Free A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr Page B

at work.
    At first Teresa thought he was simply self-centered, a flaw he himself seemed to recognize in his character. “He’s also very generous,” said Teresa, “because he knows he’s self-centered and he feels guilty about it.”
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    Lawyers in America have never been well liked. One of the first lawyers to arrive in the New World was an Englishman named Thomas Morton, who landed at Plymouth Colony in 1625, four years after the Pilgrims. Two years later he was jailed for trading firearms to the Indians and then expelled from the colony. In Massachusetts, fifteen lawyers practiced the profession in 1740, collecting debts and litigating disputes among merchants. By the time of the Revolution, that number had grown to seventy. For some citizens, lawyers had become “cursed hungry Caterpillars” whose fees “eat out the very Bowels of our Commonwealth.” Two hundred years later the basic complaint remains the same. “We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1977.
    As a youth, Jan Schlichtmann had not thought highly of the legal profession. He was born in Framingham, a working-class city dominated by a General Motors auto plant. His father, a traveling salesman, had always told his three sons that they should work for themselves. At the dinner table, he saw in his second son, Jan, a gift for argument. The boy had a passionate desire to persuade others to his own point of view, and he was unrelenting in his efforts. Irksome as this was in an adolescent, his father thought he saw in it the makings of a successful lawyer, and he urged Jan to consider the profession.
    At the University of Massachusetts, Schlichtmann studied philosophy. To him, the legal profession did not seem any more independent or exalted than the plumbing trade. That was the analogy that occurred to him when he thought about becoming a lawyer. People hired you to fix things in their lives—wills, divorces, collecting on bad debts—the same way they’d hire a plumber to fix clogged pipes and leaky faucets in their houses. Working in a big law firm would be even worse. You’d do the dirty work of the rich and powerful.
    When he graduated from college, in 1972, he married a fellow student. They moved to Rhode Island, where his wife entered graduate school. Schlichtmann, with a degree in philosophy, could not find a job that suited him. For want of anything better, he started selling life insurance to graduate students. In six months, he sold nearly a million dollars of insurance, but he despised the work. His marriage was unhappy. One day in the spring of 1973, he stopped selling insurance and started watching the Watergate hearings on television. For threemonths he sat at home, engrossed in the drama. His wife accused him of indolence. When the hearings ended, he knew he could never go back to selling insurance. He told himself he wanted to do something useful, something to benefit society, but he could not figure out what. He combed through the newspapers looking for a job. Finally he found an ad that read: “National Social Service Organization opening Rhode Island Branch. Looking for young, dynamic person as Executive Director. $8,500 salary.” He applied and discovered that the organization was the American Civil Liberties Union. One evening, he heard on the local television news that the ACLU had just opened its Rhode Island branch. Its new director, said the newscaster, was named Jan Schlichtmann.
    His first case at the ACLU involved a group of nuns and welfare mothers who had gathered in the State House rotunda to protest the governor’s cuts in welfare aid. The group convened at the State House once a week on Wednesday afternoons for half an hour. After a short prayer they’d sing, “Wake up, my people, wake up to the needs of all who suffer sorrow.… All across the nation, hungry people are starving.” On the third