En route to New Jersey to celebrate my beloved father’s 85th birthday, my family and I visited Washington, D.C. so we could show our son Elliott the museums and monuments that capture the history of our country. Among the places we saw were the Lincoln Memorial and the Holocaust Museum. I was profoundly affected by their exhibits which portray the best (Lincoln) and the worst (Hitler) in human potential along with two views of the ideal society at the extreme ends of the philosophical spectrum.When Lincoln read the declaration in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and all have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, he had no doubt that this declaration applied with equal force to white people and people of color. He was aghast that white citizens in the Southern United States reserved these rights to themselves while forcing people of color to engage in hard labor without pay while depriving them of education and subjecting them to harsh physical punishment if they refused to go along. He saw slavery as the greatest conceivable contradiction to the declaration of belief that all men are equal.
Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855: How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know-Nothings (a nativist, anti-immigrant group) get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.
Lincoln saw the creation of the United States as a compact by the States to form an unbreakable union to establish a way of life in which all men (without any exception based on skin color) had liberty and all were treated equally. He viewed secession by any State as an illegal act. Lincoln firmly believed the federal government had the responsibility and the power to stop any State from taking the illegal path of secession to preserve slavery. Prior to the outbreak of the Civil War he begged the Southern States to remain in the union and refrain from seceding but to no avail. When they did secede he had the integrity and the courage to wage war to preserve the union.
When I left the Lincoln Memorial and looked around I saw people of all skin colors and national origins mixing together, snapping pictures, smiling and laughing. It occurred to me that if Lincoln had not bravely asserted his position that all men are equal means that ALL men are equal, I would be living in a very different world, one a bit closer to insane world envisioned by Hitler.
My journey through the Holocaust Museum was an immersion into the mind of a person who attempted to re-create the world along racist lines by starting a world war which ended up causing the deaths of 50 million people. There is no doubt that Hitler was motivated by a lust for power and that the objective for much of his robbing, enslaving, killing, and looting the corpses of others, was to acquire the money and labor he needed to mount attacks on other countries and achieve world domination. But there was another aspect to the unparalleled brutality and destructiveness of his campaign, and that was racism.
Hitler preached that the Aryan race was mentally and physically superior to all other races and therefore entitled to rule the world and have all its wealth and treasures at its disposal. He preached that other races were mentally and physically inferior, morally degenerate and even subhuman. He employed so called scientists to set up institutes and museums to propagate his racist views by instructing the populace on the inferiority of non-Aryan races using skulls, skull measurements, photographs, pseudo-evolutionary charts and other exhibits. His scientists selected photographs that portrayed Germans intelligent, noble and heroic while portraying Jews, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Africans and other groups in the most unflattering light.
There can be no doubt that Hitler’s racist hatred and genocidal plans focused mainly on the Jewish people, yet the Holocaust Museum shows he hated, attacked and killed other groups including Gypsies, gays and lesbians, Poles, Catholics, and the disabled. Lincoln’s point, in his letter to Joshua Speed in 1855, applies here. Once you define yourself as belonging to a group of people which is superior to another group of people, it doesn’t take long for you to add to the list of inferior groups which you are entitled to exclude or mistreat.
As I went through the Holocaust Museum I boarded a windowless rail car that was used to transport Jews to concentration camps. I learned these cars were stuffed so full of people there was no room to sit down. There were old people, children and pregnant women in these cars. There were no sanitation facilities. The cars would sit for hours or even days at a complete stop in boiling heat or sub-freezing temperatures. Most people in these cars died and the living had to endure being in contact with the corpses. I saw other bone chilling exhibits including a pile of thousands of shoes and a table that was used to extract the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses at concentration camps. Thank goodness the exhibits finally changed as they began to focus on the Allied victory, the liberation of the camps, the resettlement of the survivors, the punishment of some of the Nazis and so forth.
As I left the museum and looked around me I was incredibly thankful for the bravery, courage and persistence of the Allied forces who defeated Hitler. I mused that if we had lost our country would be involuntarily serving Germany and I would have been placed into a concentration camp. I also thought about the insanity of dividing up all human beings along racial lines, deciding their worth on those lines, and making life and death decisions about their continued existence based on inclusion in racial groups. In an earlier blog article I discussed an excellent book on racism called Human Kinds. This book showed that any effort to classify people based on race is non-scientific since race is a concept in our minds not an objective reality. Furthermore, no one “race” contains people who are strictly identical with regard to their genes, national origins, history, culture, language, politics, religion, temperament, lifestyle, etc.
What does all this have to do with lawyers? As lawyers we come into contact with all sorts of people ever day. Depending on our mind set a person’s race can or cannot come into play when we make hiring and firing decisions, partnership decisions and work assignments. When we assess the credibility of a witness or an expert. When we adopt a certain tone of voice and manner while questioning a witness, addressing a judge or addressing another lawyer. When we select juries by using our peremptory challenges to retain some people and exclude others.
I am glad that I went to Washington, D.C. and saw the Lincoln Memorial and the Holocaust Museum because they sensitized me to the issue of race. While I have always made a conscious choice to exclude race in how I deal with people, I know from books like Human Kinds that race can creep into my thinking and behavior unconsciously and that I must remain vigilant in detecting it and defeating it. The same is true of all of us.
Let us all remember the example of Abraham Lincoln and his determination to eradicate slavery. Let us all be vigilant in screening out race from how we think about, feel about and act towards others so that we treat others as unique individuals who are every bit as entitled as we are to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
