Background
Dudley Field Malone was born on June 3, 1882, in New York City. He was the only child of William C. Malone and Rose (McKinney) Malone. His father was from New York state; his mother came from Ireland.
Actor attorney lawyer politician
Dudley Field Malone was born on June 3, 1882, in New York City. He was the only child of William C. Malone and Rose (McKinney) Malone. His father was from New York state; his mother came from Ireland.
Reared in a middle-class Irish Catholic home, Malone graduated from the College of St. Francis Xavier in 1903 and later took two courses at Fordham Law School.
From 1907 to 1909, Malone was associated with the law firm of Battle and Marshall. In 1909, Malone became assistant corporation counsel of New York City. In politics a progressive, anti-Tammany Democrat, Malone supported the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1908.
By the beginning of 1912, he had become a member of Woodrow Wilson's inner council. That year, Malone helped organize Wilson's presidential primary campaigns and, after Wilson won the Democratic nomination, worked to secure Tammany support. He was one of the few personal friends invited to spend election day with the candidate and his family.
Early in 1913, President Wilson appointed Malone third assistant secretary of state. Malone's eye, however, was on the patronage-rich post of collector of the Port of New York, which he hoped to use to break the political power of the Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy. Wilson, seeking a compromise between the anti-Tammany counsels of Col. Edward M. House and William Gibbs McAdoo on the one hand and the wary Senator O'Gorman, an occasional ally of Tammany, on the other, gave the post at first to John Purroy Mitchel.
But Mitchel's election as mayor of New York in November 1913 on an anti-Tammany fusion ticket convinced Wilson that the time was right for reorganizing the New York Democrats, and to fill Mitchel's place as collector he chose Malone. Emphasizing the need for honest and efficient administration, and claiming Wilson's blessing, Malone used his patronage powers against Murphy and issued a broad appeal to all progressives for support.
Before long, Wilson began to fear the political effects of splitting the New York party. Influenced probably by his secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, the president in 1914, decided not to pursue the attack on Murphy and pressured the reluctant Malone to abandon his support of anti-Tammany candidates in that summer's primary election, which the Tammany forces won. Malone, in his role as port collector, was also swept up in the controversies growing out of World War I.
Although accused of being duped by both British and German interests, he defended his enforcement of the port's neutrality. After the sinking of the Lusitania he insisted that he had not allowed the ship to arm itself, though he acknowledged interpreting regulations liberally in order to allow the loading of ammunition.
In 1917, he served as an attorney for sixteen militant suffragists jailed for picketing the White House. Although Wilson subsequently pardoned the women, the arrests and imprisonment of suffragists continued; and in September 1917, Malone resigned his federal post with a widely publicized letter of protest to Wilson.
Malone's subsequent career was erratic, reflecting his impulsive nature and perhaps also the difficulty Progressives had in finding a political home after World War I.
During the 1920's, Malone became more a colorful personality than a political power. He advocated recognition of the Soviet Union and toured the United States on behalf of Polish and Irish freedom. Working with the American Civil Liberties Union, he represented several indicted radicals and in 1925 cooperated with Clarence Darrow in defending John T. Scopes in the Tennessee evolution trial.
There Malone delivered an address to the court on freedom of education which was described by co-counsel Arthur Garfield Hays as "one of the high spots of the trial, " and by the journalist H. L. Mencken as "the loudest speech I ever heard". Characteristically, Malone combined such efforts with the lucrative practice of international divorce law, the campaign for repeal of prohibition, he was co-founder of the Association against the Prohibition Amendment, and involvement in the glamorous sports world of the 1920's, in which he arranged matches for the prize fighter Gene Tunney and financed Gertrude Ederle's successful attempt to swim the English Channel.
He died of a coronary thrombosis in Culver City, California, and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Los Angeles.
Liberal in his sympathies, Malone was an early supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and of the woman suffrage movement, and he became increasingly critical of the Wilson administration's seeming disregard for civil liberties. He supported the Socialist party in the New York elections of 1917, returned to the Democrats in 1918, and then helped organize the Farmer-Labor party and ran unsuccessfully as its gubernatorial candidate in 1920.
In 1924, he supported the local Democratic ticket but backed Robert La Follette for president; four years later he endorsed Alfred E. Smith. In 1932, as a delegate to the Democratic national convention, Malone worked against the nomination of his old anti-Tammany ally Franklin D. Roosevelt and eventually campaigned for the reelection of Herbert Hoover.
In spite of his anti-Tammany history, he opposed the Seabury investigation into municipal corruption and then helped his friend Mayor James J. Walker prepare answers to the removal charges brought against him in the summer of 1932. Malone soon ran into financial difficulties that led to a declaration of bankruptcy in 1935, and in the late 1930's, he moved to California as counsel for the Twentieth Century-Fox film corporation.
Quotations: "I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. "
Malone was described as well-groomed, witty and eloquent speaker. As many of his critics charged, he enjoyed the limelight.
In 1908, Malone married May Patricia O'Gorman, daughter of Judge and U. S. Senator James Aloysius O'Gorman. When Malone divorced with she in August 1921, he remarried on December 5 of that year Doris Stevens, one of the suffragists he had defended in 1917. He divorced his second wife in October 1929 and on January 29, 1930, married Edna Louise Johnson, a New York actress.
His only child, Dudley Field, was born the following year. His last brush with fame typified his eclectic career. Possessing a striking similarity to Winston Churchill, Malone portrayed the British prime minister in the 1943 film Mission to Moscow.