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Judge Gus Solomon (1906-1987) I

Bill Long 10/10/04

One of the delights of being a legal historian (among other things) in a land (Oregon) where there are not too many legal historians, is that when someone has written a history or biography of a legal subject from Oregon's past, I often get a chance to see it before it is published. So, a manuscript copy of a biography of Judge Gus Solomon, the longest-serving Federal District Court Judge in Oregon's history (1950-87), came into my hands. It is by Dr. Harry Stein of Portland, who has a Ph. D. in history from the University of Minnesota and taught for several years in academia but left the academic world in the late 1970s to move to Portland and become a public historian.

His writing credits include some catchy things, such as a book on the singles life and scene in Portland--written in the early 1980s, before there was much national attention to the phenomeon--; a pictorial history of Salem; a volume, with E. Kimbark MacColl, on Portland's early history; and, most recently, a book on the history of one of the Northwest's leading timber companies. He therefore comes to the task of writing a biography of Judge Solomon with impressive credentials and experience.

Gaining a Perspective

Almost no one writes books on the lives of US District Court judges. Not even all US Supreme Court Justices have had biographies written of them, and only a few prominent Circuit Court of Appeals' Judges have biographers--the most significant of them being Gerald Gunther's biography of Judge Learned Hand of the 2nd Circuit. Thus it is a move of some courage, and foresight, for Dr. Stein to set out on the task of a Solomon biography. I think that within 20 years a whole new generation of historians will find in the US District Court judges a wealth of material for useful biography. Dr. Stein has been at work on it since 1995, and the finished product, when it is published, will be well worth the read.

In this mini-essay, I wil only mention a few points by way of overview of the manuscript. Subsequent essays will present some of Dr. Stein's research. First, Dr. Stein helpfully locates Gus Solomon in many overlapping communities. He was a Portlander nearly his whole life, and so a broad introduction to Portland in the twentieth century lies behind the work. Second, Solomon was a Jew in a time where there was systematic exclusion of Jews from the Portland (and American) big-city, big-firm law practice. He was the son of Eastern European Jews, and his whole life was characterized by a personal edginess as well as a commitment to social justice on behalf of the "outsiders" in American life. Third, he was intimately involved in the liberal political life of 1930s -1950 Portland. Dr. Stein does a masterly job of bringing us through the labyrinthine and intersecting realities of the liberal/radical groups in Portland in this period. He does this with the full awareness that Oregon was a white, Protestant state well into the 1950s, that rarely had a Senator or US Representative from the Democratic party before the 1950s. Fourth, he was an active attorney, arguing cases at all levels of the Courts in Oregon and even, on one occasion, shaping the approach to an Oregon case (DeJonge v. Oregon) that was a significant case in the US Supreme Court's free speech jurisprudence.

Finally (for this mini-essay), what makes the manuscript an absolute delight is the care that Dr. Stein takes with nearly every sentence to cite primary or secondary sources to illustrate what he is talking about. He cites oral histories of dozens of people, books of leading scholars in probably a dozen fields (from Portland Jewry to American Jewry to the public power movement in the 1930s to the history of the ACLU), interviews with scores of people all over the country who knew Judge Solomon and large number of case files of Oregon Supreme Court cases that are now in the Oregon State Archives in Salem. He has given us, thereby, not simply a detailed and well-presented biography of Solomon, but has set the bar very high for subsequent biographers of federal district court judges.