Light from Lansing

Last week the nine Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court were busily storing up energy against that day next October when they will sit for the first time in their new marble temple across the plaza from the Capitol and resume their constitutional wrestling match with the New Deal. After a long motor trip through New England, Chief Justice Hughes arrived with Mrs. Hughes and their chauffeur at Buffalo, N. Y. "I'm sorry, but I cannot give time for an interview," he explained courteously to reporters. "I cannot permit a picture to be taken, either." Thereupon, majestically unaware of a skulking cameraman (see cut') and a dockside loafer who chirped, "Hello, Judge," the handsome, white-whiskered Chief Justice boarded the Great Lakes Transit Corp.'s steamer Juniata, cruised to Duluth, entrained for the West.

Mr. Justice Van Devanter was cruising the North Sea. Mr. Justice Brandeis was at his Chatham cottage on Cape Cod. Mr. Justice Cardozo was sunning himself at Rye, N. Y. Mr. Justice Butler was golfing at Bluemont, Va. Mr. Justice Roberts was on his 700-acre farm near Kimberton, Pa. Mr. Justice Sutherland was on his 24th trip to Europe. Mr. Justice Stone loafed at his favorite island near Isle au Haut, Me. And Mr. Justice McReynolds, visiting a friend at Gloucester, Mass., gave an interview to the Beverly Times about the Constitution.

Meantime at Princeton, N. J. scholars announced an historical discovery concerning the U. S. Constitution which may be of prime importance to the nine vacationing Justices.

Just how sturdy a foundation the Constitution's framers intended to lay for the Federal Government is a question which has been puzzling Supreme Court Justices for 146 years. Air-tight was the wall of secrecy with which the Constitutional Convention delegates surrounded their deliberations. In Philadelphia one summer day in 1787 a delegate chanced on a lost copy of the propositions then pending before the Convention, quickly turned it over to the presiding officer, General George Washington. At the close of the day's session that hot-tempered hero up-rose before the delegates, sternly declared: "I must entreat gentlemen to be more careful, lest our transactions get into the newspapers and disturb the public repose by premature speculations. I know not whose paper it is, but there it is, let him who owns it take it."

Thereupon the great man bowed, picked up his hat and, according to one witness, "quitted the room with a dignity so severe that every person seemed alarmed." Nobody ever claimed the paper.

Not until 1821 were the copious notes taken by Delegate Robert Yates of New York on the Convention's debates published. In 1841 a detailed Convention journal kept by scholarly James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," was published. Only from these notes, the meagre official journal and a smattering set down by other delegates, have judges and scholars learned what the Fathers thought & said while they were piecing together their great patchwork of compromises.

In Manhattan about 9 o'clock one December evening in 1829 John Lansing, one-time Chief Justice of New York's Supreme Court, left his hotel, set out to post some letters on the Albany boat at the foot of Cortlandt Street. He was never seen again, no trace of him ever found.* In time the tremendous sensation caused by his disappearance died away and no one thought much about John Lansing again until last week. Then History Professor Joseph R. Strayer of Princeton announced that he had discovered, in the possession of Lansing descendants living in Florida, two precious documents hitherto unknown to historians. In pocket-size notebooks of 71 and 68 pages respectively were notes set down by John Lansing when he was a delegate from New York to the Federal Convention of 1787. After a month in Philadelphia Delegate Lansing, disgruntled with the way things were going, withdrew from the Convention, later opposed the Constitution when its ratification came up in New York. Last week Professor Edward S. Corwin of Princeton, famed authority on the Constitution, after comparing the Lansing notes with those kept by Yates and Madison, gravely wrote: "The Lansing Notes, like those of Yates, bear striking testimony to the strength of the nationalistic impulse to which the Federal Convention owed its inception. In this respect they are probably more to be relied upon than Madison's Journal. The latter underwent an immense amount of revision and elaboration at the hands of its author through nearly half a century following the Convention, and during this period Madison's constitutional creed, after undergoing ... a violent shift in the States-rights direction, gradually settled down to a position which represented a sort of compromise between the Madison of 1787 and the author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798.

"The Lansing Notes, on the other hand, are strictly contemporary records. . . . Some recent decisions of the Supreme Court seem to reflect a doubt on the part of that tribunal whether it was really the intention in 1787 to establish an effective national government, but the Lansing Notes do not support this doubt--quite the contrary, in fact. It might be a public service to supply the Court with a copy of Professor Strayer's discovery."

* In Manhattan at 9:15 p. m. a century later Justice Joseph Force Crater of New York's Supreme Court said goodnight to some friends, stepped into a taxicab at the corner of Broadway & 45th Street, vanished. Last week on the fifth anniversary of Judge Crater's disappearance detectives were still searching for him.

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