Judge R. M. Wanamaker of the Supreme Court of Ohio

              1913
New Wilminton Pa - Nov. 13 FtWayne Feb 22

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Judge R. M. WANAMAKER of the Supreme Court of OHIO


Judge R. M. WANAMAKER, of the Supreme Court of Ohio
WE are proud to present Judge Wanamaker, of the Supreme Court of Ohio, to Chautauqua and Lyceum Committees and commend his great ability as an orator and a thinker.  Especially is he well qualified to speak on subjects dealing with the law, with our courts and with the system of their administration.  He has made it a study for many years; has studied the Canadian System, and expects to use his lecture income to make a trip to Europe and study the administration of justice there, particularly in England.

Judge Wanamaker is a speaker with a most pleasing personality, and in the discussion of legal matters he uses language that the layman can understand.  His lectures will interest and appeal to all classes of people—women as well as men.  There are probably more courts in the United States than in all Europe.  Chicago alone has more judges than England.  And probably our courts are the most inefficient institutions of any sort to be found in any country that can claim to be really civilized.  In many states their gross inefficiency has made the delay, expense and uncertainty of litigation so great that people will suffer almost any bearable wrong rather than take ruinous recourse to the law.  Every open-minded person, professional or lay, realizes this scandalous inefficiency of the courts.  Few subjects have been more debated during the last half dozen years.

For the judge of the Supreme Court of a great state like Ohio to discuss these problems is most timely.  Especially is this so when this judge believes in progress more than precedent, and when he is a speaker of great ability, with a fund of information on the subject to be secured nowhere but in the court.  Judge Wanamaker believes in, and openly advocates, the recall of judges, as well as in the reform of our cumbersome legal procedure.  He will be a big success on the Lyceum platform.



Lecture Subjects:

The Recall of Judges
The Laws Delays
The Five Great Epochs of American History
Cain and Abel
The Eleventh Commandment
The Non-Partisan Progressive Movement



Part of the article What One Judge Did by Will Payne which appeared in the February 22nd, 1913 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

OHIO enjoyed a Democratic landslide in November.  Wilson carried the state by over a hundred and forty thousand.  The Democratic candidate for governor walked in by more than one hundred and sixty thousand.  A nearly solid Democratic delegation was returned to Congress and the Democrats captured the legislature by a majority of seventy-two on joint ballot.

Decidedly it was a poor year in Ohio for Republicans and it was a still poorer year for Progressives.  Taft beat Roosevelt in the state by nearly fifty thousand; the Republican candidate for governor beat the Progressive by more than that number.

Yet one candidate, who had been a life-long Republican and who was in November a Progressive, won by a good margin in a field of thirteen candidates, leading the highest Democrat by over three thousand and the highest Republican by seventy thousand.  And this almost solitary survivor of the landslide was running for the Supreme Court, which usually arouses about as much enthusiasm among voters as a game of basketball does among devotees of sports.

R. M. Wanamaker is the survivor's name.  For seven years, as Judge of the Common Pleas at Akron, he had been demonstrating day in and day out that, without any elaborate legislation for legal and judicial reform—with the laws, precedents and procedures just as they are now—an American trial court can be made tolerably efficient if the presiding judge is determined upon it.  The people of Ohio knew what Judge Wanamaker had done in the Court of Common Pleas.  That is why they made an exception of him at the November election and sent him to the Supreme bench with more votes than any other judicial candidate received, though he figured as a Progressive and other Progressive candidates were beaten.

Judge Wanamaker began life in a manner that would have been depressingly conventional if it had happened a generation earlier—that is, he was born on a farm—near Youngstown, Ohio—and lived in a real log cabin.  But there is a great difference in living in a log cabin seventy-five years ago and forty years ago.  In the former period everybody did it, as all biographies of eminent citizens show.  In the latter period a log cabin connoted hard luck.  The Wanamaker family, in actual and not merely relative fact, was poor.  Juvenile R. M. found getting an education a decidedly difficult matter.  Fortunately, perhaps, at that early period he was rather undersized and not very strong physically, though no one would guess it to look at him now; so his manual labor was not worth much.  He did manage to attend district school—the traditional little red schoolhouse, presumably with its traditional over-worked and underpaid one teacher for all grades—until he was fourteen, meanwhile displaying one bent of his character by practicing oratory and debate.



A SELF-STARTER
NATURALLY, with his bent for oratory, he studied law, finishing the course in 1893.  Cleveland then was about the most flourishing city in the state, with much money and law business, so he decided to locate in Cleveland—but he had to change cars at Akron and missed the connection there.  Happening to run across an acquaintance and observing that Akron was also a flourishing city, with considerable money and law business, he decided to locate there—thus, at least, saving carfare to Cleveland.

