Dear Dan,
Well, there are a long and a short answer to that, dear friend. I imagine you already know that your darling Allison will give you the long and the short of it, but the long comes first because how can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
This all starts, of course, during the Third Servile War (73–71 BCE). Oh, don’t roll your eyes yet, dear Dan, I know you remember this one because this is the one with Spartacus. What? You’re only vaguely familiar? You prevail upon me to help you out? Then your fearless correspondent will endeavor to give her own slanted recount, as is her custom.
Historically and in film, Spartacus was a Thracian mercenary who fought for the Roman army for a while. After he deserted, he was spared crucifixion, which was the common punishment for desertion, and instead sold into slavery. Then, he was purchased by a gladiator school, where he was trained and forced to fight as a murmillo, a specific type of gladiator armed with a short sword and heavy helmet and shield. Murmillos had to be tall and muscular, in order to shoulder the weight of their armor, and Spartacus, much like Kirk Douglas (who would portray him in Stanley Kubrick’s eponymous disowned 1960 masterpiece), was no exception.
Though the gladiatorial life was one of the better assignments a slave in ancient Rome could hope for, Spartacus was not satisfied. He mustered a slave-and-proletariat army, at one point numbering around 40,000 men. Of course, the Roman senate was good at quelling uprisings, and we know how this story ends, Constant Reader—with literal miles of broken, crucified bodies posted along the Appian Way. The real Spartacus was likely killed on the battlefield, and thus spared that final torturous humiliation, at least.
Two thousand years later, Spartacus had come to be a favorite figure of the Communist Party. They saw him as a sort of early civil-rights leader who sacrificed his life to end human bondage and wage slavery in those early days before individual rights. The truth, of course, is much more selfish. The truth is that Spartacus and the slaves who fought with him had no intention or desire to end slavery as a whole—or even slavery for anyone other than their own sweet selves. They just wanted to be free. And I suggest to you that that’s probably normal. When one is enslaved, loftier social ideals are all well and good, but the most important thing is one’s own freedom.
Does the truth matter, though? The story is all the more interesting, the hero all the more heroic, using the heavily filtered lens of the casual historian and the Communist party.
This glorified ideal of Spartacus was canonized in a book in the early 1950s, and a very controversial screen writer and Communist, Dalton Trumbo, turned it into a film script. Trumbo had served time in federal prison for refusing to testify before Congress in McCarthy-era witch-hunt hearings and was one of the top names in the Motion Picture Association of America’s infamous Hollywood blacklist. Of his conviction for “Contempt of Congress,” Trumbo said, “[…][i]t was a completely just verdict. I had contempt for that congress and have had contempt for it ever since.”
Trumbo was extremely talented, and he was largely used as a ghost writer for major films even during his blacklisting, quietly living in Mexico, full of contempt. Stanley Kubrick, everyone’s favorite crazed director, made Spartacus the book into Spartacus the movie in 1960. Kirk Douglas, with his winning smile and bronzed chest, not only starred in but produced the film. Kubrick planned on listing himself as screen writer, but Douglas insisted on naming Trumbo. This put everyone who worked on the film at risk of being tainted by association with the infamous Communist—especially because the subject of the film itself was a pro-populist, proto-communist historical figure and the film was being released in 1960, as the government was realizing the Civil Rights movement was a powder keg and the fuse was already lit. The film was released, and those less brave than Douglas and Kubrick held their breath.
President Kennedy loved the movie, and so did everyone else (except for Kubrick himself, but that’s a different story). Spartacus’s success and the public listing of Trumbo as screenwriter curtailed the power of the MPAA’s blacklist and brought a quick end to the Hollywood witch hunts.
But what does this have to do with what we are talking about?
Dear Reader, the real hero here is everyone except the actual Spartacus. Actual Spartacus was an escaped criminal who we know few true things about. We know (1) he killed people for money, (2) he deserted the army and was given a lenient sentence for doing so, and (3) he escaped custody and was a ruthless murderer in pursuit of his own goals.
The people who actually changed things for others in this system, for better, worse, or in-between, were Kirk Douglas, Stanley Kubrick, Dalton Trumbo, JFK, and the Communist Party of America.
Spartacus gets all the credit, though.
Similarly, those of us at work in the criminal justice system are rarely the names that get remembered. One of the best-kept “secrets” in the law is that most lawyers abhor legal writing and contract it out to ghost writers: brilliant, silent law-lawyers who get no credit for the immense work they do under the names of others. The best of our appellate and post-conviction lawyers shrink from the spotlight, quietly cranking out briefs that shake the foundations of the system in near-anonymity. Even most of our trial lawyers, puffed up in their gladiatorial finery, are rarely known outside of our own lawyerly circles. The brazen DWI guys, the meanest DA in the courthouse—they are all tempests in teapots of our own small practice circles.
Whether prosecutor or defense lawyer, for good or bad, it’s the defendants who get remembered, not us. I encourage you, Dearest Dan, to try to make that something that is ok with you. The worst enemy of the lawyer is her ego. When we remember that the person we represent may not have the same values that we have, that they may not feel to us like they are “worthy” of our representation, that’s when we have to worry. When we think our practice is no longer practice, but perfect—when we think our own sweet names are more worthy than anyone else’s—we falter and fall short of the standards to which we pretend.
I suppose the thing is that we have to be OK with the fact that the waves that we make affect the change that we want to see, even if we never get the credit for making them.
I see you, though. And a lot of other lawyers like you. Though you recognize that you yourself are in chains, you have the foresight, the great ability, to want to hack at the chains of others and at the whole unfair system of chains. You are more than Spartacus was. And in my small and insufficient way, I commend you.
It’s not enough. I know. It’s not fair and it’s so natural to desire some recognition. I hope that you find what you’re looking for, and I hope you know that even if no one says anything, your quiet good work is so meaningful, and I hope you can take some validation from that, from this, from me.
Love Always,
Allison