Delmas, D
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uber1:https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1591
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Delphin Delmas(SCU, Big Basin): Representing Santa Clara County was Delphin Delmas, "silver tongued orator of the West”. Emigrated from France at ten to join his father, a 49er (established a large wine vineyard, but also brought snails to CA). A graduate of Santa Clara College ( and a delegate to Democratic convention 1904, nominated W.R. Hearst in part because his anti-monopolist position?), worked for local towns and as a defense attorney; he worked pro bono and alone to protect last redwoods with Semper Virens Club in creating the first state park in California.
In this case against the SP, and others, he argued passionately for the rights of natural persons, vs artificial ones. Trial of the Century (Hearst Yellow tabloid journalism) Harry Thaw murdered architect Stanford White (Astors, Vanderbilts)
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corphistlon
S.W. Sanderson, represented the railroad and had the "reputation of a pit bull" TH (ex judge for SPRR). Similar to Conklin, Sanderson claimed a "secret committee" in Congress intended 14th to apply to corporations (p 22).
Representing Santa Clara County was Delphin Delmas, "silver tongued orator of the West”. Emigrated from France at ten to join his father, a 49er. A graduate of Santa Clara College ( and a delegate to Democratic convention 1904, nominated W.R. Hearst in part because his anti-monopolist position?), worked for local towns and as a defense attorney; he worked pro bono and alone to protect last redwoods with Semper Virens Club in creating the first state park in California.
In this case against the SP, and others, he argued passionately for the rights of natural persons, vs artificial ones.
Sanderson wrote that Southern Pacific could not be taxed differently on its fences than other corporations or human beings?. The court rejected Santa Clara County appeal, but one of the railroad's six defenses involved the 14th Amendment. However, since many of those arguments not needed, never argued nor ruled on.
However, the headnote (summary) by Davis included the ideas that that corporations are equal to natural persons and not artificial person (the reporter alludes to Waite saying that's our opinion without rationale) 24..The case itself had no legal justification. More alarming, Waite was concerned about errors in court reporter work (Allison)
Stephen Johnson Field, friend of Gov. Leland Stanford (who later headed the Southern Pacific Railroad) (one brother promoted the Transatlantic cable, another worked for railroads. Judge Field annoyed his colleagues by requesting to write majority decisions on railroad cases (Allison). He had some liberal views when young, but bad news from Europe about political and labor unrest soured him, "A shocking example was the spontaneous uprising of the Paris Commune in March, 1871, followed by its bloody suppression. In America, newspaper exaggerations fed an hysterical conservative reaction against Granger and labor movements as conspiratorial threats to property. He had seen similar uprisings in his European tour of 1848. Worse still, the disease seemed to have crossed the oceans to San Francisco, where he arrived to find a miners’ strike in July, 1871. Workers in the Amador mines, seeking in vain a $3 wage and something shorter than a 12-hour day, had stopped the pumps at a cost of $100,000 in property damage.
One can only imagine the effect upon Field the jurist as strikers battled the troops
sent in to pacify them (Graham, 1968). And there were the Great Railroad Strike of
1877, theMussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, and the Haymarket Riot of 1886." (Allison)
Farmers and workers quashed a bid for Democratic presidential run.
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" The Santa Clara decision was enshrined in 1889 when, three years after it was
handed down, it was first cited in a majority opinion as a precedent. Because Chief
Justice Waite died in 1888, he was not on hand to admonish Associate Justice
Stephen J. Field--as he likely would have done--whenField, writing the Court’s
unanimous opinion about three hogs killed by a train, cited Santa Clara County v.
Southern Pacific Railroad Company as a precedent for corporate personhood
(Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Company v. Beckwith (1889)).
Allison ] Field admitted in 1889 that Santa Clara County case did not grant personhood legally.
"In these two sentences (according to the conventional wisdom), Waite weakened the kind of democratic republic the original authors of the Constitution had envisioned, and he set the stage for the future worldwide damage of our environmental, governmental, and cultural commons. The plutocracy that had arisen with the East India Company in 1600 and had been fought back by America's Founders had gained a tool that was to allow it, in the coming decades, to once again gain control of most of North America and then the world
Ironically, of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court in the years between Waite's proclamation and 1910, only 19 dealt with African Americans: 288 were suits brought by corporations seeking the rights of natural persons.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black pointed out fifty years later, "I do not believe the word 'person' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations.... Neither the history nor the language of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection."
