Transcript

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Mr. Justice, in listening to your recollections about your early years, some of the themes of your opinions come back to me, for example, your opinions show a lot of reverence for American history.

You love American history and love the sort of sweep of it.

Do you remember where that began to grow?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I liked history and probably a good bit of it was instilled by my grandfathers' participation in the War between the States and what that meant to this country, holding it together.

And elections, I was always interested in elections at every level and how people campaigned and how they came to be elected and how they came to be defeated, generally, just interested.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Well, another theme that comes through in your discussion of the dude ranch is this love of the environment, the great outdoors.

Is that something that you always had or that was fostered by that experience?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I think it was fostered by that experience.

I think one has to learn in a way to like the outdoors and to enjoy what it has to offer.

I was never a fisherman particularly, and I was never a hunter.

Warren Burger often went hunting with his brothers and others.

I never did.

But there's so much to gain from outdoor experience and the beauty of it, the preservation of it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Another theme is the Native Americans you wrote about.

You wrote a number of well-known opinions about them.

Did you have exposure to Native American culture or history in any of these trips?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, living in the Upper Midwest one is bound to be exposed to it a bit because of the fact that Minnesota, in my childhood anyway, was full of Indian reservations and they had problems.

I was always interested in the battles from an historical point of view, between the Sioux and the Chippewa.

There's a place, it's a park nowadays, just south of St. Paul called Battle Creek where presumably the Chippewa and the Sioux had a big pow-wow one time and, pow-wow, I mean a battle, and the Sioux were pushed westward.

Of course, I'd always, the name Sioux always indicated to me a fearsome type of visage, and I was surprised to find they could be defeated once in a while, which they were.

But Native American culture was certainly present in the Midwest as I grew up.

It wasn't dominant at all, but one was conscious of it, and I think to the good of everyone concerned.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Another strand of your opinions is your solicitude or concern for immigrants and aliens.

Do you think that grew at all out of this period, this early period?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, it might have, perhaps.

Certainly a good body of the people in the Upper Midwest were not very far removed, maybe one generation, from immigrant status.

So many of them, of course, were of Scandinavian origin and talked a good bit of their immigration experiences, what it meant to be in the "old country", as they called it, and the joy of working and getting the nest egg put together and going back to the old country to visit.

Those ties are pretty strong, I think, among the Scandinavian people.

They're good, hearty, cohesive people.

A little stubborn here around the edges but they were there and after all, around the turn of the present century, that is around 1900, I think immigration was a matter of day-to-day life in this country still, and the restrictions hadn't, that exist today, hadn't been developed.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you see discrimination against immigrants?

Or, you spoke about the African-American community, did you personally witness acts of discrimination against these groups?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I saw it against the African-Americans and to some degree against Native Americans.

I didn't see it too much against immigrants as such, there were too many of them, both Irish and Scandinavian, and we were all in the same boat together.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember any specific cases of discrimination that you saw with regard to African Americans or Native Americans?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, they were pushed aside a little bit, but nothing outrageous at the time, that I can put my finger on now.

I was conscious of it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Another area that you're famous for, almost legendary for, is your love of baseball.

How did that come about?

When did you first get interested in the game and how did you follow it?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I like baseball, I suppose in part because it's mathematical basically and, of course, baseball statistics to me were fascinating.

In those days while the Twin Cities didn't have any Major League club and the Major League seemed to be far off in the East, eastern part of this country, the American Association and the International League were the two dominant, I would say, minor leagues.

And I'm positive some of the teams in both of those leagues were better than the worst teams in the majors in those days.

This is long before inter-ownership developed and the like.

But if I was lucky, why I could get out and watch the St. Paul Saints at Lexington Park play and if I were super lucky I could sneak a ride to Minneapolis and watch the Minneapolis Millers play in Nicollet Park.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did any of those players go on to fame and fortune in the big leagues?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, yes, they did indeed, a lot of them.

But one good thing about the schedule in those days was that on holidays, t.

Paul and Minneapolis always played each other and usually a double header, only it was a divided double header, they'd play at Nicollet Park in Minneapolis in the morning and Lexington Park in the afternoon, or vice versa.

I used to think that the St. Paul Saints were my heroes... always could beat the Minneapolis Millers... but, as I look back I'm not sure that was the case.

