Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

He grew up in a house where somebody else was the famous Holmes. His father, the physician and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., filled the parlor with talk, and the boy answered to Wendell. William and Henry James were friends of the household. Emerson was a figure to be argued with — the undergraduate sent him an attack on Plato and got back the warning that if you strike at a king you must kill him. He was an abolitionist before he was anything else, and once served as bodyguard to Wendell Phillips, whose speeches drew mobs. He took his Harvard degree in 1861 with Fort Sumter already fired on, and his father arranged a commission in the Twentieth Massachusetts.

Three battles took pieces out of him — Ball's Bluff, Antietam, Chancellorsville — and dysentery nearly did the rest. He mustered out in 1864, took a law degree in 1866, published The Common Law in 1881, and sat 20 years on the Massachusetts bench before Theodore Roosevelt sent him to the Supreme Court in December 1902. What he did across the next 29 years, the dissents and the speech cases and the sentences that entered the language, belongs to BriefHistory. This page is about the man behind them and the opinion he is not usually quoted on.

In 1927 he wrote for an eight to one majority that Virginia could sterilize Carrie Buck against her will, and closed the passage with the line that has followed him since: three generations of imbeciles are enough. He was a convinced eugenicist, and he was wrong about the facts as well as the principle. Later scholarship established that the suit was collusive — two eugenics enthusiasts had picked Buck for a test case and got her own guardian to bring the challenge — and that she was probably of ordinary intelligence. Tens of thousands of sterilizations followed. Buck v. Bell has never been overruled. Courts simply stopped relying on it, and one scholar's summary is that the Court distinguished the case out of existence.

His papers went to Harvard Law School and stayed shut for decades, and the vacuum filled with invention. Catherine Drinker Bowen's novelized 1944 life, Yankee from Olympus, sold for years, and a Broadway play and a 1950 film built a genial old sage out of him. When the library finally opened the collection, the scholarship turned colder and the first biography drawn from the papers did not appear until 1989. What he actually left was more literal. Among his effects were his officer's uniform, still stained and torn with shot, and the Minié balls that had come out of him in three separate battles. He had kept them for 70 years. He lies beside Fanny at Arlington.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Common Law book
  Written from a series of lectures, and the reason he got a judgeship 1881
• The Soldier's Faith speech
  A Memorial Day address, and the clearest look at what the war left in him 1895
• The Path of the Law article
  Published in the Harvard Law Review 1897
• Schenck v. United States case
  For a unanimous Court 1919
• Abrams v. United States (dissent) case
  Against a majority he had recently joined 1919
• Buck v. Bell case
  Upheld compulsory sterilization, eight to one, and stands unreversed 1927

• July 1861 aged 20 Commissioned second lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts He had graduated from Harvard that spring, Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude.
• October 21, 1861 aged 20 Wounded at Ball's Bluff, the first of three times Antietam followed in September 1862 and Chancellorsville in May 1863.
• 1866 aged ~25 Takes an LL.B. and joins the Massachusetts bar His father, he said later, had kicked him into the law.
• 1872 or 1873 aged ~31 Marries Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, a childhood friend Wikipedia's text gives 1872 and its own summary box gives 1873. They had no children.
• 1881 aged ~40 Publishes The Common Law
• December 8, 1902 aged 61 Takes his seat on the Supreme Court Theodore Roosevelt had nominated him out of the Massachusetts chief justiceship.
• May 2, 1927 aged 86 Writes the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell Tens of thousands of forced sterilizations followed.
• January 12, 1932 aged 90 Retires at 90, after 29 years on the Court
• March 6, 1935 aged 93 Dies of pneumonia in Washington He left his residuary estate to the United States government.

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. appointed by
• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. colleague on the Court
• Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965
  Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law. carried the argument forward
• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. read his undergraduate essay
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. lifelong friend and sparring partner