Sixty years later Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas made the same point, writing, "There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view [that corporations are legally 'persons']." p25
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hartmann
The lead lawyer for Santa Clara County, California was Delphin M. Delmas, a Democrat who later went into politics and by 1904 was known as 'the silver-tongued Orator of the West' when he was elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from California. While Waite and Sanderson had spent their lives serving the richest men in America, Delmas had always worked on behalf of local California governments and, later, as a criminal defense attorney. For example, he passionately and single-handedly argued before the California legislature for a law to protect the remaining redwood forests.
Fiercely defensive about the 'rights of natural persons,' Delmas was a fastidious, unimposing man, known to wear 'a frock coat, gray-striped trousers, a wing collar and an Ascot tie,' whose 'voice thrummed with emotion' and was nationally known as 'the master dramatist of America's courtrooms..' He had a substantial nose and a broad forehead only slightly covered in its center with a wispy bit of thinning hair. In the courtroom he was a brilliant dramatist, as the nation would learn in 1908 when he successfully defended Harry K. Thaw for murder in what was the most sensational case of the first half of the century, later made into the 1955 movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.}:
The case about to be decided in the Old Senate Chamber before Justice Waite's Supreme Court was about the way Santa Clara County had been taxing land and rights-of-way of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Claiming the taxation was improper, the railroad had refused for six years to pay taxes levied by Santa Clara County, and the case had ended up before the Supreme Court, with Delmas and Sanderson making the main arguments before the court.
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http://r-house.org/the-brainstorm-and-the-barristers-barley/
Besides being the son of the infamous importer of garden snails (AKA escargot) from France, Delphin Michael Delmas was a nationally famous attorney and a shipper of products through Rengstorff's Landing. The recently restored accounting record of shipments from the landing includes the June 1880 entry, "Shipped per Schooner Mountain View ... 53 sacks of Delmas & Briggs barley and 100 sacks of [their] wheat."
Delphin Delmas, farmer, dam builder, district attorney, defense attorney in the "Crime of the Century," Regent of the University of California, presidential nominator, was born in France in 1844. He came to California at the age of 10, settling in Santa Clara County, joining his father, Antoine the escargot gourmet, who had preceded the family by five years. By 1858 Antoine owned vineyards with 350,000 vines of 105 wine varieties.
The son Delphin came to own 600 acres of Mountain View (now Sunnyvale) farmland near El Camino Real and Bernardo Avenue and built the Delmas Dam on Stevens Creek near Fremont Avenue. He graduated from Santa Clara College in 1862, received a law degree from Yale in 1865, was elected District Attorney of Santa Clara County in 1867, later carried on a private law practice, was known as "The Napoleon of the Western Bar," was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis in 1904 where he gave the nominating address for William Randolph Hearst for president.
:{:{One of the most formidable lawyers of the age, he was selected as the defense attorney for the 1907 New York trial of Harry K. Thaw, wealthy playboy, for the murder of Stanford White, renowned architect. Witnessed by scores of onlookers at the Madison Square Garden roof theater, Thaw fired three shots into White's face, instantly killing him.
The motive was Thaw's fury over the earlier, long term dalliance between White and Thaw's new wife Evelyn Nesbit, artists' model and Floradora girl, who became known in the tabloids as the "Girl in the Red Velvet Swing," named for the device installed in White's opulent apartment and used by Evelyn starting at age 16. This reference to her became the title of the 1955 motion picture detailing the crime and the trial. Delmas's defense of Thaw was temporary insanity and was supported by medical testimony claiming that Thaw's fulmination was the result of a "brain storm," thought to be the first time that expression had been used. It became an instant catch word during the trial and ever thereafter, although the meaning has morphed from violence to whimsy. }:The trial ended with a hung jury; in the second trial Delmas got his client acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity.}:
http://www.palmspringsbum.org/genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I54549&tree=Legends
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Delphin Delmas, a noted defense attorney, was a member of the movement to save the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The following selection is an excerpt from his address to the California State Assembly on February 18, 1901, in support of a landmark bill appropriating $250,000 for the purchase of 2,500 acres of redwood forest northeast of Santa Cruz. The bill was passed later that month, leading to the creation of Big Basin, California’s first state park. This year, Big Basin State Park celebrates its centennial with a variety of public events, hikes, exhibits, and activities, both indoor and outdoor, throughout the summer and fall.
For more information, contact the Mountain Parks Foundation at (831) 335-3174 or www.mountainparks.org, and the Sempervirens Fund at (650) 968-4509 or :{:{www.sempervirens.org}:}:.
