In 1984, when I was a Nieman fellow at Harvard College, I asked Maury Maverick Jr. to come to Cambridge talk to 14 American and 14 international journalists about his late-in-life career as a firebrand opinion columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. One cold March morning, Maury arrived at the airport in Boston and demanded to be taken immediately to Granary Burial Ground where his distant cousin, Samuel Augustus Maverick, is buried with four other victims of the Boston Massacre in 1770. Maury was 63-years-old, half-blind in one eye and unsteady on his feet. I locked my arm in his and led him to the narrow grave, situated only four feet from the grave of Samuel Adams. I could feel Maury’s body trembling next to mine as he stood at the foot of the grave of his cousin, an apprentice carpenter, who at 17 was killed by a British soldier in the battle that preceded the American Revolution. Maury lovingly fingered the name of his cousin, and sighed: “Here lies my cousin Sam, a true son of liberty.” It was an operatic moment--only one of many during our 30-year friendship. To this day, I don’t know which of us was more overcome with emotion: Maury or me.
Later that night I was surprised when Maury took his place at the lectern and told the crowd of journalists that although he loved his career as a journalist, journalism was not the subject he had in mind. He said he considered journalism an important vehicle for defense of the Bill of Rights, but the law Maury said is the ultimate defense against tyranny. “I never made any money practicing law,” Maury said. “But if I dropped dead tonight, I know that during my career as a civil rights lawyer, I did something for my country and I had an exciting time doing it.”
It certainly was true that money was not his primary motive. Once in the mid-1980s, Maury made $27,000 in a single year practicing law--a lifetime record--thanks largely to a referral fee from another lawyer. Most years, he made between $10,000 and $13,000 a year. Arthur Gochman, one of his former law partners, said that Maury was averse to making money as a lawyer. Every three or four years, his secretary cleaned out his desk drawer, discovered a few undeposited checks from clients, and put the money in Maury’s account. His motive for practicing law was two-fold: it directly connected him to his cousin’s Sam battle for liberty and indeed helped him earn his individual stripes as a “maverick”--the word his clan famously contributed to the American language--and second, the law helped Maury become the man his namesake father willed him to be.
In Cambridge that night, Maury was animated. “Don’t give up on the courts,” he told us, imploringly. I saw him the way he must have looked in 1950 when as a young, strong member of the Texas Legislature he played brilliantly to journalists as he fought unsuccessfully against McCarthyism. During his six years in the legislature, he not only voted against 18 anti-Communist bills, including one that called for the death penalty for any known member of the Communist Party, he knew how to play to the press gallery as well. Like the time he introduced a motion to substitute the name of Mickey Mouse on a resolution inviting U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy to address the Texas Legislature, telling reporters if Texas lawmakers were going to “invite a rat to speak, it should at least invite a good rat.” His motion failed but the press loved him. All those years later, the Nieman class of 1984 loved him too. He received a standing ovation after his talk.
Over the years, Maury wrote me letters and turned over some of his many files, including several about his favorite legal cases. Looking over those papers now, I see that I should not have been surprised by what he said those many years ago in Cambridge. His love for the law runs through the documents like a vivid red line. For instance, in a letter he wrote to me on May 26, 1978, Maury said that the day before a young boy had come into his office, claiming that he’d been beaten at a foster-care facility. The boy wanted legal help from Maury. “May be a god dam little liar,” Maury wrote of the boy, “but it was so sad.”
The boy-in-trouble in 1978 was reminiscent of his first big case: Elder v. Aetna Casuality and Surety Co., which was tried at the district court level in the fall of 1950. Billy Elder, a 16 year-old delivery boy for the San Antonio Express-News, was injured while delivering newspapers and sought worker’s compensation for his injuries. In his notes about that case, Maury described the situation in colorful language: “The dirty low down thing newspapers did was to get these children to sign contracts (or their parents) with a lot of fancy language in it so that the kids would be classified as ‘independent contractors’ rather than ‘employee.’ This meant that the kid would not get workmen’s compensation, hospital etc. Kids were often hurt out on their newspaper routes.”
