ABSTRACT
Oliver Wendell Holmes's hagiography was far from inevitable, however. For in March 1919, Holmes had upheld criminal convictions for speakers in three prominent cases, Schenck v. United States, Frohwerk v. United States, and Debs v. United States. The story of Holmes's transformation rests significantly on the influence of Harold Laski. No one was a more intimate intellectual companion to Holmes in his years as justice than Laski, a Jewish immigrant from England blessed with prodigious energy and an exceptional mind. Laski, who was friends with Chafee, recruited the latter to alter Holmes's position. Laski arranged for the two to have social tea at his summer residence in Rockport, Massachusetts. Yet it is one thing to infer that Chafee and Laski had served as catalysts for Holmes's change of mind, and quite another to assume that he had adopted their ideas wholesale.