But I had a had habit of examining the box scores and cutting them out of the paper, and I suspect in my storeroom are still season-long packets of box-scores from those early days, I'll have to dig them out and see what they look like.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: If you had to name one favorite player, who would that be, of all time?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, in those days there was a pitcher for St. Paul named Charlie Hall who 1 revered.

I thought he was pretty good; he didn't lose many games.

And if I could sneak in, why, I'd go see Charlie Hall play.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Can we talk about your parents a little bit more?

Your mother and father together and then your mother alone after your dad passed on.

They're obviously a great source of values for you.

What kind of values did they emphasize in the home?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, Mother was a distinctly moral person, there's no question about this.

She had no patience whatsoever in immorality or things associated with it.

There had been some alcoholism in her family, which was distressing to her, and she herself, of course, was a teetotaler and didn't have much patience with anybody who was tempted by John Barleycorn, as they called it in those days.

But she had high moral standards; she didn't preach at me but she certainly let me know of their value in life, particularly in the long run.

And yet she was a practical person.

I think I got more of that from Mother than I did from my Father.

He was a little tougher and particularly when he took an interest in Minnesota National Guard and was there, as I mentioned to you, for some twenty years and went up in its ranks and worked with people including going out to Fort Snelling for target practice on Sundays.

He'd take me out, and I'd learn to shoot a little bit.

Those days, I can't imagine what the people in his regiment or company thought to have this kid come along and shoot along with them, but I enjoyed it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now you mentioned that you were interested in being a doctor.

Was that something that you announced openly as a boy or as a high school student?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Sure.

I talked a good bit about it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you have any role models in that regard?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, this close friend, John Briggs, who wanted to do it and through him some physicians in the St. Paul area, including our own family doctor, and a couple of other specialists that we learned to know.

I have to include among them an ophthalmologist named Harry Binger, who was, we were referred to him by a relative of ours, and he was the father of James Binger, who later became head o1 Minneapolis Honeywell.

I remember one time, I met him on the street, I was just a kid and he was walking down, I was walking and we stopped, greeted each other and I took my hat off because he was a pretty big figure.

In response he took his off.

I never forgot that.

But there were others and I... of course, the University of Minnesota had a good medical school at the time.

I think they still do although there are some problems up there.

But it was a way of life that appealed to me.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: It seems to me that history would want to know when was the first time you heard about abortion?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, I can't answer that question, I really don't know.

One didn't talk about that in those days.

Maybe it wasn't experienced except by back-alley coat hanger operatives.

We didn't hear much about those at that time.

Although every now and then of course, there'd be a girl in high school who all of a sudden dropped out, and we never heard anymore about her.

And I'm sure, while I didn't understand it much at the time, I'm sure that that was the cause of some of those dropouts.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And how about homosexuality?

Was that something that you were aware of?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No.

I would say almost un... untalked about in those days.

Certainly not the way... we didn't begin to accept the recognition of it today at all.

We've reached a point where if two men, both unmarried, get an apartment together why everybody frowns at them and thinks something's wrong.

And that certainly wasn't the case in my day, up through college days.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: People have tried to identify in your history some event or set of events that gave you your feeling about the right to privacy.

Do you think there were any such events?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, I don't think so.

I can't put my finger on any anyway.

I think it's pretty important and I thought the two cases that were on the books before Roe against Wade, which emphasized the right of privacy, were pretty persuasive.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When you--

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Including Justice Brandeis and his co-authored article in 4 Harvard Law Review.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --Right, "The Right to Privacy".

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: "The Right to Privacy".

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Getting back to where we were, you're heading across country now for your trip to Harvard College.

How far east had you been before that experience?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I had been to Chicago because I had an aunt who lived there and was allowed to go visit them on occasion.

She had a daughter [Midge Hayford] who was born the same day I was, only she was six years older than I was, so we celebrated our birthdays together, that kind of thing.

I was close to her and there, as I indicated, was the time, I'm sure, when I was introduced to major league baseball.

But I had never been east of Chicago until I went off to Harvard College.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And just to get this on the record again, although you're a member of the Emil Verban Society you are actually not a Cubs fan, a Chicago Cubs fan, is that correct?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I'll take the Fifth on this.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Okay, well, we'll keep going.

When you first arrived in Harvard Square, you arrived by train, or how did you?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

Of course, from the Twin Cities we took probably either the Burlington or the Northwestern or the Chicago-Milwaukee, they called it the St. Paul line in those days, they all ran from the Twin Cities down to Chicago.

