Justice John Paul Stevens - The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years

I T WAS NOT until after her death ten days before her ninety-eighth birthday that I learned that my mother had been almost three years older than my father. She was a beautiful woman who always wore her blond hair in a nineteenth-century bouffant style. She was alsolike her mothera devout Christian Scientist who regularly read Mary Baker Eddys texts explaining the importance of mind over matter. Because she did not believe that physical diseases really existed, she did not accept medical advice or remedies; instead, she relied on frequent uses of enemas as an all-purpose response to childhood ailments. Her religious faith explains why the broken nose that I suffered during a high school soccer game was never repaired.

My mother and father were both proud of their ancestors. She grew up in Michigan City, Indiana; her best friend was the daughter of the warden of the nearby Indiana State Prison. I believe my grandfather used prison inmates to provide labor for the glove factory that he managed. That belief is not based on any actual knowledge, because he was employed in an office job in San Francisco when I first came to know him many years later. My mothers family included Lewis Cass, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1848; and George Street, the English architect who designed the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London and is buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.

My father prepared a handwritten genealogy, which states that the name Stevens is of Scotch origin and was originally Fitz-Stephens. The genealogy states that Henry, the immediate progenitor of the family, was born in the county of Cornwall, in the southwest corner of England about 1520. He was knighted by King Henry VIII. He had three sons and a daughter who married an Asquith. Why her marriage into the Asquith family was a sufficiently important event to be mentioned by my father has always been a mystery to me.

Henrys son John had six sons. His youngest, Nicholas, had an outstanding career as a brigadier general in Oliver Cromwells army. In 1659, after the death of Cromwell and the defeat of his son Richard by royalist forces, Nicholas came to America. I presume that he was one of the Puritans who were motivated by their fear of religious persecution and their interest in following the dictates of their own consciences in matters of faith. Nicholas and his family settled in Stonington, Connecticut.

Four generations later, members of his family moved, first to Dutchess County, New York, and later to Barrett, Vermont, where one of the daughters, in a family of ten children, married Colonel Ethan Allen. After two more generations, Socrates Stevens, the youngest son in an eleven-member family, married Amanda and moved to Colchester, Illinois. Socrates and Amanda were my fathers grandparents.

While I was unsuccessfully trying to find a record of Amandas maiden name, I was surprised to receive a letter from Colchester signed Dev that contained persuasive evidence that the Stevens family was well regarded by leading members of the towns community in the 1880s. Dev is an executive of the local brick company that recently acquired a parcel of real estate on which an old church is located. Her letter enclosed a colored photograph of a stained glass window in the church that had been built in the 1880s. The inscription on the window bore the names of Socrates and Amanda Stevens, presumably reflecting a favorable local reputation of my fathers grandparents. Their five sons were then successful merchants in Colchester, and soon thereafter they all moved to Chicago, where they all prospered.

My grandfather James William Stevens (J.W.) became extremely wealthy while my father was still a child. I am told that J.W. made shrewd investments in real estate, that the Illinois Life Insurance Company, which he organized, was highly profitable, and that he financed successful business ventures in Chicago, including the Charles A. Stevens Department Store, operated by one of his brothers. In 1909, he acquired what was then Chicagos newest and finest hotel. Constructed at a cost of $3.5 million, the twenty-three-story La Salle Hotel was located on the northwest corner of La Salle and Madison Streets. Notable guests at the hotel included Presidents William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge, as well as Buffalo Bill Cody, who presented my father with an autographed picture (see photo insert).

My father received a bachelors degree from the University of Chicago in 1904 and a law degree from Northwestern Law School in 1907, a few weeks after he married my mother. She had attended both Vassar College and the University of Chicago and was teaching English in Michigan City during their courtship. My father never practiced law but became the general manager of the La Salle Hotel when it opened and later also managed the Stevens Hotel in Chicago, which was constructed in 1926 and was at the time the largest hotel in the world.