«His practicing colleagues?»
«He was disbarred in Missouri. He’d won one appeal in the State Supreme Court; he wasn’t welcome after that. He went underground, landed in New York, and became part of the movement. He got the Red fever; for five years he really believed it was the answer.»
«What’s that got to do with Genessee Industries? With the Bellstar decision?»
Vicarson pulled the chair out from under the writing desk and straddled it, his arms resting on the back. «The Genessee attorneys got to him. Very subtly. Veiled but explicit threats of exposure.»
«And he sold out. He sold the bench.»
«It’s not that simple, Mr. Trevayne. That’s why I wanted to see you alone, without the others… I don’t want to write up a report on Studebaker.»
Andrew’s voice was clipped, cold. «I think you’d better explain, Sam. That decision isn’t yours to make.»
And Sam Vicarson tried to explain.
Joshua Studebaker was in his seventies. A large, magnificently gifted Negro, he was the son of an itinerant crop hand named Joshua, as his father before him was Joshua. In 1907, during one of Theodore Roosevelt’s last-gasp reform programs, young Joshua was selected to receive some minimum schooling.
Studebaker’s government-sponsored education lasted an extraordinary seven years, six more than the counter-reformers anticipated. During those years the young boy crammed an equally extraordinary amount of knowledge into his previously illiterate head. But at sixteen he was told there was no more; he was to be grateful for what he’d been given. It was certainly no birthright, not in the year 1914 in the state of Missouri, U.S.A.
However, the tools had been provided, and Joshua Studebaker took care of the rest. He sought, begged, stole, and fought for the remainder of an education. The years were migrant years, but instead of following the crops, he went to where the classrooms were open for him. He lived in squalor, when it was available; more often in railroad yards and dump shacks with corrugated metal roofs and fires kindled by refuse. At twenty-two Joshua Studebaker found a small experimental college that prepared him for the law. At twenty-five he was a lawyer. At twenty-seven he’d astounded the bar in Missouri by successfully appealing a case before the State Supreme Court.
He was not welcome in Missouri.
He was soon thereafter without a practice in Missouri, disbarred over technical preparations. He’d been put in his proper place.
There followed years of running, eking out whatever living he could—teaching when possible in back-country schools, more often doing manual labor. His prized lawyer’s certificate was next to worthless. Negro attorneys were not sought after in the twenties; a disbarred Negro attorney not at all.
Studebaker drifted north to Chicago, where he made contact with the disciples of Eugene Debs, living out his last years writing and lecturing among the socialist intelligentsia. Joshua’s talents were perceived by the extremists in Debs’s circles, and he was sent to New York—to the soft, hot core of the Communist party.
For the next five years of his adult life he was a vital, unknown legal manipulator, hidden by anonymity, doing the work of headlining radicals. He was getting even with the Eden that had cast him so unfairly from its garden.
Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected President, and the Marxists went into panic. For Roosevelt went about saving the capitalistic system by boldly implementing social reforms the Leninists held as their own.
Joshua Studebaker was approached by the Marxists to enter into another phase of operation. He was ordered to form an elitist subcell, the end result of which was the training of insurgent teams used for the physical disruption of government reform programs. Offices, job camps, food-distribution centers, were to be sabotaged; files stolen, welfare caseloads destroyed; any and all tactics employed that might cripple or make ineffective by delay the cures for the economic ills of the lingering Depression.
«It was appalling that they should have chosen me,» Joshua Studebaker had said to Sam Vicarson. «They misunderstood my zeal… As a thinker, a strategist, perhaps, I accepted the principle of violence. As an activist I could not accept participation. I specifically could not accept it when the first results were directed at those who were helpless.»
Joshua Studebaker, after reading in a newspaper the aftermath of a life-taking fire at a CCC camp in New York State, went to the Justice Department.
It was the time of welcoming back errants; it was also a time of rewarding those who could help the Roosevelt administration wash off the taint of the Red brush. Joshua fit into both categories. He was quietly hired by the government, and all his legal privileges were restored. For the first time in his life Joshua Studebaker could stop running, stop scratching, stop lashing out at the horrors—real and unreal—that had pursued him. Eden became a productive, serpentless garden.
And finally, as if the circle of experimentation were complete, Joshua Studebaker was awarded the first black judgeship west of the Rocky Mountains. It was a safe experiment—a small appointment with a constituency generously peopled by transient lumbermen and Tacomack Indians, but a judgeship, nevertheless.
Ironically, it was later, during the McCarthy madness, that Studebaker received his «promotion,» as it were, to Seattle. It was someone’s sense of outrage that a once dangerous though anonymous radical was put forth. It balanced someone’s scale.
«He’s spent thirty years fighting vested advocacy, Mr. Trevayne. I guarantee you that; look at the law books, at the supportive adjudications used by thousands of Legal Aid attorneys in the ghettos, in the barrios. I know, sir. I’ve been there. From land condemnation to restraints, from undue process to abridged rights. Studebaker’s been a one-man barricade against the self-interest groups. If we expose what he was, all that could be in jeopardy.»
«Why?» Andrew was annoyed. «For something that happened forty years ago, Sam? You’re unreasonable.»
«No, I’m not, sir! He never recanted, there was no public confessional, no groveling for forgiveness… His court decisions have been interpreted as ideologically left of center. If his past is brought up, they’ll be labeled something else.»
Labels. A nation of labels, thought Trevayne.
«Don’t you see?» continued Vicarson. «He doesn’t care about himself. He cares deeply about his work. And whatever the reasons—even justifications—he was a subversive. In the real meaning of the word. The prospects of ulterior motive could be attributed to every major decision he’s ever made. It’s called ‘dishonorable source.’ It usually overrides everything else.»
«And that’s why you don’t want to write the report?»
«Yes, sir. You’d have to meet him to understand. He’s an old man; I think a great man. He’s not afraid for himself; I don’t think the years he has left are important to him. What he’s accomplished is.»
«Aren’t you forgetting something, Sam?» asked Trevayne slowly.
«What?»
«The Bellstar decision. Didn’t you say it was full of holes? Are we to let the Genessee lawyers get away with the most corrupt sort of practice?»
Vicarson smiled sadly. «I have an idea they wasted their time. Studebaker might have reached the same decision without them. Of course, we’ll never know, but he’s pretty damned convincing.»