The Flag Still Flies

"I guess I'm a conservative," says University Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr. of the Law School, "because I believe in the Constitution." Retiring this June after nearly four decades of legal study, practice, and teaching, Chafee looks back on a career dedicated to that firs belief in the principles and guarantees of the Constitution.

A descendant of early New England settlers, including Roger Williams, Chafee was born in Providence R.I. on December 7, 1885. He was raised there and attended the town's university. At Brown, which the left in 1907 carring a Phi Betta Kappa Key, a summa citation, and an A.B., Chafee's chief interests were writing and Latin translation. In fact, he considers his two greatest achievements to be drafting the Federal Inter-pleader Act of 1934 and translating the anonymous Latin Poem Pervigilium Veneris while at Brown. After a few years of working for his father's manufacturing firm, reading Blackstone, and being bored, Chafee decided to go to Harvard Law School. He had always wanted to write and his work on the Brunonian, Brown's literary magazine, had given him the opportunity to do so, but he was running out of material. In his study of law Chafee found a great untapped subject which was to become his lifelong interest--civil rights. The guaranteed liberties of the American citizen gripped Chafee's imagination and became the material for intense exploration. From these first intellectual groping came such monumental work as Freedom of Speech (1920), America Now (1938) and Free Speech in the United States (1941).

After three years of practice in the Providence firm of Tillinghast and Collins, Chafee returned to Harvard to teach civil rights in the Law School. Among his first students were such incipient barristers as Dean Acheson, Joseph N. Welch, and Archibald MacLeish. Chafee hopes his lectures "did they no harm." Since 1919 Chafee, in the capacity of full professor, has preached the primacy of the First Amendment, its defense and its preservation.

Anxious to promote his Cause at every opportunity, Chafee has served on many private and public bodies investigating freedom of the press and speech. In the late twenties he acted as counsel to the National Committee on Law Observance and Enforcement. Form 1943 to '47 Chafee, along with Jacques Maritain, Harold Lasswell, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Rheinhold Niebuhr, and Archibald MacLeish, served on the Freedom of the Press Committee, a private group sponsored by Henry Luce to investigating the extent of freedom of the press in the U.S. When the Committee started investigating Luce, the publisher stopped attending meetings and thereafter dropped by only for cocktails. The Committee's members explore their Personal philosophies together, finally produced six books, among them Ohafee's now classic law text, Government and Mass Communication.

In 1948 as U.S. delegate to the U.N. Social and Economic Conference in Geneva, Cahfee made a speech inquiring why a Czech friend of his was at the first meeting of the conference but absent from the second. Incidentally alluding to the Russian coup of the week before in Czechoslovakia, Chafee lamented the fact that the Czechs were not represented at the Conference. The speech, he recalls, made the Reds feel uncomfortable for the remainder of the session. Chafee was told not to become too intimate with the Russian delegate. "I'm not too well built to do what I'm told though," he comments, "and a Red delegate, Lomarkin, and I developed a strong personal friendship. We dined together often and got to know all the good spots in Geneva."

Commenting on current politics, Chafee believes Stevenson to be "the most qualified man for the job that I have seen in my lifetime." "I can't remember him," he muses, "But I've probably taught him." "Stevenson," says Chafee, "has more of the qualities that make a great President than of those which enable a man to be elected." Chafee also has high regard for Eisenhower, but thinks that the President should, like himself, retire. "The job requires a man's full energy to do great things," reflects Chafee, "and the President just hasn't got that much energy left."

Chafee now believes that the crisis in the threat to freedom of expression has passed. Freedom shrinks only when fear grows and people today are less scared, he claims. They are now better aware that they have been more scared than they ought to have been. "My great confidence in the American people, in their love of liberty and their good sense, makes me believe that their fits of tantrum about disloyalty among out fellow-citizens will end long before 1970," states Chafee in his forthcoming book, The Blessings of Liberty. "The blessings of liberty, though weakened, are ours if we want them, to hold and make strong. The flag still flies, and the city has not yet fallen."

Professor Arthur Sutherland, who, along with his son, was a pupil of Chafee's, lauds him as "a man who all his life has stood for the free man in the free society. He is in the forefront of the movement for human freedom throughout the world." Zach Chafee intends to remain in this forefront after his retirement. Although he will take more time out to enjoy boating, loud shirts, touring, and his eight grandchildren, Chafee plans to speak out more strongly than ever for the protection of freedom of expression. In retirement, he feels, there will be opportunity to wield an aggressive lance in defense of this freedom.

The terms "liberal" or "conservative" do not apply to Chafee. "My only wish, he maintains, "is the constant desire to preserve what we started out with--the right to speak up and out. Freedom of speech properly belongs to a people which is free from fear."