And then transferred and caught a Michigan Central train called the Wolverine, I can still remember, which ran from Chicago across Ontario and into Boston.

I was going out there, I didn't have a place to live and was worried a little bit about it.

The reason I didn't have a place to live was because my decision to go to Harvard came really after August of that year.

The term, we were due to be out there on the 21st, 22nd of September, so there wasn't much time.

But on the way, on that train, I ran into two brothers from Los Angeles, their name was Grimm, G-R-I-MM.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: The Brothers Grimm.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: The Brothers Grimm.

And they were in the same boat, they had matriculated late, they didn't have any place to live and so we commiserated with each other on the way out and landed in South Station, Boston.

I think I had twenty bucks in my pocket, and they didn't have much more, but we got our valise, as we called it in those days, found the subway and went over to Cambridge and checked into... somewhere in the administration there was an office that would advise students where they could maybe find housing or something.

And the three of us for two days wandered around Cambridge and tried to find a place to stay.

I well remember a woman who had a house on Mt.

Auburn Street, I think it was.

When we showed up at five o'clock she said,

"Well, where are you boys going to stay tonight? "

Well, we didn't know.

And, well,

"You can lie on the floor in my spare room, I don't have a bed in there but you can lie on the floor if you have something to cover yourself with. "

"And so we stayed there for two nights. "

"That floor was pretty hard but it was a place to stay. "

"And then the sun rose all of a sudden and the brothers were given accommodations at Gore Hall down on the river and they found a place for me in Persis Smith, that's P-E-R-S-I-S, I don't know who he was, Persis Smith Hall, on the fifth floor of a suite that had accommodated five of us. "

"And so I had a place to live and that housing condition was taken care of. "

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: You were only sixteen at that time.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, going on seventeen.

I was seventeen in November.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now later when you described coming to the Supreme Court you said you said to yourself, "What am I doing here"?

Did you feel that same way?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, I certainly did.

I certainly did.

And in retrospect, probably I would have been well advised if I'd stayed out a year and worked somewhere and been a year older when I went down there.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Have you given thought to what kind of career path you would've taken had you stayed in Minnesota and gone to college out there?

What do you think would have happened?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Hmm.

Well, the same old problem between a good medical school there at the university and an acceptable law school.

I might well have gone to medical school, been a poor doctor in some small town in Minnesota,--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now, did you have any famous classmates, undergraduate classmates at the college?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Well, one was Telford Taylor who distinguished himself in war activities.

Our class was not so famous as the one immediately before it, but there certainly were a number that have done extraordinarily well.

Carl Pforzheimer gave a magnificent gift to Harvard recently of something like nine million.

They've done all right.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Who was in the predecessor class?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, among others, Nathan Pusey, later president of Harvard University.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When you first got there, these roommates of yours, did they become your best friends or did you gain other friends?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, they didn't become my best friends.

They were kind of a scattered lot.

Most of them poor kids but from all over the country.

One of them became a pretty good friend.

He was from Duxbury, Massachusetts.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Right, the one you saw Miles Standish's grave with.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: And later to my surprise went to divinity school and ended up as an Episcopal priest so that today he's called the Reverend Canon so and so.

And whereas in my... our younger days, he wasn't particularly active and if it was anything it was in Congregational and Unitarian leanings I suppose, But you never know.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Were you yourself an active Methodist all during this period?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, not at all during those years.

Actually, during my Harvard years I was distinctly inactive.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Were you supposed to support yourself and immediately start to find other jobs to work at while you were in college?

Was that the plan, or what was your plan?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: That was my plan, and that twenty bucks I had didn't go very far, and I borrowed a little bit and then started looking for jobs.

I would've preferred not to work that first year until I got my roots under me and was aware that I could handle the Harvard curriculum with the threat that if I flunked out, why nobody from my high school would go again.

But one of my, well, the Reverend Canon came in one afternoon and said,

"Harry, I've just acquired a job to drive a launch for the crew, and I think there's another vacancy. "

"Why don't you go down and look? "

So I went down and lo and behold I got that job.

And the two of us drove coaching launches for the Harvard crews as long as we were there.

I did it for six years, and he was gone before then.

He didn't go on to graduate school, there anyway.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What exactly did that entail?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, it entailed being out on the river.

