On this date in 1892, jurist Robert Houghwout Jackson was born on his family’s farm in Spring Creek Township, Pa., to Angelina (née Houghwout) and William Jackson and was raised in Frewsburg, N.Y., near Jamestown. Both parents came from prominent families. His father owned a stable of racehorses, inspiring Jackson’s lifelong love of horses.
No one in his immediate family was affiliated with any formal religious group despite a history of Scotch-Irish Protestantism. “Not one of them was intellectually or emotionally committed to any denomination or dogma,” he wrote, recalling being “soundly spanked” by his mother for denouncing Catholicism to an Irish “hired girl” and reprimanded by his father for his irreverent behavior that upset attendees at a revival meeting. (“The Faith of My Fathers,” an unpublished essay by Jackson discovered after his death)
He read law after high school at a Jamestown firm where his uncle worked and then enrolled at Albany Law School. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 at age 21 and married Irene Gerhardt in an Episcopalian ceremony when she was 25 and he was 24. They were cousins. Their son William was born in 1919 and was followed by a sister, Mary Margaret, in 1921. William married Nancy Dabney Roosevelt, a granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Jackson practiced law for 15 years in Jamestown and was active politically as a Democrat. He held several assistant attorney general positions in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and served as U.S. Solicitor General from 1938-40, winning all but six of the 44 cases on behalf of the government before the Supreme Court.
He served two years as U.S. Attorney General before Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1941, with the Senate approving the nomination by voice vote. Jackson wrote the 6-3 majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which overturned a public school regulation making it mandatory to salute the flag and imposing penalties on students who failed to comply. The suit was brought by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Declaring the state law void, Jackson wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
He dissented from the 6-3 majority in Zorach v. Clauson (1953) in which the court ruled that New York’s release-time program for religious instruction was constitutional. Such programs let public school students attend regular religious classes off campus. Jackson wrote: “The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion except for the sect that can win political power.” Joining his dissent were Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. All three cited McCollum v. Board of Education (1948).
Jackson had taken a leave of absence from the court in 1945-46 to serve as U.S. Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. Twenty-four Nazis or their sympathizers were indicted for war crimes. By early 1946, staff delegations from the U.S., France, Britain and the Soviet Union numbered over a thousand, about two-thirds from the U.S.
“From the beginning, I was taught that the other man’s relations with the infinite were none of my business. My people detested all meddlesome in affairs of the spirit — and so do I,” Jackson wrote in his “Faith of My Fathers” essay. “Intellectually I am and have always been an agnostic. I don’t know the answers to the mysteries of our existence and I don’t think other humans have any faculties for the search that we do not all have.”
He loved gardening, square dancing and riding horses but suffered from a cardiac condition near the end of his life and died of coronary thrombosis at age 62 in Washington on his way to the court.
His Episcopalian funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral. His wife remained unmarried and died at age 95 in 1986. He was buried less than a mile from his boyhood home. His tombstone, unadorned by religious symbol or quotation, says “He kept the ancient landmarks and built the new.” (D. 1954)
