About Judge Wilson Alex Haley's Visit

MARCH 2011

About Judge Wilson Alex Haley’s Visit

The courts have long had Standing Orders, plus Local Rules, and

sometimes it hasn’t been easy to determine in which of these cat-

egories a directive issued by the court should be placed.

A July 1927 booklet in the Court Historical Society’s archives re-

ﬂects the similarity of the directives. The 36-page booklet is titled

“Rules of the United States District Court for the Eastern Dis-

trict of Tennessee.” Tucked inside it is a 22-page pamphlet titled

“Standing Orders of the United States District Court for the East-

ern District of Tennessee,” also dated July 1927.

Over the years, the court has issued updated copies of its Local

Rules and made these copies available to attorneys and anyone

else desiring a copy. Today, the Local Rules are available on the

court’s Website.

In the meantime, the court has continued to issue Standing Or-

ders, all 393 of which are ﬁled in the Clerk’s Ofﬁce, dating back

to January 1925. These orders are indexed and ﬁled consecutively.

They provide a running history of the many internal matters that

the court has had to deal with through the years, ranging from

establishing fees that the Referee in Bankruptcy could charge for

defraying the expense of maintaining his ofﬁce to changing the

court clerk’s ofﬁce work days in 1954, when the court was open

on Saturdays.

The bankruptcy order, dated October 1928, was signed by Judge

George C. Taylor, then the district’s only Article III judge. The

other order, dated December 1954 and signed by the then two dis-

trict judges, Leslie R. Darr and Robert L. Taylor, read as follows:

Whereas it appears to the Court that all federal ofﬁces

are on a ﬁve-day basis except the Clerk’s Ofﬁce, and be-

ing of the opinion that the Clerk and his staff are entitled

to the same consideration and should be on the same

working basis as other federal employees, and having

made an investigation of the ﬂow of business through

the Clerk’s Ofﬁce on Saturday, it is concluded that the

work ﬂowing through the Clerk’s Ofﬁce on Saturday

does not justify keeping the ofﬁce open on that day.

The Judicial Conference of the United States has recently adopt-

ed a report and recommendation prepared by Professor Daniel J.

Capra of Fordham Law School that contains guidelines on which

category the court directives should be placed in.

A FRIENDLY CHAT--Judge James Jarvis stopped for a friendly chat as

he left the ofﬁce on July 18, 2005. The mural on a wall of the fourth ﬂoor

of the federal courthouse in Knoxville was being painted at the time, just a

few feet from where the judge stopped, and News Sentinel photographer J.

Miles Cary, who was on hand to photograph the artist at work, snapped this

picture of the judge. Judge Jarvis died two years later, on June 6, 2007.

NOVEMBER 2008

Local Rules vs. Standing Orders

In his oral history, conducted by the Court Historical Society in

2001, Judge James H. Jarvis gave an interesting account of the

occasion on which he received a telephone call from President

Reagan telling him he was going to nominate Judge Jarvis for the

federal judgeship.

“The President called my house on the ﬁrst day of September 1984,

and I was dove hunting, as I always am on the ﬁrst day of Septem-

ber, and the maid answered the phone and told my wife, ‘This is

the White House calling Judge Jarvis.’ My wife took the phone and

explained that I wasn’t there. So that day, I didn’t get the word.

“The next Monday, I was in the ofﬁce, and sure enough, President

Reagan called me, and he was on Air Force One at the time. He

said, ‘Judge Jarvis, I have some papers here that I’m going to sign

in a minute that nominate you as a United States District Judge for

the Eastern District of Tennessee. What do you think about that?’

“That’s the way he put it to me. ‘What do you think about that?’

I said, ‘Well, I’m tickled to death,’ and, of course, I said, ‘Thank

you so much. I am deeply honored,’ and we talked a while about

the election--it was 1984 and he was going to run, and he want-

ed to know how he was going to do down here.”

