1787. He's the only person everyone in America has heard of. There's no CNN, there's no nightly news.
He was famous throughout the world and he defeated the most powerful nation in the world, you know, Great Britain. The French hadn't been able to do it in hundreds of years. And then, instead of seizing power, he laid down power and went home and was a farmer. And this was incredible.
He could be trusted because people knew he was not interested in wielding or gaining any kind of absolute power. He had the best interests of the country at heart. Washington fought to establish a republic. And here he was less than four years after the war, trying to save it.
Right away, they take care of the easy stuff. The convention unanimously chooses Washington to preside. After that, everything they talked about could have brought them big, big trouble. You know, the interesting thing about the Constitution's drafting is that it wasn't authorized. Illegal is too strong a word, but what they were doing was not permitted under the Articles of Confederation itself.
These people had no authority under the previous system of government to do what they were doing. Not supposed to be a constitutional convention. This is a tweaking convention.
Wasn't supposed to come up with a new constitution, it was just supposed to amend it. The third day of the convention, Edmund Randolph gets up and he says, Virginia thinks we should throw out the Articles of Confederation and write a new constitution. So on the third day of a convention called to make recommendations to amend the Articles of Confederation, they overthrow the government.
This was it, the moment of truth. These 55 men were either going to save the nation or they had just destroyed it. There was no turning back. They decided in order to accomplish this mission, they had to meet in secret.
They really wanted to have an open and candid debate. They take a vow of secrecy. You're not supposed to say anything to anybody.
And they all obey the rule. And they pay for it. Every day, they literally lock themselves in this room.
You've seen the paintings. Long hair, wigs, the northerners are wearing wool. Philadelphia is having a bad summer.
I grew up in Philadelphia, and it is oppressively hot and humid. It pours every day, and there is an invasion of great big bottleneck flies. And so people can't even open their shutters. And they're in a cooped-up room with no air conditioning. The group buys Madison's idea, and it basically goes like this.
A central government with three separate branches. A legislature. which was most important to these men, an executive to do what the legislature wanted, and a judiciary. And here's why. The three branches of government should keep each other in check.
No one branch should become too powerful, kind of like a giant, very elaborate game of paper, scissors, rock. See, look, the president can't go to war unless Congress declares it. Congress can't create a law unless the president signs it.
A president can't appoint a judge unless Congress confirms that nominee, and then the judge would serve for life and could one day strike down a law that both the president and Congress passed. And that law violated the Constitution. Sounds difficult? A little complicated? Good.
That's just the way they wanted it. The thing you notice most about the Constitution in reading it is the keen awareness... That concentrated power is dangerous.
It is almost as if the whole thing was written to make making laws difficult. They expected legislators and congressmen to try to expand their powers. They expected the president to try to expand his powers. They expected the courts to try to expand their jurisdiction.
But by placing them in tension with each other, they thought they would block each other's overly ambitious actions. These men are anxious. Each and every one of them believes. That powerful governments are dangerous.
So they want to create something that in a sense they're afraid of. And the double irony of this is that the very people they don't trust with power is themselves. Because they are going to be the leaders of that government. They start with the executive branch and can't decide if it should be a committee or just an individual.
All that power might be too tempting for one person. He might try to take over and become a dictator or a king or worse. And they can't decide how the president should be elected.
Should the people vote for him directly or should each state choose him? Near the end of the convention, someone comes up with a compromise called the Electoral College. In the Electoral College, voters choose a slate of representatives who then... Never mind. Ask your teacher.
They move on to the discussion of Congress and this is when it gets serious. The larger states wanted representation based upon population, and the smaller states wanted equal representation by state. Okay, proportional representation. Let's say Delaware's got 1 million people and Virginia's got 10 million.
Suppose we give each state a vote in Congress for each million. Virginia's fat and happy with 10 votes. Delaware's got one. Bigger states rule. They would have a much bigger voice in the national government.
Madison wanted this because he thought a true national government should be elected by the people. And that states, well, we tried that with the Articles of Confederation, remember? Oh no!
You're not gonna judge me or any other man in this county! The people from the small states go berserk. Maryland will never give up her freedom.
Nor will Connecticut, Mr. Martin. My state will never stand by to see Pennsylvania and Virginia rule the country. Neither will New Jersey.
They were so torn apart No! No! that some of the representatives, including one of the ones from Delaware, threatened to walk out and even threatened that some of the smaller states would make alliances with foreign countries. But it's not just large states, small states. This is the moment of truth.
