Early involvement in the Afrikaner language movement

Fagan returned to the Cape at a time of great turbulence and excitement.^[5] The Afrikaans language movement was taking shape and J. B. M. Hertzog would soon found his National Party, and Fagan was thrust into this emerging movement for Afrikaner nationalism.^[3][4][5] He was the secretary of the committee which founded the Nasionale Pers, becoming a director of the Pers and the assistant editor of its flagship newspaper, Die Burger, under D. F. Malan, then beginning his political career as leader of the National Party in the Cape Province.^[2][4] He also lent editorial supervision to the Pers's family magazine Die Huisgenoot, of which his uncle J. J. Smith was the first editor, and translated the works of Theodor Storm into Afrikaans.^[5]

In 1919, Fagan left Die Burger and became, for a brief period, the first Professor of Roman-Dutch law in the newly formed law faculty at the University of Stellenbosch.^[5][6] The following year he returned to legal practice.^[6] He continued to be involved in the Afrikaner language movement, and helped ensure, along with his close friend C. J. Langenhoven, that Afrikaans was made an official language (replacing Dutch) in 1925.^[5]

In Parliament

Though Fagan's practice had become very reputable, and he had been appointed a King's Counsel in 1927, he was "bitten by the political bug" after Hertzog's National Party achieved electoral success.^[6] He decided to stand for election to the House of Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, in 1929 in the Hottentots-Holland (now Helderberg) district, but lost narrowly.^[2] He succeeded four years later, becoming a National Party MP representing Swellendam.^[2] When Hertzog fused with Jan Smuts' South African Party in 1934, leading to rancor with Malan's now 'purified' National Party, Fagan decided — after a two-year delay, during which he occupied his parliamentary seat as a so-called independent Nationalist — to break with Malan and his other old friends and follow Hertzog into the United Party, whose relatively conciliatory racial politics he preferred.^[6][7] In 1936, he was instrumental in setting up the Cape Town-based newspaper Die Suiderstem, an Afrikaans-language mouthpiece for Hertzog (who had lost Die Burger's support after splitting with Malan).^[8]

In 1938, Fagan was given a chance to withdraw from politics and become a judge, but he refused, preferring to stand as the United Party's candidate for the contested Stellenbosch seat in an attempt to wrest it away from the National Party.^[6][9] Malan himself came out to campaign on behalf of the Nationalist candidate, Bruckner de Villiers, who promised to strip coloured voters of the franchise.^[9] Fagan won by a narrow majority.^[6] He became Minister of Native Affairs in Hertzog's government (alongside the likes of Jan Kemp and Oswald Pirow) after the 1938 general election and was, in the view of one leading historian, the "most outstanding" of Hertzog's associates.^[3] Just a year later, however, Hertzog left the United Party in protest at Smuts' decision, in the face of clamant calls for neutrality from Afrikaans-speakers, to take the country into War in support of Britain, and Fagan "felt bound to go with him into the political wilderness".^[6] Fagan resumed legal practice, but remained an MP.^[1][6] Both he and Hertzog rejoined the National Party a few months later, a move Fagan strongly supported.^[9] When Hertzog once again split from Malan in 1941 to form the Afrikaner Party, however, Fagan did not follow him, staying instead in the NP caucus.^[9]

Thus, although Fagan had been in the vanguard of the Afrikaner nationalist movement and began and ended his political career as a colleague of Malan's, he "was not a Malanite" and differed in crucial respects, and at crucial historical moments, from the post-Hertzog National Party.^[7] The best-known instance would be his report for the Native Laws Commission (commonly called the Fagan Commission), which recommended a gradual liberalisation of South Africa's system of racial segregation and was accordingly "savaged" by his old party.^[3] Fagan was described, at least in these early years, as a "moderate", and retained significant ties to the Afrikaner establishment.^[5][7]

Fagan Commission

In 1946, as pressure was building from Malan's reactionary National Party, Smuts sought to devise a comprehensive United Party position on the so-called native question.^[3] For this purpose he appointed the independent Native Laws Commission, with Fagan as its head, to investigate changes to the system of segregation.^[3] When the Commission reported in 1948, it stated that the total segregation or apartheid envisaged by the National Party was "utterly impracticable", since South Africa's racial groups were inevitably interdependent, and the 'reserves' set aside for black South Africans were far too small to support them.^[3] It therefore recommended that 'influx control' measures be relaxed, allowing black South Africans to move to cities with relative freedom and the incremental integration of the races. Yet the report did not favour racial equality, and rejected the full social or political integration of black people as unacceptable.^[3][5] It recommended liberalisation primarily on the basis that it would benefit the white population economically, and recommended accordingly that only those black persons who would benefit industry should be allowed to stay in the cities.^[3]

Nevertheless, the Commission had firmly rejected the principles on which the National Party's official policy of apartheid was based, and therefore raised its ire.^[3] Hendrik Verwoerd, then an MP and the editor of Die Transvaler, was especially critical.^[7] And a declaration signed by a prominent group of Stellenbosch academics angrily pointed out that if Fagan's racial integration were allowed this would lead inevitably to gelykstelling (social levelling) and, as a result of pressure to give blacks equal civil rights, the political marginalisation of the white population; the upshot would be the death of the Afrikaner volk.^[3] Though they were angry, the Nationalists had not been caught unprepared: in fact, Malan had already set up a rival commission headed by his closest confidante, Paul Sauer, and staffed by three NP parliamentarians, and which had reported in 1947.^[3] The Sauer Commission had given added detail and heft to the Nationalists' policy of apartheid, recommending that influx control measures be strengthened to prevent any mixing between the races, with black people consigned to the reserves. It was this hard-line view which triumphed when Malan's National Party won the 1948 general election.

Appellate Division

Despite the uncongenial report of his Commission, the Malan government was willing to elevate Fagan to the Appellate Division, the country's highest court, in October 1950, to replace the departed Chief Justice Watermeyer.^[10] Concern was growing at that stage that the Nationalists were trying to fill the Appellate Division with loyalists, but in Fagan's case these concerns were, again, attenuated; despite his links with the government, he was a moderate whose appointment was justified on merit.^[7]

Fagan's most significant judgments were about private law, raising little political intrigue:^[10] he established that gambling debts are unenforceable in South African law,^[12] and that undue influence vitiates a contract.^[13] But he did find against the government in its attempt to enforce the Population Registration Act, 1950, raising the standard of proof required to classify a person as 'non-European' on the provocative basis that Parliament could not have intended something so unjust as foisting that status on a person without adequate proof.^[7]