Archivist Connie Cartledge and a Manuscript Division team organized some 500,000 items in the collection of papers that Justice Blackmun gave to the Library. Here she holds a 1925 autograph book from his senior year at Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, Minn. Papers from his pre-judicial years fill 16 boxes. - Michaela McNichol
Harry A. Blackmun was a meticulous note taker while considering more than 800 cases that came before the U.S. Supreme Court during his 24 years on the bench as an associate justice. Those notes, together with all his other papers, are expected to enlighten researchers about the inner workings of the court for years to come.
"He has given a great legacy to the nation," said Connie Cartledge, the Manuscript Division archivist assigned the gargantuan task of organizing the Blackmun Papers.
The papers arrived at the Library in two shipments of file cabinets on July 21, 1999, and Cartledge set to work on the collection the next day.
"It was exciting," she recalled. "He had the reputation of being a meticulous person; he took a lot of notes, and he saved them. We even have his Harvard Law School notebooks and his award-winning high school essay on the Constitution."
As another example of Blackmun's attention to detail, Cartledge recalled a memorandum he sent to his secretary before she left Minnesota to take a job with him at the Supreme Court. "He told her how many quarters it would take for her to pay all the tolls between her home and Washington," she said.
Cartledge and her Manuscript Division Preparation Section team completed their work on the Blackmun Papers in about 15 months, earning the admiration of division chief James Hutson, who commended her "heroic efforts," and division historian Daun van Ee, who described Cartledge's archival work as "stunning" and "amazing."
Courting Blackmun
Preparations to receive the Blackmun Papers began in the early 1980s, when David Wigdor, then assistant chief of the Manuscript Division, initiated contact with Blackmun, beginning a courtship over nearly 15 years to win the papers for deposit at the Library of Congress. Wigdor, who retired in November, had been instrumental in establishing the Library as a preeminent repository for the papers of the federal judiciary, having acquired, or helped acquire, the papers of, among others, Supreme Court associate justices William J. Brennan, William O. Douglas, Arthur J. Goldberg, Robert H. Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, Wiley Rutledge and Byron R. White.
"We wrote him [Blackmun] a couple of letters, and then Dennis Hutchinson, then a law school professor at Georgetown, brought Blackmun over and we gave him a tour," Wigdor recalled during a visit to the Library to witness the papers' opening on March 4. "We showed him Felix Frankfurter's papers—he had been a student of Frankfurter's, and Blackmun still had notes from his class."
Another favorite justice of Blackmun's was Harold Burton (1945-1958), whom Wigdor described as "workmanlike, professional, thorough." Blackmun was a "very understated man, very modest, and he saw that Burton worked very much as he did. He found those papers appealing," Wigdor said.
Later, Richard Meserve and Harold Koh, two of Blackmun's former law clerks, brought the justice back to the Library to discuss the possibility of locating his papers in the Manuscript Division. Wigdor gave him two long memoranda detailing how the Library would administer his papers.
"I think the context—the availability of all the other justices' papers here—appealed to him," Wigdor said. "We had a lot of experience, and I think he felt his papers would be in a place where we know how to take care of them and how to help people use them."
"It didn't hurt that, on our way through the reading room, a Georgetown Law School student looked up from his research, jumped to his feet, clasped Blackmun's hand, and said, ‘Justice Blackmun, I hope you put your papers here.'"
Blackmun retired from the court in 1994 at age 85 and moved with his papers to offices in the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building. He gave his papers to the Library in 1997, but they were not transferred to the Library until after his death on March 4, 1999.
"This is an important collection. I am elated it is here," Wigdor said.
Undaunted Archivist
As massive as the collection was, archivist Cartledge was undaunted by the challenge of organizing it in time for the collection to open. She had earned a master's in history from Mississippi State University (1984), where she had worked in the special collections department, and a master's in library and information science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1986). Since joining the Library's Manuscript Division in 1987, she had processed the papers of Justice Thurgood Marshall, appellate court Judge Frank Johnson and Brooklyn Dodgers president and general manager Branch Rickey, among others.
Knowing she would be in charge of processing Blackmun's papers for research, Cartledge had read extensively about his life and the big cases he had helped decide, such as those pertaining to abortion rights and capital punishment, as well as the Pentagon Papers and Nixon Tapes cases.
She and Wigdor had consulted with two of Blackmun's executors and his daughter Sally, an attorney, so they understood Blackmun's wishes. In 1999 she and Wigdor visited with Blackmun's longtime secretary Wanda Martinson, who coached them on the content of Blackmun's files and their organization, which Cartledge maintained for the most part.
"It was helpful to be able to preview the files and advise her on how to ship them in order," said Cartledge, who oversaw the order in which dozens of five-drawer file cabinets were loaded into two big trucks and then deposited along two long walls in the Manuscript Division's Preparation Section on July 21, 1999. (Another smaller shipment arrived in 2001.)
"Work on the project started the day after they arrived," Cartledge said. Over time, the Blackmun Papers processing team included archivists Joseph K. Brooks and Melinda Friend; technicians Patrick Kerwin, Sherralyn McCoy, Brian McGuire, John Monagle and Chanté Wilson; temporary helper Jennifer Gunter and student intern David Luljak. Karen Stuart provided automation support.
After a general survey of the papers to determine the types of materials and their need for possible preservation, Cartledge settled on three main divisions. One includes all the materials from Blackmun's "pre-judicial years," including his years as a student, law clerk, practicing attorney and counsel for the Mayo Clinic and Mayo Association in Rochester, Minn.; these materials take 16 boxes. Another division includes papers from his years (1959-1970) on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit; these papers fill 46 boxes. The third division, the largest, consists of the Supreme Court files, which take up 1,514 boxes. An additional nine containers hold oversized materials; there are 1,585 containers in all.
"We started with the Supreme Court files," Cartledge said. She and her team ordered the files by case numbers and court term dates, tucked materials into acid-free folders and containers and kept a running list of the containers. With the first file, Cartledge started a finding aid, which grew into the 362-page document that was made available online and in print to opening- day researchers on March 4. As she processed the papers, she kept notes that became the "scope and content" for the collection guide.
Materials in each of the more than 800 Supreme Court cases are arranged by "slip opinion," which is the final, prepublication draft of the court's opinion; correspondence and memoranda between justices; draft opinions; conference notes; oral argument notes; law clerks' memoranda about petitions for certiorari; law clerks' memoranda; bench memoranda; and public correspondence and clippings.
"It was a lot of fun to process, and I had a lot of help," Cartledge said.
Because Blackmun "was such a collector, you get a sense of who he is," she said, adding she enjoyed a sense of humor evident in his notes and annotations. She also enjoyed his candid opinions, which he exhibited in letter grades he assigned to the books he had read (he kept reading lists of fiction and nonfiction).
Blackmun's accumulation of documents, memoranda and all his notes—his own and those handed or sent to him—in all their boxes lined up side by side stretch farther than two football fields. "It may take years before they are fully appreciated," Cartledge said.