Are the states going to have, as states, A house, a platform in the government where their sovereignty is recognized, or is this government going to be a government of the individual people? Is it going to be the United States of America or the United States of America? Even the men who believed in a strong national government knew they had to give in a little, right now, if this had any chance of working. One of the supporters of the nationalist camp comes up. to James Madison and says, corners him, and says, if you don't compromise, the small states are going to walk out of this convention and you will have destroyed the chance for the country to survive.
This was it. The whole thing was on the line. So the next day, Connecticut's Roger Sherman came back with the idea of a bicameral legislature, which is a fancy way of saying two houses in one Congress. So now, to go along with the House of Representatives, there would be a Senate. The House would have proportional representation based on population.
That made the Nationalists happy. And the Senate was the compromise. There, each state, big and small, would have two representatives. So Delaware would get the same number of votes in the Senate as Virginia. This made the Federalists happy.
This is all in Article I. And if you look closely, you'll see another big compromise right here. Three-fifths of all other persons. Probably the biggest consideration regarding slavery in the Constitution is what's known as the three-fifths compromise.
Other persons was a code that everyone in the room understood. It meant slaves. And slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person.
To the Framers, this wasn't a direct statement about a person's value as a human being. Equality, the end of slavery, they weren't there to talk about that. This was all about the power some states would have in the new Congress. If slaves were counted, even though they were slaves, then southern states would get more representatives in the House.
Northerners didn't want slaves to count as whole persons, because then the southern states would have more power. Half or more of the population in many of those southern states were slaves. So it means the more slaves a state has, the more political power it has. So in Philadelphia, the founders decided that almost everyone in the population would be counted. But not everyone counted would have rights.
Or could even vote. The framers of the Constitution, the leaders of the Revolution, had a very limited idea about who was entitled to political rights. They did not believe in democracy.
They did not believe that every man should have the vote. They certainly didn't believe that women should have the vote. They didn't believe that African Americans should have the vote.
To have a vote in the 18th century, you had to have what they called a stake in society. You had to have property. because it was their theory that you would make irresponsible decisions if you didn't have anything to lose.
They didn't get some things right. I mean, clearly, we now realize, and many framers then realized, that slavery was evil. It should not be protected by our legal system. At the same time, it showed that they had to make compromises to get the Constitution through. If the Constitution actually prohibited slavery in 1788 and 1789, it probably never would have been ratified by the southern states, and we would not have had...
a constitution at all. So you can also see sort of the practical aspect of people willing to make compromises, sometimes against the principles they believed in. They were making it up as they went along. And they were making compromises for purely political reasons to get an agreement. They didn't believe for a moment it was an ideal constitution.
It was simply the best one they could get in the circumstances. The story of the Constitution is too often told without acknowledging its problems. Not all of the compromises made in Philadelphia worked out.
As brilliant as it was, the Constitution, written in 1787, left slavery and state sovereignty unresolved. And 70 years later, these compromises led to the greatest constitutional crisis the United States has ever seen, the Civil War. To me, it's important to realize that the Constitution is not perfect. And it was never intended to be perfect.
The framers themselves did not think it was perfect. So they made it possible to change it. That's why they wrote Article V, amendments. They knew they hadn't solved every issue. And there was one problem with their Constitution they'd have to fix almost as soon as the ink dried.
Why didn't the framers at the Philadelphia Convention add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution? To us, it would seem obvious. You know, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, we want it in there.
You have to understand, every state had a Bill of Rights. Virtually every state had very carefully spelled out Bill of Rights. The guys wanted to go home. That's just the plain fact of it.
And when someone said, should we have a Bill of Rights, everyone moaned because they thought, by time we all argue over what should be in it and how many clauses. We'll be here another month. The Bill of Rights are the first ten amendments, and they weren't part of the original Constitution. The first Congress wrote the Bill of Rights, and it was ratified two years later.
Finally, it was time to go home. They had created a constitution that would last beyond their wildest dreams. Quite certain not a one of them would have imagined that in the early part of the 21st century we would still be operating under their constitution.
It would be as if you started a club with a bunch of friends in 2001 and someone said to you, what's the probability it'll be in existence in 2225? And so we have the legends, the coins, the statues. They're all part of the myth now. But their words tell the better story.
They weren't gods, and they knew they weren't perfect. But they were pretty good. These are men who are remarkable largely because they were ordinary human beings facing a major crisis who did something that turned out really quite well. They were in a new world.
They were away from all the old forms of government. What they were saying is, we have an opportunity to create the right kind of government. What should that government be?
