42 pages • 1 hour read
Anthony LewisGideon’s Trumpet
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Quest for Justice
The most important theme in the text is the quest for justice. Even with his limited grasp of the legal codes of the United States, Clarence Gideon senses a deep injustice. He has a guttural feeling that he should have been assigned a lawyer during his trial and makes it a point of order to appeal. From this moment, Gideon’s story becomes the narrative of a poor man who is seeking recourse for a perceived miscarriage of justice. This is not limited to one man. Gideon is well-aware of the nationwide impact of his quest. Beginning with one man in a Florida courtroom, the quest ventures all the way to the highest court in the land and—in the Epilogue—back to the Florida courtroom where it began.
The defining quality of this quest is the manner in which it positions the poor man against the system. Gideon cannot afford a lawyer and thus cannot afford an adequate legal defense. Though he tries hard and produces a commendable effort, there are certain actions and recourses that—as a layman—he simply does not know. Therefore, Gideon’s legal situation is determined by his financial and economic status. This, he believes, is an injustice and the quest to resolve this injustice becomes the narrative of the text.
In addition to the story of Gideon, the quest for justice functions as an opportunity for the text to explore the frequently misunderstood and occasionally byzantine processes of the Supreme Court. Gideon’s appeal is tracked from his prison cell to the Court floor, providing a detailed narrative of how the Court functions. The quest for justice becomes an important insight into the way in which the law functions in American society, using the case as a vehicle for an educational text.
The narrative also introduces an important consideration: how many are not as lucky as Gideon? Though Gideon’s quest for justice is successfully resolved, there are clearly many others who have suffered similar injustices. The thousands of retrials listed at the end of the text are evidence of this. Gideon is fortuitous but his success calls on the reader to ask how many other potential quests were halted prematurely.
Federalism
In writing the story of Gideon’s case against the Florida authorities, the book portrays the tension between the justices of the Supreme Court as an ideological fight. The issue that causes this tension is federalism, the debate over whether power and authority should reside at a state or a federal level. This battle is presented as a disagreement between two justices—Black and Frankfurter—whose ideological difference has the power to scupper the case. For Justice Black, a federal level law requiring legal counsel to be assigned to defendants seems a matter of course. For Justice Frankfurter, this is a matter for states to decide of their own volition. While Frankfurter is not actually present during the session in which Gideon’s case is heard, the issue of federalism remains a difficult impasse for Fortas and his team.
As such, federalism becomes an important theme in the text. Gideon’s case, for example, is portrayed mainly at the state level. The legal officials he deals with belong to the Floridian authorities; his only contact with the Supreme Court (a federal institution) is via mail and through Fortas. Gideon remains imprisoned by a state authority after having fallen victim to a state’s failure to assign him a lawyer, which he views as a great injustice. Gideon (and, by proxy, his team) are of the belief that this issue requires federal attention, while Jacob and the Florida authorities wish to retain the control over whether they are required to assign a lawyer to defendants. At Gideon’s level, at the Supreme Court’s level, and at every juncture in between, there is a clear disagreement on the issue of federalism. It permeates the entire debate surrounding Gideon’s case.
This theme is expanded further. In preparing for the case, Jacob writes to other states asking for support. He believes that the attorneys general of these other states will support him, supposing that state representatives will come down on the side of the states when presented with a federalist issue. Quite the opposite occurs, however, and many states come out in favor of the opposing side. Rather than a divisive matter, federalism becomes a banner under which the vast majority of states seem to come together. Even Frankfurter, in the final chapter, agrees that he would have voted with the court. Ultimately, federalism becomes a unifying theme.
Legal Evolution
Written shortly after the ruling in Gideon’s case (the book was published in 1964, a year after the Supreme Court’s decision), Gideon’s Trumpet functions as a product of its time. The specificity of the time and place in which it was published make it a reflection of contemporary views and realities that—to the modern reader—can seem discordant. The language in the text, for instance, reflects a country in the midst of massive political changes. The issue of civil rights is an indicator of this theme; while the book is not about the civil rights movement in any meaningful sense, allusions, references, and mentions of civil rights permeate the text, as is befitting of a time when one of the most hardly fought political issues of the 20th Century were still fresh in the minds of every American and—in many ways—were far from settled law. The march on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, for example, took place six months after the ruling in Gideon’s case. As such, the text functions as a time capsule, highlighting the extent to which such issues influenced the political climate of the 1960s.
As well as mentions of contemporary issues, the use of language in the text signifies its roots in a specific time and place. The use of terms such as “negro” as a synonym for African-American, for example, may seem awkward to the modern reader but accurately reflects the unfortunate reality of inequality at the time—further emphasizing the need for a case like Gideon’s to stem the tide of racism. Likewise, the text takes for granted the non-existence of female judges or justices. The demographic makeup of the Court is strictly white and male, to the point where mentioning that a certain justice is Catholic becomes a matter of note. In the modern era, when notions of female justices and people of color serving on the Court are taken for granted, it reflects the chronological distance that separates the time in which the text was written from the modern day. Likewise, the modern audience might take the issue of lawyers being assigned to defendants as an accepted fact of life but—as is shown by the case itself—this was far from settled law. As a result, the text functions as a product of its time and place in American history, showing modern readers the differences between then and now and the legal ramifications therein.
