Benjamin N. Cardozo
$3.50
By WHITTLESEY HOUSE
IN contrast with Mr. Wise and Mr. Levinger in Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, Mr. Hellman introduces a distinguished fellow-Jew in terms which the well-disposed Gentile finds embarrassing. Mr. Hellman disables himself at the outset by attempting a biography, tor Justice Cardozo’s life, aside from his career on the bench, presents nothing on which to hang a biography. A solitary figure, reticent, diffident, almost a recluse, he ‘ hid his life,’ as Epicurus so wisely advises us all to do. Hence Mr. Heilman has to magnify and sentimentalize a number of purely commonplace matters, and this unavoidably gives his work an unpleasant air of fulsomeness. Then, his persistent stress on Justice Cardozo’s Americanism, which no one in his right mind would ever dream of questioning, is so gratuitous that it affects a reader disagreeably. Still more disagreeable is his flat assertion, without a shred of evidence produced to support it, that Mr. Justice McReynolds was indisposed to Justice Cardozo on grounds of ‘ racial prejudice.’ This is going behind the returns most unwarrantably. With the best will in the world, one is bound to feel like turning back to Mr. Wise and Mr. Levinger and asking them in all frankness why a Jew so regularly assumes that if a Jew is unacceptable it can only be because he is a Jew. Mr. Justice McReynolds is a very strict constitutionalist. Knowing this, anyone might easily see that he may he quite as indisposed to Justices Black, Douglas, and Murphy as to Justices Brandeis, Cardozo, and Frankfurter, and tor the same reason — which is that he distrusts their guardianship of the Constitution. He is also very forthright; therefore anyone might see that he probably takes as little pains to conceal his indisposition in the one case as in the other.
Formal introductions are a delicate business and should above all else he mannerly. In this respect Mr. Wise and Mr. Fevinger come off extremely well; Mr. Hellman, not so well.