Scope and Content Note
The papers of E. Barrett Prettyman (1891-1971) cover the period 1901-1971, with the bulk of the material falling within the years 1945-1965. The papers relate chiefly to Prettyman’s judicial career, although other aspects of his professional activity and his personal life are also represented. The papers consist of diaries, correspondence, subject and case files, writings, and miscellaneous material. The collection is organized into nine series: Diaries, General and Special Correspondence, Subject File, Case File, Legal File, Writings, Memorabilia, Miscellany, and Oversize.
The Diaries include daily records of the routine activity of Prettyman’s office while he was general counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and corporation counsel of the District of Columbia, as well as a private attorney. Of particular interest are short diaries that record his experiences as a rifle instructor at Camp Meade, Maryland, during World War I, describe the incidents surrounding his participation in a tax case involving the automobile companies in Detroit during 1927, and summarize his evaluation of the steel seizure case (Sawyer v. U.S. Steel) as it came before the Court of Appeals.
Prettyman’s General Correspondence is largely related to topics featured in the Subject File and to his writings and professional career. Some personal notes are also to be found, especially in his correspondence with Benjamin Mosby McKelway, editor of the Washington Evening Star, Henry L. Shepard, a former law partner who also served as a kind of editor for some of Prettyman’s writings, and his former law clerks.
Of significance is a large group of correspondence reflecting his efforts in 1932-1933 to secure the position of general counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, and the status of his partnership in the law firm of which he was then a member. Also of note is correspondence of late 1943 and early 1944 regarding the Office of Price Administration’s Legal Advisory Committee, of which he was a member, and which was created to recommend ways to reorganize the OPA’s legal staff.
Of lesser significance substantively are personal notes from Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, Warren E. Burger, William P. Rogers, Harry S. Truman, Richard M. Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, the latter relating to certain legal questions which arose as a result of Prettyman’s retirement as chief judge. An exception is a letter from Harry A. Blackmun, dated April 10, 1964, in which Blackmun comments on his friendship with Warren Burger.
The Special Correspondence consists of letters sent to his wife Lucy Courtney Prettyman and their children on the occasion of Judge Prettyman’s death.
The most important material in the Subject File relates to Prettyman’s activities as chief judge of the circuit. He was instrumental in organizing the Judicial Conference of the circuit in support of congressional legislation to establish a legal aid agency for the District of Columbia, to increase the number of judges for the Juvenile Court, and to abolish the mandatory death sentence in the District. A large file on indigent persons also contains material regarding the role of the Judicial Conference in the passage of the Criminal Justice Act in 1964.
Of related interest is the file on in forma pauperis appeals. This material includes examples of such appeals files by indigent convicted criminals on their own behalf and reflects the attempts by the court to deal with the administrative problems caused by these cases.
As chief judge, Prettyman also organized one of the first circuit conferences of sentencing procedures for criminal cases, and a file on sentencing contains material relating to the establishment of that conference and to its results. Moreover, through the Judicial Conference, he was instrumental in shaping legislation regarding code revisions and the courts of the District of Columbia. Subject files on the Judicial Conference and the Court of Appeals provide further information about his activities as chief judge.
During Prettyman’s years on the Court of Appeals, the court was active in reshaping insanity laws and the law of insanity defense in criminal law. Prettyman took an active part in these developments, sitting on panels that heard the Durham, Carter, and DeMarcos cases. A file on insanity in the Subject File preserves materials from these cases and related matter as he collected it. The court’s decisions, for the most part, were highly controversial, particularly Durham, which liberalized the test for determining whether a defendant was insane for the purposes of a valid insanity defense. The extent to which Prettyman was committed to these changes in the law is indicated by a letter in the Correspondence that he drafted, but appears not to have sent, to Benjamin McKelway in August 1954, and by a play written about the matter in the Writings series. Also of interest in this connection is his draft of jury instructions for the De Marcos case.
It should be noted that material in the Subject File on indigent persons, insanity, and juveniles also served as research material for Prettyman’s Tucker Lectures, “Three Modern Problems in Criminal Law,” given at the University of Virginia Law School and evident in the Writings series.
Non-judicial aspects of Prettyman’s career are represented in other subject files. The Internal Revenue Service file is made up of legal material generated during the period when Prettyman was a member of the legal staff of that agency. His activity in matters affecting the District of Columbia is reflected in various subject files, most particularly on the Citizen’s Efficiency Committee and Conscientious Objectors. The former relates to a citizen’s group, of which he was chairman, established to report to the Commissioners on the state of the D.C. Government. The committee was disbanded in 1937, but was re-formed in 1939 to respond to the Griffhagen Report, a congressionally-sponsored study that recommended a reorganization of the D.C. Government. During World War II, he served as a hearing officer for the Selective Service Board in the District of Columbia in conscientious objector cases, and the file containing that material records various aspects of this work.
