—So we said last week in writing about the difficulties of re-drawing congressional or legislative districts after each census.
Those of us who are of a certain age (I think I am beyond it, actually) remember a St. Louis mover and shaker named Paul Preisler (rhymes with Chrysler, as I recall) who was a pain in the neck on redistricting after census counts in 1950, 1960, and 1970.
Preisler was a Ph.D. biochemist, lawyer, photographer, civil libertarian, photographer, and once an instructor at the Washington University School of Medicine. He also was a Socialist back in the days when it wasn’t quite the curse word that it has become.
In the 1930s he helped found the St. Louis chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and as its first president he led a successful effort to let the public school teachers there organize.
He joined the Socialist Party during the Depression and sued the Board of Election Commissioners when the board refused non-partisan candidates and minority parties the right to have poll watchers and challengers. The Missouri Supreme Court came down on his side, giving minority parties the authority to have poll watchers and challengers.
This guy never seemed to runout of gas. Two years after the St. Louis chapter of the AFT was created, he ran for a place on the city board of education. The school board rejected his candidacy because the board’s constitution made it non-partisan.
The Missouri Supreme court ruled three days before the election that the school board had to let Preisler run. The board had to print new ballots. Preisler lost but he says he was running on principle, so the loss was okay.
When he got back from the war, he went after the city school board again because of its policy banning married women teachers from being teachers. He won that case, too, and shortly thereafter decided, at the age of 48 that he wanted to be a lawyer.
And he did. In fact he was a professor at the Wash-U law school and became professor emeritus in 1969.
By then he had gotten into challenging redistrict maps. His first target was again the St. Louis Board of Education. In 1952 he challenged the way the city Board of Election Commissioners had drawn new district maps. He won again and new maps were drawn.
Not one to be satisfied just filing lawsuits, Preisler filed himself in 1954—as a non-partisan congressional candidate. When Secretary of State Walter Toberman refused to accept his filing fee, saying that splinter parties (such as the Communists, and this was at the height of anti-communist feeling in the country) and Communists could not have candidates if the party didn’t get a lot of votes in the preceding election. Preisler argued that he should be able to run as a person rather than as a representative of a political party. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed with Preisler, again.
Not content with shouting from the sidelines, Preisler ran for office several times: twice, as a Socialist, for the legislature (1934 and ’36), six times as a non-partisan for a spot on the St. Louis Board of Education with campaigns starting in 1937 and continuing to 1971. He ran as a non-partisan for the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.
He never won any of the several offices for which he ran, which was fine with him because he ran to make a point.
In the 1960s he targeted the state. He decided the new congressional districts drawn after the 1960 census were not as compact and as nearly equal in population as the law required. That was 1962. When the legislature tried again and the public accepted the map in ’65, Preisler refiled his lawsuit in early in ’66 and the State Supreme Court agreed with him in the summer of 1966 that THAT map was unconstitutional.
The cases all led to landmark rulings on compactness of districts and the legislature’s authority to exercise its discretion, the court writing in the 1962 case naming Secretary of State Warren Hearnes as defendant that, “[A]ny redistricting agreed upon must always be a compromise. Mathematical exactness is not required or in fact obtainable and a compromise, for which there is any reasonable basis, is an exercise of legislative discretion that the courts must respect.”
For a time Preisler did pro bono work for the American Civil Liberties Union. The State Historical Society of Missouri, which houses 22 cubic feet of his papers at its St. Louis Research Center, says, “He defended the right of students to wear long hair, hold anti-war demonstrations, and the publish uncensored newspapers. He also defended prisoners and women against discrimination.”
He was also involved in municipal affairs, once filing a suit against the City of St. Louis that eventually killed city plans to build a roadway through Shaw’s Gardens.
When he died in 1971 at age 69, Paul Preisler had another challenge to congressional districts pending. He lost that one, posthumously, in 1975.
There has been no one like him since.
But every time there’s a redistricting map drawn for congressional or legislative districts, there’s always that uncertain time.