Tom Campbell Clark

CLARK, TOM CAMPBELL

Distinguished jurist and federal law enforcement official Tom Campbell Clark played a pivotal role in U.S. law following WORLD WAR II.
During his three decades in the federal government,
Clark served in various capacities in the
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (1937–45), as U.S.
attorney general (1945–49), and as an associate
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1949–67). A
conservative whose political philosophy moderated
in his later years, Clark took part in the
Supreme Court’s expansion of CIVIL RIGHTS
and civil liberties in the 1960s.
Clark was born in Dallas on September 23,
1899, to a life of comfort and privilege. Following
high school, he attended the Virginia Military
Institute and then served as a sergeant in
1917, narrowly missing overseas action in
WORLD WAR I. After his discharge, Clark followed
his grandfather, father, and brother into
the PRACTICE OF LAW.He entered the University
of Texas, and completed bachelor of arts and
bachelor of law degrees in 1922 before joining
his father and brother in their law practice. He
soon married Mary Jane Ramsey, a former
fellow student, with whom he later had two children.
Family political connections served Clark
throughout his career. Help in launching his
career came from two influential Texas politicians,
Senator Tom Connally and Representative Sam Rayburn. With Connally’s help, Clark left
private practice in 1927 to become the civil district
attorney of Dallas County. He had a perfect
prosecution record in his five years in the office.
In the early 1930s, he was active in Texas politics
as well as in corporate law, and he briefly represented
the Texas Petroleum Council as a lobbyist
fighting tax increases.
In 1937, Clark began his long career in
Washington, D.C. He joined the U.S. Department
of Justice as a special assistant to the attorney
general, an appointment secured through
the strong political support of Senator Connally.
The job required overseeing several department
bureaus and prosecuting antitrust cases, in
which he distinguished himself. By 1939, he was
chief of the Antitrust Division’s West Coast
offices, fighting and ending price-fixing in the
lumber industry.
During World War II, Clark held two leading
positions in the Justice Department: chief of the
Antitrust Division in 1942 and chief of the
Criminal Division in 1945. Wartime had transformed
the federal government, multiplying
responsibilities for its officers, and thus, Clark
found himself assisting the U.S. Army in a controversial
domestic action: he coordinated the
federal effort to round up and intern in camps
American citizens of Japanese ancestry residing
on the West Coast. Clark also worked closely
with Senator Harry S. Truman’s Special Senate
Committee Investigating the War Program,
which unearthed cases of war FRAUD for the Justice
Department to prosecute.
Throughout the late 1940s, Clark and Truman’s
association benefited both men. Clark
supported Truman at the 1944 DEMOCRATIC
PARTY convention, and was awarded an appointment
to Truman’s cabinet as U.S. attorney general.
Holding the position from 1945 to 1949, he
took the unusual step of personally arguing the
federal government’s position in antitrust
cases—his specialty—before the U.S. Supreme
Court. He also helped fuel the postwar era’s RED
SCARE by investigating so-called subversive
groups and helping to prosecute the leaders of
the American Communist party. Clark’s anti-
Communism and loyalty to the president converged
when Truman sought election in 1948.
Republicans attacked Truman for not being sufficiently anti-Communist, a common tactic in
the era’s fervent politics, and Clark came to his
defense. After Truman won a second term, he
appointed Clark to the U.S. Supreme Court in
1949.
In his early years on the bench, the new associate
justice remained conservative. Under the
leadership of Chief Justice FRED M. VINSON, the
Court was reluctant to return decisions in favor
of civil liberties, and Clark tended to vote with
Vinson. But the character of the Court—and
subsequently that of U.S. law—changed with the
appointment of EARL WARREN as chief justice in
1953. In its exercise of JUDICIAL REVIEW, the
WARREN COURT placed a high value on the BILL
OF RIGHTS, handing down decisions that profoundly
altered the course of life in the United
States.
Clark supported several of these decisions.
Like the Court, he had changed, shifting toward
a more moderate position on First and FOURTH
AMENDMENT issues. He still resisted liberalism:
for instance, he dissented in Aptheker v. Secretary
of State, 378 U.S. 500, 84 S. Ct. 1659, 12 L. Ed. 2d
992 (1964), which struck down a provision of
the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 (50
U.S.C.A. §785) that prevented members of the
Communist party from securing passports. But
on balance, he voted in favor of VOTING RIGHTS,
privacy, and the separation of church and state.
In 1961, Clark wrote the majority opinion
in MAPP V. OHIO, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S. Ct. 1684, 6
L. Ed. 2d 1081 (1961), a seminal and controversial
decision. Mapp concerned the Fourth
Amendment right to be secure from unreasonable
searches. By a narrow 5–4 majority, the
Court extended to defendants in state criminal
cases a protection that had previously been
available only in federal cases: it barred state
prosecutors from using illegally obtained evidence
under the so-called EXCLUSIONARY RULE.
In theory, the Fourth Amendment had always
protected citizens from government intrusion.
But the amendment contains no specific means
for redressing violations. Since the vast majority
of criminal cases have always been brought at
the state level, it took the decision in Mapp to
give this liberty real teeth. Now, cases in which
police officers abused their power—for example,
by failing to properly obtain a search warrant—
could be thrown out of court. “To hold
otherwise,” Clark wrote, “is to grant the right
but in reality to withhold its privilege and
enjoyment.”
In 1963, Clark wrote the majority opinion in
another pivotal civil liberties case. ABINGTON
SCHOOL DISTRICT V. SCHEMPP, 374 U.S. 203, 83
S. Ct. 1560, 10 L. Ed. 2d 844, banned the Lord’s
Prayer and Bible reading from public schools. It
followed by one year the Court’s landmark ruling
in ENGEL V. VITALE, 370 U.S. 421, 82 S. Ct.
1261, 8 L. Ed. 2d 601 (1962), which held unconstitutional
a state-authored school prayer. Engel
was the first major decision on the unconstitutionality
of religious practice in public schools.
Schempp went further. It issued the Court’s first
concrete test for determining violations of the
First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Thus,
it laid the groundwork for anti-prayer rulings
that continued into the 1990s.
Earning a reputation for integrity and judicial
independence, Clark remained on the Court
until 1967.He stepped down to clear the way for
his son, RAMSEY CLARK, to become U.S. attorney
general, thus removing the possibility of a conflict
of interest in government cases before the
Supreme Court. But he did not leave the federal
judiciary: he went on to become the only justice
in U.S. history to sit on all eleven circuits of the
U.S. Court of Appeals.
After Clark’s death on June 13, 1977, in New
York City, among the tributes paid to his life and
work was this statement by U.S. Supreme Court
Justice WILLIAM J. BRENNAN JR.: “His great distinction
as a judge is the reflection of his conviction
that it is wrong to live life without some
deep and abiding social commitment.”

FURTHER READINGS
Young, Evan A. 1998. Lone Star Justice: A Biography of Justice
Tom C. Clark. Dallas, Tex.: Hendrick-Long.

CROSS-REFERENCES
Communism; Japanese American Evacuation Cases; Religion;
School Prayer; Search and Seizure;Warren Court.