The most important jurist to emerge from early Keokuk was Supreme Court Justice Samuel F. Miller, whose house on Fifth Street in Keokuk is the current home of the Lee County, Iowa Historical Society and has been restored with tasteful mid-Victorian decor.
Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lincoln, Miller was a moderate Republican on the Court, supporting far stricter requirements for re-admitting the seceding states than those actually implemented and who deplored the capitalists and industrialists, largely in the North, who accumulated wealth and political power by exploiting the laboring classes.
At the same time, he eloquently condemned the violence in the South against African-Americans and the rise of Jim Crow laws preventing them from exercising their legitimate votes.
Many of Justice Miller’s observations of the American political landscape in the post-Civil-War era are eerily appropriate today.
In a Miller decision quoted by Michael Ross in his Justice of Shattered Dreams (LSU Press, 2003, 249), Justice Miller writes,
If this government is anything more than a mere aggregation of states . . . it must have the power to protect the elections on which its existence depends from violence and corruption. . . . If it has not this power it is left helpless before the two great natural and historical enemies of all republics, open violence and insidious corruption. [Ex parte Yarborough, 110 US, 651-6 (1883)]
This observation of Miller’s from 140 years ago seems hauntingly familiar as a warning of the current state of our politics. As bad as the state of the country was toward the end of Justice Miller’s tenure on the court—a very dark period punctuated by a yawning gulf between the ultra- rich and the abject poor—our country is worse off today.
Wracked for almost four years with unsupported claims of a stolen national election, assaulted by increased political violence (including an assault on our constitutional processes in 2021), and diseased by xenophobic extremism and Christian nationalism, the country in my opinion has fallen into a political chasm similar to, though more terrifying than, that into which the country plummeted in Miller’s era. His words are cautionary and prophetic at the same time.
Unless we can arrest this fall, political violence and corruption will spread like a cancer throughout the country. Some would argue it already has. In such a crisis it behooves all those who value our democratic republic and its creaky protocols to lend their talents to the fight for their beliefs. Here are mine.
Instead of promises of revenge, suppression of legitimate opposition, and the glorification of selfishness, let us rededicate ourselves to fairness, justice for all, serious civil discourse, and the welfare of all the people. If we do not, we risk losing our republic and falling into despotism, which Benjamin Franklin said was the fate of all republics riddled with corruption.
Many thanks to Erika Barrett whose essay some months ago on Justice Miller published in the Daily Gate City introduced me to Miller’s opinions. Thanks also to Sue Olson who insisted that I read Ross’s Justice of Shattered Dreams to gain a fuller context for Justice Miller’s thinking.
Duane Taylor
Warsaw, Illinois
