Finding "the More Satisfactory Type of Jurymen": Class and the Construction of Federal Juries,
1926–1954

M. Catherine Miller

In 1926 the press and Progressive reformers were stunned when a federal jury, after hearing lurid testimony about the exchange of valises full of cash, acquitted Albert Fall and Edward Doheny of bribery in the Teapot Dome oil-leasing controversy. Certain that Fall and Doheny were guilty, commentators debated the outcome of the threeweek-long deliberation: Was the prosecution inadequate? Was the conspiracy statute faulty? Was the trial too long delayed? Ultimately they seized on what the former secretary of the navy Josephus Daniels called the "inferiority complex of the jury."1 In the Nation, reporter Paul Y. Anderson analyzed the FallDoheny jury and found it composed of ordinary men—a teamster, a steamfitter's apprentice, an electrician, a railroad clerk, a cigar clerk, a grocery clerk, a bank clerk, a newsstand proprietor. Except for one or two, Anderson argued, these men lacked the intelligence, experience, and maturity (seven of the twelve were in their twenties) to interpret the evidence and understand the crime at issue. They had been "yanked from shop, counter, truck and desk" and then "their bewildered eyes and confused ears were assaulted with a huge volume of oral and documentary evidence, much of it highly contradictory." The only juror who fought for conviction was the one "professional man" on the jury, an architect "whose intelligence and educational advantages" allowed him to sift through the confusion in the manner Anderson had. But this man, Anderson lamented, had been unable to persuade his fellows, some of whom accepted the exchange of money as normal business and governmental practice.2	1
At the core of this critique was the idea that the social class of a juror was important, and for the next two decades that idea impelled efforts to reform the class composition of federal jury pools. Reform efforts were centered in the Southern District of New York, which, due to its location in Manhattan, the financial center of the nation, had the busiest and most important of the federal district courts; actions there became models for courts thoughout the nation. Faced with a largely immigrant population and a militant working class, federal judges and allies in the Federal Grand Jury Association (FGJA) set up a classsensitive mechanism that recruited wealthy jurors and screened out those whose class, race, ethnicity, or education rendered them "unfit." These elite reformers defined a fair and representative jury as one that understood the needs of the financial community, and they consciously attempted to mold the federal jury system to meet this goal. Although rejecting as corrupt efforts to change the law for mere personal advantage, reformers did not see the law as autonomous in either a philosophical or a practical sense, nor were they content to accept the legal system as a "mirror of society." Rather, they saw law as the product of class interests, and they sought a mechanism to ensure that law reflected the needs of their class in a very immediate, pragmatic sense.3	2
While elite reformers invoked images of efficiency and competence, other groups raised calls for inclusion. Middleclass women demanded to serve on juries as a right of equal citizenship. Workingclass radicals and radical lawyers, who agreed with elite reformers that class marked a person's concept of justice, demanded juries of workers to ensure fair treatment and marshaled the language of citizenship to challenge racial and class exclusions.	. . .