Legacy (12 page)

would win. If not, it would be the predicted tie, which would mean that they had lost yet again. All turned to stare at the young fellow who had been pressured by both sides. When the clerk called for his vote, he replied in a whisper 'Aye', and it seemed as if the entire captial burst into curses and cheers. The Constitution of the United States had been modified in accordance with orderly procedures laid down a hundred and thirty-three years before. That night Emily Starr, an outcast from her family, her friends and even her own group of crusaders, stood in the smallest bedroom of the little Tennessee boarding house, still clad in her long black dress and outmoded hat, experiencing the terrible loneliness that can overtake good peo- ple when they have won a significant battle. She felt no sense of triumph. An involuntary cry escaped: 'Oh, Philip! It needn't have been so.' Then she stiffened, averted her eyes from the small mirror, and said: 'It was wrong and it had to be set right.'

Richard Starr 1890-1954

Since my grandfather died when I was only three, I can scarcely claim that I knew him, but I do remember his coming to our house and bouncing me on his knee. He, too, was tall and thin, and cranky, except to me, and he smelled of tobacco. I certainly remember his funeral. It was a cold, misty day, and someone said something I can still recall: 'The day is as mean as the man.' He had not always been that way, and some of the stories about him that were repeated in our home bespoke a kindlier young man. But financial reverses in the Great Depression embittered him' and it was his sour behaviour in his later years which dominated the stories. In the early days of his marriage he was well-to- do or even rich, the result of an inheritance froln his mother, one of the Greer textile family of New Hampshire, so he never really had to work. He was in what they called at the time 'investments' and since he was neither brilliant nor particularly adept at managing money, his adventures turned out poorly, and the Crash of 1929 damaged him. It was then that he developed the great passion of his life, for he became known as 'the man who hated Roosevelt.' When I was a boy the letters F.D.R. were anathema in our house, for my grand-

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father had said that he had tried to turn America, into a Communist state. 'It began with those damn-fool amendments,'he stormed. 'Why meddle with the Constitution? Like they say, "Why fix it if it ain't broke?" ' He described the Seventeenth Amendment, which called for the election of senators by popu- lar vote, a tragic mistake: 'In the old days you had men of property and breeding in the state legisla- tures, and they could be depended upon to appoint men like themselves, men of substance, to the Sen- ate.' He believed that to allow the general public to determine the character of our upper House was the first step toward revolution: 'Just watch what comes out of the Senate now,' and when the first laws were enacted, he went about crying: 'The rot has begun!' His scorn for the Nineteenth Amendment was sulphurous: 'The brightest day in the history of the Starr family was when my grandfather, General Hugh, cast his lot with Robert E. Lee ... the dark- est was when that crazy daughter of his, Aunt Emily, started working for women's suffrage.' Of course, he inherited his impression of the infamous Emily from his mother, Anne Greer, whose scornful memory of her sister-in-law inten- sified as the years passed. She once told my grandfather of that hideous night in Pittsburgh when Emily had made a fool of her: 'She mimicked me, she laughed at me, humiliated me in every way, and I never spoke to her again as long as she lived. She was a dreadful person and she intro-

duced alien ideas into American politics.' But my grandfather's harshest abuse fell on the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the col- lection of income taxes: 'If that darmi thing hadn't

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been passed, you'd be a rich man, Thomas,' he used to tell my father, overlooking the fact that his own unskilled investing had been the cause of his misfortune, not the income tax. What gave him special cause for remorse was the fact that each of these amendments had been passed in his lifetime: 'If I'd been paying attention, maybe I could have stopped them. Maybe we patriots were caught napping.' Repeatedly he lec- tured my father on this point: 'Thomas, never let them meddle with the Constitution. It's perfect as it is,' and he cited the nonsense over how the Eighteenth Amendment tried to stop drinking: 'We let a lot of do-good women and teary-eyed minis- ters inflict it on us, and as soon as it came into effect, every sensible person knew it was a mon- strous mistake that had to be corrected. Thank God, in due time men like me were able to get rid of it, but it should never have been sneaked into the Constitution in the first place.' Before I discuss the event which gave my grand- father what he interpreted as a personal victory, I must explain just how deep his loathing of Presi- dent Roosevelt went. In 1944, when my father's Twenty-seventh Division was removed from Saipan under shameful circumstances, my father, Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Starr, lost a leg, went ape, and won himself the Congressional Medal of Honor, than which there is none higher. Grand- father, ecstatic to know that another Starr had behaved with honour, drove about Washington and northern Virginia telling everyone of Tom's heroism. He was invited, of course, to the White House to share in his son's glory when the medal was pre- sented, but when he realized that the conferring

