Morris Leopold Ernst: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center Descriptive Summary Creator: Ernst, Morris Leopold, 1888-1976 Title: Morris Leopold Ernst Papers Dates: 1904-2000, undated Extent: 590 boxes (260.93 linear feet), 47 galley folders (gf), 30 oversize folders (osf) Abstract: The career and personal life of American attorney and author Morris L. Ernst are documented from 1904 to 2000 through correspondence and memoranda; research materials and notes; minutes, reports, briefs, and other legal documents; handwritten and typed manuscripts; galley proofs; clippings; scrapbooks; audio recordings; photographs; and ephemera. The papers chiefly reflect the variety of issues Ernst dealt with professionally, notably regarding literary censorship and obscenity, but also civil liberties and free speech; privacy; birth control; unions and organized labor; copyright, libel, and slander; big business and monopolies; postal rates; literacy; and many other topics. Call Number: Manuscript Collection MS-1331 Language: English Note: The Ransom Center gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided funds for the preservation and cataloging of this collection. Access: Open for research Administrative Information Acquisition: Gifts and purchases, 1961-2010 (R549, R1916, R1917, R1918, R1919, R1920, R3287, R6041, G1431, 09-06-0006-G, 10-10-0008-G) Processed by: Nicole Davis, Elizabeth Garver, Jennifer Hecker, and Alex Jasinski, with assistance from Kelsey Handler and Molly Odintz, 2009-2012 Repository: The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center Ernst, Morris Leopold, 1888-1976 Manuscript Collection MS-1331 Biographical Sketch One of the most influential civil liberties lawyers of the twentieth century, Morris Ernst championed cases that expanded Americans' rights to privacy and freedom from censorship. In addition to the following text, a more detailed chronology of Ernst's life follows. Morris Leopold Ernst was born in Uniontown, Alabama, on August 23, 1888, the son of Carl Ernst, an immigrant from Pilsen, Bohemia, and Sarah Bernheim, the daughter of German immigrants. The Ernst family moved to New York City when Morris was two. Ernst's father was a moderately successful salesman and real estate speculator, yet the family's fortunes fluctuated over the years. During times of prosperity, Ernst attended the Horace Mann School and then Williams College, to which he maintained lifelong ties. Intensely ambitious even at 15, Ernst took the entry exams for Harvard University and failed. While at Williams College, Ernst developed some of his most important friendships, including Lawrence and Edward Greenbaum, as well as the columnist Heywood Broun. After college, Ernst worked in a shirt factory and then as a bookkeeper and salesman at a furniture company. It was only after a chance meeting with a former Williams classmate that Ernst decided to attend night school at New York Law School. After graduation, his old friends Lawrence and Edward Greenbaum invited him to join their fledgling firm along with Herbert A. Wolff in 1915. The legal firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst (1915-1982) specialized in real estate law. Through Ernst's influence, the firm added the representation of literary figures and publishing companies to its specialties. Often, the firm's success in corporate or mortgage law cases paid for Ernst's dabbling in civil liberties cases, an exchange that brought the firm ample publicity. The firm also pioneered in employment practices, prominently hiring women and African-American lawyers and giving them equal responsibilities; one of the most capable, Harriet F. Pilpel, was made partner in 1943. Yet it is conceivable that Ernst's most important partnership was with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU grew out of the National Civil Liberties Bureau in response to laws passed during World War I that restricted civil liberties; Ernst's ties to the organization began shortly after its 1920 founding. Its mission was, and is, to defend individual liberties and rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, including civil liberties and free speech, regardless of the subject matter. Because of the many failed attempts at challenging these restrictive laws in the courts, some expected that the court of public opinion would prove more conducive to change than legal contests. Ernst served as ACLU general counsel from 1929 to 1955, and he and co-counsel Arthur Garfield Hays demonstrated that the avenue to expand first amendment rights was in the courtroom. Ernst's first attempt at challenging the Comstock Law of 1873 regarding the prohibition of sending any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mails ended rather ignominiously. The case was United States v. Three Packages of Bound, Obscene Books, and Ernst's failed defense of John Herrmann's book What Happens led him to co-author, with William Seagle, a groundbreaking book explaining censorship laws and their consequences to the general public. In To the Pure (1928), Ernst assembled and outlined his future strategies for attacking the ambiguous legal definitions of literary decency. Ernst's sustained and logical arguments against the forces of censorship made him the foremost expert as laws regulating obscenity and censorship were challenged during the 1920s and 1930s. He rarely lost another censorship case, either outright or on appeal, for the rest of his career. In quick succession, Ernst vindicated literary works such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of 2 Ernst, Morris Leopold, 1888-1976 Manuscript Collection MS-1331 In quick succession, Ernst vindicated literary works such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Boccaccio's The Decameron, Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming, and Flaubert's November in the courts. Battling the book burning forces of John Sumner and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Ernst argued in case after case that each work deserved to be considered "as a whole, even though some paragraphs standing by themselves might be objectionable." Ernst built his censorship cases upon his previous successes, using a combination of publicity, in order to get public opinion behind him, and letters from prominent individuals and experts testifying to the merit of each individual work. However, it was his defense of the novel Ulysses in United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce that remains his most enduring argument in favor of artistic truth. In the Ulysses trial, Ernst purposefully delayed the case until he thought that he had secured an open-minded judge, and then he subtly demonstrated the intricacies of Joyce's novel stream-of-consciousness style. In his judicial opinion, Judge John M. Woolsey famously ruled: "I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac." While much of Ernst's career was devoted to the vigorous support of free speech, his other guiding principle was the defense of knowledge in all domains. Ernst demonstrated again and again how the continuing evolution of morals, mores, and customs had moved public opinion away from the staid Victorian beliefs enshrined in the Comstock Law, and that individuals in the 1930s could no longer be held to such antiquated notions of prudery. His exoneration of Marie Stopes and Mary Ware Dennett's sexual education manuals also put him in the midst of laws forbidding contraception and basic information concerning birth control and sexual education. He was counsel to the Birth Control Federation of America, and represented Margaret Sanger and her Clinical Research Bureau in People of the State of New York v. Sideri (1930), and Dr. Hannah Stone in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries (1937). Once more, Ernst's skillful use of the media and his growing expertise in educating the courtroom audience, and often the judge, about basic female anatomy, ensured his cases favorable opinions. In the same vein, he also defended Life magazine in 1937 when censors objected to a photographic essay related to the film The Birth of a Baby. While Ernst was largely successful in loosening the censorship around sexual education manuals and information, the last remaining state law banning contraceptive devices for married couples was not struck down until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965—a case won with the participation of Ernst protégé Harriet Pilpel. Ernst also energetically defended first amendment and freedom of speech cases for the growing labor movement, notably in his defense of the right to assembly for the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) against Jersey City mayor Frank Hague in 1939. Citing the possibility of violence, Hague had denied the organization the right to have public meetings and parades. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and ended in a victory for Ernst and the CIO. Similarly, Ernst helped newspaper employees gain the right to organize by representing the American Newspaper Guild, an organization co-founded by his friend Heywood Broun, in Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board (1937). With his reputation firmly established, Ernst had largely ceased to actively try cases by the early 1940s, apart from the occasional amicus brief, leaving much of the legal legwork to his