Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

3-10-2008

SSRN Discipline

HIST Subject Matter eJournals; Legal Scholarship Network; *Humanities - Forthcoming Areas; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; Law & Society eJournals; African-American Studies; AFAM Subject Matter eJournals; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Law School Research Papers - Public Law & Legal Theory; Humanities Network; History; Political Science Network

Abstract

Henry D Clayton 18571929 lived a remarkably full public life The namesake son of an Alabama Confederate general he was a loyal Democrat and white supremacist a lawyer a Congressman 18971914 and a federal judge 19141929 He took part in his states 1901 disfranchisement of African Americans later in Congress he was identified with the Progressive wing of his party giving his name to the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 As judge of Alabamas Middle District he was a zealous partisan of the Wilson administrations wartime repression of civil liberties as a visiting judge in the Southern District of New York he presided over the infamous Abrams case After the First World War however he rethought the wisdom and ethics of government intervention in citizens private lives During the 1920s he was a staunch opponent of the second Ku Klux Klan Anyone considering the diverse phases of Claytons life might be excused for concluding that he was an inconsistent man in inconsistent times Yet with his whole career in perspective it is clear that Claytons lodestone was the valuesystem of the Alabama Black Belt the paternal instincts the racial and economic hierarchies that survived from his parents time and the political order cobbled together in the aftermath of Reconstruction This article is a lightly revised version of a piece by the same title published in Volume XIV of Southern Studies

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