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would be done by President Roosevelt, he refused to go: 'Any medal that son-of-a-bitch touched would be contaminated.' And when my father brought it home, Grandfather wouldn't touch it. But he did like to point to it when strangers drop- ped by. In 1933 and '34, Grandfather had an especially bad time, for it was in those bleak years, when it looked as if our nation might fall apart, that F.D.R. initiated his radical reforms. Were such swift changes necessary to save our society? Who knows? Had I been living then, I think I might have supported the innovations, but who knows? Grandfather knew: 'Roosevelt is a Communist. He's a worse dictator than Mussolini.' At one point he bellowed: 'Someone should shoot that Cornmie,' but Grandmother warned him: 'You say that where people can hear you, you'll go to jail.' If he did temper his public threats, he never relaxed his private hatred, and what he seemed to object to most was the intrusive way in which the regula- tions of Roosevelt's N.R.A impinged on his life: 'National Recovery Act! Leave things alone, they'll take care of themselves. Meddling into everything, this is dictatorship at its worst.' There was a popular song at the time, a silly jingle, 'Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long,' and one morning Grandfather saw this crazy headline in his newspaper:

Sam, You Can Make the Pants Longer or

Shorter but You Better Not Charge More Than $2.50

'My God,' Grandfather shouted, slamming his paper to the floor. 'Now he's interfering in the work of tailors.'

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And then, in his moments of apparent defeat, came triumph. It was a Supreme Court decision handed down in 1935 during the depth of the Depression, and it bore the curious title Schecter Poultry Corporation v. United States, and Grand- father claimed: 'It's the greatest case in the his- tory of the United States. Saved this nation.' And in later years I've found others who felt somewhat the same. The facts were clear. N.R.A. officials appointed by Roosevelt, not Congress, had issued a regula- tion, not a legally passed law, saying that you could notmove sick chickens from one state to sell in another. The Schecter people found the order somehow oppressive and refused to obey. They continued to move chickens, well or sick, from New Jersey and into New York, so they had to be arrested. The case went to the Supreme Court, which declared 9 to 0 that the whole N.R.A. was unconstitutional in that it allowed the President to enact law, rather than Congress. Well, when I first heard this story about Grand- father, I could understand little and I suspected my parents might have the facts garbled, but when I later learned the interpretation Grand- father gave the case, I tended to agree with him. He went about Virginia telling everyone: 'Roosevelt was a dictator, make no mistake about that, and the N.R.A. was his trick for fashioning chains of steel about our necks. Now, the history of the world is filled with cases in which dictators have used a temporary crisis to install illegal, crisis legislation. "The times demand it," they bellow, but mark my words, when the crisis ends, the dictators never leave office. They hang around until they destroy their countries.

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'The miracle of the United States, we've just had our dictator, a dreadful man, but when the crisis was over we had an agency, put in place more than a century before, which could say: "Crisis is over. Hand back the reins. We play by the rules again." Read about Cromwell in England. He came in just like Roosevelt, had many of the same kinds of laws. To get rid of him, they had to have a civil war. We did it with our Supreme Court.' Roosevelt, outraged by the Schecter decision, which struck at his effort to restore the nation's economy, retaliated petulantly. He tried to pack the Supreme Court with additional judges guaran- teed to vote his way, and when Grandfather heard of this plot he went berserk. An old man, still living in Virginia when I went off to West Point, told me: 'Your grandfather, always a patriot, assembled a group of us who knew something about politics, and we toured the south lambasting F.D.R. as a dictator and calling for impeachment. Your grandfather was especially effective, for he could shout at the crowds: "My ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence and helped write the Constitution and fought at the right hand of Robert E. Lee." The crowds cheered, believe me. And then he shouted: "We must defend the Constitu- tion as written and stop Roosevelt in his tracks!" But when we talked late at night as we drove on to the next town, I found that your grandfather was pretty picky about how much of the Constitution

he was willing to defend. He was happy with only the first part. He wasn't too keen on the Bill of Rights, he distrusted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which gave the coloured folk more rights than they needed, and he positively loathed