In the fall of 1950, Maury was just a boy lawyer himself. He’d attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and graduated from St. Mary’s School of Law in 1949 and joined his father’s law firm, Maverick, Putman and Putman. The firm was located in a suite in the Smith Young Tower, later named the Tower Life Building, still an iconic skyscraper on the banks of the San Antonio River in downtown San Antonio. The Elder case was tried by Harold Putman at the trial level. “Harold did a grand job, but we lost,” Maury wrote in his notes. The firm appealed to the Texas Supreme Court and Maury wrote the appellate brief himself--his first one ever. The Supreme Court ruled that Elder was entitled to worker’s compensation. “This was my first big victory,” he wrote, “and it was a grand feeling to know that I had helped children all over Texas.” With that victory, Maury was on his way.
Often, I try to imagine what Maury’s life would have been like if he’d stayed in California and not returned to Texas. He always talked fondly about his years in California. His father wanted him to attend law school in Texas and eventually Maury complied and transferred to St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. Those few years in California provided Maury with psychological space from the model of his father’s legacy as a crusading leader of the New Deal in Congress. “I always knew that I had a famous name and needed to put it to good use,” Maury told me on several occasions. “But I felt it as a burden, too.” At Loyola, there was talk among civil rights professors about how to challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine set in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. It was just after World War II and Maury felt that a new era in civil rights law was dawning. The president of the law school was Father Joseph Donovan, a Jesuit, whom Maury admired for his intelligence and compassion. In his notes, he called Donovan a “good fellow.” While at the law school, Maury studied the small claims court that was in place in California and thought it was a progressive idea, a way, as he put it, “to let laymen try their own cases without a lawyer for smaller debts owned them or injuries done them.” When he was elected to the Texas legislature in 1950 Maury introduced a bill creating a small claims court in Texas that was modeled after the California law. The bill passed and that’s how Texas got its small claims court.
In 1954, during his second term as a member of the Texas Legislature, Maury took the case of I.H. “Sporty” Harvey, an African-American boxer who challenged a 1933 state law banning professional boxing matches between blacks and whites. Earlier, Maury and a half-dozen other legislators had filed a bill in the Texas house to repeal the law that segregated boxing. It was killed in committee. Harvey, who’d been a promising heavyweight boxer in the fifties, came to see Maury and asked him to take his case. He had fought white men in Mexico and had wanted to do the same in Texas. Naturally, the ban insured that every champ of every weight division was a white man. Sporty was poor, and to him the issue was more about money than civil rights. The purse was larger in the white ring than in the black. Maury took Sporty’s case, filed it in Austin and approached it in his usual passionate style. “This is a case about Sporty Harvey not being able to pick up grocery money,” he wrote. “He wants to fight in Technicolor.”
Instead of arguing that the Texas law was unfair, Maury continued to argue that law denied his client a chance to make a decent living. The attorney general of Texas made the case about race--he said if blacks were permitted to box whites, there would be race riots in Texas. To counter that, Maury put two local sports writers--Dick Peeples of the San Antonio Express-News and Harold Scherwitz of the San Antonio Light--to testify on Harvey’s behalf. He lost at the state court level, but won at the Court of Civil Appeals in Austin.
That night in Cambridge, Maury told the Nieman fellows that civil rights lawyers from the NAACP were furious with him for not filing the case in a federal court because they knew Harvey had a better chance in federal court. But Maury wanted to win civil liberties cases in state court because he wanted to change the mind-set of Texas judges and juries. “I tell young lawyers to file civil rights cases in state courts, not just federal court. If we abandon the hard questions at the state level and always go to federal court, then we lose the chance to make change at the state level,” Maury said.
The Harvey case also made him reconsider his support for the process of electing judges. Jack Roberts, the trial judge who initially ruled against Harvey, later told him that he would have ruled in his favor if he’d been a federal judge and not subject to reelection. “Someone in our society must be in a position to say no to churches, labor, big business,” Maury said. “Someone needs to be bullet-proof from being thrown out of office by a popularity poll.”