Jarvis Oral History

SEPTEMBER 2009

continued on page 2

Don K. Ferguson

Executive Director and Newsletter Editor

Howard H. Baker Jr. U.S. Courthouse • 800 Market Street, Suite 130

Knoxville, Tennessee 37902

865/545-4234, Ext. 2222 • Don_F[email protected]

THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE, INC.

The following letter was written to the Court Historical Society

by retired Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice E. Riley An-

derson. We have reproduced it here with his permission. Justice

Anderson was prompted to write the letter after reading in the

December 2010 issue of the newsletter an excerpt from the oral

history of the late Knoxville lawyer William C. Wilson about

the appointment of his brother, Frank W. Wilson, to the federal

bench. Judge Wilson served in Chattanooga from 1961 until his

death in 1982. Anderson and Frank Wilson were law partners

in Oak Ridge before either was named to the bench.--EDITOR

***

I read the Bill Wilson excerpt from his oral history about

Frank’s 1961 appointment. I had been with the firm

four years at the time. It’s true that Estes Kefauver was

quick to support Frank, but Albert Gore held back for

a time, which disappointed Frank, because he had been

a statewide manager for Gore as well. It obviously took

both senators to agree.

It wasn’t that long before Gore agreed as well, perhaps

a month or two, but an eternity for Frank. Usually the

political thing for the senators to do is wait till all the

aspirants are known.

There was opposition from Chattanooga, because Leslie

Darr, who had the position, was from that area and they

wanted a successor from Chattanooga. Frank later was very

popular with the Chattanooga lawyers, but initially stubbed

his toe by having hearings on Saturday mornings, which

interfered with attorney travel to football games at UT.

Frank had a very strong work ethic and worked every

day of the week, including Saturday and Sunday. I used

to say I was glad he was religious, because I got Sun-

day mornings off! I, of course, was not required to work

the weekends, but I was ambitious, so I was always with

him, both in preparation and in every trial.

Frank was a great trial lawyer. He had a unique combina-

tion of high intelligence, superb preparation and an abil-

ity to communicate with all levels of society, which, in

Anderson County, was both Ph.D. scientists and farmers

and others of less education. ■

Alex Haley, the Pulitzer prizewinning

author of Roots, spoke at a naturaliza-

tion ceremony in Knoxville 20 years ago

this month. U.S. District Court reporter

Jolene Owen was instrumental in making

the arrangements. In her off-duty hours,

she served as a reporter for a deposition that

took place at his Norris farm and volun-

teered to convey to him the court’s invita-

tion for him to speak. The Court Historical

Society has in its archives a copy of the pro-

gram that he autographed and inscribed

with the words “Brotherly Love!” The

opening portion of his talk appears below.

continued on Page 2

***

It’s obviously a privilege for me to be able to speak on

this occasion. I was thinking, sitting there watching and

hearing, that at one time, say 200 to 300 years ago, all

across Europe the most exciting single word to be heard

was ‘America.’ When that word was heard, families

which had been together for generations immediately

began to think about who was going to go there and who

would stay in the old country, as it came to be known.

The people who made the decisions were generally the

older men of those families. And finally there came a

day in the history of the ancestry of everyone in this

room who is of European ancestry that the family gath-

ered somewhere. There were children, parents, grand-

parents, dear friends and there was hugging and kissing

and crying because people knew that they were hugging

and kissing and crying with other people dear to them,

indeed who they probably would never see again.

Then the day came when the steerage tickets were

bought and those who were going to this magical

place called America got on immigrant ships and

came across the Atlantic Ocean, and then in that way,

a family which had been one big family in Europe

had split and then on this side of the Atlantic Ocean

those who had come began to have children, and on

the other side those who had stayed began to have

children, and one of the most exciting things in the

The Historical Society of the United States District Court

For The Eastern District of Tennessee, Inc.

