This one is going to be long.
Frankfurter really didn't like the more liberal on the court, particularly Douglas and Black, but also Warren.
I’m impressed, Nathan! I’m pleased you remember that from a post of mine from a little over a year and a half ago.
First, I’ll address Black v. Frankfurter and Black v. Jackson.
Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter had long and intense arguments with one another - both behind the scenes within the Court and in “public,” with their written opinions - about judicial philosophy and the meaning of certain parts of the Constitution. But those were only intellectual arguments, and they were not indications of personal hatred. Behind the scenes, they got along with each other very well, and they respected each other’s intelligence a great deal. They both referred to one another as one of the smartest members of the Court.
Yes, at one point in the mid-1940’s, Black and Robert Jackson had a very nasty feud with each other, and that feud was leaked into the press. It proved to be very embarrassing to the Court as a whole, and even President Truman commented that the Court was turning itself into a mess (or so I remember reading somewhere). But the feud did not last long, and after passions and tempers were spent, they resumed a cordial relationship with one another.
The best answer to give to the OP is that the hatred between William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter was the most intense and longest-lasting hatred that has probably ever occurred between any two Justices who served together. Their feud with each other started almost immediately, the first year they served together on the Court, and it lasted almost fully 23 years until Frankfurter retired. Both Frankfurter and Douglas came onto the Court with no prior experience as judges, but they had both been law school professors. Frankfurter spent about 25 years teaching at Harvard, whereas Douglas taught at Columbia for one year, and at Yale for several years. Before their appointment in 1939, they knew about each other, probably, by reputation alone, and what they knew of each other, they respected a whole lot. Almost everything I’m going to quote below comes from pages 90-93 of a book called
Of Power and Right (OPAR), published in 1992. The authors, Howard Ball and Phillip J. Cooper, documented almost every single quote they used in the book, and I’m going to include the sources that they documented as I quote those authors.
First of all, the differences of opinion about judicial philosophy and interpretations of the Constitution that Black and Frankfurter had with one another also carried over into the disagreements between Douglas and Frankfurter. “But the origin of Douglas’s and Frankfurter’s deep-seated animosity went beyond important jurisprudential differences. Temperamentally, they were opposites. From the beginning of their close association as justices, the two men simply grated on each other’s nerves. … Beneath it all, there was a ‘real personal antagonism.’ (
Super Chief, by Bernard Schwartz, p. 53) … Their mutual dislike was so bitter that for extended periods of time the two men did not speak to each other. (
Mr. Justice and Mrs. Black, Hugo L. Black and Elizabeth Black, p.102) … Although in 1974 Douglas claimed that there had been no ‘war’ between him and Frankfurter (letter by Douglas to Michael E. Parrish, dated Dec. 16, 1974, from Douglas’s private papers), the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Frankfurter and Douglas, two important American jurists whose decades-long bitter debates (indeed, whose ‘wars’) contributed a great deal to our understanding of constitutionalism in a modern democratic society, could not tolerate each other. Intentionally and unintentionally, they went out of their way to harass each other for over two decades.” (OPAR)
The animosity began the first year they were together on the Court. The Court had a case called
Board of Commissioners v. United States, and at the first conference of the justices, they voted 8 to 1 how to resolve that dispute. Black was the only dissenter, and Frankfurter started writing the majority opinion. But Douglas decided, before long, to switch his vote and join the dissent by Black. Frankfurter asked him why he changed his mind, and the only answer Douglas gave was that he didn’t think Black should be all alone. That response made Frankfurter furious, and he told his law clerk that Douglas was an “absolute cynic.” (
The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection, Bruce Allen Murphy, p. 265) Eventually Frankfurter declared that Douglas was one of “two completely evil men I have ever met.” (No source.) In 1954, Frankfurter wrote to Judge Learned Hand that Douglas was “the most cynical, shameless, immoral character I’ve ever known.” (Schwartz,
ibid)
Just as Frankfurter thought of Douglas as evil, Douglas likewise thought that Frankfurter was arrogant and condescending. “He was one of the most arrogant men Douglas had ever met, and this after a career on Wall Street and dealing with corporate lawyers.” (OPAR) Condescending? Early on, Frankfurter wrote a memo to Douglas to critique an opinion that Douglas had recently written, and the memo began, “I must say it is bad for the both of us that we are no longer professors. Because if you were still a professor, you would have written a different elaboration and if I were still a professor, I would get several lectures out of what you have written.” (Memo from FF to WOD, dated Dec. 2, 1941, in Frankfurter’s private papers.) Among reasons that Douglas hated Frankfurter was that the latter so often took too much time explaining his views during conference sessions of the Court (
i.e., when the Court would deliberate in its private chamber like a jury). As Justice Potter Stewart recalled, “Felix, if he was really interested in a case, would speak for fifty minutes, no more or less, because that was the length of the lecture at the Harvard Law School.” (Schwartz,
ibid, p. 39) To Douglas, what was worse than just the length of Felix’s lectures was also how else he would behave. “Frankfurter indulged in histrionics in Conference. He often came in with piles of books, and on his turn to talk, would pound the table, read from the books, throw them around and create a great disturbance. … At times, when another was talking, he would break in, make a derisive comment and shout down the speaker.” (
Court Years, Douglas, p. 22) Douglas said that Frankfurter had always been “divisive”: “At Harvard. On the Court. He liked to see people argue. He was Machievellian.” (
Independent Journey: the Life of William O. Douglas, James F. Simon, p.9) Justice Stewart shared the story that, on at least one occasion, after one of Frankfurter’s fifty minute lectures, “Bill would say in a quiet voice: ‘When I came into this conference, I agreed with the conclusion that Felix had just announced; but he’s just talked me out of it’ – which used to drive Felix Frankfurter crazy.” (Schwartz,
ibid, p.53)
Among the reasons Frankfurter hated Douglas was that the latter would often go to the Democratic National Conventions and seek to get himself placed in nomination for Vice-President or even for President. It happened at least in 1944, 1948, and 1952, and it always made Frankfurter angry. Although I haven’t seen any evidence that the two men discussed that issue, I can easily imagine how a conversation between them would go:
Frankfurter: You should resign from the Court, immediately. I don’t mean that you should wait to find out if you get nominated and then resign. Since you are campaigning for national office right now, you have a duty to resign right now.
