Rounds, Stowell

English

St. John's University School of Law

St. John's Law Review Volume 23 Number 2 Volume 23, April 1949, Number 2 Article 28 July 2013 We Hold These Truths (2nd Ed.)(Book Review) Stowell Rounds Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview Recommended Citation Rounds, Stowell (1949) "We Hold These Truths (2nd Ed.)(Book Review)," St. John's Law Review: Vol. 23 : No. 2 , Article 28. Available at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview/vol23/iss2/28 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in St. John's Law Review by an authorized editor of St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact selbyc@stjohns.edu. 1949 ] BOOK REVIEWS 393One chapter in the book is devoted to some of the procedural sections ofthe Code-assessment and collection of deficiencies, interest and penalties andoverpayments.There is, too, a chapter on personal holding companies, which apparentlythe authors think should be discussed in a book of this kind as being of generalapplication.There is no doubt that the authors give the reader a general familiaritywith the tax law. They point out all the problems that are presently engagingthe attention of tax practitioners and the courts. Twenty-three years agothis reviewer was given the task of instructing a group of students interestedin income taxation. There were no "tax courses" available at that time, sothis reviewer wrote something he called A Cide to the Revemue Act of 1926,for use in his classes. It perhaps served the purpose for which it was written.However, the book this reviewer would have wanted to write is this one,so well and ably done by Joyce Stanley and Richard Kilcullen.The practitioner who shies away from this book because it may seem ele-mentary, in that it is "only" a guide and discusses only matters of generalinterest, is missing something.BENJAmIN HARROW.*WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS. Second Edition by Stuart Gerry Brown. NewYork: Harper & Brothers, 1948. Pp. xi, 396, index. $2.75.In these days of seminars on semantics, it is interesting to find an attemptto bring together the basic documents for the study of the meaning and im-plication of a word. As Mr. Stuart Gerry Brown points out in his thoughtfulintroduction to this casebook on the American idea of democracy, it is tooeasy to use a word for its effect on the hearer, instead of as a means of com-munication, or definition of ideas.Semanticists would call democracy a rather high order abstraction; if theyare right, the dictionary definitions will be of little help towards understandingthe meaning of the word. The express purpose of this little book is to collectthe materials for a more extended study of the American idea of "democracy,"beginning, in fact, with the Mayflower Declaration. We are given the docu-ments setting up the government machinery designed to ensure democracy andits continuance (or prevent its undue extension), including not only the Con-stitution,' but the Articles of Confederation, 2 the Massachusetts Bill of Rights,3* Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law.1 P. 76.2 P. 58.3 P. 52.ST. JOHN'S LAW REVIEWand the Hartford Constitution. 4 We find also the debates that preceded thiscountry's first great internecine struggle,5 and are refreshingly reminded thatour grandfathers rationalized, or translated, this latter conflict (which we arenowadays told was essentially economic) into a battle of ways of definingdemocracy.It is curious that we often find much less verbiage and discussion of "gen-eral principles" in contemporary political documents than in the eighteenth andnineteenth century pronouncements. Thus President Truman in his proclama-tion granting independence to the Philippines uses scarcely more words thanare necessary to effect his purpose. 6The author gives gratifying recognition to the dual role of the UnitedStates Supreme Court: at once the guardian (if partly self-constituted) of theconstitutional safeguards of democratic institutions, and the most articulate andauthoritative expounder of the basic ideals and concepts behind them. But itis to be wished that the selection of judicial opinions had been wider. If thedebates between Webster and Calhoun over states' rights are worthy of ex-tensive treatment (though "lots of Webster" and some even here, is "fustian")7why omit the more contemporary, and hardly less heated argument over ad-ministrative law, over the impact of government on the individual? BothHughes' prevailing and Cardozo's dissenting opinion in the "Hot Oil" case 8are certainly relevant. If the Supreme Court majority later became morefriendly to "new deal" legislation, it should never be forgotten that basicsafeguards were written into such laws in deference to these and later opinions.9A criticism of the book, in fact, is that while up to the 1880's the docu-ments appear to reflect contrasting