Mark De Wolfe Howe

Background

Howe was born in Boston, Massachussets, in 1906, the son of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, the biographer and essayist, and Fanny Huntington Quincy.

Education

He attended Phillips Andover Academy and received his B. A. from Harvard in 1928 and his LL. B. from the Harvard Law School in 1933.

Career

Upon graduation from law school, Howe served for one year as secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , who by then had retired from the United States Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Howe considered the year well spent, not only for the older man's friendship but for what he learned about the relation of law to society. Years later Howe wrote that Holmes's clerks "learned that professional capacity achieves the highest fruitfulness only when it is combined with energy of character and breadth of learning. " After clerking with Holmes, Howe joined the Boston law firm of Hill, Barlow, Goodale, and Wiswall; but his own inclinations, as well as repeated urgings from Felix Frankfurter and Louis D. Brandeis, led him back to the academy.

In 1937 he joined the University of Buffalo Law School as a professor of law and in 1941 became dean. He also edited the correspondence between Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock (2 vols. , 1941). In 1943 he entered the army as a major in the Civilian Affairs Branch and saw service in North Africa, Sicily, and southern France. He received the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Service Medal and was discharged in 1945 with the rank of colonel.

After the war Howe went to Harvard as a professor of law. Unlike many of his law-school colleagues, Howe taught undergraduates at Harvard College, where he soon became an extremely popular teacher. At Frankfurter's prodding, he continued his study of Holmes's life and work. Over the next several years he produced Touched with Fire (Holmes's Civil War letters and diary; 1946), The Holmes-Laski Letters (2 vols. , 1953), and a definitive annotated edition of The Common Law (1963). Howe also began work on a multivolume biography of Holmes. Only the first two parts, The Shaping Years (1957) and The Proving Years (1963), were completed before his death. It is this latter volume that has earned the greatest appreciation from legal scholars, because in it Howe managed, with skill and grace, to explore Holmes's intellectual development leading to the seminal Lowell Institute lectures on the common law.

Howe also edited a casebook, Readings in American Legal History (1949), and wrote The Garden and the Wilderness (1965), in which he argued that the evangelicalism of Roger Williams was as much responsible for the separation of church and state as Thomas Jefferson's political secularism. Williams' concern for the "purity of the church's garden" required that religious and secular activities be totally separate. Howe was an early opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy and in 1953 joined with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. , and Archibald MacLeish in issuing a letter calling upon liberals to work for McCarthy's defeat.

Following the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision in 1954, Howe became a passionate proponent of civil rights, declaring that racial inequality is "the greatest brutality of our time. " He signed on as a member of the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and helped teach scores of southern trial lawyers how to conduct civil rights litigation. Howe did more than just teach; he also set a personal example. He founded the Lawyers' Constitutional Defense Committee and participated in the March on Washington in 1963. The next year, he challenged Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's assertion that the federal government lacked jurisdiction to take police action in Mississippi during the racial disturbances. In 1966 he spent weeks in local courts in Mississippi defending civil rights workers. Shortly before his death, he was appointed chairman of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Advisory Committee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

He died at his Cambridge, Massachussets, home.

Achievements

• He is remembered as a civil rights leader and historian.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Holmes- Pollack Letters: The Correspondence Of Mr Justice Holmes And Sir Frederick Pollock 1874-1932, Two Volumes In One.
  • Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Proving Years 1870-1882
  • The garden and the Wilderness, Religion and Government in American Constitutiona

Connections

On February 28, 1935, he married Mary Manning; they had three children.

Father:

Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe

1864–1960

Mother:

Frances Huntington Quincy Howe

1870–1933

Spouse:

Mary Manning