In 1963, Maury took a case that would seal his reputation as one of the country’s best-known civil rights lawyers. Texas law enforcement officials, acting on a 1954 Texas anti-communist law, raided the San Antonio home of John W. Stanford, an alleged communist who operated a bookstore out of his home. The police seized 14 cartons of papers, including his marriage certificate, bills, receipts, as well as writings and books by Karl Marx, Jean Paul Satre, Pope John Paul XXIII and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
Maury argued that the authorities had no right to use a general search warrant to seize the papers of a suspected communist. Both Maury and Stanford received death threats. Later Maury said that during the district court trial he lived on the edge of panic. In the courtroom, plainclothesmen were planted to protect Maury and Stanford. At one particularly tense moment during the trial, Maury stood at the bench, directly in front of the judge, whose name was Solomon Caseb. The judge leaned over and whispered to Maury, “Please move to the left or right a few feet. If you get shot at now, I’ll get it right between the eyes.” Maury was so terrified that his voice momentarily left him. He had to go into a conference room and lie down to recover.
Maury took the Stanford case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. During oral arguments, the justices were particularly dismayed to learn that a dissenting opinion by Black, a member of the court, had been seized in the police’s search of Stanford’s home. Justice Potter Steward wanted to know if Justice Black’s opinion had been returned to Stanford by Texas law enforcement authorities.
“No, sir,” Maury told the justice. “I have high hopes they will read that opinion and grow in stature.”
In his argument before the Supreme Court, Maury pointed out that all the confiscated books and letters, even Black’s opinion, had been stamped “SEDITIOUS” by the police. Upon hearing this, Chief Justice Earl Warren stood up and asked: “They did what to my brother Black?” Maury later said that he saw Justice William O. Douglas laugh and poke Black in the ribs, but Justice Black was grim-faced.
The court sided with Maury, citing the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees against illegal search and seizure. In the History of the Supreme Court, the Federal Bar Association described the Stanford case as one of the most important but little known cases in the history of the United States.
Not much better known was that all through the 1970s, Maury was one of a handful of lawyers in America who represented conscientious objectors. In his notes, Maury gave two reasons for why lawyers were reluctant to touch the cases. “No. 1: No money it,” wrote Maury. “No. 2: They were terribly unpopular cases. For example, I would walk into federal court with a pimply faced, post puberty boy who didn’t want to kill or be killed and it was as if I had walked in with a murderer.” Even Maury had to be coaxed into the job. As a veteran of World War II, Maury said he was reluctant to take the cases. But in time the young conscientious objectors convinced him that the war in Vietnam was what Maury called a “Third World revolution against Western colonization.” One of his clients gave Maury a book by Robert Tarbor’s entitled The War of the Flea. The book described America’s efforts in Vietnam to a large dog trying to win a war with fleas that were sucking its blood dry. He sent the book to President Lyndon Johnson, a friend of the Maverick family, hoping it would convince LBJ of the folly of the Vietnam War. He received no reply, but from then on that book remained one of Maury’s favorites.
Maury believed his most case involving conscientious objectors was his 1971 Helwick vs. Laird. Helwick was an Army medical corpsmen who developed strong anti-war feelings once he’d joined the Army and discovered that he and his peers were treating the wounded only so they could go back to Vietnam. When he applied for conscientious objector status, the Army denied it on the basis that Helwick wasn’t opposed to war when he joined the Army. However, Maury argued that it was only when Helwick realized that his job as a medic was to put men back into combat to kill that he developed strong anti-war feelings. The district judge agreed.