. . . I appear before you under the favoring auspices of the Sempervirens Club. That association, as you are doubtless aware, is composed of some of the foremost representatives of education, municipal government, and public affairs, and many, too, of the gentlest and most generous ladies of the land. The object which it has in view is fairly indicated by the name it has assumed. Its labors are devoted to the preservation of a fragment, at least, of those redwood forests which, in the infancy of the State, extended in exuberant profusion along our seaboard from the Oregon line to Monterey, but which, invaded now by the demands of commerce, are being so rapidly destroyed that unless the hand of devastation is stayed soon no vestige of them will remain. While the field of activity of these public-spirited citizens is confined to no section of our territory, yet I voice their sentiments when I state that, for the present at least, they have centered their attention upon one particular spot and the preservation of one especial body of trees. And had you visited this spot, as I lately did, had you felt, as I felt, the emotions which it awakens, had you been brought, as I was, under the influence of the spirit of the place, you too must needs share in their enthusiasm and justify their predilection.
Camping at Big Basin
Camping at Big Basin (no date). Photo by Alice Iola Hare, courtesy of Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley.
:{:{In the heart of the Santa Cruz Range this chosen spot is found. It presents to the eye the aspect of a vast amphitheater whose encircling walls are the dim heights of mist-crowned mountains. Seen from the crest of the ridge, it stretches toward the setting sun, its distant outlines blending the purplish-blue tints of the woods with the hazy vapors of the ocean. From this point of view you catch a confused suggestion of a great forest watered by intersecting streams. Descend from your eminence and enter within the limits of the forest. Your first feeling is one of awe. Your very breath seems hushed by the solemn stillness of the place. Here the winds are mute. Their distant murmurings are unheard within the depths of the shaded solitude. Your step falls noiseless upon the thick carpet of marl—the cast-off vesture of countless seasons—upon which you tread.
The crackling of a twig under your foot or the startled cry of a frightened bird but intensifies the silence which enfolds you like a shroud. Contemplate now the scene spread on every hand in never-ending vistas. See the great moss-covered oak, the light and graceful maple, the glossy laurel, everywhere entwining their branches and blending the varied hues of their foliage in tangled profusion, while here and there the glistening trunks of clustered madronos stand out against the dark background like streaks of yellow sunlight. As you lift up your eyes, behold above the giant forms that sentinel the place. These are California’s own—hers, for in no other soil have they ever found root and under no other breeze save that of the Pacific have they ever swayed their boughs.}:}:
A sense of humility overwhelms you as you gaze upon these massy pillars of Nature’s temple, whose tops, lost amid the clouds, seem to support the vault of the blue empyrean. The spell which the mystic light of some venerable cathedral may at times have thrown upon your soul is tame compared to that which binds you here. That was man’s place of worship; this is God’s. In the presence of these Titanic offsprings of Nature, standing before you in the hoar austerity of centuries, how dwarfed seems your being, how fleeting your existence! They were here when you were born; and though you allow your thoughts to go back on the wings of imagination to your remotest ancestry, you realize that they were here when your first forefather had his being. All human work which you have seen or conceived of is recent in comparison. Time has not changed them since Columbus first erected an altar upon this continent. . . . They were old when Moses led the children of Israel to the promised land. . . . And if their great mother, Nature, is permitted still to protect them, here they will stand defying time when not a stone of this Capitol is left to mark the spot on which it now stands, and its very existence may have faded into the mists of tradition.
You experience a feeling of profound sadness as you conjure up the picture of these venerable trees falling hacked and shivered, to become the commonplace materials of barter and trade. As you behold their lofty foliage stirred by the ocean breeze, you seem to hear them murmur a prayer to be saved from such desecration. . . .
Legislators of California, guardians of her material interests, but custodians no less of her physical beauty, will you turn a deaf ear to these appeals? Upon what ground would such a course stand justified before your constituents?
:{:{Legislators of California, while deeply grateful for the courteous attention you have accorded me, I cannot but apologize for the trespass I have already made upon your time. No one better knows the importance of your labors here and the mass of legislation pressing upon you. Yet, even so, turn not away from this project. The people have it at heart. Attend to it—attend to it, I pray you, now. Do not leave it as unfinished business to your successors. When they shall come upon the scene it will be too late. The slopes which surround this forest are already denuded. The work of devastation has reached the very edge of these woods.
There, even while I speak, the axman stands ready to strike. If he pauses, it is only to await your decision. Two years from now his work will be done, and the last remaining fragment of the primeval trees which clothe the mountains rising up at the very threshold of our metropolis will have vanished. Vain, then, will be our regrets, and all attempts to repair the evil vain. Man’s work, if destroyed, man may again replace. God’s work God alone can re-create. Accede, then, to the prayers of the people. Save this forest. Save it now. The present generation approves the act; generations yet unborn, in grateful appreciation of your labors, will rise up to consecrate its consummation.}:}:
Research for this article provided by Irene Barnard.