They created a framework that is extraordinary in that it allows us to set in motion the kind of world we want to create for ourselves. Each year we have our parades and our fireworks on July 4th because our founding principles were first announced to the world with the Declaration of Independence. But it's the Constitution that allows us to live by those principles every day. A poor man interprets the Constitution and he changes America.
It sounds like a fairy tale, but it's actually true. I'm here at the National Constitution Center, a place where you can learn about the framers, the Constitution, and its core values. This is the National Constitution Center.
I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution.
I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution.
I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution.
I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution. I'm here to talk about the Constitution.
the story of one poor man who didn't know much about American history, but he thought he'd been treated unfairly, and he knew just enough about the Constitution to do something about it. Now, you may think watching this today that your voice can't be heard or doesn't matter, but Clarence Earl Gideon changed the way we administer justice in this country, and he did it from a prison cell. A turn off Route 98 in Bay Harbor, Florida is not a trip down memory lane.
Memories here don't last as long as the smoke from the local paper mill. Take this empty lot. Today you'd never know it, but history was made here. The pool hall is gone and so are the people But the principle they left is still standing This is Clarence Earl Gideon He wasn't much at pool And he was almost as bad at life He was a very unlikely constitutional hero, but you know, the cases that come to the court don't usually come from the winners in society, they come from the losers.
Clarence Gideon was poor. He had been involved in the criminal justice system ever since he was a kid. He had been getting in trouble.
Trouble seemed to find Gideon, like on June 3rd, 1961, when he was arrested for a crime that amounted to pocket change. Literally. Small change had gone missing from this cigarette machine and from this jukebox. Maybe five to sixty... dollars total in the Bay Harbor pool room on the edge of Panama City, Florida.
That's the pool hall there on the bottom. Some wine, some beer, and a few bottles of Coca-Cola were also gone. A witness claimed he saw Gideon that night, his pockets bulging with change. For the change in the stolen drinks, Gideon found himself facing some very serious time in prison. CBS reports the poor man and the law.
The case of Clarence Earl Gideon set the stage for a great turning point in American jurisprudence. Look at this. The Gideon case became such a big deal that CBS News did a prime turn.
documentary about it, using the actual people to reenact the courtroom scene word for word. An educational film did the same thing a little bit later, but in color. The man with a deep sense of his legal rights. There's a very famous book about it written by this man, Anthony Lewis, called Gideon's Trumpet.
And they made the book into a movie, starring Henry Fonda. I'm entitled to a lawyer? The next case on the docket is the case of the state of Florida versus Clarence Earl Gideon. What says the state? Are you ready for trial?
The state is ready, Your Honor. What says the defendant? Are you ready for trial? I'm not ready, Your Honor.
Gideon was flat broke. So broke he had spent the last two months here, in the county jail, because he couldn't even afford bail. There was no way he could pay for a lawyer.
I have no counsel. Wait, wait, wait, stop. Rewind. Okay, I know this is black and white film and bad acting, but this is a turning point in our story. Sorry for interrupting, but I didn't want you to miss it.
I have no counsel. Why do you not have counsel? Did you know that your case was set for trial today? Your Honor, I request this court to appoint counsel to represent me in this trial. I'm sorry, but I will have to deny your request to appoint counsel to defend you in this case.
But Gideon was a stubborn old man who thought this was unfair. The United States Supreme Court says I'm entitled to be represented by counsel. He had this obsession that he was entitled to a lawyer.
He was wrong, of course, under the laws that stood before he began the case. He was wrong. Well, half wrong.
Here's how it works. We actually live under two sets of laws, federal and state. Most crimes and small infractions, like driving through a stop sign, fall under state laws.
Criminal law is mostly state law. 90% of criminal cases in this country today are state cases. Tax evasion, smuggling, interstate crime, they will land you in federal court. In federal cases, the court had laid down the rule that all defendants were entitled to lawyers.
Gideon was being tried by the state of Florida. So in 1961, in a state court, he was not automatically entitled to a lawyer. By asking the court to appoint a lawyer, Gideon thought he was asserting a right written into the Sixth Amendment, the right to counsel. This right is as basic as any right in the American Constitution, because the threat that is presented by arrest and imprisonment and sometimes even execution is as great as any threat that the Constitution allows the government to have.
You need a lawyer who will go into court for you and argue on your behalf, who will find out the facts. and present your case. You really feel the power of the state bearing down on you when you're in a criminal proceeding. You have a judge sitting on a bench, you have a prosecutor at a prosecution table.
