Biography Hawaiʻi; Harriet Bouslog; Interview with Eric Seitz 9/11/02 #1

Actually, the bad one won away games, yeah? No, they won't play on special games. Not even special games. If it's away, they're not going to pay for us. What do you play on life? Only for basketball. Oh, because black because they get money to give us. That's how you're using it. You don't have money to pay for us. Okay, great. When did you first hear about or become aware of Harriet Boas' law? I think probably in about 1968 or 69. When I was active with the National Lawyers Guild, first in law school in Berkeley, and then I became the National Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild in New York. And at that point, I began to meet some of these people who, to me, had risen to heroic proportions in terms of the things that they had done in the 50s and the early 60s.

And I began to hear a lot. I had met my assignments, I think, at a convention of the Lawyers Guild in 1968, and I began to hear more and more about this infamous pair of bouslog and assignments in Honolulu who was part of this group of people who were very impressive. Could you talk just a little bit about the National Lawyers Guild and why they would be associated with it? The National Lawyers Guild was formed in 1937 as an alternative to the Bar Association. And it was largely comprised of lawyers who had been active in the CIO and who were champions of the abolition of racial discrimination. And found no place in organized bar entities, and were increasingly at odds with the organized bar in the judiciary and the government because of the clients who they chose to represent. And so they came together and formed what they originally envisioned as an alternative bar association. And it was at first a fairly large organization during the time of the Roosevelt administration

and the New Deal when they would have conventions, they would get greetings from President Roosevelt and others and we had some of those plaques in our offices. But in the 50s, the organization was bitterly attacked. There was an effort to put it on the Attorney General's subversive list because of the associations that the lawyers had with their members. A lot of lawyers left the organization and it dwindled to an organization probably of about four or five hundred members nationally in the mid-50s. And then in the 60s it became an increasingly larger organization as activism in this country increased again. And people who had been politically active went to law school and then wanted to become part of an entity or an organization that had both historical roots and some very substantial political connections in terms of bringing about change in this country. And the organization then grew back to about ten or twelve thousand members at the time that I served as the national executive director. And you know, there were these group of people who had been there from the beginning who had associated themselves for their own protection

and for their own professional alliances and political alliances with the lawyers killed. And among the earliest members were Meyer, Simons and Harriet Bauslogg. And I think probably for some period of time the only members in Honolulu. So outside of Hawaii, what were they known for? What was the reputation you encountered? Well, in addition to the reputation at least of being a communist front or a communist organization, the lawyer's guild was best known for being associated with the most advanced political activities on the left. The National Lawyers Guild represented people who were the Defense and the Smith Act cases. Lawyers guild members almost exclusively handled those cases in the fifties. Handled some of the earliest, most famous and infamous cases in the south where blacks were charged with rape or threatened with executions or were executed in many instances. In the late 1950s, they began to get involved in anti-Huak activities, represented people before Huak, House on American Activities Committee.

In the early 60s, the lawyers guild set up an office in Mississippi. It actually sent lawyers down to Mississippi to represent people who were the early stages of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. And then as the anti-war movement in the 60s increased, we became increasingly involved in representing people who were involved in demonstrations and the conspiracy cases that evolved in that period in the anti-draft movement. And then, increasingly, we moved into representing people in the military who were resisting the war in Vietnam. So those were the kinds of things we did. We represented the Black Panther Party, represented a number of other organizations and entities that were among the most prominent on the left in that period. And continuing up until today. What brought you to Huai so that you actually sort of started working with those log assignments of people in the same area? Well, I had come through Huai initially for the first time after having been in Japan to set up an office, the National Lawyers Guild opened, which came to be known as the National Lawyers Guild Military Office.

And we staffed that office in Japan and the Philippines, and we traveled throughout Asia in the latter stages of the war in Vietnam representing people in the military. And after having been to Southeast Asia initially to do the groundwork to set up the office, I came through Huai in 1971, May of 1971. And I remember that that's when I first met Harriet. Mayer Simons and Harriet Baoslogg and their office set up a luncheon with a number of lawyers who were interested in meeting me and finding out what the National Lawyers Guild had been doing. And so I met with them on that occasion. And then I passed through Huai two or three times, subsequently when I went back to Asia to work in that office. And saw people usually on those occasions sometimes saw Mayer Simons, sometimes saw Harriet. And then I moved out here in 1973 after having spent a year in Asia and then a year doing a military case in San Francisco. And that was when I had more substantial contact with them.

