Harlan Crow Is ‘Collateral Damage’ of a Smear Campaign Against Clarence Thomas In an effort to delegitimate the Supreme Court, left-leaning journalists libel him as a Nazi sympathizer.By Barton Swaim
American politics lately feels like an endless game of—pardon the infelicitous word—delegitimation. The aim isn’t to convince voters that a political adversary is wrong or misguided, or even that he’s stupid or lying. It’s to assure the like-minded that he has no legitimate place in the public square and to drive him out if possible.
The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness; the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes.
The politics of delegitimation arose on the political left, an inheritance of 20th-century collectivist ideologies that saw no legitimacy in the liberal capitalist regimes they aimed to overthrow. But sizable segments of the American right now indulge in it, too. Donald Trump rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate. Mr. Trump’s claims that Mexican-American judges have no right to rule against him, or that President Biden’s election was fraudulent, may be false. But they aren’t unique.
The impulse to delegitimate is at its ugliest any time a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court. During their confirmation hearings all of the current court’s conservative justices, with the partial exception of John Roberts, were accused of engaging in disreputable behavior or of holding opinions so bizarre and regressive as to disqualify them from service. In the stated views of their critics, these judges weren’t just wrong; they were bad.
Now that the court’s conservatives have a tenuous 6-3 majority despite the efforts of their defamers, the work of delegitimation has broadened to sitting justices and the court itself. Some recent headlines: “Supreme Court Term Begins Amid Questions about Its Legitimacy” (Washington Post), “Is the Supreme Court Facing a Legitimacy Crisis?” (New York Times), “The Supreme Court Is Fighting Over Its Own Legitimacy” (CNN). These and similar stories are manifestly intended to precipitate the “legitimacy crisis” they pretend to report.
Lately, the delegitimaters have concentrated their fire—not for the first time—on Justice Clarence Thomas. He was the first recent nominee to the high court to face opposition based on accusations of personal misconduct. Those accusations fell apart under scrutiny, but they are still repeated as though indisputably true by—in a touch of sad irony—the very people now claiming to worry about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.
Last year a series of press accounts portrayed Justice Thomas’s wife as a right-wing activist. That’s a fair assessment, but the suggestion that Mrs. Thomas’s activism affected the integrity of her husband’s judicial decisions wasn’t borne out. The latest story alleging Justice Thomas’s wrongdoing, and thus the Supreme Court’s “illegitimacy,” concerns the justice’s friend Harlan Crow.
Mr. Crow, a Dallas-based developer, is wealthy. He has hosted Justice and Mrs. Thomas on several trips of the sort ordinary vacationers—including the Thomases—wouldn’t be able to afford. Earlier this month ProPublica, a left-leaning news site, published an account of these acts of hospitality with the suggestion that the justice’s failure to report them on federal disclosure forms amounts to a violation of the law.
The account didn’t bother to note that under the law then in effect Justice Thomas wasn’t required to report the trips. Also making the ProPublica story’s broad hints of impropriety rather puzzling, Mr. Crow has never been party to any case before the Supreme Court. The reporters note that “the court periodically hears major cases that directly impact the real estate industry,” but this tenuous inference tellingly avoids mentioning how Justice Thomas came down in those “periodic” cases, never mind how they might indirectly affect Mr. Crow’s interests.
A later story noted that Mr. Crow purchased the Savannah, Ga., house where Justice Thomas’s mother lives, together with two empty lots, for around $133,000. In a statement Mr. Crow explained that he bought the properties with the aim of creating a museum “dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice.” Which, if you’ve read the justice’s 2007 autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son,” seems entirely reasonable. A self-styled “ethics watchdog” demanded an investigation and accused Justice Thomas of deceptively disclosing the sale.
But as my colleague James Taranto has shown, the ProPublica report badly misread the evidence. Justice Thomas should have reported the sale and didn’t, but the filing instructions were unclear and it was an honest mistake. The purportedly deceptive disclosure not only was nothing of the kind; it involved a different property entirely.
The effort to smear Justice Thomas has turned into an effort to smear his friend Mr. Crow. He is an inveterate collector of historical artifacts: books, manuscripts, statues, paraphernalia of all kinds. His archive and library, as I learned this week on a visit to his home, is head-spinningly large and diverse, housing roughly 15,000 books and 5,000 manuscripts. One of his interests among many others: paintings by political leaders. On his walls are original paintings by Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Mr. Crow’s friend George W. Bush. Not displayed are two paintings by Adolf Hitler, which are archived, along with other items pertaining to Nazi-era Germany, for the benefit of historical research.
The existence of these items in Mr. Crow’s collection has permitted a variety of left-leaning media outlets to portray him as some kind of Nazi enthusiast. Again, some headlines: “Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler Artifacts” (Washingtonian), “Clarence Thomas’ Pal Harlan Crow Collects Nazi Artifacts” (Inside Edition), “Clarence Thomas’ Family Got $133K from Nazi-Obsessed Billionaire” (Rolling Stone). Several similarly unscrupulous commentators—Ian Millhiser and Elie Mystal are two—jumped on Twitter to libel Mr. Crow as a Nazi sympathizer.
At Old Parkland, a kind of Americana-themed office park and research campus owned by Mr. Crow, he tells me about the debates regularly hosted at the site. We sit down first in the campus café.
“We’ve had a lot of speakers here,” he says, “President [George W.] Bush has spoken here many times, but Bill Clinton has spoken here. Beto O’Rourke was here. [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries was here.” The Dallas business community leans Republican, he says almost apologetically, so Old Parkland “probably hosts more speakers on the center-right than otherwise. But we have a lot.”
