Book Review

Sarah Hart Brown's Standing against Dragons examines the careers of three white liberal lawyers--dissenters from the political mainstream, champions of the First Amendment--who lived in the American South during the era of the cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. For most of their lives, John Moreno Coe (1896–1973) lived in Florida, Clifford Judkins Durr (1899–1975) in Alabama, and Benjamin Eugene Smith (1927–1976) in Louisiana.	1
The three men, each left-of-center-non-Communist, but not anti-Communist, were heavily involved in the National Lawyers Guild (Durr and Coe served as president in the 1950s) and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Their politics overlapped in 1948 when Coe and Smith promoted the presidential campaign of Progressive candidate Henry Wallace, as did Durr's wife Virginia. Their careers intersected in 1954 when all three appeared with clients in New Orleans where the House Un-American Activities Committee was conducting hearings as it investigated the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Their professional biographies illuminate the law of civil rights and civil liberties, the culture of the American legal profession during the Cold War, and the legal and political environment of the South and the nation during those years.	2
The book is a labor of love, and Brown clearly admires the trio. She mourns the changing political culture of the late 1940s, as "popular front" groups came under increasing suspicion, and maverick southerners like her trio "and their nonconformist clients faced formidable opposition from a growing antiradical consensus, North and South . . . that imperiled dissent and frustrated reform" (55).	3
Aliens and traitors--especially white southerners who opposed segregation--seemed to be everywhere, their opponents thought. Coe's clients included men with names like Shantzek, Scheiner, Schlafrock, and Smolikoff. For his intrepid efforts, Coe and his family faced ostracism, and he faced threats of disbarment and indictment, as did the other two. To tell the story, Brown mines a remarkable range of unpublished sources, including interviews that she conducted with their colleagues and relatives as well as FBI reports she obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.	4
Brown notes that in the era of Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955)--at the same time that the Supreme Court was moving to the left on matters of race, encouraging efforts to equalize opportunity on the racial front--an arm of Congress was dogging white southerners who were pushing in that direction. Moreover, the same Supreme Court that insisted pretty reliably on expanding liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment often took a narrow approach to the First Amendment. Brown's three men emphasized the civil liberties dimension of the quest for freedom, generally seeing even the Civil Rights Movement in terms of freedom of political expression.	5
Brown's context might be said to be the Jim Crow South as it related to Cold War America. Brown's trio disapproved of Cold War liberalism, had difficulty seeing it as having much application to the South, and even saw it as an impediment to racial change. The global rivalry with the Soviet Union, while it spurred changes in the nation's racial policies at home, also legitimated an anti-Communism that segregationists deployed as a weapon against southern proponents, especially white proponents, of racial equality in the South. Clifford Durr spoke of the South's intolerance of diversity and its resistance to change as only a variation of "the national disease" (180).	6
Brown betrays a delicious, if tragic, sense of the contradictions she reveals. John Satterfield, a leading Mississippi lawyer, served as president of the American Bar Association; wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover of his wish to expel from his organization any lawyer affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild; and "advised Governor Ross Barnett to defy the Fifth Circuit court order to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi" (180). Mississippi's U.S. Senator James O. Eastland's "fervent, nationalistic Americanism survived discordantly alongside his dogmatic belief in the right of states to defy or ignore the constitution or unacceptable American laws" (92).	7
As good as the book often is, it could and should have been even better. Some characters get mentioned by name without being introduced, while countless others get introduced without being named. The same goes for various court cases, with some named but not identified, others mentioned but not named or, if named, nowhere cited. Characterizing liberals' drive to abolish the poll tax in order "to democratize the electoral process" (35), Brown reveals no sense that it had to do with altering the balance of power in national politics, whatever its implications for life in the South. Contrary to what we read here, no Supreme Court decisions were "mandating integration of graduate schools" in the late 1930s (8), Theodore Roosevelt did not run for the presidency in 1901, and Khrushchev denounced Stalin and invaded Hungary in 1956, not 1958. These kinds of lapses mar a fine book that appears to have been published shortly before it was finished.	8
A theme that emerges late in the period covered here is the vital relationship of civil rights lawyers, not just to the well-known test cases, but to the day-to-day activities of civil rights workers in the Deep South in the 1960s. What remains missing from the literature is an extended examination of African American lawyers in the South during the era that Brown explores. Focusing on black lawyers, not white, people who emphasized the Fourteenth Amendment rather than the First, such a study might include such figures as Oliver W. Hill or Samuel W. Tucker in Virginia and A. P. Tureaud in Louisiana. It might draw on such works, not cited here though each author is mentioned several times, as Len Holt's 1965 book about the Mississippi Freedom Summer and Fred Gray's 1995 autobiography describing his work in Alabama. Perhaps Sarah Hart Brown or some other able historian will take an approach like Brown's and apply it to that task.	9
Peter Wallenstein Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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