Family Matters

Abstract This chapter considers Robert H. Jackson’s family life and relationships from his marriage to Irene Gerhardt in 1916 up to his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1941 and slightly beyond, based on Jackson’s accounts of his family in his private papers and letters between him and his children, William Eldred (Bill) and Mary Margaret Jackson, in the 1930s and 1940s. The Jackson Papers do not contain much correspondence between Robert and Irene Jackson before or after their marriage, but there is regular correspondence between Robert Jackson, Bill, and Mary, especially during the years (1937–1943) when Bill attended Yale College and Mary attended Smith College. There are also comments in Jackson’s autobiographical files about his experiences becoming married, being a father, raising a family, and interacting with children. A theme of the chapter is that despite Robert Jackson’s becoming an increasingly visible and important figure in government circles during the time that his children were in college, he remained not only in close touch with them but regularly concerned with the details of their lives, which he followed with abiding interest. In contrast to some “upwardly mobile” persons in that time period, who were fully aware that their children were going to be participating in more affluent and varied worlds from those in which they had grown up, both Robert and Irene Jackson were concerned with instilling in their children a sense of financial and social restraints.