Newsletter

March 2011 – Page 2

Oral History Notes

Historical Poster

Alex Haley’s Visit continued from page 1

Don K. Ferguson

Executive Director and Newsletter Editor

Howard H. Baker Jr. U.S. Courthouse • 800 Market Street, Suite 130

Knoxville, Tennessee 37902

865/545-4234, Ext. 2222 • Don_F[email protected]

THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE, INC.

field of genealogy or family searching today is how, in

this country, virtually everybody who is of the Euro-

pean ancestry has anywhere from dozens to scores of lit-

eral blood cousins somewhere in Europe who don’t even

know the cousins on this side, and likewise, the cousins

on this side don’t know who the ones over there are.

So the big exciting thing now in genealogy is trying to

bring together the families which were split 100, 150

200 years ago by the magic of that word ‘America.’ ■

The following excerpts are from two of the more than 50 oral histo-

ries that the Court Historical Society has conducted over the years.

These histories are on file in the Society’s archives in the Howard

H. Baker Jr. United States Courthouse in Knoxville. --EDITOR

***

W. Hugh Overcash, who served in the early 1950s as a law clerk

for U.S. Circuit Judge Xenophon Hicks. The judge’s chambers

were in what is today the Historic U.S. Post Office and Court-

house in Knoxville. (Today, those offices serve as the chambers

of Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Sharon Lee.) Hicks served

as a district judge in the Eastern District of Tennessee from

1923 to 1928 and as a circuit judge from 1928 until his death

in 1952. We conducted an oral history with Overcash in 2000.

He died in 2009 at the age of 83:

When I joined Judge Hicks, he had a little age on

him, but he was very methodical in everything he did.

He was very sharp the whole time I was with him. He

had had one eye removed because of glaucoma, his

left eye, as I recall. He read with a magnifying glass,

but he had used one before he had the eye removed.

Judge Hicks was succeeded on the Court of Appeals

by Judge Potter Stewart, who later was appointed to

the U.S. Supreme Court.

***

Wallace W. Baumann, a Knoxville business executive whose fa-

ther, architect A.B. Baumann, designed the U.S. Post Office

and Courthouse on Main Street in Knoxville. Wallace, on re-

calling the big dedication ceremony for the building in 1934:

I was only 9 years old at the time, and I didn’t attend

the ceremony, but the family talked about it a lot. The

main thing I remember is that the family was all upset

because my grandfather Baumann’s pocket was picked.

That was the news of the day in my family. There were

a lot of people at the ceremony, and I guess my grandfa-

ther looked prosperous, so the pickpocket targeted him.

[Wallace died in 2009. His grandfather, as well as his father, was

an architect.] ■

Following is another in the series we have published over time about

the large color posters distributed by the Judicial Conference of the

United States and the National Archives and Records Administra-

tion in 1989 commemorating the bicentennial of the Judiciary Act

of 1789. Titled “And Justice for All,” the posters summarize specific

cases reflecting federal court jurisdiction.

**********

Treason

United States v. Douglas Chandler, in the United States District

Court for the District of Massachusetts

------

Douglas Chandler was a World War II ‘radio traitor,’ an

American who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the United

States over Radio Berlin. Taking the pseudonym ‘Paul

Revere,’ Chandler signed on to the sound of thundering

hoofs on cobblestone streets and ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’:

‘From the heart of Hitler Germany, your messenger Paul

Revere greets you again.’ Referring to himself as ‘a patri-

otic American’ and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as

a ‘warmaker,’ Chandler attempted to fill his American au-

dience with doubt about the Allies’ ability to win the war.

Captured by American authorities at the end of the war,

Chandler was returned to the United States in 1946 to

stand trial for treason, a crime established as a federal

offense by the U.S. Constitution. On July 30, 1947,

the jury found the defendant guilty. [He was fined

$10,000 and sentenced to life in prison.] In 1963, the

73-year-old Chandler was released from prison when

President John F. Kennedy commuted his life sentence.

He is believed to have died in the 1970s.

The poster contains reproductions of exhibits submitted during

Chandler’s trial--his 1940 Application for Validation of Passport,

a copy of the indictment, a picture of the microphone he used,

and photos of Nazi troops parading in Nuremberg in 1938.