And what kind of contacts did you have with them? Well, when I was considering moving here, I first had several conversations with them about what kind of a practice I could engage in, what the political climate was like, what the bar was like. I was admitted to practice at that point in time in Washington DC and in California. And I intended to continue at least to do some military cases because that is what I had been doing. And of course with all the military personnel here, that was a relatively fertile field. And I also intended to go back to Asia to continue to do cases there if opportunities existed for that. And so I talked with them about what it was like to practice here and what kind of support I would be able to rely upon because I knew that given the kind of clients I represent that it wasn't going to be the most welcome environment. And that there weren't a lot of people who thought politically as I did and they did. And they assured me they were very encouraging.

They told me pretty much that they were doing different things and they done in their younger days and they welcomed somebody who was younger coming out and getting involved in the kinds of activities that they would have done in a different period and might get dragged back into if somebody else weren't available to do that. So I promised to provide any help and support that I would need and indeed they did. What kind of support? Well, first of all, you need people to talk to who have been through similar kinds of experiences and are able to help you strategize, able to help you handle some of the hostility and animosity and suspicions when you represent people who are controversial. It's a very critical thing and in the lawyers guild and the work that I did when I was traveling around the country as the National Executive Director, we tried to establish situations where lawyers were isolated would get support from other people. Not necessarily people who agreed with everything they did but supported the necessity for them to be able to do what they did and to represent the kind of clients that they did.

The SI and Harriet really and other people in their firm were really very supportive of me. When I would feel like I was in hot water, I could pick up the phone and call them or go over and have lunch and they would help me kind of figure out the actual situation and what I ought to do and how I ought to handle them. That happened several times in the first few years that I was here. And then there were occasions when I got into trouble on my own and they would hear about it and read in the paper and I would get a phone call saying maybe you need to come talk to me. Do we need to stop? Yes. If you could just pick up again and talk a bit about the kind of support that I was like and Simon was able to give you in the kind of role you were doing. There were certainly occasions when I would approach them and ask them for the opportunity to come and sit down and talk and try and figure out a situation either involving a case or responses to things that I had done.

And they were always amenable and open to that and I would go over to their office and talk to them or have lunch. There were a couple of occasions when I could recall specifically where I would get calls saying gee I heard you did this and that and maybe you ought to come over and talk about it because we're a little concerned about how what you did is being perceived or being responded to. There was one in particular that was particularly sharp where in the case in which I represented John Lincoln. We had had a very bitter pellet argument and actually Judge Burns, Governor Burns son was the chief judge in that case and they issued an opinion which was a horrendous opinion. It was later reversed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But I got that opinion and I was asked by somebody in the media to respond to it and I made some comment about how the real criminals in that case were the ones wearing black robes. And that was reported and the immediate response of that was that the chief justice referred my comments to the disciplinary counsel and I got a call from Harriet I can remember distinctly saying you know I don't think that's even something I ever would have said.

And maybe you better come over here we got to talk about how you're going to respond to that because I think you can anticipate a little bit of trouble. And those were the kinds of things that certainly made it much easier for me to deal with the pressures of being one of the very few people who was doing controversial cases and to be able to continue to do it and to know that there are always people there who would be supportive and would be appropriately critical and would help me learn from my own mistakes and my own indulgences. And I certainly counted Harriet as one of my main supporters during that period. What are the things that make doing the civil liberties law in Hawaii especially difficult? Well civil liberties law is one thing because if you basically just file civil rights cases and you do it within the parameters it's sort of acceptable. There's a little distinction between doing that between clients who are doing it for clients who are controversial and doing it in a way that is perceived as advancing the interests of those clients and therefore you're linked with your clients.

That's a very different thing than practicing civil rights law. That's really being part of and supporting the advocacy of positions taken by your clients and for most of us who come from that experience of the National Lawyers Guild that's really why we practice law. We practice law not merely because we want to uphold the Constitution but because we want to use the Constitution to advance the interests of what our clients are saying and doing. In Harriet's case it was the ILW and obviously she was painted with the brush of the ILW and quite accurately perceived to be an advocate for what the ILW and Jack Hall and the leadership here were fighting for. When that happens then certainly in the community people treat you as they would treat them. Up until the 60s at least there was kind of a convention that we would be attacked, we would be charged with misconduct, professional organizations, there would be efforts to disbar us or to hold us in contempt or to discipline us and those were the kinds of things we expected. After the 60s things took even a sharper turn and there were a number of lawyers who were physically assaulted, a couple who were shot and killed, basically because of the degree of advocacy and the close links that we had with our clients.

