"Human life now"

MR. NOONAN: When this very welcome invitation to say something in tribute to Jim McFadden came to me, I was just reading that marvelous diary of an old New York lawyer, George Templeton Strong, which describes the founding of the Union League Club. And it could not but strike me how appropriate that we should be gathering here to honor Jim in this place. As Strong describes it, it was the winter of 1863, and in his judgment, the war could not be prosecuted 12 months longer. They were "dark, blue days," as he put it. And the idea was to "associate into an organism"-his phrase800 to 1,000 New Yorkians who would support the government of the United States. They were to be vigorously excluded-all the weak-hearted, the vacillating, the secretly disloyal, the compromising, who even then, in the middle of the war, made up a good part of the elite of New York. "The whole dirty crowd," in Strong's words, "of false-hearted back-stump orators and wire-- pullers, all the embodiments of corrupt, mercenary, self-seeking, sham patriotism." I observe that even in 1863 a Buckleyian capability for robust rhetoric flourished in New York.

Well, the cause for which the Union League Club was established prevailed, and the spirit has survived. And it has found its modern shape in Jim McFadden. The irony that the courageous spirit of 1863 should find its modern form in this fashion would not have been lost on Strong. He believed-I don't know whether he was the first to say it-but he certainly believed that the snakes of Ireland had died from biting the Irish. [laughter] And there is no modern New Yorker resentful of recent immigrants as resentful as he was of the Celtic tide of his generation. I doubt if he would have made an exception for the people from Donegal. But he and we, I believe, can put aside the prejudice that was local and contingent and see true principles. And the principles, the unswerving loyalty of those men of 1863 in "dark, blue days" when the war could not be prosecuted another 12 months longer, is as marked today in Jim McFadden. The loyalty is the same. The division in the country is analogous and the causes are similar: human liberty then, human life now.

And there has been the same great need for organization, direction, and projection of opinion on the right side. In the case of slavery, there was really only one organ of public opinion in New York, Horace Greeley's Tribune, which provided a forum in which anti-slavery thinking could find a national audience. In the case of abortion, Jim McFadden has given the cause of human life what it so badly wanted: a vigorous, articulate organ of opinion in which the many facets of the abortion issue could be analyzed and commented upon and debated. Abortion, and it has been apparent in the pages of this journal, is about as much a single-issue issue as a centipede is one-- footed. Jim McFadden has also edited the liveliest, most newsful and most invigorating newsletter, which has given life indeed to those of us engaged in a campaign which has often needed such encouragement and such invigoration. And he has provided the direction and fundraising and organization and counsel as indispensable to the cause of human life as his services have been to National Review. Counsel which has been shrewd and bold and sagacious and successful. I would compare him to Horace Greeley in providing a voice for a great cause neglected or caricatured in the establishment newspapers and journals. I would compare him, except that he has a stability and a modesty and a sense of human limitation which Greeley did not possess. We need not expect him, unlike Greeley, to abandon the Republican Party in order to become the Democrats' nominee for president. Also unlike Greeley, his commitment to principle and politics is anchored upon, is integrated with-I dare to say it-his profoundest religious convictions. If he fights for man, it is not for the average hypothetical figure of the liberal politician. It is for the actual human beings who are united in his faith with Jesus, redemptor hominis. His humanism is founded upon the God who took human flesh and frame in the womb of Mary. His life follows the law which Hopkins captured in the lines: "Our law says: Love what are love's worthiest, were all known;/World's loveliest-men's selves. Self flashes off frame and face." It is in response to these actual human beings, their frames, their faces that Jim McFadden has acted and continues to act. [applause]

John T. Noonan, Jr., a well-known legal scholar and author, is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He made these remarks at a Testimonial Dinner for J. P. McFadden which he co-hosted at the Union League Club in New York City on May 21, 1979.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Winter 1999
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