A Pioneering Spirit
Patricia Collins Butler is accustomed to being a pioneer — whether blazing a trail as a female attorney in the 1930s or being a 100-year-old firebrand.
When I graduated it was, ‘Oh, you’re a lawyer. Ever go to court? Ever put anyone in jail? This lady’s a lawyer!” said Butler, 33l. “Now, it’s ‘Patricia Butler is 100 years old!’”
The third woman to attend Emory Law, Butler finished second in her class in 1931. For the next three years, she worked in the Emory Law library while looking for an opportunity to practice.
“When I started, women weren’t supposed to be lawyers,” she said. “My poor mother was kind of apologetic. My father pushed me into it. He would say “Paddy? She’s a lawyer, you know?
“I spoke with a lot of law firms who said we would like to have you, but our clients wouldn’t stand for it,” Butler said. “At [golfing great] Bobby Jones’ firm, they told me ‘that’s nice that you went to school with Bobby, but we can’t handle you.’ ”
The only woman in a class of thirty, Butler found law school awkward in the beginning.
“Discussions were foreign to me. Then it just happened,” Butler said. “I made friends, and it got better. My dad let me have a car, and I started giving the guys rides into Atlanta — then I started studying with them.”
While she searched for a position, Butler worked in the law library in the mornings and the American Law Institute in the afternoons doing research.
Championing Butler’s cause
“I had a champion — Mr. Smythe Gambrell was determined to help me find a job,” Butler said. “He had a lot of contacts and was well connected in Washington.”
Her law library and research experience reaped benefits.
One Christmas while in Canada, Butler received a message to stop in Washington on her way home for a job interview with the Department of Justice.
“Gambrell had arranged for me to meet with [Harold M.] Stephens at the Department of Justice in the antitrust division,” Butler said. “When I arrived, he was arguing a case before the Supreme Court.
“On the second day, he was still too busy,” Butler said.
“On the third day, he met with me. I learned a great deal waiting for that interview. I found out I had the job through a telegraph wanting me back in Washington in a week.”
Butler was hired to put the antitrust library together in the Justice Department’s new building.
“The library was all on the floor. I put it into shape,” Butler said. “I walked into a room this size [the Faculty Library in Gambrell Hall] with books on the floor. Nobody ever knew where the books were.
“I stayed in the library for a while and worked on some big research on Indian law,” she said. “Newspapers were our main source. We would get those long wooden dowels from the Library of Congress. We would go through them day by day.”
During her time in the antitrust library, Butler assisted Carl Swisher for two years to help finish his history on the Department of Justice, Federal Justice.
Janet Reno, the only female U.S. attorney general, has called Butler a “pioneer among women at the Department of Justice.” For years, Butler had few women colleagues.
Her time in the Justice Department included working in the war division, researching World War I records on enemy aliens.
The call for war
“During the New Deal, we did a lot of research related to the first World War so I was picked to help do the research leading up to World War II,” Butler said. “Looking back, during that time we couldn’t tell anybody. I did go home for a visit and told my mother war is coming.”
At the time, Butler was working on three war proclamations.
After Pearl Harbor, she got the call that she was needed at the White House.
“The drafts were practically in shape,” Butler said. “The first was for the internment of the Germans and Japanese. It was signed and issued.”
Butler also worked on Roosevelt’s court-packing plan.
“I had to write many letters favoring his plan,” she said. “It was very hard to do. It was a poor idea.”
While she disagreed with the court-packing plan, Butler enjoyed working with the Roosevelts.
“When Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt talked to you, you felt like you were the only person there,” Butler said. “She was a very sweet person. She would listen to your story and then help or say I’ll see what we can do about that.”
Justice Robert H. Jackson recruited her to work in the attorney general’s office where she remained and worked for every attorney general from Roosevelt to Nixon, including Bobby Kennedy.
Her first husband and assistant attorney general, Salvador Andretta, encouraged Butler to argue an immigration case, Johnson v. Shaughnessy before the Court. Despite being incredibly nervous and taking over in an emergency, Butler won her case.
During her time in the attorney general’s office, she became friends with Chief Justice Warren Burger, then an assistant attorney general.
“I remember being at lunch with Elvera Burger when her husband had been trying to get a hold of her,” Butler said. “He was trying to tell her he was about to be appointed to the Supreme Court.”
That friendship bore fruit when Burger invited her to join him for tea one day to discuss an idea.
“He put his chair back on two legs and leaned back and said ‘practically every court has a historical society,” Butler said about forming the Supreme Court Historical Society in 1974.
Burger told her to “put together some bylaws.”
“You’d laugh at what we put together,” Butler said. Today the society has a beautiful building, a budget, and full-time staff.
“It’s an extremely important society,” she said. “It researches all the judicial branches.”
Butler was also the founding secretary of the American Bar Association’s section on administrative law and founding editor of what is now the Federal Register.
By Wendy Cromwell