That was kind of an evolving thing and of course it's much sharper in places like Peru and South America, Mexico where lawyers regularly have been exposed to the kinds of physical attacks and threats on them and their families because of their representation of certain clients. There are people who step forward in that situation and defend us because they recognize our right to represent those people and there are other people in the community including lots of lawyers who think that we shouldn't represent them and we certainly shouldn't represent them in a manner that advances their interests. That's the source of a great deal of controversy and conflict. What struck you about Harriet Bouslog as a lawyer working with those kinds of cases both sort of by reputation and then the person you actually met up with in the early 70s? Well, by reputation, Harriet was out in the frontier and what was equivalent to the Wild West and Kauai and Hilo where there were physical battles being fought and organizing workers and she was right there on the front lines and she put herself out there in a period of time just like some of the lawyers in Detroit and elsewhere when the CIO was organizing who very selflessly put themselves out there

and made it clear that they were throwing their lot in with the workers and with the working class that was fighting for justice for themselves and for the class of people, the vast class of people who in this country did not have very many rights in that period. By doing that, clearly she exposed herself to a great deal of personal risk. Many of those people in that period certainly willingly accepted a lower economic standard given the fact that they were professionals and also exposed themselves to a great deal of antagonism by their colleagues in the bar because most other lawyers distance themselves from people who handled the kinds of cases and represented the kind of clients that Harriet did and Harriet went beyond that of course. She didn't just represent them in court, she went out and encouraged them by giving speeches, she pushed the limits certainly in terms of the content and the nature of those speeches and those were fiery speeches in which she encouraged her clients to do exactly what they then continued to do and come into conflict for in which she then would represent them on.

And knowing full well that that was going to create a reaction which was going to jeopardize her professional and personal well being. So what that says to me is first of all, this is a person who is very passionate, very dedicated, extremely bright, extremely capable and everything I saw about her and read about her and heard about her suggested to me that even those of us in the 60s who criticized some of our forebears in the profession who were a little stodgy in the way they represented people but Harriet wasn't one of those people, she was really advanced, she was on the cutting edge and did things which people reinvented in the 60s and in the 70s in some of the more controversial cases, the Chicago conspiracy case, the Black Panther cases and others. Harriet had gone down those roads on her own because of her own brightness and commitments and she was extraordinarily impressive.

And by the time I met her personally, she wasn't really practicing much anymore, she kind of withdrawn, the ILW was in a different period, they were sharing power after all Burns was the governor at that point and they had good friends in government and they had friends who were running the land use commission and other things. The union was in a different place and Harriet really wasn't that interested in being involved in the legal work at that stage and other people in her law firm had pretty much taken it over and Harriet was doing other things, she wasn't really doing courtroom law. But there were a couple of occasions where I had to ask her for specific help on things and she was able to sit down and just by reminiscing from her own experiences, call to mind things that were helpful to me. And in one instance we had a very controversial case where a bunch of people had demonstrated in the Mayor Right Housing Project in 1979 in Honolulu and had gotten attacked by the police and there had been a melee that had broken out and all these people were arrested. And in the course of the trial which began, there was a lot of controversy and the judge was going after the lawyers.

And so it occurred to me to go to Harriet and ask her to help us and when I went to ask her for help, she said, I'm not going to get involved in that, I don't go into court anymore. I said, but Harriet, you're the resident expert on attacks on lawyers in Honolulu and even if you were to sit there just at council table, it would bring to bear the force of some historical precedent. And I think it would be very important for you to just come and help us and support us and show visibly your support in this situation. And she was very reluctant and I had to work on her for a while but as the attacks in that case sharpened, eventually she relented, she came to court. At one point we had a contempt citation for several of us and we had to respond to it and she responded in our behalf and she was as fiery as like undoing the clock. She hadn't done that for 20 years or so and she got up and she talked and she talked about the cases. Most of the cases were her cases in which she had been the target and she convinced the judge to back down and then we walked out of court and she said, that was fun.