He drove the varsity coach, I drove the freshman coach.

And I'd get down about 1:30 and get my launch in shape, get the brass polished up, the boat cleaned so that when he got in it wasn't in bad shape.

And then we'd go out with crews on the Charles River, be out there until dark.

It was a great job because it got me out of doors for one thing, and it paid three dollars a day.

It was fifteen bucks a week, which was a fair amount of money.

I could eat on that.

It led to a lot of things.

I think in some respects my assignment at the freshman crew was better than his to the varsity crew because I got to know the freshmen of each class as they moved along and, that is, the rowers and things.

And I well remember Jimmy Roosevelt who was in the class behind me and whose father was the speaker at our commencement in 1929 because he was Governor of New York at that time, was gunning up to run for the presidency and of course, was elected, as you know, in '32.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What do you remember about his speech?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, it was a good speech.

Of course, the Depression hadn't hit us in '29 yet, but it was fairly economic, and he waved the flag as he had to.

I viewed him with some suspicion because he was out of New York, he was an easterner, and I was a midwesterner, and they didn't pay much attention to anybody West of the Hudson River in those days.

But he had that seeming arrogance with the cigarette and the long cigarette holder and his distinct speech.

You can recognize it anywhere.

But he was an impressive guy, there's no question about it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now I've read that you had other jobs as a handball court painter, a milkman, a janitor.

Are all these accurate?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I worked for the Harvard Athletic Association, particularly in the wintertime.

Of course in the wintertime we also got the launches out of the water, and we had to scrape the barnacles off the bottom and that took three or four weeks.

But then I worked for the Athletic Association cleaning handball courts and cleaning them consisted largely of getting the spit out of the corners.

When people played handball, they always spat in the corner, they didn't do it anywhere else, sort of a dirty job.

We did that.

And then as the years.

went by I was able to tutor in mathematics, and the more math I had, the better the job became and got a job correcting papers for one of the mathematics professors there, a person whom I highly respected.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was his name?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: His name was Morse, Marston Morse.

Group theory was his specialty as I recall.

Far beyond my intellectual capacity to manage, but of course, I could correct papers for freshman or sophomores and juniors in undergraduate math courses.

Enjoyed that.

Oh, there were other kinds of jobs you pick up here and there.

Anything that paid a little bit I latched on to.

I must have had about ten different jobs.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you feel constantly pressed for money during that period?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

But we made it all right.

And of course in the summertime I was tempted to stay in the Boston area but came back and got a job peddling milk, driving a milk wagon.

In those days, in the early days that I did it, I had horses.

But then I was there just at the time they converted from horses into Model-T Fords.

But those old horses were great because they knew the route... we called it "rout", we didn't call it "root"... and they'd go along and stop, and I knew that house was where I was supposed to go.

But that paid fairly well for a summer job, and I accumulated a couple of hundred dollars doing that.

Again it was good because it got me out of doors.

In those days, we peddled milk in bottles, not in packs the way they are now.

I remember one time we had a special stop in the excavation site for what became the St. Paul Courthouse.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: The Eighth Circuit Courthouse?

That you later sat in?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, the County Courthouse.

And my boss at the Minnesota Milk Company said,

"You go down, you get there at ten o'clock and run wherever you go and service those construction workers and don't let the competing milk company in. "

So I went down there one time and I had four quart bottles in one hand and a basket full of bottles in the other and tripped over a piece of construction wood and went head over heels and came up bleeding.

I still have scars in my fingers from that, and well, the workers didn't get their milk from me that day but from somebody else.

, There's always something funny like that.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: I guess I'm interested in two kinds of relationships.

It sounds like there were the rich kids and the scholarship kids at college.

How did you feel about that kind of social structure?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, it certainly was true at Harvard.

I suppose it's true at Yale and some of the other Ivy League Schools.

I felt it at first and then I didn't bother too much with it.

But it was perfectly natural because youngsters that would go to Phillips Exeter or Phillips Andover of course had their friends made.

One of those schools fed largely into Harvard and the other one into Yale and a graduate of that school would come and he'd know twenty classmates and so they had their social circles already made.

But those of us who came out alone were pretty much alone and of course had a much lower social status than the effete easterners, but we got over that after a while.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Well, it's interesting, because when you later faced the question of affirmative action in the Bakke case and the whole issue came up about diversity at various institutions, elite institutions of higher education including Harvard.

