Scope and Content Note
The papers of Warner Winslow Gardner span the years 1930-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1941 to 1996. The collection documents Gardner's career as an attorney and special assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States (1935-1941), as solicitor for the Department of Labor (1941-1942), solicitor and assistant secretary for the Department of the Interior (1942-1943 and 1945-1947), and as a founder and partner for the District of Columbia law firm Shea & Gardner (1947-1999). The papers are in English and organized into five groups: correspondence, diaries, speeches and statements, subject file, and writings.
Although not comprehensive, the collection documents primarily Gardner's work as an attorney in Washington, D.C., first as a government official during the New Deal period and early World War II and later in private practice from 1947 to 1999. The Gardner papers consist of correspondence, diaries, memoranda, notes, speeches and statements, writings, reports, photographs, printed matter, and other material.
The correspondence, comprising only a few folders, is mostly personal. There are, however, letters from President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepting Gardner’s resignation from the Department of Labor to move to the Department of the Interior in 1942 and from President Harry S. Truman upon Gardner’s resignation as assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior in 1947. Truman compliments Gardner for his work at that post as well as for his previous government positions. The correspondence also includes a letter (March 12, 1948) to Gardner from Harold L. Ickes, former secretary of the Department of the Interior, disagreeing with Gardner about a congressional bill to restrict Alaskan fishing rights.
The bulk of the collection is comprised of diaries. The early diaries (1941-1946) pertain chiefly to Gardner's work as a government lawyer with the Department of Interior, although the diaries also relate to his service with the Office of the Solicitor General and his nine months with the Department of Labor before returning to the Department of the Interior. These diaries provide cursory information about events and include mentions of participants in Gardner's legal endeavors as a government solicitor but do not contain much substantive information about cases. Diaries from 1947 to 1996 cover his private legal practice at Shea & Gardner, co-founded with Frank Shea. Gardner used his law firm diaries to track his daily activities on behalf of clients. Near the end of each volume, Gardner listed yearly totals of his time spent for each client.
The Shea & Gardner firm handled primarily regulatory cases for maritime companies, mining companies, and railways. Client names in the diaries consist mainly of acronyms. A client documented throughout the diaries is American President Lines, Ltd. (APL). The diaries contain loose and missing pages and were received in this condition by the Library. Although Gardner served as a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Harlan Fiske Stone from 1934 to 1935, the Library received no diaries for those years.
The subject file covers Gardner’s work with the Department of the Interior, including letters pertaining to Harold L. Ickes’s resignation as secretary of the Interior, his activities with Shea & Gardner, and his correspondence and reflections about Supreme Court justice Harlan Fiske Stone. The Stone file includes a couple letters from Stone to Gardner as well as two letters from Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter discussing Gardner’s written reminisces about Stone. Also worthy of mention is a document in the “family” folder of the subject file containing Gardner’s impressions about the confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Gardner’s children had requested he send them his recollections about the hearings as Gardner was one of the lawyers who represented Anita Hill.
The writings file includes articles, book reviews, and an unpublished memoir by Gardner. In 1989 Gardner self-published a memoir, Pebbles from Paths Behind: The Public Path, 1909-1947. The writings file contains no drafts for this published volume but does include drafts of an unpublished memoir similarly titled but focused on “the private path.” This later memoir relates mainly to Gardner’s endeavors at Shea & Gardner.