I forgot how much fun this was. What kind of, because you do very much the same kind of law, what kind of personal characteristics do you have to have to be able to keep practicing that kind of law? Which ones do you sort of associate with Harry? Well, you clearly have to be committed to social change and you have to be angry about the conditions that exist in the world and the fact that people are treated with the kind of horrible circumstances which many groups of people face in this country and of course in other countries where there's a lower standard of law. So a lot of anger and passion fuels what you do and you really want change to occur. You have to really, I think, be dedicated to your clients and have a sense that you can help them not take over and articulate for them what they are expressing and advocating but that you can be supportive and assist them and you have to be committed to what they're advocating for. And I don't think there's any question that Harriet felt very strongly that what the IOW was trying to do in its organizing of workers in Hawaii and its multicultural organizing and its vision for the kind of role that agricultural workers and other workers in this state had to be able to play in a just society without those kind of commitments and the strength to continue to support them.

You can't really accept the tenuous position and the attacks and the fact that you're threatened not only with the loss of your professional license but the possibility you can go to jail. I mean people put themselves on the line because they believe in what they're doing and then they have the capacity and the strength to continue to do that even though they're personally attacked. Harriet really is a primary example of that. She's one of the best examples of that in our profession that I'm aware of. There are many others who I've met had the fortune of working with because of my association with the lawyers guild and those are the people who inspired me and inspired a whole generation of lawyers who followed them. And I think that we've made contributions in large part because of the kind of inspiration and the lessons that we've been able to learn from them and the support that they've provided to us as well.

How would you contrast the way that the character or strategy of Meyer Simons as a lawyer in the area? Well, Meyer certainly shared the same commitments. He came out here to do the same things but he was not the fiery battler that she was. She liked to be in the trenches. Meyer liked to tell stories and put his arm around people and he liked to have certainly a very different style of doing things. And yet, I don't think there's any question. Harriet couldn't have done what she did without Meyer doing what he did because I think as he used to say, he did the nuts and bolts of the law practice to keep them going, to keep them alive while Harriet did all this more flamboyant stuff that was out there. And that's a dilemma in terms of doing what she did and what I do. You still have to make a living somehow. I've been fortunate that there are many more lawyers now in this community who are supportive of what I do than there were when she was doing it.

And those lawyers ensure that I get lots of good cases referred to me from which I can make a living to do the things on which I don't make a living. But in those days, Meyer was the person who Harriet relied upon to be able to keep the practice afloat and he did things somewhat differently and he maintained better relationships with his colleagues and went out of his way to do that behind his back. He used to make jokes about him and they also used to make jokes about the fact and they bitterly resented the fact that he was in partnership with Harriet. And he took a lot of hits because of that, but he was very loyal to her and loyal to what she did and what she believed in and shared those beliefs and therefore did what he did to enable her to do what she did. What do you think it was about Harriet that made her so distasteful or just such a flashpoint for other lawyers and so many people in the community? I think because she was smart, she put them in their place, I think they were intimidated by her. I think that they hated what she stood for because most of those other lawyers represented the entrenched interests in the community and they knew that she was an incredibly formidable advocate for the clients whom she represented and that with her help those clients stood a much better chance of being successful in what they were doing.

So I think it is an absolute compliment to her as it has been to me and to other people that were hated by our adversaries because that means we're doing what we should be doing. As Mao said, it's not a bad thing to have your enemies hate you and I think clearly in this case that it was respect and fear of Harriet that generated the adverse reactions to her in the community and the efforts, persistent efforts to try and take her license and keep her from doing what she was doing so well. In terms of that insistence on Harriet's part of keeping doing what she is doing, how important is it as a precedent is the enraged lawyer case when she did the Supreme Court?

Well, I think, frankly, when I was in law school, the first case that we got that we looked at, the first day we walked in was about a case of a lawyer who was a colleague of the National Lawyers Guild who also similarly was being denied admission to the bar in New Mexico because the fact that he was associated with the Mind Mill and Smelter Workers Union in Western Colorado. And that case and Harriet's case really made the law and stand for the proposition that people cannot be attacked, cannot be denied admission to the bar, cannot have their licenses taken because of their associations with clients and because of their exercise of First Amendment rights. Those are the two cases which are absolutely seminal and to which we always go back and from which everything flows in that arena in terms of protecting ourselves against the kind of attacks which we all still get. So, I can't tell you, you know, that was an incredible victory and it was, it expressed some opinions by some judges who were very amazing and ahead of their times because to have had those opinions expressed at that particular juncture in support of somebody who was so controversial, was pretty remarkable.

And at that time I think was very encouraging about the independence of the judiciary. Well, obviously we've gone through different periods about the independence of the judiciary since then but I think that opinion stands out very sharply as a really major high point in protecting the rights of lawyers to advocate for unpopular and controversial clients. What kind of distinctive quality? Great.