Mr. Crow is clearly uncomfortable talking to the press. He says he agreed to speak because a few influential people are saying terrible things about him in an attempt to hurt Justice Thomas. “I’m collateral damage, I realize that,” he says.
Mr. Crow takes me for a walk around the campus. He shows me innumerable paintings, statues, artifacts and stone-engraved quotations: a statue of Harriet Tubman, a framed letter from Thomas Jefferson, a lapidary quotation by Tocqueville, a commissioned painting of Martin Luther King Jr., a painting of the Wright Brothers—and so, dizzyingly, on.
Not ideal material on which to base an allegation of crypto-fascism, one would have thought.
As we walk across a row of stepping stones, he looks down at them and says, “Now this is just stupid.” I gather he means “stupid” in the sense of lavishly misguided but for a good cause. He points to the granite stones beneath our feet. Embedded in each is a rectangular marble insert bearing the image of the title page of some great work of political philosophy. One stone has the title page of Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws,” another of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” A touch rococo, maybe, but I wouldn’t call it stupid.
Under the campus’s bell tower we descend to what looks like a small parliament: three terraced rows of wooden desks and leather-upholstered chairs on each side, a speaker’s dais in the middle. More quotations of the ancients adorn the walls—Livy, Marcus Aurelius. “This is the debating chamber,” Mr. Crow says. “That’s what we call it, anyway. We host all kinds of debates here. Anyone who’s reasonable, really.”
Reasonable? Such as? “We’ve had Cornel West—he’s a good friend—Cornel and Robbie George of Princeton. They’ve been here three or four times. That kind of thing.”
Mr. Crow says he doesn’t like talking about himself, especially to the press, and I begin to believe him. He possesses a disarming humility one seldom encounters in the very wealthy. And despite all the ornate bookishness of the Old Parkland campus, Mr. Crow makes no claim to be an intellectual or a scholar. “I’m in real estate,” he says. “I know a lot about building codes.” All the Tacitus, Madison and Tocqueville quotations engraved on the walls? “We bring in scholars to help us. I’m not smart enough to do this s—.”
What he wants as a philanthropist, he explains, is to encourage the civil exchange of ideas. “I mean it’s obvious to everybody, I think, that civil discourse has broken down,” he says. “Americans love to talk about America and debate what it means to be American. We used to be able to do that vigorously, and now it’s breaking down. And so anything I can do, any thoughtful citizen can do, to promote a return to high-quality, courteous civil discourse—that would be a big win for all of us.”
Later we visit Mr. Crow’s house in Highland Park. He shows me, in addition to the paintings by Churchill, Eisenhower and the rest, the largest personal library I have ever seen. Two floors of mahogany shelves in a room perhaps 80 feet long, nearly all of it shelving books and manuscripts about American culture and history. Among the sections he wishes me to see is one on American Judaica.
Mr. Crow thinks of it as a research library and makes it available to scholars. “I do believe that if you’re going to tell the story of anything, and in this case it’s the story of America, you have to do it warts and all,” he says, seated in his library. “And we have a lot of warts. I try to have things here that are very open about our warts. . . . There’s stuff about the Japanese internment, stuff about racism in its many forms throughout a long period of time.”
Nearby Mr. Crow shows me a handwritten manuscript of Abraham Lincoln, a syllogistic note on the wrongness of slavery, and an early edition of Jonathan Edwards’s pamphlet “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.”
“We have a lot of material on the abolitionists,” Mr. Crow goes on. “It’s all here. The only thing we don’t do is Hollywood and sports. That would be too much.”
After lunch—ham and turkey sandwiches and fruit—we return to his friendship with Justice Thomas. He points out that they don’t always agree on policy. “Look, I’m a moderate Republican,” he says. “Some of my other Republican friends think I’m too squishy, but I am what I am. I’m kind of a traditional George Bush type Republican. That’s my belief system. So I do what I believe. I support a number of moderate Democrats, too.”
He pauses briefly, then says: “This is not terribly important, but I’m moderately pro-choice—a first-trimester guy. That would be my point of view on the issue. So when people say I want to influence people on the court, I would say that if I were trying to do that, which I’m not, I’m not doing a very good job.”
As we talk, he becomes more animated on the subject of his lack of influence on the justice. “Do we talk about politics? Sure we do. We talk about sports. We talk about the game or whatever. But do I influence him? Hell no. I respect his judgment about those things way more than mine. I’m actually probably a little bit more moderate, but we don’t talk about that s—. I mean, why would I do that?”
Mr. Crow reaches for an analogy. “Let’s say you’re a professional golfer,” he says, pointing to me. “For me to sit down and tell you about golf, that’d be stupid. I can’t tell you about the golf.”
Behind Mr. Crow’s house is perhaps the strangest garden in America. Here and there along a walking path are statues—some small, some enormous—of 20th-century communist leaders: Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Béla Kun, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Fidel Castro, Felix Dzerzhinsky and others. All of them once stood in public places in communist countries, but after the fall of the Soviet Union they were torn down or quietly removed. Several are defaced, having been disfigured by the victims of their real-life originals. Béla Kun’s concrete nose is missing, perhaps a victim of a Hungarian hammer or bat when it came down it in 1989.
Mr. Crow bought the sculptures—legally, he is careful to point out—and had them shipped to the U.S. Why? “It’s weird, I know,” he says. “But I believe strongly that we have to remember what these regimes did to their people. If we don’t remember, then what?”
He’s right—the garden is weird. But he has a point. All of the insurgents and dictators represented by these drab statues came to believe that no one who opposed their revolutionary plans had a rightful place in the new egalitarian society they wished to create. No opponent of revolution could claim legitimacy. The result was a lot of collateral damage.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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