Edward Douglass White was born on November 3, 1845 in Parish Lafourche, La. , the son of Edward Douglass White and Catherine S. (Ringgold). His paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland to Pennsylvania, where his grandfather, James White, was born. His father was born in Tennessee, but was taken at an early age to Louisiana and there attained considerable prominence in public life.
Edward Douglass White received his education at Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Md. , the Jesuit College in New Orleans, and Georgetown College in the District of Columbia. At the age of sixteen he left college and enlisted as a private in the Confederate army. On the fall of Port Hudson in 1863 he was taken prisoner and shortly thereafter was paroled.
After the war he read law in the office of Edward Bermudez, was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1868, and almost immediately went into politics. He was elected to the Louisiana Senate in 1874 and later was appointed to the state supreme court, on which he served from January 1879 to April 1880. His judicial career in the state was cut short because, under a new constitution, the court was reconstituted and his term ended. He was early identified with the anti-lottery movement, largely as the result of which he was elected to the United States Senate, where he took his seat on March 4, 1891. Himself a successful sugar planter, he fought vigorously for a protective tariff on sugar in the Wilson Bill, continuing his activities in this regard even after he had agreed to accept appointment to the Supreme Court bench. Before the completion of his term in the Senate, White became the sudden and wholly unexpected beneficiary of the political bad blood that existed between President Cleveland and the Democratic senator from New York, David B. Hill. In 1893 Justice Samuel Blatchford of the United States Supreme Court died. He was a resident of New York and it was assumed that his successor would be chosen from that state, more especially since Cleveland himself came from New York. Without consulting Hill, Cleveland nominated first William B. Hornblower and later Wheeler H. Peckham to fill the vacancy on the bench. Under the rule of so-called senatorial courtesy Hill succeeded in defeating both of these nominations, whereupon Cleveland sent in the name of White. Since White was himself a member of the Senate, Hill could not object and the nomination was promptly confirmed. White took the oath of office on March 12, 1894, and remained upon the bench twenty-seven years, being raised to the chief justiceship by President Taft in 1910. In selecting the chief justice from among the associate justices Taft broke with tradition. Furthermore, a more natural choice would have been Charles E. Hughes, who was Taft's own appointee. Taft was probably influenced by his desire to break the "Solid South" politically. This was the second instance of a Southern Democratic Catholic being appointed to preside over the highest court of the land, Roger B. Taney having been chief justice from 1836 to 1864. During his service on the bench White wrote opinions in more than 700 cases. In 1895 the Supreme Court rendered three decisions that gave rise to widespread criticism and to attacks upon the power of the courts. One of these, in the case of the E. C. Knight Company, appeared to draw the teeth of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Another, in Pollock vs. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company, held the federal income tax of 1894 void in part. The third, in the case of Eugene Debs, growing out of the Pullman strike in Chicago in 1894, upheld the power of the federal government to issue injunctions in labor disputes. White concurred in the first and third of these decisions but dissented in the income-tax case. Agitation for a curb upon judicial review went steadily on, reaching its peak perhaps in the Progressive campaign of 1912 shortly after White became chief justice. It is difficult to characterize his decisions as a whole. His mind was a middle-of-the-road mind. He was sometimes found with the so-called liberals, as, for example, in 1905 when he dissented in the case of Lochner vs. New York, which was made so much of in the campaign of 1912, and when he wrote the majority opinion in Wilson vs. New, upholding the famous Adamson Act of 1916 by which a scale of minimum wages for railway employees was fixed. He likewise wrote the opinion of the Court in Guinn and Beal vs. United States in which the grandfather clause of Oklahoma was held void; in the case which upheld the selective draft act; and in the case which threatened the use of federal power to compel the state of West Virginia to pay her agreed portion of the debt of Virginia. On the other hand, while he dissented in the Lochner case, which held void the New York law limiting bakery hours to ten a day, he also dissented in Bunting vs. Oregon, which upheld an Oregon ten-hour law. Again, while he concurred in the New York Central case, upholding the New York workmen's compensation act, he dissented in the Mountain Timber Company case , which upheld the Washington compensation law. He dissented in the Northern Securities case in 1904, the first important decision upholding and applying the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He concurred in the Adair and Coppage cases, both famous in the history of labor, and in the Danbury hatters' case, holding that the Sherman Act applied to labor unions in their attempt to force unionization by boycott. He dissented in the rent cases, upholding the power both of the states and the national government to prevent profiteering in rents in time of emergency. Wilson vs. New was probably the most important decision he ever wrote, even though the reasoning he employed left much to be desired, but he is doubtless best known for the "rule of reason" laid down in the Standard Oil and the American Tobacco cases, interpreting and applying the anti-trust act. He had first announced this rule in 1897 in a dissenting opinion rendered in United States vs. Trans-Missouri Freight Association. It must be said, however, that by applying this rule he wrote into the law something which Congress had not put there and that he did this by a sophistical course of reasoning in which he employed the word "reasonable" first in the sense of moderate or limited, and secondly in the sense of something reached by the process of reasoning. In this way he sought to show that the Court was not overruling itself. Perhaps without realizing it, he rather accurately described and interpreted his own judicial philosophy in a brief address delivered in 1916 in response to resolutions of the bar upon the death of his colleague, Joseph R. Lamar. He said of his late brother on the bench that in the matter of "the relation of the activities of individuals and their results to each other" he keenly appreciated the "duty to adjust between conflicting activities so as to preserve the rights of all by protecting the rights of each. " Intensely local as were his affections and his ties, he had a broad conception of his "duty to uphold and sustain the authority of the Union as to the subjects coming within the legitimate scope of its power as conferred by the Constitution. " There was a "fixed opinion on his part as to the duty to uphold and perpetuate the great guarantees of individual freedom as declared by the Constitution, to the end that the freedom of all might not pass away forever. " In his work on the bench "no thought of expediency, no mere conviction about economic problems, no belief that the guarantees were becoming obsolete or that their enforcement would incur popular odium ever swayed his unalterable conviction and irrevocable purpose to uphold and protect the great guarantees with every faculty which he possessed. " At the time of his death in 1921 some one remarked that White's opinions were "models of what judicial opinions ought not to be". This is very nearly true.
He is best known for formulating the Rule of Reason standard of antitrust law. A statue of White is one of the two honoring Louisiana natives in the National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Capitol. In his honor, the Louisiana State University Law Center founded the annual Edward Douglass White Lectures. They have featured such distinguished speakers as Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist. Edward Douglas White Catholic High School in Thibodaux, Louisiana, was named for him.
There was no crystal clarity in his reasoning processes and his sentences were long, labored, and involved. White was an untiring worker, gracious, courteous, modest, genial, with many lovable qualities and a steadfast devotion to the public service. He was full of both dignity and humility. He was especially kind to young and inexperienced practitioners who appeared before the Court. He was extraordinarily popular. A man of enormous bulk, he was nevertheless an inveterate pedestrian and was a well-known figure in Washington because of his striking appearance and the curious little informal hat that he always wore. He had a remarkable memory. He apparently knew his opinions by heart, including volume and page citations, and seldom referred to the printed page. He was an able presiding officer, speeded up the work of the Court with great energy, and by his engaging manner did much to compromise differences of opinion among his colleagues on the bench.
He was married in 1894 to Leita Montgomery Kent.