Prettyman was active in numerous conferences and commissions established by the president and by Congress, and he served as chairman of many of them. This aspect of his career is primarily represented by a file relating to the Special Committee on Veterans’ Facilities. This group, chaired by Prettyman, was established by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the possibility of closing certain veterans hospitals and homes.
Also of interest are a file relating to Prettyman’s role as arbitrator in a dispute between Eugene Rostow and a client regarding a legal fee, and a group of material related to the ministerial career of his father, Forrest J. Prettyman. The bulk of the latter concerns the ecclesiastical trial of Bishop James A. Cannon Jr., of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, on charges of immorality and impropriety. Prettyman’s father was one of the elders of the church who preferred charges against the bishop and was most responsible for developing the evidence. Dr. Prettyman was involved in other ecclesiastical trials of ministers, and material relating to some of these is also in the Subject File.
The remainder of the Subject File is primarily concerned with social clubs and organizations and civic activities of a miscellaneous nature.
The record of Prettyman’s purely judicial activity is contained in the Case File series. These materials deal with every variety of civil and criminal litigation, from damage suits for negligence to major constitutional issues. Taxation cases, in which Prettyman’s specialized, form one large group. Others involve federal administrative agencies: appeals from Patent Office decisions, appeals from Federal Communications Commission rulings regarding licensing and clear channel station designations, appeals from Civil Aeronautics Board and Federal Aviation Administration decisions on the allocation of air routes, and appeals from National Labor Relations Board Decisions in labor cases. The case files are arranged numerically according to the number assigned the case by the clerk of the court when it was filed for appeal. Due to the way the collection was originally processed and the folders were numbered and stamped, a few cases are arranged out of numerical order.
There are numerous cases challenging the constitutionality of criminal convictions, among the most important of which is Mallory v. United States. The issue of Communist subversion is prominent. Among the matters litigated in this area were dismissal of government employees on loyalty grounds, contempt citations by congressional investigating committees (particularly the House Un-American Activities Committee), issuance of passports to suspected subversives (particularly the cases involving Paul Robeson), and the registration of Communists, Communist-front organizations, and the Communist Party itself by the Subversive Activities Control Board.
Individual cases of interest include the appeal of the conspiracy conviction of former Boston mayor James Curley (Curley v. United States), the appeal of the conviction of one of the Puerto Rican assassins (Collazo v. United States), and the appeal of the seizure of the steel industry by President Truman (Sawyer v. U.S. Steel).
The Case File series also includes a large amount of intra-court correspondence in the form of memoranda and personal notes involving jurists such as David L. Bazelson, Walter M. Bastian, Warren E. Burger, John A. Danaher, Henry White Edgerton, Charles Fahy, Wilbur K. Miller, Harold M. Stephens, and George Thomas Washington.
The Legal File series contains documents relating to Prettyman’s personal legal affairs and includes a patent on an artificial Christmas tree, partnership agreements relating to law firms of which he was a member, and a record of the marriage of Alexander Bickel, the constitutional law scholar, a ceremony performed by Prettyman.
The bulk of the Writings consists of speeches, lectures, and judicial opinions. Though a variety of topics are covered by the speeches, the predominant subject is administrative law, particularly the president’s conference on administrative agency procedure, and tax law. The same is true of the lectures, made up largely of notes prepared by Prettyman while he served as a professor of taxation at Georgetown University Law School. The judicial opinions are Prettyman’s own collection of printed copies of his decisions arranged in notebooks, which also include intra-court memoranda of minor significance as well as miscellaneous newspaper clippings and correspondence. Also of note among the speeches are sermons and notes for talks on biblical and religious subjects used for church services and church school classes.
Of particular importance among other writings is an autobiography written in 1931 and added to in 1967. It is anecdotal in nature and constitutes a general overview of his life. Essays in the Writings series are formal and informal, the latter including humorous anecdotes. They derive from nearly every period of his life and touch on a variety of subjects.
Many of the reports, though not written by Prettyman, were produced by committees of which he was chairman. The speech and essay material grouped at the end of the Writings is made up of Prettyman’s own collection from among his writings, the bulk of which is taken from his speeches.
Included in the Memorabilia series is biographical material and personal mementos such as photographs, citations and certificates, programs, and yearbooks.