The defense lawyer is really the only person fit into the process to stand there with the defendant to make sure that they are not going through this very scary, intimidating process alone. We are committed in our country to an adversary system by which we mean that each side ...is entitled to have a competent lawyer present its position. You'll see in a good adversarial process that when the prosecution does present the case, that the defense lawyer's role is to come in and challenge that case. And our founding fathers believed that through that kind of push and pull of an adversarial process, the truth would somehow emerge, and a jury would be left with enough information to decide what really happened.
But Clarence Earl Gideon had to defend himself because the state of Florida had denied him a lawyer. The entire trial lasted only a day and the jury found him guilty before it was time for dinner. He was sentenced to the maximum, five years in prison. For thousands of cases just like this, the story ends here, walking into prison and doing the time. But this time Gideon went to prison convinced he didn't belong there.
He still said he was innocent. And that without a lawyer, the state of Florida didn't give him a fair trial. So he did something most people would attribute to insanity or fairy tales.
With a pencil and a prison notepad, Clarence Earl Gideon wrote a petition to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court has a category of cases it calls informer pauperous cases. That means cases brought to the court by people who are too poor to pay the usual fees. and too poor to print up their documents. Poor people can file just with a typewritten or even handwritten document.
And Gideon's was handwritten. It was a letter. Unlined prison stationery.
You couldn't imagine a simpler, more elementary way of getting to the highest court in the land. But why would the Supreme Court decide to hear the case of a poor man with no lawyer who was already in prison? Because the Constitution allows even the poorest citizens to be heard and have an impact on the rest of us.
Lightning strikes from the ground up. It may have been sparked by Gideon, but there on the court was Justice Hugo Black, ready to fight. to catch it.
He was the most influential member of the Supreme Court during his time. Black felt that people should not be disadvantaged in getting justice because they are poor. As a judge, his Bible was the Constitution.
We have the best constitution in the world, and if we would follow it, it would be alright. He always kept the constitution in his pocket, and I, as most of his former clerks, keep the constitution so that when there's There's a question, you know, you look to the Bible, you look to the language. Alabama Senator Hugo Black was President Roosevelt's first nominee to the Supreme Court.
It was big news in 1937. And for over 30 years on the Supreme Court, from FDR through the Civil Rights Movement, on into the Nixon administration, Hugo Black stood for the equality of the ordinary citizen. Black had been the champion on the court for the principle that the various provisions of the Bill of Rights should be applied to the states. The passage of the 14th Amendment made the Bill of Rights applicable to the states.
Okay, here's what this means. The Bill of Rights, which originally applied only to Congress and the federal government, also applies to the states because the 14th Amendment says states can't deny a citizen's fundamental rights. The 14th Amendment, passed in the bitter aftermath of the Civil War, was virtually neglected by the courts until hugo black argued that it could no longer be ignored Every citizen, rich or poor, no matter what state they live in, said Black, is entitled to the same fundamental rights.
But when Black arrived at the Supreme Court, the court didn't see things his way. The majority of the justices, these men, believe states should have more independence from the federal government. Early in Black's tenure on the court, a case would test Black's interpretation of the 14th Amendment. That case was Betts v. Brady, and Black was on the losing side.
I don't know. And Justice Black dissented in that case. It's a famous dissent. What he said was, in substance, you can't have a fair trial without a lawyer.
So in the Betts case, Black writes, the Sixth Amendment says citizens have the right to a lawyer, and the Fourteenth Amendment says states can't deny that right. That a state can't deny people a lawyer because they are too poor to pay for one. He was in the minority, six to three. The court decided that the states did not have to give everyone a lawyer. Only those who have thought.
to have special circumstances. Then there had been one case after another in which the Supreme Court had been defining what was meant by special circumstances. And what happened was that more and more defendants and their lawyers tried to show the court that their client was entitled to a lawyer because they suffered from some special disability. The rule that you don't need a lawyer was being eaten up by the exceptions. And over the course of two decades, it seemed that each exception proved black right in the Betts case.
And he seethed for 20 years. He really thought Betts and Brady was decided the wrong way. He dissented and he meant it and he kept saying it for 20 years until it came time to decide Gideon against Wainwright. Now that the Gideon case was before the Supreme Court, Gideon really needed a lawyer. So the Supreme Court appointed Abe Fortas.
Clarence Earl Gideon, who had no lawyer when he was tried in Florida, had appointed to be his... lawyer in the Supreme Court, someone who is probably one of the half dozen sharpest lawyers in the United States. You know, they don't appoint the most powerful lawyer in the United States to represent somebody unless they want a deluxe performance.
