Understanding Clarence Thomas

A fifteen-cent price sticker on a cigar may be the key to understanding Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court Associate Justice with strong views regarding the proper role of government.

Those views were clearly expressed on April 15 when Clarence Thomas spoke to law students at the University of Texas, Austin, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was hardly a celebration. After brief introductory remarks, Thomas declared:

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the very values announced in it have fallen out of favor…all too often the sentiments tend toward cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals.…

What gave birth to these dark sentiments? Well, it all started more than a century ago as Justice Thomas told the young law students:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism…. Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration….

Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas speaking to University of Texas law students on April 15.

Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor," was the father of modern Germany after uniting dozens of fractious German principalities, kingdoms, and free cities into a single German empire in 1871.

But it wasn’t the Iron Chancellor’s nation-building that Wilson admired, Thomas said, it was Bismarck’s pioneering social programs. To bind the new country together, Bismarck made Germany a pioneer in social welfare with health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884), and old-age pensions (1889). It was these progressive social policies that Wilson admired—and more than a century later, Clarence Thomas detested.

Today, America is torn by the tension between progressives and conservatives. There are few stronger advocates for conservative values than Clarence Thomas.

Thomas focused his criticism on Woodrow Wilson, but the Progressive Era actually began nearly three decades earlier with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Driven by public outrage at the “Robber Barons” who controlled the oil, railroad, and steel industries, the Sherman Antitrust Act introduced the idea that the federal government had not just the authority, but the obligation to protect the public interest. A deluge of government oversight and regulation followed.

The Northern Securities Case (1904) was a Supreme Court ruling upholding President Roosevelt’s antitrust suit against J.P. Morgan’s railroad trust, the first successful use of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) prohibited the manufacture and sale of fraudulent food and drugs after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle revealed horrible conditions in the meatpacking industry. The Department of Labor (1913), created two years after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 garment workers, established the principle that worker welfare was a federal concern. The Federal Reserve Act (1913) created the Federal Reserve System after the Panic of 1907 had demonstrated the nation’s banking system needed oversight. The Federal Trade Commission Act (1914) was created to investigate and prohibit unfair business practices. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) gave women the right to vote, the Progressive Era’s most significant democratic achievement.

An outraged public demanded government regulation after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women and girls.

Viewing these government acts collectively, it’s easy to understand why today’s conservatives claim progressivism has led to governmental overreach. But each of the acts had a purpose, and were strongly supported by Americans at the time. And why not? Would you want your breakfast sausage to contain the bodies of dead rats? To work in a factory without fire escapes? To have a railroad monopoly charge exorbitant rates? To have multi-billionaires buy up land currently comprising Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, or Yosemite for their personal use? To have the national economy managed by private Wall Street financiers? To be refused the vote because you are a woman?

Even as recently as the nineteen-seventies, progressive federal environmental acts passed with huge margins. As I wrote in We The Presidents:

During Thanksgiving 1966, “heat inversions trapped the chemicals and particulates from industrial smokestacks, chimneys, and vehicles” over New York City, killing an estimated two hundred people. A 1969 oil spill off the Santa Barbara, California coast dumped three million gallons of crude oil into the ocean and killed thousands of birds and aquatic animals. That same year, the Cuyahoga River, engorged with industrial pollutants from the steel mills and factories that lined its shores, caught fire. In a cover story, Time magazine called America’s rivers—the burning Cuyahoga, the filthy Mississippi, and the stinking Potomac Rivers—little more than “sewers.”

….Over the next three years [starting in 1970], Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and even a Noise Pollution Act. These new regulations were wildly popular. Americans had become disgusted by American industry’s abuse of the nation’s environment and natural resources. With strong public support, environmental legislation sailed through Congress with huge margins: the National Environmental Policy Act passed the House 375–15, the Clean Water Act 366–11 and the Endangered Species Act 390–12.

In reality, what Clarence Thomas derides as progressivism has been promoted, with strong public support, equally by Democrats and Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt (Republican), Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat), Lyndon Johnson (Democrat), Richard Nixon (Republican).

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Today, our health, education, workplace, environment, and economy all are subject to government oversight. Has progressivism gone too far? Many believe it has, few more so than Clarence Thomas. What bred such antipathy against progressivism? Thomas seems to have answered that question in his 2007 memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, as he describes his childhood and coming of age years.

Clarence Thomas was born in a single room shack on the grounds of a former Georgia slave plantation. Raised by his maternal grandparents, his grandfather—a hardworking, fiercely independent fuel-oil deliveryman—instilled young Clarence with an iron discipline tempered by a deep Catholic faith.

Attending segregated Catholic schools, Irish nuns taught Clarence that human dignity came from God, not a government that separated its citizens by the color of their skin. After years of Catholic education, Thomas was drawn to the priesthood and entered a Missouri seminary in 1967. He soon left when confronted with racism by a fellow seminarian. Transferring to Holy Cross College, Thomas graduated cum laude in 1971. He then entered Yale Law School, one of only twelve Black students, where in 1974 he graduated, once again, with honors.

Clarence Thomas upon graduating from Yale Law School in 1974.

Yet, despite his outstanding Yale credentials, major law firms rejected Thomas, assuming his admission to Yale and academic performance while there were due to affirmative action rather than merit. “Many asked pointed questions,” Thomas wrote in his memoir, “unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated. Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.”

The rejection was a bitter disappointment. Thomas concluded that the progressive government that had designed affirmative action programs to help Black men like him had instead undermined his true achievements. It was a lesson Thomas never forgot; a lesson Thomas years later took to the Supreme Court where he has consistently argued against progressive government programs.

Shortly after his graduation from Yale Law School, Clarence Thomas affixed a fifteen-cent cigar price sticker to his Yale diploma. Since then, it’s served as a reminder of how his years of hard work and achievement had been devalued by “the taint of racial preference.”