Douglas: Why do I have any less of a right to run for national office than, say, Charles Evans Hughes?
Frankfurter: That example proves my point: Hughes did not go to the 1916 Republican National Convention seeking to run for President. He didn’t attend that convention at all. The party nominated him in absentia, because they thought he could re-unite the factions that had split between Taft and Roosevelt, and because they believed his career in office would make him an outstanding President of the United States. Once he received word that he had been nominated, he sent the convention a telegram saying that, although he hadn’t sought to be nominated, he accepted the nomination, and he resigned from the Court. You are nothing like Hughes. You’re running for office in a way that Hughes did not. Hughes, while serving as a member of the Court, did not harbor political ambitions; you do. That’s disgraceful.
Douglas: Oh, golly gee! How awful it is to have ambition! That’s totally un-American, isn’t it?
Frankfurter: It’s not un-American, but for a sitting judge with judicial responsibilities, it’s injudicious.
Douglas: Even if a comparison between myself and Hughes doesn’t exactly match, there have been previous members of the Court who ran for national office the way I am. Back in the Nineteenth Century, John McLean did it more than once, as did Stephen Field. I’m no worse than them.
Frankfurter: They were as wrong then as you are now. Three wrongs do not make a right.
(Again, I’m not saying that’s the conversation they actually had, but I imagine it could have occurred that way.)
In 1954, Douglas wrote a memo that he sent to Frankfurter which said, “Today at Conference I asked you a question concerning [a memorandum opinion Frankfurter had written]. The question was not answered. An answer was refused, rather insolently. This was so far as I recall the first time one member of the Conference refused to answer another member on a matter of Court business. We all know what a great burden your long discourses are. So I am not complaining. But I do register a protest at your degradation of the Conference and its deliberations.” (memo from WOD to FF, dated May 29, 1954, Douglas’s private papers) Six years later, Douglas drafted a memo to all his colleagues -- which ultimately was not sent – in which he said he would no longer attend conference sessions because of
the continuous violent outbursts against me … by my Brother Frankfurter. [They] give me great concern. They do not bother me. For I have been on the hustings for too long. But he’s an ill man; and these violent outbursts create a fear in my heart that one of them may be his end. I do not consciously do anything to annoy him. But twenty-odd years have shown that I am a disturbing symbol in his life. His outbursts against me are increasing in intensity. In the interest of his health and long life I have reluctantly concluded to participate in no more conferences while he is on the Court. (Memo by Douglas dated Nov. 21, 1960, Douglas’s private papers.)(Authors Ball and Cooper speculate that it was probably Chief Justice Warren who persuaded Douglas not to send that memo to the Brethren.)
Douglas was the only member of the Court who did not attend Frankfurter's funeral in 1965. (Simon,
ibid, p.217; Black and Black,
ibid - "we arrived at 3:00. All the Court except Bill and Joanie Douglas were there.")
About a year and a half ago, when I posted a long comment about Justice Douglas on another board, I said that I think of him as a preening, pretentious hypocrite. What do you think about him saying “I do not consciously do anything to annoy [Frankfurter]”? In the 1974 letter that he sent to Michael Parrish, he said, “One would err greatly to conclude that Frankfurter and I were at war. We clashed often at the idiological [
sic] level but our personal relations were excellent and I always enjoyed being with him.” Yeah, right.
Again, the winner for the worst case of mutual hatred that lasted the longest was, hands down, between Douglas and Frankfurter.
