In Manhattan

It was one of those footless cases which a dash of sex appeal and a tang of alcohol make so palatable for the public--a typical Broadway morsel--that was dished up last week in a Federal court in Manhattan. The protagonists were the Government (in the person of U. S. District Attorney Emory R. Buckner) and Earl Carroll, theatrical pander. The issue: to convict Mr. Carroll of perjury in sworn testimony he gave to two Grand Juries last winter when the Government investigated a Washington's Birthday party given by him in his theatre--a party at which, according to some of the 500-odd "nighthawks" present, Mr. Carroll had filled a wheeled bathtub with champagne made zestier by having a nubile nymph in Carroll's pay (Chorine Joyce Hawley) strip off her chemise and sit naked in the tub as the drinkers dipped their swirling glasses.

Newspaper readers rejoiced that the excuse had been found for reviewing so luscious an episode--relished again the choice memory of Countess Vera Cathcart, self-advertising adultress, who had been Carroll's chief guest; the presence of other fascinating people, such as dissolute Harry K. Thaw and Editor Philip A. Payne of the Daily Mirror (Hearst gum-sheet); the transcript of Carroll's earlier testimony, including:

"Were there any literary men there?"

"No."

"Was Irvin S. Cobb* there?"

"Yes."

The case splashed along delightfully, few Manhattanites really caring that it was part of Attorney Buckner's zealous campaign to make Manhattan as dry as the letter of the Volstead Act, few paying any special attention to Attorney Buckner's able young assistants, who conducted much of the cross-questioning. Yet for persons to whom Manhattan's nympholepsy and relative humidity have no charm, the case still had keen interest, since one of the young assistant attorneys chanced to be John Marshall Harlan, grandson and namesake of the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan, who sat on the U. S. Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911. There was a piquant index to the course of U. S. legal history in the fact that, at the age (later twenties) at which his grandfather was sitting on a Kentucky county bench and running for Congress, the grandson was making a debut-- from the modern point of view a most auspicious debut--by probing for his Government into the nocturnal diversions of innocuous flesh-potters.

The grandsire was a towering figure of stalwart military bearing and the face of a grey eagle, surmounted by a dome of head from which flashed deep-set kindly blue eyes and issued a thunderous voice. The grandson is not so tall, leaner, faintly stooped; the pointed jaw gives his face a cast of ascetic scholarship, emphasized by the domed Harlan cranium which came down to him modified but still recognizable from the intermediate Harlan, his lawyer-father John Maynard Harlan, in whom it is magnificently preserved today. (It shone proudly in the audienec at last week's hearings.) The grandson's voice is bass, but soft, slightly nasal and with a humorous catch--a voice for shrewd argument instead of old-time oratory. Where his ancestor was trained at Centre College and Transylvania University in the comparatively primitive '50's, the grandson has had the mellowing advantages of modern Princeton and ageless Oxford and, paralleling his ancestor's legal instruction from George Robertson, Thomas A. Marshall and the luminaries of Kentucky's state capital, he has studied under patriarchal Elihu Root.

Advantages, however, do not necessarily proclaim the man. The first John Marshall Harlan reached the highest bench in the land at the extremely youthful age of 44 and sat upon it for 34 years. His solos of dissent in the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust cases--fierce, sarcastic, "as solicitous for truths as a microphone"--have an undiminished ring today in the annals of the Big Bench.

It is by their character that such men come to high places. And more important than his legal training is stuff already visible in the younger Harlan similar to that in his dynamic grandfather which led men to believe that "he went to bed with the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other." At Princeton, Editor John Harlan, '20, of the Daily Princetonian and President John Harlan of the senior class and council, were known as a fearless, fair, thoughtful leader, whose moral discrimination needed and sought no guidance from either the dean's office or the campus religious headquarters. His friends were not surprised when, upon taking oath as assistant to U. S. Attorney Buckner, he instinctively imposed upon himself a quiet policy of eschewing all alcoholic drinks, even of unquestionable legality, the rigidity of his adherence to this policy being strengthened by the fact that it does not accord with his private views on individual liberty.

*Corpulent author of Speaking of Operations, Here Comes the Bride, etc.