Did you think back on that experience in any way?

Did you see many African-Americans around or Jews or any--

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, there were a lot of Jewish kids around and not many African-Americans.

I tutored two of them in later mathematics years.

They were having a terrible struggle, but we got them through, and they passed their courses and the like.

That was interesting to tutor them because it taught me a lot of what was troubling to other people.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --The other kind of relationship I'm interested in is when you would go home in the summertime, a Harvard kid now, how did the locals feel about you?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, they thought I was pretty stuffy I suppose.

I always called on those four men who'd been on the scholarship committee, I had to check in with them and they'd tut, tut, ask me a lot of questions, but the grades came through, and the grades were acceptable.

At least I didn't flunk out.

Of course the real problem arose when I graduated from law school, which was '32, there weren't any jobs to speak of, but I had wangled a promise out of a Boston lawyer to come in to his office.

I don't know whether he would have fulfilled that promise or not, but I was tempted to stay.

I liked Boston, I think most people do.

But my father was ill then as he had been for a number of years, and I went back to check up on him, and I just never returned to Boston.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Had you stayed in Boston you probably would have become a partner in a Boston firm, do you think?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I don't know.

Boston firms are Boston firms, and I think they demand a certain amount of business-getting capacity, and old family connection and that kind of thing, which I certainly didn't have.

But as I interviewed in those firms, they were always polite, nice.

But that was... at least I didn't find that to be true when I went to the Midwest and certainly in the law office in which I did affiliate after my clerkship, there was never a mention of how much business can you bring in.

You come in here and do the work and the business will come.

And it was just as true as could be.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: I'm interested in your feelings about the old boy network versus an open-competition merit system.

In some ways, you started as someone with no ties but through your own work you eventually became part of a network of people who had gone to these schools.

Did you think about that much?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I don't think much about it, and if I was conscious of it, I'm sure I tried to resist it because the experience was too recent in my mind.

One certainly is going to run into that in the Ivy League schools.

No question about it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How conscious were you of women and the kinds of education they were getting.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Women?

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Yes.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, we were conscious of it to some degree because Radcliffe is right there and regarded itself, they did anyway, as being, getting Harvard educations, and I think those of us, as Harvard undergraduates, would kind of sniff at that.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But you went to classes with women?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Women showed up in our classes, not many, but as we moved along, particularly in mathematics and got into, I was taking graduate courses in my senior year, there wasn't any point in having a parallel course over in the Radcliffe campus.

And so there were young women who'd come and be with us, maybe we had two or three or four of them in the class and they were... their presence was not resented at all.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: So they were treated pretty much the same?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: They were what?

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: They were treated pretty much the same.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, yes.

Certainly at that time, my senior year, there was no problem about it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: At what point did you decide to major in math?

Almost from the beginning?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Almost from the beginning.

After that session with Abbott Lawrence Lowell, I thought if I could handle it, why, I'd stay in it, and as a matter of fact at one point thought seriously of making a profession out of it, My roommate did and did rather well actually, became head of the math department at Michigan State University.

But I felt that maybe I had reached my intellectual limits of absorbing mathematical logic.

On the other hand, I had to write a, I took my honors in math, I had to write a thesis, the subject of which is "Some Examples of Riemannian Surfaces".

Well, I came across it the other day and looked at it and I couldn't understand the first two sentences at all.

It looked pretty impressive to me but.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Could you talk about your experience with the Harvard Glee Club?

You've been the "musical person" on the Court as well and I know that that was a large part of the reason.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --It's an experience I'm very grateful for having had.

Another friend of mine who was a far better singer than I was, well, we both sang on the Freshman Glee Club, which was a kind of a made-up organization, didn't amount to much.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And you were a baritone?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Baritone.

But then he went on and tried out for the Harvard Glee Club which took sophomores on up and suggested that I try and I got into a quartet that was set up for a quartet trial with Doc Davidson, who was the conductor at the time.

And I got cold feet because I really wasn't very good at all.

But I well remember when we had that quartet trial Doe was there bouncing around and "Baritone, louder, louder".

I was perspiring but, he passed me with the lowest possible grade to get in.

You had to have a 70, and if you made a 70, you got into the Glee Club, and I got a 70.

My friend I think had an 82 or something like this.

