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Judicial Conservatism and Protestant Faith: The Case of Justice David J. Brewer
Linda Przybyszewski
The most solemn and profound truth that man can utter and which has the greatest influence on his life, is expressed in four words. There is a God.
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| —Justice Joseph P. Bradley, "Truth" |
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No one is so thoughtless as not to sometimes ask of himself what would befall mankind if the solid fabric of belief on which their morality has hitherto rested, or at least been deemed by them to rest, were suddenly to break up and vanish under the influence of new views of nature, as the ice-fields split and melt when they have been floated down into a warmer sea.
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| —James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1897 |
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| On September 22, 1887, John Stewart Kennedy demanded that the collector of U.S. customs at the port of New York take action against the Church of the Holy Trinity. Kennedy accused the church of having violated the Alien Contract Labor Act of 1885, which made it "unlawful for any person, company, partnership, or corporation ... to prepay the transportation, or in any way assist or encourage the importation or migration of any alien ... under contract ... to perform labor or service of any kind in the United States." Labor unions had championed the law to prevent employers from contracting with cheap unskilled workers, but Holy Trinity had contracted with E. Walpole Warren, an Englishman, to be its pastor. Kennedy had nothing against Holy Trinity or Warren; he even gave the church a check to pay the thousand-dollar fine, should it be imposed. An advocate of immigration and himself an immigrant turned wealthy financier, Kennedy calculated that nothing was more likely to publicize his objections to the law than asking his adopted country's courts to enforce it against a man of the cloth.1 |
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The New York Times editorial columns of 1887 and 1888 grew sarcastic over the case of the "'Coolie' Clergyman" who was "a pernicious and unlawful immigrant, a kind of human dynamite." The poorly written act did apply; "the law is no respecter of parsons." Not even the United States district attorney prosecuting the case in May 1888 approved of the law's application to the Reverend Warren, but the statute excepted only actors, artists, lecturers, singers, or personal servants. The attorney for the church claimed that the act violated the First Amendment's guarantee of free exercise of religion, but the circuit court judge ruled in favor of the government while admitting that "it would not be indulging a violent supposition to assume that no legislative body in this country would have advisedly enacted a law framed so as to cover a case like the present."2 |
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When the case came before the United States Supreme Court on January 7, 1892, almost all the justices asked questions that indicated they thought the law applied to the case. Justice Stephen J. Field noted that the act prohibited the importation of persons under contract to perform any service or labor and asked the church's counsel, "Don't we [the justices] perform service here?" When Seaman Miller, Holy Trinity's counsel, argued that to apply the law to Warren was an absurd statutory construction, Field's nephew David J. Brewer, also a justice, asked, "Is it not just as much of an absurdity to prevent the incoming of an honest laborer as of an Episcopalian minister?" The assistant attorney general grew so confident of success that he submitted the case on the brief alone without bothering to make an oral argument. But upon reflection, the brethren decided that Counselor Miller had a point. A month later a unanimous Court, speaking through Justice Brewer, refused to apply the Alien Contract Labor Act to Warren.3 |
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