When a Supreme Court Justice Published in a Porno Mag: William O. Douglas in Avant Garde, March 1969
Folk Songs, Porn, Violence, Unionism, 44 Year Age Gaps, Black Power, and More
William Orville Douglas (1898-1980) is considered perhaps the most liberal Supreme Court justice in history. That gives him an incredible leeway to be a raging degenerate.
He retired in 1975 and was replaced by John Paul Stevens.
He was serially married (4x), and not too surprisingly, also serially broke.
So Douglas did things to earn a few bucks on the side.
And as a man of letters, writing came naturally to him.
So he wrote for a friend of his, a pornographer who had a porno mag masquerading as something of a political piece. But even in its politics, it reveals a bit of ugly left-wing essence that is usually hidden behind platitudes. Gems like “Robert Kennedy was a pig. Sirhan deserves a medal for shooting him.” You know, things the left usually thinks but is disciplined enough… not to say the quiet part out loud.
Here’s the cover to the issue in question:
If you’re just here for the T&A, then here’s the black and white version, and for you Kodachrome viewers, here’s the color version.
If this profile photo of Justice Douglas were art, I think we would label it as ‘hyperrealistic anti-idealism’, as opposed to mere realism or romantic ideals. That in itself seems a consistent theme among liberalism, along with all the unromantic debauchery and coarseness.
Anyhow, back to the scandal at hand. Here’s how those Commies at Wikipedia minimize and deflect from the Douglas porno scandal. The basic TLDR is that Congress found it scandalous that a sitting Supreme Court justice, making rulings related to obscenity laws, was actively taking payment for services on the side from known pornographers.
This is timely in relation to the current contrived scandals about Clarence Thomas, where Thomas was provided with subsidies from a single rich individual who didn’t have obvious business in front of the Court.
Yet when a liberal justice took payments from a scandalous industry while they had repeated controversies in front of the court: that’s somehow completely different.
The modern left dismisses all claims to obvious hypocrisy as ‘whataboutism’ - which is another way of saying: what we do is correct, what our enemies do is wrong, even when it’s the same thing.
Personally I don’t care a whit about the finances of Supreme Court justices, but I would like to know why the name John Roberts was on the Epstein flight logs. But that’s another matter.
The controversy about Justice Douglas’ article here is briefly mentioned on his Wikipedia page. They do a great job spinning and lying about the content.
They mention that then-Congressman Gerald Ford attempted to impeach Douglas, and that this article was one of his public motivations. Suspiciously little other context is offered.
Not mentioned is that Douglas was apparently a notorious predator of young women.
This picture of 67 year old Douglas with his 23 year old fourth wife Cathleen Heffernan Douglas Stone is a bit jarring for its age gap:
Some pathetic law school leftist manages to relate this impeachment effort to Vietnam and the left’s favorite political history boogeyman, ‘the Southern Strategy’, as though catering to conservatives is a conspiracy. But the write-up does an adroit job sidestepping the contents of Avant Garde.
I highlighted the publication’s name in this screenshot of the wikipedia entry under Justice Douglas if you want to zero in on that part:
So, a sitting Supreme Court Justice was given $350 in 1969 to write a piece on folk music. By pornographers. That amount is $2,941 today.
Who hates folk music?
So, was it a piece on “folk music”? Not exactly.
Here’s the entire article in question:
Now Douglas mentions a lot of folk songs, this is true.
The article is, on some basic surface level, about that. But of course it’s about much more as well.
Leftists: always indulgent on the subtexts.
But this article is a love story to unionism. The adulation for the hard-left Communist wobblies, the IWW, is a little surprising. But this is also a form of intellectual virtue signaling for a man of the Court to show his bona fides to the wider left-wing movement that he is one of them.
There’s always the glancing reference to violence among leftists. There’s always a little taste of blood in the liberal mouth, a kind of visceral politics that reminds people what they’re capable of.
The I.W.W. was also the most Communistic of the unions of the period, and the most left. By showing that his heart was with the wobblies, Douglas is saying to us that he’s sufficiently left. He hasn’t sold out because he has a nice position and works in a building with marble columns that calls itself ‘Supreme’.
He’s a man of the streets and of folk songs and riding the rails.
I suspect that none of this is true. Every major industrialist has a bogus mythos where they started ‘shining shoes on fifth avenue’ before they, miraculously and magically, became a billionaire. Every major Wall Street type has a story where he ‘started as a paperboy’ or in the mailroom, or some other such legendary tale.
It’s the whitewashing of their privilege with made-up tales of hardship and struggle.
It’s amazing how often people fall for it.
In any case, Justice Douglas references quite a few folk songs. Many of them are conveniently on YouTube, so I have shared them below.
I’m not sure that this makes for the most coherent of articles or stories, but it seems irresponsible to talk about songs and not let you just listen to the songs on here. This is the 21st century after all.
So, here are the songs he references below. Some of them are covers because those are the only ones that survive. I have included some more digression and analysis after my Top40 countdown here:
“Frankie and Johnny”
”Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!”
Carl Sandburg, “American Songbag”
Woody Guthrie, “When the Curfew Blows”
Oh Dem Golden Slippers
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot:
The Blue-Tailed Fly:
She’ll be Coming Around the Mountain:
I Wish I was Single Again:
Foggy Foggy Dew
Poor Lonesome Cowboy
I Ride an Old Paint
The Strawberry Roan
Pete Seeger, “We Shall Not be Moved”
Joan Baez singing “The Lord’s Prayer”
Tom Whited’s “The Lord’s Prayer” doesn’t appear to be on YouTube.
Here’s the table of contents of that particular issue of Avant Garde to give you context for the nature of the other articles:
Here’s the masthead plate on the inside:
A particularly intriguing article that starts with the familiar phrase in the sub-headline, “Scientists say…”
More classy articles within Avant Garde:
This article on “Black Power” was next to Justice Douglas’ piece. In it, the pulled quotes from the article highlight some… pretty extreme and unique positions glorifying murder, sedition, violence, and even the assassination of supposedly beloved past left-wing figures.
Personally I find all sorts of romantic fantasies on the political right when they gather to have private discussions, wherein people would be content to discuss all-day different features of capitalism, or whether minor adjustments in obscure and esoteric programs and tax rates would result in rather egalitarian benefits.
And on the left, perhaps I am just attuned to it, but I always seem to notice none of that nonsense, and always the simple will to power. They don’t care if the programs work, or if it helps people: it’s just about getting the power, and then using the power. Consequences be damned.
Some like Justice Douglas were wise enough to just hint at violence, they do a quick curtsy rather than a full genuflect, but the sentiment towards power and violence is always still there.
In any case, yet another proof that one should never trust Wikipedia when they say or suggest there’s nothing to be gained from reading the primary source material.