points of view, the later quotations tend torepresent only the prevailing opinion. It can be argued that while democracymeans, in the first analysis, majority rule, there is a necessary implication thatthe minority must be heard, and at least respected; for if the minority ideasshould, by the passage of time or change of conditions or otherwise, come torepresent majority opinion, they must be given a chance to prevail, or democ-racy has ceased to be-has, in effect, committed suicide. Our institutions can-not be interpreted in such a way as to admit the seeds of their own destruction.But if the idea or abstraction "democracy" is bound to supporting gov-ernmental institutions, and to ideas of a balance between state, economic, in-4p. 11.5 See famous speech on the slavery question made in 1850 by John C.Calhoun, p. 164; Daniel Webster (Seventh of March speech, 1850), p. 183;Abraham Lincoln (House Divided speech, 1858), p. 232.6 Proclamation of Philippine Independence, July 4, 1946, p. 382.Judge Learned Hand, quoted in The New Yorker, June 10, 1944, p. 18.8 Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U. S. 388, 79 L. ed. 446 (1935);cf. Mr. Chief Justice Hughes' opinions in Morgan v. United States, 298 U. S.468, 80 L. ed. 1288 (1936), and Morgan v. United States, 304 U. S. 1, 82 L. ed.1129 (1938); the question of the judicial temperament might also be con-sidered, as in Clark's concurring and dissenting opinion in N.L.R.B. v. BaldwinLocomotive Works, 128 F. 2d 39, 51 (C. C. A. 3d 1942).9 Cf. the court review provisions of the Emergency Price Control Act of1942, 56 STAT. 31 (1942), 50 U. S. C. App. § 924 (1946); and the Adminis-trative Procedure Act, 60 STAT. 241, 5 U. S. C. § 1006 (1946).[ VOL. 23BOOK REVIEWSdividual and geographical rights on one hand, and popular majorities on theother, it is less clearly bound up with ideas of independence and liberty; 10these may be more or less unrelated abstractions. Freedom from British rulemay have been an essential condition to the inception of the American demo-cratic idea; but arguably Thomas Paine's "fight talk" to the Continentalarmies (included in this book) 1' could have served equally well to encouragethe troops of a would-be South American dictator. The words used in ourConstitution may have influenced the idiom of the Latin American constitu-tions, yet few of these latter, during the nineteenth century, made much con-tribution to our ideas; and the Monroe Doctrine,12 burdened as it is with im-plications of hemispheric defense and the balance of power, is only secondarilya declaration of a democratic ideal. Possibly Mr. Brown wished to suggest,by including President Monroe's statement of the Doctrine, that democracy,in American thinking, has never been dynamic in its relations with othernations. Aside from a few ideologically dubious episodes such as the Mexicanand Spanish American Wars, this non-aggressive attitude is apparently sodeeply ingrained in American thinking that it may not be separable from theabstraction "democracy." Furthermore, a rival abstraction is being built upby the Cominform which, judging by its actions, believes in imposing itsinstitutions on non-communist countries. It is helpful to have in one volumethe documentation at least of one of these two ideas of democracy.Interesting sidelights are Carl Schurz's moving statement of the meaningof America to an immigrant filled with the idealism of 1848,23 and Turner'sstudy 14 of the interaction (or "feed back")1 5 of the frontier on our institu-tions. Some of the selections from Franklin D. Roosevelt's papers seem tobe chosen more for intrinsic historical importance1 6 than as expressions ofthe late President's philosophy of democracy.The book contains a number of documents not easily available to thegeneral r-ader and is a timely source book for anyone interested in trends inAmerican and world government.There is an elaborate index.STowELL ROUNDS.*10 "Liberty" seems to be a word representing not one but several differentabstractions. An idea of an individual liberty, in varying amounts, seems toform part of the complex of ideas that makes up American democracy.Cf. To Secure These Rights, p. 391, and The Four Freedoms, p. 362, and JudgeLearned Hand's speech made at I Am an American Day ceremonies, New YorkCity, 1944, quoted in The New Yorker, June 10, 1944, p. 18.21The Cris, 1776, p. 44; much of the quotation from Common Sense,pp. 26-33, seems irrelevant.22 P. 147.13 Famous address entitled True Americanism made in 1859, p. 236.14 See excerpt from essay by Turner, The Frontier in American History,p. 270.15See WIENER, CYBERNEcS (1948).16 Cf. the War Message of December 8, 1941, p. 373.* Member of the New York bar.19491

We Hold These Truths (2nd Ed.)(Book Review)

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We Hold These Truths (2nd Ed.)(Book Review)

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