Earl Warren

… was born in Los Angeles on this date in 1891.

Among the decisions the Supreme Court made under Warren as Chief Justice were those that:

• Outlawed school segregation.
• Enunciated the one-man, one-vote doctrine.
• Made most of the Bill of Rights binding on the states.
• Curbed wiretapping.
• Upheld the right to be secure against “unreasonable” searches and seizures.
• Buttressed the right to counsel.
• Underscored the right to a jury trial.
• Barred racial discrimination in voting, in marriage laws, in the use of public parks, airports and bus terminals and in housing sales and rentals.
• Extended the boundaries of free speech.
• Ruled out compulsory religious exercises in public schools.
• Restored freedom of foreign travel.
• Knocked out the application of both the Smith and the McCarran Acts–both designed to curb “subversive” activities.
• Held that Federal prisoners could sue the Government for injuries sustained in jail.
• Said that wages could not be garnished without a hearing.
• Liberalized residency requirements for welfare recipients.
• Sustained the right to disseminate and receive birth control information.

(Source: The New York Times)

Warren’s parents were born in Norway (father) and Sweden (mother). Elected governor of California three times (1942, 1946, 1950), Warren was so popular he won both the Democratic and Republican primaries in 1946. The darkest mark against Warren’s public service was the wartime internment of Japanese Americans.

President Eisenhower appointed Warren chief justice in 1953; he retired from the Court in 1969. NewMexiKen considers Warren the most significant historical figure I’ve ever seen in person (briefly at the 1964 New York World’s Fair) — and I’ve seen four presidents.

The Week Quiz

NewMexiKen missed the first three, but aced the rest to get seven correct out of ten on The Week Quiz. And you?

Today

Bruce Willis is 51 today, Glenn Close is 59 and Ursula Andress is 70.

Congress approved Daylight Saving Time on this date in 1918. Word hasn’t reached Indiana and Arizona.

Bob Dylan’s first album was released on this date in 1962.

Wyatt Earp was born on this date in 1848. He died in 1929, age 80. Larry McMurtry has an essay on Wyatt, Back to the O.K. Corral, in the current New York Review of Books.

I am talking, of course, about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which, for starters, wasn’t fought in the O.K. Corral—the shooting occurred across the street in a vacant lot adjacent to the local photographer Camillus Fry’s rooming house. Some say the shooting only lasted fifteen seconds; others give it twenty seconds, or even thirty. Local estimate was that some thirty shots were fired, at close if not quite point blank range. Three men were killed and three wounded. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was neither more nor less violent than a number of shootings that had occurred in Tombstone or its environs in the few short years of the community’s existence. It solved nothing, proved nothing, meant nothing; and yet, 123 years later, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is reenacted every day in Tombstone, Arizona, to paying customers—lots of paying customers.

The most recent O.K. Corral movie stars Kevin Costner as Wyatt; the next most recent, released a few months earlier, stars Kurt Russell as Wyatt, with Val Kilmer as Doc. There are so many gunfight-at-the O.K.-Corral movies that they constitute a kind of subgenre of the western. In the most lyrical version, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp.

What I’m wondering is why, in this day and time, anyone should care about Wyatt Earp, or any Earp, or the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, either. The Battle of the Little Bighorn at least offers heroism, spectacle, and mass, whereas the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was merely a bungled arrest. Virgil Earp, not Wyatt, was the peace officer in charge that day. How do we get from a bungled arrest to Henry Fonda, Hugh O’Brian, Burt Lancaster, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, and all the other movie land Wyatts? I’d like to know.

It’ll cost you $3.00 to read the whole thing unless you subscribe, but it’s worth it.

[Reposted from 2005 with some added items.]