But I stayed with them for six years, and it was a great, for me, a great musical experience because rehearsals were two or three times a week, we did it over in Sever 11 at that tine, Sever being the name of the building, and it got me away from the law entirely and in contact with good music.

I think the Harvard Glee Club at that time was, people will dispute this, but it was rather a, almost an unofficial choir for the Boston Symphony.

And I remember the thrill of sitting in behind the Boston Symphony for rehearsals and watching the horn player as he'd play and his bald head would get redder and redder as he puffed away and those instances.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And who was the conductor of the Boston Symphony?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Koussevitzky most of the time.

But there were others.

Bauer came up and Stokowski and some of the others, it was a great thrill, and I look back on it with thankfulness, I'm glad I did it.

But of course it detracted in a way from law school.

Some of my law school companions said, what are you putting all this time in on the Harvard Glee Club.

But you could stay in through the graduate years, which I did.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And you did a fair amount of traveling, or at least you went to Washington once, with the Glee Club.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, the Glee Club traveled a good bit, not the full club, we had about 160 in the club, but usually maybe a group of fifty or sixty or whatever it was, of course there were isolated trips otherwise to the various colleges, but if one behaved himself and attended rehearsals in his senior year he nearly always, no matter how low his grade was, could go on the senior trip.

And that was the first time I got to Washington, in the spring of 1929.

President Hoover was in the White House at that time, and I think you've seen a photograph I have on my wall of the Glee Club taken outside the White House.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you take a general tour of the city that day?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh yes, sure, I well remember that, yes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Was this current Supreme Court building built at that point?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, because the current Supreme Court building came into being in '35 as I remember and this was before '32.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you have any recollections of your feelings about Washington the first time you saw it?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I thought it was a beautiful city and a place that would be nice, to live, exciting place, there were things to do, the typical reaction that everybody has to Washington, I think, the first time.

It was a much sleepier place then than it is now.

We liked it, it was warm.

This was April, Cherry Blossom time, all those things.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you take any classes in American History or Government at Harvard College?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

Took Government I with "Frisky" Merriman parading with his long pointer and took History I with a professor whom I liked named Bruce Hopper, H-O-P-P-E-R, I've never known what happened to him and the general courses that nearly all of us took at one time or another.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember when you started to focus between being a mathematician and going to law school and going to med school?

When did you finally sort of resolve that question?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I think I resolved not to go into mathematics about my first year of law school.

I saw my then-roommate going on and getting, doing extraordinarily well in areas that sounded too much to me.

He'd go on at great length and explain group theory or something else that was beyond my ken at the time.

So I abandoned it, but I always had my sympathy toward the medical profession but as the days went by it was pretty definite that I'd stay in law, if I were lucky and could get a job.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did you apply to the law school?

Did you apply to other law schools or just Harvard?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, just Harvard.

I thought a little bit about Minnesota at the time but it wasn't so hard to get into graduate schools in those days, especially if one had a presentable record as an undergraduate, which fortunately I did.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And during that time, the college years in particular, did you have any feeling or picture of the role of the Supreme Court in American life?

Were any of the Justices in your consciousness?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, only as a distant body down there in Washington that kind of ran everything.

As an undergraduate, I didn't think too much of it, I suppose, but when I got into law school we, of course, thought a lot about it and who the Justices were.

I remember once seeing Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who visited, and he was out in the hall and between rooms called Langdell South and Langdell South-Middle with a great crowd of students around him.

He was pretty feeble at the time, this must have been oh, 1929, 1930, but he was a revered figure at Harvard Law School then as he is today.

More revered there I think than any other place that I know of.

You know Yale, I don't believe he's as revered At New Haven as he is in Cambridge by any means.

But it was a thrill to see him at the time.

And of course, the Court at that time was pretty well controlled by four Justices, Van Devanter and Sutherland and Butler and McReynolds.

I don't name them in order of seniority but they were voting pretty much as a quartet and in the early Roosevelt days were defeating New Deal legislation so that it led him to conjure up the court packing plan that foundered later.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you have any kind of public recollection or reaction to the court-packing plan at the time?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Sure, I think everyone was basically against it.

They thought this was another F.D.R. trick.

You know, with Roosevelt, a great president but, he had his ardent admirers and his ardent detractors.

One was either for him or against him.

A lot of the media was very critical of some of these ideas, and this court packing plan was, I think, rather typical of him.

