Zechariah Jr. Chafee

Background

Zechariah Chafee was born on December 7, 1885 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. He was the son of Zechariah Chafee and Mary Dexter Sharpe.

Education

After a comfortable childhood and attendance at Brown University (B. A. , 1907), Chafee dutifully entered the family's iron business, first working in the shop, then becoming secretary and assistant to his father. Although he continued to be associated with the foundry's board of directors all his life, after three years he left the firm and entered the Harvard Law School. Chafee received the LL. B. in 1913, and entered a Providence law firm, but he left in 1916 to teach at the Harvard Law School.

Career

There he was greatly influenced by the theories on sociological jurisprudence advocated by Roscoe Pound and others. He rose from assistant professor to professor of law in 1919, to Langdell professor of law in 1938, and to a university professorship in 1950. Until he began teaching, Chafee had no involvement in, or very much concern for, civil liberties, but in taking over the third-year equity course, he suddenly found himself interested by the ambiguities attendant to the classic doctrines of libel. When World War I broke out and judges across the land began issuing new and frequently arbitrary guidelines, Chafee realized that freedom of speech in the United States was undergoing a severe trial. At Harold Laski's invitation, Chafee wrote an article for the New Republic analyzing the various district court decisions under the Sedition Act and their relationship to the First Amendment. "Freedom of Speech" appeared the week of the armistice, and it, along with the expanded version he wrote for the Harvard Law Review (June 1919) and his book Freedom of Speech (1920), established Chafee as one of the nation's leading civil libertarians. He argued that even in wartime the traditional doctrines of libel and sedition as propounded by Blackstone would have to be maintained in order to preserve free speech. While conceding that in emergency situations there might have to be some restraints, he maintained that liberty must be safeguarded in all cases. In the struggle between public safety and the search for truth, "the great interest in free speech should be sacrificed only when the interest in public safety is really imperiled, and not, as most men believe, when it is barely conceivable that it may be slightly affected. " Attempting to safeguard civil liberties in wartime was, at best, a difficult task, but it was compounded by the consideration that many of those whose rights were violated were political radicals. Chafee, the most conservative of men, labored diligently to make his argument acceptable and understandable to those who could not distinguish between civil libertarianism and radicalism. Throughout his book he referred to his own "traditional political and economic views, " and his overall philosophy strongly reflected his own patrician background. He once declared that he could not understand why he "should be out mountain climbing and enjoying life while some other chap who started life with less money and gets a little angrier and a little more extreme should be shut up in prison. " The government's prosecution of Jacob Abrams, and the subsequent Supreme Court confirmation (with Holmes and Brandeis dissenting) of Abrams' twenty-year jail sentence for distributing leaflets opposing American intervention in Russia, was just the type of behavior Chafee abhorred. His criticism of the Abrams case led Austen G. Fox and twenty other conservative Law School alumni to petition the Harvard Overseers to inquire into Chafee's alleged radicalism. In May 1921, at a trial before a special committee in the Boston Harvard Club, Chafee defended himself against charges of radicalism and impropriety. "Gentlemen, I had no sympathy with the political and economic doctrines of these prisoners, " he said. "My sympathies and all my associations are with the men who save, who manage and produce. But I want my side to fight fair. And I regard this Abrams trial as a distinctly unfair piece of fighting. " According to Felix Frankfurter, Chafee's speech was the finest defense of liberty he had ever heard. When Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell threw himself into the fight on Chafee's behalf, the committee dismissed all the charges against the Law School professor. Although Chafee overnight became the hero of civil libertarians, he always downplayed his own role. "It did not take a great deal of courage, " he said thirty years later, "because I could always have gone back to the practice of law if I had been forced to give up teaching. " Yet throughout his life, Chafee found himself constantly involved in issues affecting the rights of his fellow citizens. In 1929 he headed a subcommittee of the Wickersham Commission that looked into police use of third degree and improper trial procedures. Chafee, however, was never an absolutist; he believed that all rights had limits. In the 1950's he argued that while individuals, under the Fifth Amendment, need not testify against themselves, they did not enjoy the right to withhold information about others. Cooperation with the government was an underlying principle of the Constitution, and it did not give citizens the privilege of protecting their friends. Chafee taught at the Harvard Law School for thirty-six years, during which time he published numerous books not only on questions of freedom but also on other legal problems. In fact, when anyone asked him what he regarded as his principal professional accomplishment, he unhesitatingly identified the Federal Interpleader Act of 1936, a complex piece of legislation that enabled multiple claims against the same person originating in different states to be resolved into one proceeding. In 1950, as one of Harvard's six university professors with the right to teach on any subject he desired, he chose Fundamental Human Rights, hoping to make students aware "of how dearly these rights were bought and of what they meant to the men who put them forever into our fundamental law. " He retired in June 1956. His death, in Cambridge, Massachussets, according to Mark Howe and Archibald MacLeish, "was rightly reckoned by the best of his contemporaries as a loss not only to the University but to the country. "

Achievements

• He chaired the American Bar Association Commission on the Bill of Rights, which filed amicus briefs in the Flag Salute cases. During World War II, he served on the Commission on Freedom of the Press, and afterward performed similar duties for the United Nations.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Freedom of Speech
  • The Blessings of Liberty.
  • State House Versus Pent House: Legal Problems of the Rhode Island Race Track Row

Connections

On July 20, 1912, he married Bess Frank Searle of Troy; they had four children.

Father:

Zechariah Chafee

Mother:

Mary Dexter Sharpe

Spouse:

Bess Frank Searle