And he wanted to win 9-0. Abe Fortas knew that nine justices rarely all agree. But when they do, a unanimous decision sends a message to everyone that this is a principle that's here to stay. That's something lawyers like to call, establish the principle.
Abe Crash knows a thing or two about that. I was his field general, so to speak. He really set out from the beginning to establish the principle. That every man, the rich, the poor, and the poor as well as the rich, was entitled to the benefit of counsel. And that principle very much drove us as we worked on the case.
On the other side of the argument was Bruce Jacob, Florida's young assistant attorney general. And Jacob said, team was, well, Jacob and his wife. When I was working on the Gideon brief, my wife and I would drive up here to Tallahassee to this library every weekend or almost every weekend and do research here.
It was all on his own. He didn't have a big law firm. He had nobody else from the attorney general's office.
I gave it everything I had in terms of time and energy and work because I'm a lawyer. That's what lawyers do. When a lawyer takes a case, a lawyer puts his heart into it. Of course, the irony here is that Jacob was doing all this work to argue against a person's guaranteed right to a lawyer.
He took that argument and his inexperience into the Supreme Court in January 1963. At the time of the argument, I'd never even seen the Supreme Court. He was really outgunned. I felt like I was caught in a crossfire because the justice over here would ask a question.
There are nine people asking you questions. And one justice would ask a question, and then before I'd answer that question, someone else would ask a question, and then maybe a third person would ask a question. Bruce Jacob was interrupted 92 times by questions from the Supreme Court.
It came so fast. It was a brutal experience. It really was. The irony is that...
Florida didn't think that indigent defendants needed lawyers, and they didn't seem to think that they needed many lawyers either. We argued essentially the reasoning that was used in the decision of Betts vs. Brady by the Supreme Court back in 1941 or 1942. Jacob took the traditional states'rights, or federalist position, that states should be able to decide for themselves who does or doesn't get a lawyer without federal interference. Fortas saw this argument coming and argued that because of the special circumstances clause in Betts v. Brady, federal courts were forced to intervene in states'cases.
Jacob argued that if the courts sided with Fortas, it might force the states to free thousands of other inmates who had been convicted without having a lawyer. The entire country was in danger of having a lot of hardened criminals turned loose on society. But that cannot deter us from doing justice. in the individual case.
Fortas argued, in effect, that many of those people were sent to prison just like Gideon, and that made the principle here even more important. That the 14th Amendment made it clear that states had to abide by the fundamental rights laid out by the Bill of Rights, including the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel. The time had certainly come when this basic principle of justice had to be established. On the morning of March 18th, the decision was announced from the bench of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Warren turned to Justice Black and said, like this, just nodded, and Justice Black said, I have for announcement the decision and opinion of the court, Gideon against Wainwright.
Here was Justice Black's vindication for 20 years of dissent from Betts against Brady. He said, we were wrong when we decided Betts against Brady, and now we're finally making it right. For Hugo Black, the vindication was complete.
Not only did his belief in the 14th Amendment carry the day, but largely because of Black, the court decided in Gideon's favor, nine to nothing. The decision was unanimous. It was one of Black's greatest opinions.
The day had arrived when this principle, which he had fought for so long as a justice, was now the law of the land. The court had now truly established the principle, hanging right over its front door. Equal justice under law. When the Supreme Court decided the Gideon case, they really breathed life into that phrase. It doesn't matter if you're rich, it doesn't matter if you're poor, you get the same equal chance.
Just look at what happened to Gideon. His win at the Supreme Court didn't set Gideon free, but it gave him a second trial. I gave the people who made these films an excuse to hire Gideon's real attorney, Fred Turner, to play himself. Here he's pretending to investigate the case, which he did.
And here he's pretending to argue the case, which he did much better than Gideon. He poked holes in the state's case. That is an awful lot of change to jam into those pockets.
And this time, with a competent attorney. Not guilty. So, sir, you all gentlemen?
Yes, sir. Clarence Earl Gideon was a free man. The man who had won a landmark Supreme Court case went back to a modest and honest living, working odd jobs and pumping gas, free, because of the principle he'd helped to establish.
When I go to the United States Supreme Court and I see where it reads equal justice under law, I'm very inspired by that. I'm very comforted by that. But I'm also provoked by that, because I know that we don't have equal justice under law.
I know that even now, even after Gideon, lots of poor people are treated unfairly. I see it as an aspiration, but I don't see it as something we've realized yet. It takes more than one person to turn a principle into a common practice. But the value of that right is that it's there, written into the Constitution and established as a goal for society to reach for and to live up to.