If he couldn't accomplish his ends one way, he'd come up with an idea the other way.

Stir people up, and on balance it was probably just as well.

They thought about these governmental problems and the like.

Of course, when that thing was advanced, I think that the idea was so abhorrent to the bar as a whole that Charles Evans Hughes stepped into the breach and in effect changed the Court around.

He must have been very persuasive.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember any cases coming down during this period that stuck in public consciousness in the way that say, Roe versus Wade, has done in the minds of the general public now?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, that series of cases invalidating the New Deal legislation... I won't try to give you the names of all those cases, there were a lot of them--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Schechter Poultry, Carter Coal.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Yes, right.

The poultry case that you name being maybe the most prominent of them.

I think it shocked the country, shocked the bar generally and there was a lot of stirring around.

These were hard times economically and Roosevelt was an attractive politician and an attractive president and stirred people up and away we went.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --Did you vote for Roosevelt?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Sure, at one time.

I had lots of opportunities you know, he ran four times.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But you consider yourself a Republican.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, sure.

At that time.

Not much of a one but, Republican, I guess.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When you would go home during the summers, how did your parents react to your education, were they happy about how it was going?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I suppose they were.

I was never criticized for it.

My father never said a great deal.

Mother talked a good bit about it and fortunately the grades were pretty good that were coming in.

They went out for graduation, and I think went out proudly.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Well, you're always modest, Mr. Justice, but you were a Summa Cum Laude graduate and also a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Were you one of the first in your class in all of these years or do you remember one time when you suddenly--

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I certainly wasn't the first, very far up in my class, and by that I mean in the upper ten percent, particularly during the first couple of years.

I was working too hard outside.

And I think my outside work affected my grades to a degree.

My majoring in math was fairly, successful, concentrating in math was fairly successful.

I guess I won the sympathy of two or three of the math professors at the time, they knew I was struggling, working and the like.

But I did not make Phi Beta Kappa my junior year when they have what they call the Junior 8, in those days, just 8 of them.

But I did do it in my senior year.

Well, they had to because when I got the Summa, which was announced during graduation week, it was almost automatic that you'd get Phi Beta Kappa with it.

But I know I was surprised when I was advised that I'd get a Summa.

And I think it was due to my thesis, it was pretty good, worked hard at it.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --Did it change your vision of yourself?

Someone who could get a Summa at Harvard as opposed to someone from St. Paul who had never been out East?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, it made me feel, I guess, that four years of hard work at Harvard were worthwhile.

I hope I wasn't smug about it.

I don't think I was.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you consider taking any time off between college and law school?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Thought about it a little bit, so many people did.

It was the custom in those days to go to Europe or go around the world for a year, but I didn't have any money to do that.

If you were well equipped and had a wealthy family that's what you did.

And so I have good friends who were classmates of mine in college who were a year behind me in law school because they took that year off and educated themselves in a way that I couldn't gain at all.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: I've got to ask this question, Justice... Mrs. Blackmun, forgive me for it... did you ever almost get married to anyone else?

Seriously date others?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, sure, I think that, yes, the answer is yes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Have you kept in touch with these people?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, one in particular, sure, she was a nice person.

She died recently.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: But not from Minnesota?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, she was an easterner.

That was one of the problems, I wondered how an easterner would do in the Midwest.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: So you were pretty confident that you would go back to the Midwest after your education?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: After I went back to check up on my father and was lucky to get a clerkship, then I felt this is where I shall be.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: We're going to start the next tape by focusing on your Harvard Law School days, but let me just ask one question about that.

When you started Harvard Law School did you have a sense of self-confidence or did you feel the same sort of feeling of, "what am I doing here"?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, I had that same feeling, distinctly.

And, of course, well, you've been through it, I don't know whether you feel the same way, but I found the transition from college to law school to be a very major one in the sense of faculty attitudes and all of a sudden I felt a sense of deep competitiveness in law school that I didn't feel particularly in undergraduate school, even at Harvard.

Although there was some of it.

But it seemed to me almost from the first day in law school this was business from here on, this is professional activity and we better be good and let the devil take the hindmost, was the approach.

I felt it anyway.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Well, we'll start the next tape with a discussion of the beginning of your legal education and all those great figures at Harvard Law School.

Thank you very much, Mr. Justice.

End of interview