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the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Nineteenth. But with the help of a lot of others, we defeated Roosevelt's plan and saved the nation.' Our family has clippings of the time Grand- father hit the headlines in a big way. His wife, that is, my grandmother, was a minor official in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and when someone that Grandfather called 'a misguided do- gooder and weeping heart' arranged for the splendid singer Marian Anderson to give a con- cert in Constitution HaU, my grandmother, who considered the Hall her property, cancelled the permission on the grounds that 'it would be highly improper for a Negress to appear in such a hal- lowed place.' When the public outrage exploded, Grandfather leaped to his wife's side, with a pronouncement which hit newspapers and radios across the nation: 'Constitution Hall is sacred to the memory of those patriots who wrote the Con- stitution and their descendants, and so far as I know, there were no Negroes in that convention. , And finally, my favourite story about the crusty old gentleman. He was born on 12 April 1890, and on that date in 1945-But let my father tell the story, since he was there: 'Proud of the way I was learning to manipulate my new leg, I was in the garden when I heard the kitchen radio announce that F.D.R. had died. Hobbling to my father's study, I cried: "Dad, have you heaiCd? F.D.R. just died! 'He waved me away: "You're teasing. just say- ing that to make me feel good on my birthday. " '

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Rachel Denham Starr 1928-

One of the joys of my fife has been that my wife, Nancy, gets on so amiably with my mother, Rachel Starr. Of course, this hasn't been difficult, because my wife has good sense and my mother by herself would be justification for the Nineteenth Amend- ment, which gave women the vote. She's one of the all-time winners. On Sundays it was our custom for Nancy to leave our place in midafternoon, go over to my mother's, and help prepare a cold supper which all four of us would share at seven. I encouraged this because I found constant joy in talking with both my father and my mother. So I was alone at home Sunday afternoon when Zack barged in without knocking. He was obviously agitated, and quickly told me why: 'Norman, I've been with the big brains of our profession all yes- terday afternoon and this morning, and they all think the situation is so clear that it presents no alternative.' He rose, walked about the room, and came to rest standing over me like an irate father: 'I said, they all said, there's no escape.' 'What's that meanT He walked some more, cleared his throat, then drew up a chair so that he could sit opposite me and very close: 'Norman, you aren't going to like this,

but tomorrow morning you'll have to take the Fifth to protect yourself against incriminating yourself.' I felt dizzy. From the days of the Kefauver Com- mittee, which coincided with my birth, our family had scorned the criminals and spies and shifty ones who 'took the Fifth,' and one of my earliest memories is of my irascible grandfather shouting: 'Only thieves and crooks take the Fifth, so anyone who does should be shot.' I could not imagine any Starr in the past taking it, and for me to stand up in public and do so was unthinkable. 'No way I can take the Fifth,'l said. I'm sure Zack must have known how I would react, but since he did try to persuade me, we sat in grim silence, neither knowing what to say next. At this moment Nancy returned to fetch something from the kitchen that my mother needed, and as soon as she saw us she cried: 'You two look like the hearse just passed,' and it was Zack who blurted out: 'It did. I just advised Norman that tomorrow in the Senate hearing he must take the Fifth.' She stood stock-still, framed in the doorway, her pugnacious little chin pointed upward as always, and then she asked a totally unexpected question: 'Will they have whole batteries of television cam- eras, Zack?'And he replied: 'They will.' She remained in the doorway, wreathed in sunlight, and I could not guess what she might say next, for she really knew only three things about my work. I was not involved with Iran. I was up to my neck in Nicaragua. And although I was under the command of Vice-Admiral John Poindexter, I'd had only minimal contact with Colonel North. But what exactly I had done, and how much legal danger I might be in, she did not know, nor did any civil- ian, not even Vice-President Bush, for whose drug