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been passed, you'd be a rich man, Thomas,' he
used to tell my father, overlooking the fact that his
own unskilled investing had been the cause of his
misfortune, not the income tax.
What gave him special cause for remorse was
the fact that each of these amendments had been
passed in his lifetime: 'If I'd been paying attention,
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maybe I could have stopped them. Maybe we
patriots were caught napping.' Repeatedly he lec-
tured my father on this point: 'Thomas, never let
them meddle with the Constitution. It's perfect as
it is,' and he cited the nonsense over how the
Eighteenth Amendment tried to stop drinking: 'We
let a lot of do-good women and teary-eyed minis-
ters inflict it on us, and as soon as it came into
effect, every sensible person knew it was a mon-
strous mistake that had to be corrected. Thank
God, in due time men like me were able to get rid of
it, but it should never have been sneaked into the
Constitution in the first place.'
Before I discuss the event which gave my grand-
father what he interpreted as a personal victory, I
must explain just how deep his loathing of Presi-
dent Roosevelt went. In 1944, when my father's
Twenty-seventh Division was removed from
Saipan under shameful circumstances, my father,
Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Starr, lost a leg, went
ape, and won himself the Congressional Medal of
Honor, than which there is none higher. Grand-
father, ecstatic to know that another Starr had
behaved with honour, drove about Washington
and northern Virginia telling everyone of Tom's
heroism.
He was invited, of course, to the White House to
share in his son's glory when the medal was pre-
sented, but when he realized that the conferring
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would be done by President Roosevelt, he refused
to go: 'Any medal that son-of-a-bitch touched
would be contaminated.' And when my father
brought it home, Grandfather wouldn't touch it.
But he did like to point to it when strangers drop-
ped by.
In 1933 and '34, Grandfather had an especially
bad time, for it was in those bleak years, when it
looked as if our nation might fall apart, that F.D.R.
initiated his radical reforms. Were such swift
changes necessary to save our society? Who
knows? Had I been living then, I think I might have
supported the innovations, but who knows?
Grandfather knew: 'Roosevelt is a Communist.
He's a worse dictator than Mussolini.' At one
point he bellowed: 'Someone should shoot that
Cornmie,' but Grandmother warned him: 'You say
that where people can hear you, you'll go to jail.' If
he did temper his public threats, he never relaxed
his private hatred, and what he seemed to object
to most was the intrusive way in which the regula-
tions of Roosevelt's N.R.A impinged on his life:
'National Recovery Act! Leave things alone,
they'll take care of themselves. Meddling into
everything, this is dictatorship at its worst.'
There was a popular song at the time, a silly
jingle, 'Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long,' and
one morning Grandfather saw this crazy headline
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in his newspaper:
Sam, You Can Make the Pants Longer or
Shorter but You Better Not Charge More Than
$2.50
'My God,' Grandfather shouted, slamming his
paper to the floor. 'Now he's interfering in the
work of tailors.'
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And then, in his moments of apparent defeat,
came triumph. It was a Supreme Court decision
handed down in 1935 during the depth of the
Depression, and it bore the curious title Schecter
Poultry Corporation v. United States, and Grand-
father claimed: 'It's the greatest case in the his-
tory of the United States. Saved this nation.' And
in later years I've found others who felt somewhat
the same.
The facts were clear. N.R.A. officials appointed
by Roosevelt, not Congress, had issued a regula-
tion, not a legally passed law, saying that you
could notmove sick chickens from one state to sell
in another. The Schecter people found the order
somehow oppressive and refused to obey. They
continued to move chickens, well or sick, from
New Jersey and into New York, so they had to be
arrested. The case went to the Supreme Court,
which declared 9 to 0 that the whole N.R.A. was
unconstitutional in that it allowed the President to
enact law, rather than Congress.
Well, when I first heard this story about Grand-
father, I could understand little and I suspected
my parents might have the facts garbled, but
when I later learned the interpretation Grand-
father gave the case, I tended to agree with him.
He went about Virginia telling everyone:
'Roosevelt was a dictator, make no mistake about
that, and the N.R.A. was his trick for fashioning
chains of steel about our necks. Now, the history
of the world is filled with cases in which dictators
have used a temporary crisis to install illegal,
crisis legislation. "The times demand it," they
bellow, but mark my words, when the crisis ends,
the dictators never leave office. They hang
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around until they destroy their countries.
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'The miracle of the United States, we've just
had our dictator, a dreadful man, but when the
crisis was over we had an agency, put in place
more than a century before, which could say:
"Crisis is over. Hand back the reins. We play by
the rules again." Read about Cromwell in
England. He came in just like Roosevelt, had many
of the same kinds of laws. To get rid of him, they
had to have a civil war. We did it with our
Supreme Court.'
Roosevelt, outraged by the Schecter decision,
which struck at his effort to restore the nation's
economy, retaliated petulantly. He tried to pack
the Supreme Court with additional judges guaran-
teed to vote his way, and when Grandfather heard
of this plot he went berserk. An old man, still living
in Virginia when I went off to West Point, told me:
'Your grandfather, always a patriot, assembled a
group of us who knew something about politics,
and we toured the south lambasting F.D.R. as a
dictator and calling for impeachment. Your
grandfather was especially effective, for he could
shout at the crowds: "My ancestors signed the
Declaration of Independence and helped write the
Constitution and fought at the right hand of Robert
E. Lee." The crowds cheered, believe me. And
then he shouted: "We must defend the Constitu-
tion as written and stop Roosevelt in his tracks!"
But when we talked late at night as we drove on to
the next town, I found that your grandfather was
pretty picky about how much of the Constitution
he was willing to defend. He was happy with only
the first part. He wasn't too keen on the Bill of
Rights, he distrusted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, which gave the coloured folk more
rights than they needed, and he positively loathed
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the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Nineteenth. But
with the help of a lot of others, we defeated
Roosevelt's plan and saved the nation.'
Our family has clippings of the time Grand-
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father hit the headlines in a big way. His wife, that
is, my grandmother, was a minor official in the
Daughters of the American Revolution, and when
someone that Grandfather called 'a misguided do-
gooder and weeping heart' arranged for the
splendid singer Marian Anderson to give a con-
cert in Constitution HaU, my grandmother, who
considered the Hall her property, cancelled the
permission on the grounds that 'it would be highly
improper for a Negress to appear in such a hal-
lowed place.' When the public outrage exploded,
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