According to Maury’s notes, the second most important conscientious objector case was Pitcher vs. Laird. Pitcher was the son of a Methodist minister--“a big boy, over six feet, kind of beefy and still clumsy, as if he had just fallen out of a kangaroo’s pouch.” Maury lost at the district court level and then, pending a decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit, asked for a restraining order to keep him in San Antonio at Fort Sam Houston, the nation-wide center for conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. He lost the restraining order at the district court level and at the 5th Circuit. Maury then asked for an emergency stay from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Black granted the order pending a decision by the 5th Circuit. Eventually, the 5th Circuit ruled in favor of Pitcher’s request. “I always suspected that the Army would have gotten this kid in Vietnam and would send him down a combat trail and then the Viet Cong would kill the boy for them,” wrote Maury. “This is a harsh thing to say and I can’t prove it, but I suspected it and it filled me with apprehension for I felt that I wouldn’t merely be losing a law suit. That if I lost, the boy was really getting a death sentence.”
Maury attributed his success as a lawyer to the fact that he could embody a paradox: he could be angry at injustice but maintain a sense of humor. No matter how serious an issue --race relations, or First Amendment cases or the many cases he took on behalf of conscientious objectors--Maury was good at the law because it was his open window into the basic folly of this times. One of his favorite stories was about representing Madalyn Murray O’Hair, America’s most famous atheist, who was briefly jailed in San Antonio by the FBI. O’Hair had been in Mexico and the media heard a rumor she was pregnant without benefit of a husband. When Maury visited her in jail, he warned she might be asked about it by the local press. Sure enough, when she was released, she was asked if she was pregnant. “Boys,” she growled, “if I’m pregnant, there’s gonna be a new star in the east. You see, I had a hysterectomy.” Every time Maury told that story, he shook with laughter.
Yet when it came to the law and to the conduct of his private life, he was careful. In a note he wrote on Sept. 21, 1983, Maury warned that anyone engaged in religious or political dissent should watch what they do and say. “Always assume at any meeting (in unpopular times) which is set up to be critical of the government--that there will be an FBI informant. He or she could be a good friend. Don’t get cute in what you say. For example, if you jokingly say, ‘They ought to kill that guy’ it will be reported not as humor, but as serious intent. That does not look good in court later on. Do not get cute. Be serious, solemn, and dignified as possible under the circumstances.”
He often said that journalists and lawyers must live by the Jackie Robinson rule of life. Robinson, the first black player to make it to the big leagues, said that African Americans had to hit better, run better, and make no errors. Maury lived by that rule himself. He passed on a letter to me on Sept. 14, 1983 from Cynthia Ward, the secretary of the State bar of Texas. In the letter, Ward certified that “as the keeper of the records there had never, to my knowledge, been a formal complaint filed against you.” This note scribbled in Maury’s hand. “I am proud of the fact that no formal complaint has been filed against me before the grievance committee. I do not believe one has ever been since I became a lawyer in 1949.”
He had good reason to be proud. Most lawyers measure their success by the size of their fees, but Maury spent his career defending the underdog. The themes that he explored in his newspaper column were extensions of his ideas about justice. In his columns, he complained that the Democratic Party he loved had deserted its mission of defending the poor and the marginalized. As the Middle East became more polarized, Maury wrote in support of a Palestinian state. War was never far from his mind. His early memories were of his father crying out in pain at night because of wounds he suffered from World War I. As a little boy, Maury would sit by the side of the bath tub and wash his father’s wounds. “You must never be for war,” Maury Sr. told his son. “Never.”
Perhaps because of these early conversations with his father about what Maury called “big ideas,” Maury sought out daily banter about news events and ideas. For 30 years I talked to Maury almost every day. The telephone would ring at 8 or 8:30 a.m. “What’s going on in the world, kid?” Maury would ask. Most days, Maury ended our conversation with the same line. “Now get busy and do something brave for your country.” At 82, near the near of his life, Maury talked and wrote tirelessly about the need for enforcement of the War Powers Act and President Bush’s push for war in Iraq. “If Bush leads us into war, he’s leading us straight into a trap,” he told me before he was hospitalized in January 2003. On January 28, the day before President Bush’s state of the union message in which he made it clear that an American attack on Baghdad was imminent, I went to see Maury at the hospital. His kidneys were failing and he was in and out of consciousness. “Are we at war yet?” he asked me. “No,” I said, gratefully. “Not yet.” I wanted the man who spent his life battling for justice to die in peace.
—San Antonio, Texas
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