William Henry Moody was an American politician and jurist. He held positions in all three branches of the Government of the United States.
Background
Ethnicity:
William Moody had New England roots stretched back to the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Mr. Moody was born on December 23, 1853, in Newbury, Massachusetts, United States, to Henry L. Moody and Melissa A. Emerson Moody. His forebear, William Moody, migrated from Suffolk, England, and helped found the town of Newbury in 1635. William Henry Moody’s family eventually moved to Danvers, Massachusetts, where his father ran a dairy farm. In these early years, Mr. Moody developed a love of baseball that he carried with him the rest of his life.
Education
William Moody attended public schools until 1869, when he entered Phillips Academy in Andover to prepare for an Ivy League college education. While at Phillips he captained the school’s baseball team. He graduated in 1872 and proceeded on to Harvard, where at first he proved to be a better baseball player than a student. But toward the end of his college career he fell under the influence of Henry Adams and became fascinated with the study of history and literature. He eventually graduated cum laude in 1876, ranked third in his class.
Mr. Moody followed college with a brief stint of formal legal education at Harvard Law School, but he abandoned his studies after a semester and chose instead to read law in the office of Richard Henry Dana, a nationally prominent attorney of the time and author of Two Tears Before the Mast, a classic tale of life at sea. After 18 months, however, Mr. Dana died suddenly of pneumonia in 1878 while traveling in Europe, thus cutting short William Moody’s education. He proceeded to sit for the oral bar examination in Massachusetts in spite of his aborted studies. Although the bar authorities were initially of a mind to deny his application for lack of sufficient preparatory legal education, Mr. Moody persuaded them to examine him, and he performed so well that his accomplishment became something of a legend for excellence.
In 1904, William Moody received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Tufts University and Amherst College.
In 1878 Mr. Moody established himself in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Over the next decade he practiced law and plunged himself into the affairs of the community, becoming, not least of all, president of the Haverhill Baseball Club, as well as city solicitor from 1888 to 1890. Beginning in 1890, he served two terms as district attorney for the eastern district of Massachusetts.
William Moody stepped onto the national stage in November 1895, when he was elected as a Republican to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. At about the same time, he made the acquaintance of New York City’s police commissioner, a man who would subsequently exert a profound influence on the course of William Moody’s life: Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt had come to Boston to address a Republican group and returned home speaking highly of Mr. Moody. Moody himself soon traveled to Washington, D.C., to begin what would become six and a half years in Congress, where his reputation as a progressive young Republican increased steadily. Over these years, Mr. Moody’s relationship with Roosevelt grew closer. Consequendy, when President Roosevelt became president in 1901, he prompdy added William Moody to his cabinet as secretary of the Navy. In this position, working closely with the president, the 49-year-old William Moody - the youngest member of the cabinet - initiated a number of progressive developments in the Navy and oversaw its expansion at a time when President Roosevelt was anxious to strengthen the naval power of the United States. Moody also spearheaded the acquisition by the United States of a 99-year lease on Guantanamo, Cuba, where a U.S. naval base was established.
In summer 1904 Attorney General Philander Knox resigned from his cabinet position to accept a seat in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Roosevelt promptly named William Moody to this position. The appointment came at a propitious time for a man eager for activity. Theodore Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for “trust-busting” meant that his new attorney general soon found himself plunged into legal battles with the likes of Standard Oil. In William Moody, Mr. Roosevelt had clearly found a kindred spirit, for the attorney general pursued these battles vigorously, often appearing in person to argue cases and wielding the Sherman Antitrust Act as a cudgel against monopolistic abuses. Mr. Moody preferred, when possible, to prosecute antitrust cases as criminal, rather than merely civil, violations. The work, though, was demanding, and after two years as the nation’s chief lawyer, William Moody informed President Roosevelt of his wish to retire.
In June 1906, however, the retirement of Justice Henry B. Brown left a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Although President Roosevelt initially leaned toward appointing southern Democrat Horace Lurton, a judge on the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, to fill the vacancy, he was ultimately convinced to appoint his friend William Moody to the position instead. After some protest that Mr. Moody’s close relationship with the president might jeopardize his judicial independence, the Senate confirmed his nomination on December 12, 1906, and Mr. Moody took his seat as an associate justice on the nation’s highest court before the end of the year. William Moody’s climb to the pinnacle of American law had been dizzying in its swiftness. Barely 11 years from the date he had entered national politics as a young man by winning election to the House of Representatives, he donned black robes and took his seat beside Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one the greatest legal minds ever to sit on the Supreme Court.
After two years on the Court, Mr. Moody contracted a severe case of rheumatism, which crippled him. By 1909 he had been forced to retire to his home in Haverhill and to depend on his sister - unmarried as he was - to care for him. Congress responded to his plight by passing special legislation to allow him to retire early; the financial support this legislation provided allowed him to resign from the Court officially on November 10, 1910.
Mr. Moody was an adherent of the Republican Party of the United States and generally supported enhanced federal powers. During his two years in the post of a U.S. attorney general, William Moody moved to break up the giant monopolies, notably in the meat-packing industry, through vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws.
Views
Quotations:
"It is always well to get near to men of genius."
"The very air in which you live is an inspiration."
"At the conclusion of my argument I received very high compliments from the Chief Justice and later from other of the Judges. What they said I do not care to repeat."
"It was an argument of rare power and eloquence."
Interests
Sport & Clubs
horseback riding, baseball
Connections
William Moody was not married and had no children.