Now 1893 was a troublous year for Republicans in Ohio also.  McKinley was running for governor; but there had nearly been a landslide the year before, and a good many of the party's old-established spellbinders were discouraged.  In the face of Cleveland's big vote they did not feel like pointing with pride to anything.  Young Wanamaker learned there was a dearth of oratorical ability, promptly offered his services, and within a fortnight after landing in Akron was out on the stump for McKinley.  He made a good impression with his country audiences and in the next year's campaign there was further demand for his services.

In these two campaigns he covered the county very thoroughly, making many acquaintances.  It occurred to him there would be no harm in doing some spellbinding for himself; so, after having been fourteen months in Akron, he decided to stand for the prosecuting attorneyship.  He laid his decision before certain gentlemen who were running Republican politics in Summit County at the time.

They received it with disfavor—even with derision.  Why you're a very young man, they said; you're just getting established here.  You have only a small law practice.

True, the young man replied.  That's exactly why I want the prosecuting attorneyship.  Ten years from now, when I'm well established and have plenty of clients, it will be of no use to me.  Not only can I afford to take the office now but I can afford to work hard to make a mark in it.

The politicians still waived him aside—but Wanamaker is not a waivable sort of person.  He has been waived aside a good many times, but has always refused to stay waived.  So, notwithstanding the political gentlemen, he set right out to get the prosecuting attorneyship, making his own personal canvass from one end of the county to the other.




Judge R. M. Wanamaker · Orator
He soon discovered—what many other people in many other localities have discovered since—that the party organization in spite of all its pretensions, did not extend very far.  Time and again he called on voters who had never been approached in a political campaign before in their lives.

The result of this personal canvass was that young Wanamaker turned up in the convention with enough votes to capture the nomination and was elected easily.

Of course experienced politicians were surprised.  Here was a young man who, having an object in view, went straight at that object with a simple-minded directness that confused all conventional calculations.  No doubt that is the keynote of Judge Wanamaker's character.  Being convinced that a certain object is desirable, he just takes off his coat and goes at it without pausing to inquire whether that is the conventional thing to do or not.



JUDGE WANAMAKER'S LITTLE REMEDIES
THERE was a riot in Akron at this time.  A negro was charged with a crime against a white girl and arrested.  The usual public excitement ensued, and there were the usual persons—with the general intellectual and moral equipment of Sioux Indians—who thought it important to vindicate the superiority of the white race by murdering the accused negro.  A mob formed, broke into a hardware store, seized arms, burned a building and set off some dynamite.  It was balked in its immediate purpose, and Prosecuting Attorney Wanamaker went after it.  He secured the conviction of thirty-five of its members, some of whom served five-year sentences.  There has been no mob in Akron since.  The courage and success with which he prosecuted the mob cases was a stepping-stone to the bench.

Incidentally a typical bit of political experience happened during his first term in the prosecuting attorney's office.  An eminent Democrat was accused of bribery in connection with a public franchise.  The prosecuting attorney, Wanamaker, who prided himself considerably on his Republicanism, was rather shocked when eminent politicians of his own party endeavored to induce him to postpone the prosecution of this eminent Democrat.  The fact that there is really no politics in professional politics was further impressed upon him toward the end of his term, when he found the Republican machine and the Democratic machine working together to defeat him.

He littered the district with hand-bills entitled: The War on Wanamaker!  Then he repeated his personal canvass and was re-elected.  About this time he began making up his mind that, of all things which needed reforming, none needed it worse than the courts.  He saw the Court of Common Pleas at Akron sometimes taking two or three weeks to try a case and generally about two years behind its docket.  Knowing that justice delayed is often justice denied, here seems to be a promising field for reform.

He might have written essays about it for the law journals or made a speech to the bar association, but it occurred to him that the simplest method would be to get on the bench; so in 1905 he ran for Judge of the Court of Common Pleas.  Needless to say, the persons who were conducting Republican politics therabout at that time did not approve his candidacy.  Senator Dick lived in Akron and was popularly supposed to own the region politically.  The Dick machine had its own candidate for judge of Common Pleas; but when the nominating convention came round Wanamaker had two delegates to Dick candidate's one—a fact now commonly referred to as the beginning of the Dick machine's downfall.  At the polls Wanamaker won by a good majority; so the prosecuting attorney became a judge.

It was on his record of judicial efficiency that Judge Wanamaker went before the people of Ohio in November as a non-partisan and partyless candidate for the Supreme Court, going on the ticket by petition—though the Progressive party later adopted his candidacy.  During his seven years on the bench of the Court of Common Pleas he had been not only practicing judicial efficiency but preaching it in public addresses and in newspaper articles.  So the people knew what his candidacy meant.  Naturally his work was best known in Northern Ohio, comprising twenty-three counties; and he carried those twenty-three counties by sixty-five thousand, while the same counties went for Wilson and the Democrats generally.  Also, he carried the state.

So much for popular appreciation and approval of practical judicial reform.



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