While I was in Washington this week I went up to Rock Creek Cemetery, to visit the grave of my hero, Stephen J. Field. Rock Creek Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in D.C.—dating back to 1712—and is the last resting place of many famous people. Probably its most famous feature is the “statue of grief,” so called, or the Monument to Mrs. Henry Adams, by Augustus St. Gaudens. It’s a famous enough sculpture that I’ve seen many pictures of it, but the pictures don’t really do it much justice. Nevertheless, here is one I took.
More about that monument here.
Stephen Field’s grave is a large monument which makes note of his service on the California Supreme Court as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, where he was the longest serving justice (until William O. Douglas). Field is buried with his wife Sue Virginia Field (who was twenty years his junior) and with a Mrs. Sarah H. Swearingen (just like in Deadwood) who I can only assume was Field’s daughter (?) and by several Smiths. Their connection to Field I don’t know.
(More below the fold...)
Here lies Stephen J. Field, perhaps the most influential Supreme Court Justice with the exception of John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes; the first Californian on the Supreme Court; author of the great dissent in the Slaughter House Cases and Munn v. Illinois; author of Pennoyer v. Neff and Dent v. West Virginia; the man who, at the cutting edge of legal theory, pioneered recognizing corporations as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment and consistently defended the rights of the persecuted Chinese in California; the only Supreme Court Justice ever arrested for murder.
Most infuriatingly, Field is buried right next to Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone—one of the fathers of rational basis scrutiny and one of the leaders of the effort to undo Field’s jurisprudential legacy. I think it’s fair to say that this is not only ironic, but that Field has probably been spinning in his grave for decades now. (Stone’s son and daughter-in-law are buried next to him; his daughter-in-law died in 2001 at the age of 99.)
(This photo shows Stone and his wife in the foreground, with Field's monument in the distance.)
Also at Rock Creek is the great dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, whose stone is quite lovely—very stylish for 1911. Here is the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson; the man who, though he grew up a slave owner, was the author of the phrase “colorblind constitution”; the man whose lone dissent in The Civil Rights Cases led Frederick Douglass to urge him to run for president; the man whose defense of blacks was so notorious that a lynch mob in Tennessee once murdered a black defendant and pinned a note to his breast reading “Justice Harlan, come get your nigger.”
(Click here for a larger photo.)
Finally there’s Justice Willis Van Devanter, one of the great “Four Horsemen,” who dissented in the New Deal cases of the 1930s (Van Devanter wrote the dissent in Jones & Laughlin Steel), and whose grave says only his name, without mentioning his 27 years of service on the United States Supreme Court.
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