William Francis "Frank" Murphy was a politician and jurist from Michigan. He was named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940 after a political career as Governor of Michigan and Mayor of Detroit, serving also as the last Governor-General of the Philippines and then the High Commissioner of the Philippines.
Background
Frank Murphy, christened William Francis Murphy, was born on April 13, 1890, in what is today Harbor Beach, Michigan, the son of John F. Murphy and Mary Brennan Murphy. His father was a small-town lawyer active in Democratic politics and his mother was a devout Catholic who communicated to her son a lifelong commitment to Catholicism. Throughout a distinguished public career, Murphy would champion the underdog and the radical. The impetus to do so may have risen out of his family background. His great-grandfather had been hanged by the British for insurrection. His father, born and raised in Canada, had been jailed at one time there for his association with Fenianism, a secret society of Irish nationalists that flourished for a time in the second half of the 19th century. Frank Murphy himself grew up Catholic in a predominandy Protestant state. The blood of the outcast and the rebel ran in his veins.
Education
After receiving a public education, Murphy attended the University of Michigan, from which he graduated with an LL.B. in the 1914.
After the war, and before he returned to the United States, he studied law briefly at Lincoln’s Inn in London College in Dublin.
Career
When he returned to the United States, he immediately accepted the position of assistant U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Michigan. Murphy’s first bid for a political office suffered defeat when he ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket in 1920. Two years later he left public service briefly to practice law' privately, but he returned to public life in 1923 when he became a judge for the Recorder’s Court in Detroit, the city’s principal criminal court.
After his six years of work as a judge, Murphy successfully ran for mayor of Detroit in 1930, assuming political control of the city just at is slipped into the grip of the depression. He won reelection in 1931. The key achievement of Murphy’s career as mayor was his work in forming and serving as the first president of die U.S. Conference of Mayors. In 1932 he vigorously supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. When Roosevelt assumed the executive office, he dispatched Murphy to serve as governor-general of the Philippines, and when the Philippines became a commonwealth, high commissioner. Murphy proved to be a benevolent administrator, devoted to the cause of Philippine independence, and his years of service as governor general and high commissioner instilled a lifelong affection in him for the Philippines. When he joined the Supreme Court some years later, he decorated his office with the flags of the United States and of the Philippines.
When Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1936, he persuaded Murphy to return home and run for governor of Michigan, hoping that Murphy’s campaign for governor would assist his own campaign for president. Both men won their election campaigns. As governor, Murphy attempted to infuse his state with the kind of New Deal programs that Roosevelt was bringing to the nation. He took office at the beginning of 1937, after a General Motors sit-down strike had already begun. His tenure as Michigan governor was marked by his refusal to use the Michigan National Guard to break up the strike and his contribution to the eventual settlement of the strike. His general stance, though, did not endear him to Republicans in Michigan, who defeated his reelection bid in 1938.
President Roosevelt did not forget Murphy’s loyalty and promptly appointed him attorney general of the United States in 1939. Murphy served a short but distinguished tenure in this office, making his most significant mark by creating a civil rights division within the Justice Department. Possibly Murphy’s work as an attorney general exhibited more reformist zeal than the president’s political aspirations could tolerate. In any event, despite Murphy’s apparent desire to receive an appointment as secretary of war, Roosevelt nominated him to the Supreme Court instead, after Associate Justice Pierce Butler died in November 1939. The Senate unanimously confirmed the appointment on January 16, 1940, and Murphy took the oath of office as a Supreme Court justice two days later.
While World War II took its bloody course, Justice Murphy repeatedly sought to exchange his judicial robes for a military uniform. When the Court took its annual summer recess after the term in which Murphy became a justice, he pled with President Roosevelt to let him spend his vacation time doing something to further the war effort. Two summers later, in 1942, he actually persuaded the army to put him to use as a lieutenant colonel during training at Fort Benning, Georgia. This was as close to the war as he ever got. He had to content himself with the work of the Court, where he wrote, in the main, mostly forgettable cases in tax and labor matters. Occasionally, though, he was able to speak for the Court on important civil liberties issues, as in Thornhill v. Alabama (1940), his very first opinion, which applied the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee to protect peaceful picketing. Had he lived longer, he might have played a more predominant role once the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice in 1953 began to steer the Court down paths already well trodden by Murphy. But heart disease beset Murphy soon after he had joined the Court and ultimately caused his death of a coronary thrombosis in Detroit, Michigan, on July 19, 1949. He was 59 years old at the time of his death.
Politics
In some ways, Murphy’s self-reflection proved quite accurate. He had “been trained to action,” and the inclination to do the right thing in each particular case became his most abiding characteristic as a judge. For him, precedent and established doctrine took a secondary position to his blunt quest to find the right result in each case. If being right meant jettisoning previous decisions, then he was happy to do so. He would crash through a thicket of law to find space for individual rights and for freedom from discrimination. As he summed up in one dissenting opinion: “The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emo-tions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.” Murphy’s dedication to this principle would express itself most vividly in his dissent to the Court decision in Korematsu v. United States (1944), which up-held the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to internment camps during World War II. Joining with Justices Owen Roberts and Robert Jackson to oppose this result, Murphy branded it nothing more than “legalized racism.” Murphy’s abiding sympathy for social outcasts also made him a powerful advocate for the rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses to free speech and freedom of religion. During his first year on the Court he joined the nearly unanimous decision in Min- ersville v. Gobitis (1940), which found no constitutional infirmity in a state law that forced Jehovah’s Witness children to salute tire American flag in school, an act that Jehovah’s Witnesses considered to be a form of idolatry; however, he soon reversed course on this issue. Three years later he joined with a new majority of the Court in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) to reverse the decision in Gobitis, and he emphasized in a separate opinion the value of religious freedom and his concept that he had “no loftier duty or responsibility than to uphold that spiritual freedom to its farthest reaches.” In spite of the anti- Catholicism of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholic justice became so regular a defender of the sect that one observer suggested that “If Frank Murphy is ever sainted, it will be by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
Connections
Murphy was a confirmed bachelor, leading to speculation about his personal life. Speculation has been recorded about the sexual orientation of a few justices who were lifelong bachelors, but no unambiguous evidence exists proving that they were gay. Perhaps the greatest body of circumstantial evidence surrounds Justice Murphy, who was dogged by rumors of homosexuality [...] all his adult life".