@ Tim Bouma
2025-05-16 10:56:07
The 20th Century’s Timeless ValuesBy Stephen Breyer Justice Breyer served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1994-2022.
The Wall Street Journal
May 16, 2025
Twentieth-century America emphasized many of the values I hold dear—especially the rule of law. I grew up in San Francisco just after World War II. What I learned then may prove helpful now.
I learned the value of cooperation. My fifth-grade teacher would divide the class into groups, assign an essay topic, and give each group one grade. That system provided an incentive for us to listen and work together. I thought of that when, during Covid, I noticed that groups of residents in cities across the country were going through neighborhoods to see how old people were getting on. The effort seemed natural: Americans voluntarily working together.
I learned to put a high value on education. My father worked as an attorney for the San Francisco School Board, and I wear his watch with its “school board” inscription. I think of Justice Felix Frankfurter’s comments about the importance of education in universities. The “special task” of teachers in our democracy, he wrote, is to encourage “open-mindedness” and “critical inquiry” to create informed public opinion. Governments may sometimes intervene, but that intervention must leave teachers free to “extend the bounds of understanding,” as the Constitution guarantees “the freedoms of thought, of speech, of inquiry, of worship . . . against infraction by national or State government.”
I learned too—because the country learned—about the importance of basic civil rights. I was in high school when the Supreme Court made clear in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that racial segregation was illegal. To make that promise close to real took years and great effort. During that time the Constitution’s guarantees of a host of individual freedoms spread across the country. We saw increased efforts to assure that trials were fair. Those accused of a crime had a right to a lawyer and a bail hearing. To justify pretrial detention, there must be a judicial hearing to establish probable cause. Due process applied not only to American citizens, but also to foreign persons in the U.S.
Soon after World War II, many in San Francisco noticed delegates from foreign countries working near the City Hall. They were helping to create a new organization designed to help maintain a freer world. Political leaders from many different nations sought to advance the architecture of that new world— democratic forms of government, basic human rights, increased equality, greater trade among nations, working together to help resolve international problems with the help of international organizations such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Their advance, we thought, was inevitable. The banner under which they marched was “together.”
Helping to strengthen these values was the “rule of law.” The chief justice of Ghana, seeking help to maintain an independent judiciary, once asked me: “Why do Americans do what the courts say? What is the secret?” I told her there is no secret. There is only history, custom and shared understandings.
President Andrew Jackson helped to illustrate what the rule of law isn’t. In 1832 the Supreme Court held that the Cherokee Indian tribe owned Northern Georgia (where gold had been discovered). Jackson said that Georgia should ignore the Court’s order—in Horace Greely’s paraphrase, “John Marshall made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Chief Justice Marshall wrote to his colleague Justice Joseph Story: “I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our Constitution cannot last.” In fact, after South Carolina threatened to withhold money Jackson moderated his stance. He nonetheless had the Army send the Cherokees to Oklahoma (where their descendants still live) along the “Trail of Tears,” where many died.
Luckily for the U.S., we can’t find another Jackson-like example of defiance. The court’s efforts to end segregation took time. Some Southern states tried to close their schools. Like many, I can remember the governor of Arkansas in effect saying to nine brave black students trying to enter Central High School in Little Rock: You may have a court order, but I have the state militia. The photo of a black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, looking downcast, went around the world, along with the photo of a white girl behind her, Hazel Bryant, looking outraged at the thought of integration. President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, where they led the nine into the school. Still, the troops couldn’t stay forever. When they left, the Little Rock School Board finally closed the school. So who won? Nine judges? The state police? Gov. Orval Faubus?
The rule of law won. Why? Because it was too late for the Southern opposition. The entire nation had awakened to what was happening and to the horrors that had occurred in the South. It was the era of Emmett Till’s open coffin, Martin Luther King Jr., Selma, Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders. The nation’s opinion swayed in favor of integration. The country was moving, slowly, toward accepting the rule of law. More citizens took to heart their obligation to follow the law even if they disagreed with the outcome. That is the point I wanted to make to the chief justice of Ghana. Those she must convince of the need for the rule of law aren’t simply judges or lawyers, but ordinary citizens. We might ask the skeptics to find a television set and use it to see what happens in countries that settle their differences outside the law.
History suggests that, in the U.S., the rule of law surrounds us like the air, essential but invisible. Why has it gained such automatic acceptance? Perhaps because, as Jackson found, the nation can’t work otherwise; perhaps, because its acceptance accompanied a growing belief in equality and fairness.
Perhaps, too, the horrors of the first half of the 20th century helped ordinary citizens understand its need. In Albert Camus’s “The Plague” (1947), a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France, the author asks: “Why did I write this book?” One reason is that the plague germ never dies. It remains in attics, cellars, file cabinets, only to emerge one day, for the education or to the misfortune of mankind, sending its rats into a once-happy city. The rule of law is a weapon—not the only weapon, but an important one—that our societies use to help prevent the re-emergence of that plague germ.
Will these values last, as our Founders surely hoped? This democracy, our Constitution, our values, they said, are an experiment. It is easy for me to accept them. I grew up with them in the 20th century. The children of the 21st century must learn their histories, discuss them with others (including those who disagree), use them to help lead the world by example. I hope today’s young Americans will choose to make these values theirs.
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