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First Person: December 3, 1997
Remembering Alpheus Mason
The great constitutional scholar left his mark on generations of students
by Walter F. Murphy
TELL ME WHAT I OUGHT TO KNOW." That was Alpheus Mason's typical greeting, one he borrowed from Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court Justice whom he so admired. He would say it in a jocular tone, but he meant it seriously. He was always eager to learn and eager to pass on to others what he had learned.
When I came to Princeton in 1958, I found it daunting to be the colleague of one of the premier constitutional scholars of the age. But I took comfort in the sure thought that anyone who wrote so well and so prolifically would not have time to be a good teacher. I could not have been more wrong.
Coming to Princeton had also been daunting to Alph. Born the son of a sharecropper on Maryland's Eastern Shore, he had graduated from Dickinson College but still thought of himself as just a poor country boy, awed by the gothic grandeur of the Graduate Tower and the sophistication of his fellow students. He was also penniless. All he had was drive, determination, and talent. Fortunately, he caught the eye of "the General"--Edward S. Corwin, one of Woodrow Wilson's original "preceptor guys," the then McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and doyen of American constitutional scholars.
Corwin became Alph's mentor and also his benefactor and friend. The relationship was in many ways close, but it was always strained, for Corwin had difficulty showing warmth or affection. Still, the General made sure Alph had enough to eat when he was in graduate school and even gave him $5 for new shoes when he saw how his student had stuffed cardboard inside his only pair. As autocrat--not merely chairman--of the politics department, Corwin also invited Alph to come back to Princeton from his first teaching job at Trinity College (now Duke University) and in later years he continued to help Mason professionally.
Yet, as much as Corwin admired his protégé's intellectual power, he would not allow Alph to teach the course, Constitutional Interpretation. During Alph's first 21 years on the faculty, he was allowed to offer "Con Interp" only once, the year Corwin spent in China. During each week of the other years, the General summoned his preceptors, including Alph, to his study and made them "brief" the cases that the students would read.
In some ways, Corwin's jealous protection of his turf benefited Alph, for it meant he had to establish his own teaching niche at Princeton. And he found it in the field of American political thought, which became as central to his intellectual persona as constitutional interpretation--and perhaps dearer to his heart. Indeed, he came to see the Supreme Court's majority and dissenting opinions on constitutional issues not as legal answers to legal problems but as clashes of political theory. His collection of essays and documents on the development of American political thought, Free Government in the Making (its fourth edition coedited by his old friend and former student, Gordon Baker *52), remains the classic work in the field, almost a half-century after it first appeared.
Alph recognized and accommodated himself to the ambivalence of his relation with Corwin. He was painfully aware of the General's faults but also appreciated the older man's magnificent learning. Even when Alph was 65 and had himself held the McCormick chair for 20 years, he still addressed Corwin not as "Ned," as did many mutual friends, but as "Professor Corwin." At the time of Corwin death, in 1963, Alph and one of his former students, Professor of Politics Gerald Garvey *62, were compiling and editing a series of the General's articles under the title American Constitutional History.
"THE FASTEST PEN IN THE EAST"
Alph was a prolific writer, and his graduate students fondly dubbed him "the fastest pen in the east," but teaching always came first in his professional life. Indeed, he subtitled his autobiography "A Teacher's Story," and he had only disdain for scholars, even great ones, who did not love teaching. "He's nothing but an ornament," he remarked contemptuously about a noted political scientist whom the department was considering hiring. "An ornament. He doesn't care about students."
To watch him lead a graduate seminar was to watch Toscanini conduct a symphony orchestra. Every week, each student had to write a paper on one of the "queries" Alph had chosen. But the students could never read their papers in the seminar. Alph would do that before the meeting, remember what each had written, and begin by asking a leading question to one of the participants. He'd listen to the response for a few minutes, then turn to another student and say, "He's claiming your paper is all wrong. Are you going to let him get away with that?" Battle would be joined; from time to time Alph would shift the topic and incite fresh antagonists, but for three hours arguments would not let up.
It was a talent he never lost. Shortly before his long, final illness (he died in 1989), I took him and two of my preceptors to lunch at Prospect House. As we put our trays down, I heard him say to one: "What do you think about . . . ." I missed the next part of the sentence because I had to go back through the line for tea. A few minutes later, I returned to the sound of loud voices; my two preceptors were shouting at each other, one wildly punctuating the air with waving hands. All I said was "Alphhhh." He grinned impishly and shrugged his shoulders as if to reply: "Just wanted to make sure I still have the touch." He did.
INFECTED WITH IDEAS
His undergraduate lectures--written out in longhand--were always polished and sparkling, reflecting his abiding respect for the intelligence and commitment of his students. He was a carrier of ideas, and no vaccine could immunize against his virus. No one who heard him could escape realizing how deeply he cared about solving intellectual problems. Nor could anyone escape the contagion of his enthusiasm for ideas and for clear thinking about them. Students, colleagues, friends, and foes--all were infected.
He was not without tricks. He knew how to measure an audience and how to count a house. One day when the two of us were walking across the campus, with Alph attacking Felix Frankfurter's jurisprudence with the sort of zeal academics later reserved for Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan, he suddenly interrupted himself to speak to an undergraduate: "Mr. Henry, I'm so glad you're better." "Better?" the puzzled young man replied. "Better? I haven't been sick." "Oh," Alph said in a tone both puzzled and hurt, "you weren't at lecture this morning; I thought you must be ill." I needn't add that the young man never missed another lecture.
Alph could also be maddening. Whenever we disagreed on personnel matters, I, being young and foolish, would try to convince him. He would listen politely but seldom change his mind. "In my judgment," he would begin. "But," I would regularly interrupt, "good judgment has to be based on evidence." Just as regularly he would spring the trap: "But I must have good judgment. Didn't I pick you to come here?" There was no answer, at least none that would strengthen my case.
The corpus of his scholarship was enormous, and his 22 books included biographies of Louis Brandeis and Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, the latter nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. But his legacy as a teacher is at least as great. Shakespeare wrote that " 'gainst Time's scythe" no man can make defense except in his offspring. Alph blunted Time's blade through his thousands of students--the generations of Princeton undergraduates and graduate students, and those at the 15 other universities where he taught after his retirement in 1968. Many of these former students are now journalists, judges, lawyers, physicians, stockbrokers, and even professors. They are fulfilling Alph's usual parting command: "Carry on." If they are not doing so in the Brandeis way, certainly they are in the Mason way. The world is much the better for it.
Walter F. Murphy, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, emeritus, who for many years taught Constitutional Interpretation, now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This article is adapted from a longer tribute appearing in Luminaries: Princeton Faculty Remembered, edited by Patricia H. Marks *72, published in 1996 by the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni and available from the Princeton University Store (1-800-624-4236).
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