I’m being challenged through publications and conferences with the same two themes touching on member associations and their relevance to modern professional life. As they were in 1933, those themes are related because of the crisis in the economy:  (1) the need for adaptability by the profession and associations, to be nimble in adjusting all approaches to meet the real needs of those they serve, and (2) the importance of membership in one’s professional association(s) not just despite the economic downturn, but because of the economic downturn. These themes regularly impact discussion among the HCBA’s volunteer leaders and staff. 

We are cautiously optimistic as we look at membership renewals for this year and see a slight increase in numbers as the final renewals straggle in. We’d like to think that reflects your association’s ability to serve real needs and your recognition of the importance of HCBA membership in challenging times. As Ben Palmer did 80 years ago, we also say “thank you” for renewing your membership this year.

Daniel Boone on Broadway

October 1933

Daniel Boone on Broadway is no more of an anachronism than the individual who carries the psychology of the frontier into the cooperative life of today.

Phalanx, fasces, the spoke-joining firm of the wheel that means progress, even the prairie steers confronting the encircling wolves with an unbroken barrier of outward-turned horns: all these are eloquent of the necessity and wisdom of co-operation.

The flight of the Lone Eagle is inspiring heroism and spells victory.  The fight of the individualist who insists upon always playing a lone hand is folly and spells personal defeat and social loss.

A bird’s-eye map of the United States that would show the forces which determine your life and mine would reveal a series of larger and smaller dots indicating the isolated power plants that are you and me. Rather would it show a complex curved line, not isothermal, but indicating steams of force—economic, social, political, religious—converging on certain focal points.

The most romantic libertarian must recognize the plain fact that the only way in which he can get the most out of life is by relating himself to these streams of force and playing his part in determining their speed and flow.  Since these forces are group forces he can only act effectively through those organizations whose general goal coincides with his own heart’s desire. There is no such thing as splendid isolation.

The man tearing down grain with his hands and refusing the proffered sickle, the antediluvian sticking to the sickle in an age of reapers, is no more foolish or blind to his opportunities, than the man who fails to avail himself of the added power that comes from adding to his individual strength the power of organization.  

These are truisms often forgotten. Certainly they are truths that should never be absent from the mind of the lawyer whose prime social function is to develop, adjust to the individual, and adapt to changing social and economic conditions and the mores of his day, those complex strands of duty which make the web of life in a modern state.

Let us carry the message of organized power for self-protection and for unselfish purposes into the highways and byways so that our profession may go on to increased strength. The fact that not withstanding adverse conditions more lawyers than ever before are maintaining their membership in the Association and joining our ranks brings to exhortation the support of authority.

We know where we are going and we are on our way.

The Bug on the Brontosaurus

July 1933

Pithecanthropus erectus or the missing link shinning up a tree in the primeval forest to escape a mastodonal giant lumbering beneath might have dimly meditated upon the survival of the fittest.

Below him stood the “outstanding” monster “of all time,” as today’s press-agent would describe him: huge as a house, with mammoth claws and gigantic jaws, unchallenged strength, and armored hide impervious to bite of beast or claw of cat, the terrible “tank” of the pleistocene whose deafening roar put his enemies to flight and caused all other beasts to tremble at his approach.

But as our pre-historic brother from his tree-top refuge looked down upon the enormous king of the jungle below him, perchance he scarcely noted, or if so but with contempt or idle eyes, the bug upon the beast. As the monstrous trunk swung idly too and fro, the sunshine flickering down through giant ferns and colossal trees gleamed for a moment from the wings of a tiny insect almost too small to see: inconsequential, ephemeral, alive but for a summer’s day. Would not it and all its progeny, would not that unarmed and puny creature clinging with trembling hands and grasping feet to the tree-top—would not he and all his races pass traceless into oblivion while that mountain beast below lived on into eternity with everlasting hills?

But the beast’s environment changed: climate, and animals and plants, and with them conditions of life, but not so the pre-historic monster.

That behemoth could not change with his changing environment; or if did, he lagged behind, so that the clock of his adaptations was ever late, and his alteration was as futile as if it had never been. His apparently insignificant and evanescent contemporaries, who could not challenge him in space, outmastered him in time. They adapted themselves to their newer environments, and so survived.  And some of them, holding fast to that which was good, but with alerter minds and a greater awareness of circumambient change, making wise and timely changes in their mode of life, not only preserved themselves and their kind, but stood among the leaders of their world.

It is adaptability, and not merely strength, that counts.

As a profession, let us not be bugs on the brontosaurus.