People will fall short. Rights can be ignored or even trampled, but that's why it's written down. So that even a stubborn old man in prison can protect himself with nothing more than a pencil and some knowledge.
If you know your rights, you can protect your rights. If you don't know your rights, you can't. They'll always be there if we protect them, if we fight for them, if we make sure they're not taken away.
And that's the essence of the Gideon story. He understood he had a right, and it was being taken away from him. And he fought to get it back. Paper, scissors, rock. You know the game.
Someone wins, someone loses, and you keep on playing. You can think of the federal government's separation of powers as an elaborate game of paper, scissors, rock. You have Congress, the president, and the courts.
Only this is obviously not a game. The stakes are very high. Virtually every president has been frustrated by a Congress that overrides a veto or by a Supreme Court ruling that wasn't in his favor. President Harry S. Truman is a good example.
President Truman is credited with a long list of extraordinary accomplishments. He oversaw the end of World War II, the rebuilding of Europe, and the desegregation of our armed forces. But even Truman came up against the limits of presidential power in a confrontation with the Supreme Court. He later said, whenever you put a man on the Supreme Court, he ceases to be your friend.
So let's take a second to actually look at the document. Four sheets, less than 5,000 words, about the same length as a story in a magazine. Article 1, uh-huh, Congress makes the law. Article 2, hmm, the president sees that the law is carried out. And Article 3, the judiciary determines what's legal.
The separation of power seems so simple on paper. The framers wrote it for real life. And they knew it could get ugly. Who's got the power? The Framers knew this at some point.
Everyone wants it. And they were most afraid of men who would become president and then try to behave like a king. This cartoon is not actually a king. It's President Andrew Jackson after he had a fight. with Congress.
If any one branch tries to get too much power, the framers fixed it so that other branches could bring it into balance. This is a story about a president, Harry Truman, and the checks and balances on power. But It starts with the president that came before him. This is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR.
No modern president has ever been as powerful. FDR was elected four times. He brought the country through the Great Depression and was commander in chief during World War II.
Just as he was about to win the war at the very height of his powers, he died. leaving all that power in the hands of Harry Truman. Truman had been a minor senator from Missouri when party leaders persuaded Roosevelt to take him on as vice president. His job was pretty much to stay out of Roosevelt's way. I don't think anybody expected very much from him.
It was a question mark. We really didn't know that much about President Truman. You get, as president, this funny little man who turns out to be... an extraordinarily strong person who takes over.
Truman was the very first president to be sworn in during the war. Vice President Harry S. Truman takes the oath of office as president. He was actually sworn in at 7.09 p.m. Eastern war time. That's what they called it.
He really does come to the presidency at the height of its powers. And he knew it. But he wasn't afraid of the responsibility of the president. that comes with power.
He put a sign on his desk that read, The buck stops here. He would call the shots. Truman oversaw the German surrender to end the fighting in Europe.
Then, for better or worse, he made a decision that only a president could make. President Truman dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. Only four months in office and President Truman had put an end to World War II.
He was as powerful as any president could be. Certainly in wartime, the president's powers expand. I think both the Supreme Court and ordinary Americans would say that, yes, the president will give him a greater leeway in a time of war because things need to get done.
But when the war is over, a peacetime president has to keep fighting if he wants to hold on to some of that power. And his first big fight was with Congress. Washington is under a virtual state of siege during the closing hours of the Taft-Hartley-Labourville fight.
In 1947, over President Truman Strong and President Bush, objections, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Law as a way to resolve labor disputes. Truman called it a slave labor bill because it restricted a union's right to strike. Labor will never become reconciled to this law. It also put some restrictions on the president.
Even though Congress had considered giving him the power to seize an industry in an emergency, it decided not to give the president that power. Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress sensed that Truman was no Roosevelt, So it fought back and made Taft-Hartley law without him. It let Hartley gloat, just a little bit.
We in the Congress are sent here to do the greatest good for the greatest number. And that is what we have done in the enactment of the Taft-Hartley bill. And Congress kept chipping away at Truman's power.
When Korea erupted into war with the help of the communist Chinese, Truman committed American troops. It was back to war for Truman. Back to being a wartime president.
Except for one thing. There was never a declaration of war. Truman initiated that military conflict without seeking any congressional authorization, and certainly without seeking a declaration of war.
Article 2 calls him the Commander-in-Chief, but it doesn't give the President the power to officially go to war. He's got to go through Congress to do that. That's because Article 1 of the Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress.
