With these traditional words, U.S. lawyers respectfully catch the ears of the learned judges hearing their appeals. Briggs v. Elliott, Case No. 2 of the five segregation cases heard last week by the Supreme Court, pitted together two of the legal profession's great advocates:
JOHN WILLIAM DAVIS, 80, a white-maned, majestic figure in immaculate morning attire who looks type-cast for the part, has argued more cases (140) before the Supreme Court of the U.S. than any other lawyer living or dead. His first, Pickens v. Roy, came on in 1902—when the present Chief Justice of the U.S. was eleven. Big Steel paid John W. Davis more than $100,000 last year to win the historic Steel Seizure case (Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer). Davis' fee for taking segregation's side last week was more modest: a silver tea service, gift of the South Carolina legislature.
As senior partner of ihe 104-year-old Wall Street firm of Davis Polk Wardwell Sunderland & Kiendl (95 lawyers). John W. Davis represents A.T.&T., Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, International Paper Co., et al. He did not need another client, and he already owned a tea service. Davis took the segregation case partly because an old friend, South Carolina's Governor James F. Byrnes, asked him to, partly as a matter of constitutional (states' rights) and social conviction ("Race is a fact, like sex"). Some of his other friends were sorry to hear him, at twilight, singing segregation's old unsweet song. But the popularity of a cause rarely cuts any ice with John W. Davis. One of his permanent heroes is Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who (at 71) defied popular opinion by defending Louis XVI before a French revolutionary tribunal. Advocate Malesherbes lost his case, his royal client's neck, and his own, but not his place in legal history; Advocate Davis knows his own standing is equally secure.
No Trimmings. Once before, on another matter of principle, John W. Davis took another memorably unpopular position. In 1924, after a steppingstone career as a law professor at Virginia's Washington & Lee, West Virginia state legislator, member of Congress, Solicitor General of the U.S. and Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Davis was being talked about as presidential material. A supporter urged him to drop J. P. Morgan as a client so that he would be more palatable to the Bryan Democrats, to whom Wall Street was a dirty word. Davis refused: "Any lawyer who [trims] his professional course to fit the gusts of popular opinion . . . degrades the great profession . . ."
Davis was nominated anyway—as a compromise candidate, on the 16th day and 103rd ballot, by a sweltering, weary, deadlocked Democratic convention. (Vicepresidential candidate: Charles W. Bryan, brother of William Jennings Bryan.) The predictable happened: W. J. Bryan deserted, La Follette started a third party, the Hearst press excoriated Davis as THE MORGAN LAWYER (Columnist "Bugs" Baer cracked that Davis' national anthem would be "The Star-Spangled Banker"), and Cal Coolidge won going away. The Democratic candidate polled 8,386,000 votes—only 29%.