CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman
taught contract law, but was a Renaissance man with a strong commitment to improving society. Fay discovered that Professor Sharp was working on the controversial criminal appeal of Martin Sobell, one of the co-defendants in the world-famous Rosenberg espionage trial. Sobell had been sentenced to thirty years in prison for his role in the conspiracy for which the Rosenbergs were executed in June of 1953. Sharp had been a latecomer to defending the treason case, but found the cozy relationship between the prosecutor and the trial judge appalling. Professor Sharp had started writing a book criticizing that trial (later published as Was Justice Done? The Rosenberg-Sobell Case).
Fay also learned that Professor Sharp was the incoming president of the National Lawyers Guild. Fay was then only generally aware of the Guild, founded in 1937 as the nation’s first racially integrated bar association. Like the “shreds” Fay had hung out with in high school, the Guild functioned outside the mainstream. For the next two decades, Fay would embrace the Guild’s civil rights agenda, siding with her future husband and other young Turks bent on expanding the Guild’s focus from civil rights to other Movement causes.
Guild lawyers attacked Jim Crow laws and had met with their first major success in the 1940 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of Hansberry v. Lee, which opened the door to challenging racially restrictive housing covenants. When the Guild continued to champion Leftist causes into the late ’40s, the onset of the Cold War greatly diminished its membership. By 1950, fewer than half of the original 35 chapters of the Guild still functioned. HUAC then recommended that the Guild be classified as a subversive organization, its members barred from federal employment and banned from membership in the American Bar Association (ABA). The conservative leadership of the ABA went further, urging states to disbar lawyers who advocated Marxism and to discipline those who took the Fifth Amendment in HUAC hearings. In 1952, Attorney General Herbert Brownell added the Guild to his list of subversive organizations.
Some of the excitement Fay felt as Moore’s protégé surged within her once more. Membership in the Guild gave her a ready way to participate in transforming society. As Fay arrived at law school, the Guild’s most pressing local issue was to address the loyalty oaths required to live in Chicago housing projects. The Guild would ultimately get the Illinois Supreme Court to strike down that requirement. The Guild’s biggest national concern was then the McCarran-Walter Act, which imposed severe immigrant quotas and permitted suspected subversives to be rounded up under “loyalty clearance programs.” Almost half a million Mexicans had been deported in 1953, leaving many more farm laborers at risk.
A month into law school, Fay was curious to attend the first fall meeting of the Guild’s student chapter. Professors Sharp and Llewellyn stood grimly before thirty to forty students, informing them that the Illinois State Bar Character and Fitness Committee had just denied admission to George Anastaplo. The married World War II veteran pilot had graduated first in his class at the law school in 1951, but refused to answer the committee’s questions about membership in the Communist Party or other organizations deemed subversive. Ignoring the advice of professors and classmates, Anastaplo had also defended Thomas Jefferson’s view of a right of forceful revolution to achieve meaningful change.
Professors Sharp and Llewellyn announced that Anastaplo had appealed, but the outlook did not look promising. The Illinois Supreme Court would in fact twice deny Anastaplo admission, and the United States Supreme Court would deny him relief.2 Sharp and Llewellyn worried aloud whether all the students in the room faced similar risk of being denied their licenses. With Attorney General Brownell branding the National Lawyers Guild “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party,” then third-year-student Marvin Stender vividly recalled what the two professors told the students: ‘You’ve got to disband. You would be foolish not to disaffiliate.”
Stender took charge of the October meeting as the club’s current president. Tall and earnest, the dark-haired, bespectacled young man was less than fifteen months’ older than Fay. His self-assurance and steadfast commitment to the Guild’s goals — despite the obvious political risks — impressed Fay greatly. Marvin realized that membership in the student chapter was vague anyway. It basically consisted of those who came to meetings. Heeding the professors’ warning, the students voted on the spot to disaffiliate from the National Lawyers Guild and reconstitute themselves as a different organization that just happened to be dedicated to similar objectives.
Fay was physically attracted — as always — to a natural leader, someone who took personal risk in stride while he championed unpopular causes. Acting on impulse, she approached Marvin at the end of the meeting. Encouraged by his engaging smile, she began excitedly talking about her experience with the Quakers in Mexico that had convinced her to become a lawyer. He responded warmly to her enthusiasm. Each was smitten with the other and their courtship began. It proved a fitting start to a lifelong political bond that would carry their inconstant marriage far longer than many of their friends would have predicted. For the time being, Fay shelved her ongoing obsession with Stanley Moore.
Marvin came from a well-off Chicago family. In late October of 1953, soon after the two met, Fay asked to borrow the Stenders’ relatively new family car to drive into the Chicago Loop on an errand. Fay was too nervous to go alone, so she invited her friend Dag to join her on her adventure. Fay arrived at a busy intersection, hesitated, and then started forward when she shouldn’t have and immediately hit another car. The minor accident rendered Fay practically inconsolable, tearfully moaning about her terrible driving skills. She wailed to Dag, “How can I tell Marvin?” Fay feared that the dented car would surely ruin their relationship. Dag reassured Fay that this could have happened to anyone. In fact, the minor accident cemented Fay’s relationship with Marvin. He had completely surprised and disarmed Fay by being so understanding. Fay decided that this steady, patient man, committed to the same causes as her, was in fact the perfect soul mate.
Despite looming exams, Fay and Marvin focused on wedding plans. The couple married on January 5, 1954, in a simple ceremony in Chicago just three months after they met. At the time, it did not feel like a whirlwind courtship. They were in love and, at nearly 22, Fay was not a young bride in comparison to her peers. Joan DeLasaux had been the first among Fay’s high school friends to marry and become a mother during Fay’s senior year of college. Hilde had soon followed suit.
Fay’s parents were thrilled and much relieved to have a third-generation American Jew, and, especially, a promising young professional, as a son-in-law. The wedding took place during the winter break before only a few friends and Marvin’s family. Fay and Marvin then moved into a tall apartment building with an awning and began accumulating wedding gifts. Their prize possessions included a record player and record collection, a refrigerator and a stove. The newlyweds lived in luxury compared to their classmates.
Fay enjoyed law school far more her second quarter. She now worked part-time for Professor Sharp on research for the Sobell appellate brief. With Bob Hamilton’s continued tutelage, she grew more skilled at legal analysis. By the spring, Fay exhibited tremendous self-confidence. She had developed rapport with several faculty members, including the Dean and the sole woman professor, Soia Mentschikoff, and her husband, Karl Llewellyn. By her very presence teaching advanced commercial law courses and working on the Uniform Commercial Code, Soia Mentschikoff advertised to Fay and her female classmates that the law school truly esteemed women after all.
Yet what really riveted Marvin and Fay were the McCarthy hearings, much as law students twenty years later would be fascinated by Watergate. Very few students had a radio or television of their own; they watched the hearings in the student lounge on campus or at a local bar. CBS television’s hard-hitting commentator, Edward R. Murrow, host of “See It Now,” impressed them all in March of 1954 when he aired a program highlighting news clips of McCarthy’s most outrageous charges, including his claim that the presidencies of FDR and Truman constituted twenty years of treason.3
The students again gathered in the lounge later that spring, all cheering as Joe Welch, the Army’s chief counsel, famously stood up to McCarthy on national television. McCarthy had just tarred a lawyer in Welch’s office as a suspected Communist simply for once having been a member of the National Lawyers Guild. Welch accused McCarthy of “reckless cruelty,” and ended his comments with a rhetorical flourish that made Guild members proud: “You’ve