Truman did get money from Congress for the Korean... Conflict. Yes, we call it a conflict, not a war, because Congress never made the war official.
That was a real blow to Truman. And when the fighting went bad, he lost more than Congress. He lost a lot of popular support, too.
He was taking a beating in the polls. And whenever a president loses these things, he loses power. Okay, I want to stop for a second to point something out. These old films you've been watching, they're called newsreels. Back in the 1940s and 50s, television was brand new.
People didn't really watch the news on TV. They went to the movies. And before the main feature, they got their news from these.
They were loud, corny. Right on, Tim Peru. And by March 1952, Harry Truman's news was that he wouldn't seek re-election. I shall not be a candidate for re-election.
He was a lame duck, but he was still the president. So when the nation faced an almost certain steel strike and Truman's power was waning, Truman was still behaving like the wartime president he had been when he was sworn in. Now the lame duck whose power had been chipped away by Congress.
Truman said the president has the power to keep the country from going to hell. In fact, at that moment, steel was being produced largely because of President Truman. For months he had asked the unions to hold the deal. hold off on a strike hoping to find a settlement. To invoke Taft-Hartley now and make them wait another 80 days, Truman thought, wouldn't be fair.
But the nation needed Steele and a settlement right now. The president would defy Congress by taking control of the situation and refusing to invoke Taft-Hartley. And he would make his case in a way no president had ever done before.
But every president has done since. Good evening. Fellow Americans.
Good evening. I'm John Starris. My fellow Americans, good evening.
Truman used one of the greatest levers of power a president has to get his message to the people. My fellow Americans, tonight our country faces a grave danger. President Truman went on national television to announce that he would be taking over the nation's steel mills. The strike was supposed to start in a little over an hour, and he wasn't going to let that happen.
If steel production stops, we will have to stop making the shells and bombs that are going directly to our soldiers at the front in Korea. He gave a very impassioned speech. With American troops facing the enemy on the field of battle, I will not be living up to my oath of office if I fail to do whatever is required to provide them with the weapons and the ammunition they need for their survival. President Truman says, That steel production is necessary to produce the munitions and weapons we need to fight the Korean War.
If you interrupt steel production in the middle of a war, you will, you know, he essentially says, you will be losing lives on the front. I'm directing the Secretary of Commerce to take possession of the steel mills and to keep them operating. He wanted a settlement, and that's what he was about.
And he talked about how we needed steel and we couldn't afford a strike. And all of that would have been just fine, but then he got all revved up about the steel industry. The steel industry is making very high profits. They are raising all this hullabaloo in an attempt to force the government to give them a big boost in prices.
And how they were trying to rob the government by raising prices and rob the American people. They wanted money that they were not entitled to. The steel industry wants something special, something nobody else can get.
By the next morning, Charles Sawyer, the Secretary of Commerce, was the new boss of steel. The U.S. flag now... ...flew in front of every seized mill.
The government was officially in charge. And that made Clarence Randall really, really angry. Randall was the head of Inland Steel, and the spokesman for all of the...
steel companies. Since the steel industry negotiated one contract for all the companies, they spoke as one. And Randall, a World War I vet and a graduate of Harvard Law School, was particularly steamed about Truman's speech from the night before. the president of the United States to whom I make answer. It is Harry S. Truman, the man who last night so far transgressed his oath of office, so far abused the power which is temporarily his, that he must now stand and take it.
Now you're talking about over 600,000 jobs at stake plus national security. This was a big, big deal. And Randall and the steel companies were powerful enough to get equal.
TV time with the president. He didn't waste it. I shall not let my deep respect for the office which he holds stop me from denouncing his shocking distortions of fact, nor shall I permit the honor of his title.
to blind the American people from the enormity of what he has done. He has seized the steel plants of the nation. But Randall was quick to make it clear that this was not going to be a fight over personal issues. This was a fight over personal issues. was a fight about the Constitution.
This he has done without the slightest shadow of legal right. No law passed by the Congress gave him this power. He knows this and speaks of general authority conferred upon him by the Constitution. But I say, my friends, that the Constitution was adopted by our forefathers. to prevent tyranny, not to create it.
When the U.S. president seizes private industry and industry talks back, that's kind of the quintessential constitutional question. What can the president do and what can he or she not do? But before a higher court could decide the big constitutional issues, Steele went to a lower court just to stop Secretary Sawyer from taking over the mills.
