The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero
The definitive, sweeping biography of an American hero who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court.
At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. As case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the United States.
Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.
Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is an epic rendering of the American legal system’s greatest failures and most inspiring successes.
They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, it was John Marshall Harlan’s words that helped end segregation, and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.
The Great Dissenter is a magnificent biography of the righteous legal trailblazer John Marshall Harlan. Drawing upon a wealth of archival and published sources, deep-diving into the American horror-show of systemic racism, Canellos showcases Harlan as the rare Supreme Court Justice fighting for a more equitable economic system and civil rights for all people. Highly recommended!
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and New York Times bestselling author of Cronkite
John Marshall Harlan is one of the most fascinating and important figures of modern America, and this book does him justice. Carefully researched, and rewarding even informed readers with rich insight into Harlan’s life and work, The Great Dissenter is a must-read, both for students of the Supreme Court, and for those concerned about the past, present, and future of racial equality in the United States.
Gabriel J. Chin, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis
Canellos succeeds in showing us how central Justice Harlan’s roots—from his Kentucky background to his half-black brother, Robert Harlan—were to shaping many of his views on controversial social issues and landmark civil rights cases in American history.
Nikki Taylor, Chair of the Department of History, Howard University, and author of Frontier of Freedom and America’s First Black Socialist
Peter Canellos’ biography of John Marshall Harlan brings to life the story of the “Great Dissenter.” But more importantly he chronicles the story of Robert Harlan, the mixed-race slave of the Harlan family, who by all likelihood was the Justice’s brother. In paralleling their life stories, the author uncovers the hidden complexities of life in second half of the twentieth century America for both blacks and whites and relates an aspect of the Justice’s life that impacted his way of thinking and perhaps made him the “Great Dissenter.”
C. Ellen Connally, Judge (Retired); Former Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Akron College of Law. Member of the board of Trustees of the Ohio History Connection.
What a spectacular achievement! Canellos has single handedly resurrected the memory of a largely forgotten American hero. Far ahead of his time, Justice Harlan denounced corporate power and passionately defended the rights of labor, immigrants and African Americans. On the Supreme Court he was a bold and lonely dissenter, but as this book shows, history vindicates him and awards him a place of high honor in the pantheon of American freedom fighters.
Stephen Kinzer, author of The True Flag
Peter Canellos has vividly brought to life an absolutely fascinating story that I’m embarrassed I didn’t know: A man raised in a slave-owning family who became one of the greatest champions of civil rights in the history of the Supreme Court, his lone-dissenter opinions cited decades after his death. John Marshall Harlan needs to be added to our pantheon of American heroes.
Adam Hochschild, bestselling author of Rebel Cinderella
Canellos is a brilliant researcher and writer who takes us on an enlightening tour through history made new in retrospect. His focus on Justice John Harlan’s African American half-brother Robert Harlan is a tour de force. Every individual interested in the history of our country’s political and societal steps should consider it must-reading.
Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of A Slave in the White House and The Original Black Elite
The Great Dissenter does full justice to its subject, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, his times, and his life. But more than that, and more than any other study, it tells the story of Robert Harlan, born into slavery and a man many considered his half-brother. Juxtaposing the lives of the two men, who corresponded as friends and equals, reveals much about race relations in Gilded Age America. It is a superb achievement. Based on exhaustive research and well written, this study fully explains the forces that shaped a slaveholding Kentucky Unionist, a forward-looking justice, and a great man.
James C Kotter, The State Historian of Kentucky, and author of Henry Clay and Kentucky