Caleb Foote Papers

Background on Caleb Foote

An ardent pacifist, civil rights advocate, and legal scholar, Caleb Foote was born in Cambridge, Mass., on Mar. 26, 1917, the middle of five children from a union of two prominent families. Foote's father, Henry Wilder Foote, Jr., descended from a long line of New Englanders with a strong record of public service, creative talent, and a penchant for both Harvard College and the Unitarian church. A paternal great-grandfather (also named Caleb Foote) was a long-time editor of the Salem Gazette, as well as a state-level politician, and an associate of Nathaniel Hawthorne; while a great-uncle, Arthur Foote, was considered one of America's finest classical composers. Another great-grandfather, Samuel Atkins Eliot, served in succession as mayor of Boston, congressional representative, and treasurer of Harvard University, while a great uncle, Charles W. Eliot, was Harvard's president for more than forty years. The Harvard and Unitarian connections merged fully in the three generations of Henry Wilder Footes that bracketed Caleb's life. Grandfather Henry Wilder Foote Sr. occupied the pulpit at King's Chapel in Boston from 1861 to 1889; Caleb's father ministered to four congregations in his career and was Assistant Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and Wilder Foote, the brother, served for twenty-five years at Unity Church in St. Paul.

Foote's mother, Eleanor Tyson Cope, were members of the Quaker elite and came from one of the so-called First Families of Philadelphia. Eleanor's great-grandfather, Thomas Pym Cope, made a fortune in trans-Atlantic shipping, establishing the first commercial shipping line between Liverpool and Philadelphia, and he became a promoter of public works and philanthropist. A first cousin once removed, Edward Drinker Cope, was a noted paleontologist and one of the nation's leading experts on dinosaurs in the nineteenth century.

Although influenced by his father's liberal Unitarian tradition, it was his mother's Quaker beliefs as much as anything that led Foote into an early commitment to peace, social justice, and racial equality. By the time he prepped for college at the Belmont Hill School, he already considered himself a pacifist, and his beliefs deepened when he followed in the family footsteps to Harvard in the fall 1935. A stellar student and history major, he honed his writing skills as sports editor for the Harvard Crimson in his junior year, followed by a senior-year appointment as managing editor under Crimson president Cleveland Amory.

Foote's desire to use his talents to better the world continued to grow after graduating from Harvard 1939, leading him on a ten-month camping tour through the western states in his station wagon with the aim of seeing the nation, and the nation's problems, up close. Against the backdrop of Europe descending into war, he crossed the northern Plains into Montana, then drove to California and the Pacific Northwest, testing his political ideas and will. After witnessing firsthand the plight of migrant families in California and both anti-labor and Communist strife consuming the labor movement after the Soviet invasion of Finland, he wrote to his college friend Calvin Stillman, trying to remain grounded about the fearful world that lay ahead for pacifists:

After his tour wound down, Foote entered Columbia University to study for a master's degree in economics, and when it came time to register for the draft in October 1940, he applied for a conscientious objector's IV-E classification. Meanwhile, he searched for a meaningful line of work where he could live his principles and contribute to a better society, finding his opportunity in the summer 1941 during a post-graduation month spent at Quaker Pendle Hill Center. There, America's best known pacifist organizer, A. J. Muste, recruited Foote to become Field Secretary for Northern California for the interfaith pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Based in San Francisco, and later Berkeley, Foote dedicated himself to fighting the twin problems of racial discrimination and war.

Despite being raised in a household suffused with religion, Foote did not consider himself a religious pacifist. Writing to his college friend and fellow pacifist Russ Freeman, Foote commented that he was put off by the "mysticism" of some of their fellow travelers:

Not long after beginning his life on the west coast, Foote met a recent graduate of Black Mountain College, Hope Stephens, while the two were working at Hidden Villa, the home of activist Josephine Duveneck and a refuge for European Jews fleeing Nazism. Aligned socially and politically, the two quickly grew close, marrying on Nov. 17, 1942, and they settled into a rental in Japantown, San Francisco. While awaiting the call to military service that they knew would come, Hope taught kindergarten in Chinatown while Caleb traveled far and wide, speaking to increasingly hostile audiences about peace and racial tolerance. When he finally received his draft notice in the spring 1943, Foote promptly refused conscription and rejected the alternative of entering into Civilian Public Service (CPS), arguing that CPS leant legitimacy to forced conscription and that work there was mere "boondoggling," going to no socially productive end. His was direct with the authorities:

In June 1943, a sympathetic Judge Louis Goodman sentenced Foote to a relatively lenient six-month term in federal prison, ending in his parole just prior to Christmas. Despite the experience, and despite his father's disapproval and his mother's pleas for a less confrontational approach, imprisonment did little to dampen Foote's absolutist support for resistance against war. Throughout 1944, he continued his Fellowship work, speaking out against Japanese relocation and supporting other conscientious objectors and resisters in Civilian Public Service. He remained clear of further governmental scrutiny until March 1945, when he was drafted a second time. Once again, he refused to cooperate. Summoned before the U.S. District Attorney in April 1945, he refused to cooperate, surrendering instead to the Federal Marshal. One month later, his first child, Robert, was born.

At trial, Foote repeated his decision to reject of conscription and all of the supposed alternatives for pacifists:

In response, the judge sentenced Foote to another year in the federal prison at McNeil Island, Washington. With the war finally over by the time he was released in May 1946, Foote returned to the Bay Area, his convictions still intact. His was among the 1,500 names that appeared on President Truman's list of pardons issued to religious conscientious objectors on Dec. 24, 1947, but since the list covered only a quarter of all objectors, Foote was among those who protested.

After wrapping up his work for the Fellowship, Foote tried his hand at farming and landscaping before returning east with his family in 1948 to become Executive Secretary for the Central Committee of Conscientious Objectors. During his two years with the CCCO, the Footes lived in Arden, Delaware, a community founded on the single tax principles of Henry George. Meanwhile his family continued to grow, adding a daughter Heather, and sons Andrew in 1949 and twins Ethan and David in 1958.

Deeply affected by his prison experiences and by the racial and economic inequities he witnessed in the courts and jails, Foote decided to leave the pacifist movement to enter law school at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his degree in 1953. From his earliest publications in the Penn Law Review, where he was managing editor, his legal sensibilities and concern for prisoners' rights were evident. Early work on due process, sentencing standards, and the treatment of sex offenders were just the beginnings of an academic career of nearly thirty-five years where Foote sought to apply legal theory to bring balance and equity to the criminal justice system. Two years at the relatively conservative law school at the University of Nebraska were followed by invitations to return to Penn in 1956 and then to the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California Berkeley in 1965. He made important contributions to empirical studies of the behavior of lower courts regarding vagrancy law and was author of a widely-used casebook on family law, and he became a national leader in bail reform, which he argued was biased against the poor and a burden on the falsely accused. In later years he stood in opposition to the growing trend of mass incarceration.

Foote retired from Berkeley in 1987 and spent most of his latter years in a home at the head of Tomales Bay in Point Reyes Station, Calif. He and Hope were active in environmentalist causes in Marin County. Foote died on March 4, 2006, aged 88, followed by Hope on April 30, 2011.