They wanted a preliminary injunction. Preliminary injunction is essentially saying, keep things as they are for the time being until we can figure out what the law actually requires. In Washington, steel company attorneys promptly seek an injunction in federal district court to prevent the executive order from being carried out.
But there in the lower court, the president ran into Judge David Pine, who was not going to give the president a pass just because he was the president. Pine was born and raised in Washington, had clerked for two attorneys general. Served in World War I and had been the District Attorney for Washington, D.C. He was no lightweight. He knew a thing or two about the separation of powers. And at the hearing, he was going to make sure the President's lawyer, Holmes Baldridge, was clear that there were some limits to presidential power.
Pine would ask him simple things about executive power, like if the government went into your home and said, Out of here. this home is mine. Do you have nowhere to go? You have no rights?
And he said, right, if the president does this, the president has the power to do this if he needs it, which was not the answer that the judge was looking for. It was very simple-minded. And basically in a whole series of exchanges, Holmes Baldrige made the unfortunate statement. That executive power was unlimited.
President Truman had lost his fights with Congress. He had lost popular support. And now, of all things, he had lost to a lower court judge. Pine's decision that the president couldn't seize the mills was a colossal defeat. Truman had one more chance, the Supreme Court.
But it was a good chance for Truman. He had appointed a number of the justices himself, including his former attorney general, Tom Clark. and his good friend and poper pal, the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson.
The case was called Youngstown Steel vs. Sawyer because Youngstown was the first of seven companies suing the government. And technically, remember, Commerce Secretary Sawyer, not Truman, was in charge of the mills now. Youngstown was a special case, so the Supreme Court would hear it and decide it quickly.
Both sides based their arguments on their read of the Constitution. Steele continued to argue that if neither the Constitution nor Congress gave the President the power to seize the mills, then the President simply didn't have that power. The administration argued that seizing the mills was an emergency use of presidential power that the commander-in-chief could take to avoid a national catastrophe.
And when this court full of Roosevelt and Truman appointees handed down its decision less than two months after the president had seized the mills, President Truman had lost. The decision was a devastating blow to Truman. The court ruled 6-3 that the president did not have the authority to seize the mills, even Justice Clark. Truman's former Attorney General came down on the other side. Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion, which says that because the Constitution does not give the President power to seize the mills, and because Congress didn't give him that power either, the seizure was illegal.
Hugo Black, the fundamentalist, simply said, there is no power, the President can't do it. End of the story. The president can't legislate. That's not right.
The Constitution doesn't allow it. The president has certain powers. Congress has certain powers. It's quite a sweeping decision.
Five justices wrote concurring opinions agreeing with Black's conclusion. but taking slightly different paths to get there. We look back now at Justice Jackson's opinion as the most important one.
He's essentially saying that there are three categories, or three ways of considering presidential action. And it goes like this. First, if the president's actions are backed by law, or the implied authorization of Congress, the president is at the height of his powers.
He's pretty much in the clear to act. Second, If the president acts but there is no law, or Congress, as they say, is silent, not with him or against him, then the president is in what Jackson called a zone of twilight, where he and Congress have found some middle ground. It's not ideal, more like a definite maybe as to whether the president can act.
Third, if he acts against the will of Congress, that is, Congress has either expressly written a law saying he can't do something, or implied he can't, as in the case of Taft-Hartley where Congress chose not to give him the power to act, then presidential power is at its weakest. And if they have to, the courts can step in to stop him. Jackson applied that measure to Steele's seizure. Harry Truman had seen the heights of presidential power, and now in his last months in the White House, was filling its limits.
The Roosevelt period of the mighty president was over. It had to stop. If there weren't something that stopped it, the movement in terms of centralizing everything in the president would be much too dangerous.
And so you find in the history of the United States, again and again, After a tremendous growth of presidential powers, Congress, the courts, the courts, the courts, Congress, doing things to say enough already. Youngstown made clear that the President of the United States does not have the authority of a king. Even when the President's powers are at their height, the President is limited by the guarantees of the Constitution.
In some ways, the Youngstown case is remarkable that it's even a case. You can think of very few countries around the world, especially at that time, where you would have a case about whether the president of the country could seize a private industry at a time of conflict. The mere fact that this is a case that could go through the court system, that a district court judge could halt the actions of a U.S. president, and that there was no question that the president would respect the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court when it came, is really a remarkable thing, and it speaks to the power of the Constitution and the separation of powers. That was just one case, but the battles caused by the separation of powers have continued to this day.
It can be a little messy, but it's a mess that these men who wrote and signed the Constitution would be very happy to see, because it means the country is working just the way they planned.