Herbert Brownell, Jr. (1904-1996)
Born in 1904, Herbert Brownell attended the University of his native Nebraska before going on to Yale Law School. He passed the bar in 1927 and immediately began practicing law in New York City. He quickly became very involved in the Republican Party, and was elected to the New York State Legislature in 1933. He managed the successful gubernatorial campaign of Thomas E. Dewey in 1942, as well as Dewey's unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1944 and 1948. Between 1944 and 1946, he also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Brownell was able to convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to retire from the military and run for President in 1952. Once elected, Eisenhower appointed Brownell Attorney General. In this office, Brownell played a major role in the nomination and appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where Warren would oversee and insure unanimity on the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. After the controversy surrounding the integration of Little Rock's Central High School in the fall of 1957, which was only made possible by the intervention of federal troops, Brownell came under pressure from southerners in Congress angered by his consistent support of civil rights. He stepped down from his position on November 8, but in later years would again serve his country as U.S. Representative to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in addition to numerous other civic offices. He died of cancer in 1996.
Civil Rights Era
Brownell was responsible for developing and presenting the Eisenhower administration's position on Brown v. Board of Education to the Court. President Eisenhower was not prepared to state officially that the federal government believed segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, but Brownell was permitted to state his own opinion as Attorney General. When the question was put to him, Brownell stated that he believed such segregation to be, in fact, unconstitutional. In 1956, Brownell authored a civil rights bill to be presented to Congress. This bill would (1) create a bipartisan Civil Rights Commission, (2) expand the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department into a Civil Rights Division, (3) allow the Attorney General to secure court injunctions in civil rights cases and move such cases from state to federal courts, and (4) grant the Justice Department greater power to enforce voting rights. "Part III" became the most controversial, and it was equated by Georgia Senator Richard Russell with "another reconstruction at bayonet point of a peaceful and patriotic South." Part III was stricken from what became the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first federal civil rights legislation, to be passed, indeed, since reconstruction.
Bibliography
Information for this biography was gathered from the following sources: