Alexander George Sutherland was an English-born U.S. jurist and politician. One of four appointments to the Supreme Court by President Warren G. Harding, he served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court between 1922 and 1938.
Background
George Sutherland was born on March 25, 1862, in Buckinghamshire, England, across the Atlantic Ocean from the war then waging between the North and the S. His Scottish father, Alexander George Sutherland, and his English mother, Frances Slater Sutherland, became converts the same year to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints (the Mormons) and migrated from England to Utah Territory in the summer of 1863. Soon after arriving in Springville, Utah, however, Alexander renounced Mormonism and moved his family to Montana. By 1869, though, the family had moved back to Utah Territory and eventually settled in Provo. There Alexander Sutherland followed a vocational migration as varied as the geographic one on which he led his family: mining prospector and recorder, postmaster, justice of the peace, and eventually lawyer. Young George Sutherland experienced the harsh and arduous life of the frontier and in later years thought of himself as a pioneer or, at least, a “pio-nearly.”
Education
He was forced to drop out of school by the age of 12 and subsequently earned a living in a succession of jobs. By 1879, however, when Sutherland was 17 years old, he had managed to save enough to enroll in Brigham Young Academy (later Brigham Young University) in Provo, where he came under the formative influence of Karl G. Maeser, the headmaster of the school. Maeser drilled his students in the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and in the proposition that God had divinely inspired the men who framed the Constitution a century before in Philadelphia.
Career
Following this educational experience, Sutherland worked for 15 months for the contractors building the Rio Grande Western Railroad and then headed north to Michigan, where in 1882 he enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School. There he studied with Dean Thomas M. Cooley, one of the leading constitutional scholars of the time, whose influence readily supplemented that which Sutherland had already absorbed from Karl Maeser.
In 1886 Sutherland and his father dissolved their law partnership, and he formed a new partnership with Samuel R. Thurman, who would later become chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court. The tw'o were eventually joined by William King, who in later years would become one of Sutherland’s political opponents. Sutherland made an early foray into politics in 1890 by running as a member of the Liberal party—w-hich opposed the Mormon practice of polygamy—for mayor of Provo. He lost handily but soon announced himself a member of the Republican party after the Mormon church abandoned the practice of polygamy that same year. In 1892 he suffered his second political defeat after running as a Republican for a seat in Congress representing Utah Territory.
By 1893 Sutherland had moved to Salt Lake City, joined a prominent firm there, and helped organize the Utah bar association. When Utah became a state in 1896, Sutherland won his first political contest by gaining a seat in the Utah state senate. After four years in this position, he made a successful bid for a congressional seat, defeating along die way his old law partner, William King. After his two-year term in the House of Representatives, however, Sutherland returned to the private practice of law and prepared to make a bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. His bid was successful, returning him to Washington in 1905. There, somewhat surprisingly in light of his later judicial reputation, Sutherland proved to be a friend of at least some progressive causes, including women’s suffrage and workmen’s compensation laws. He opposed, though, a variety of federal laws designed to regulate businesses, including the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, both passed in 1914.
By 1937 the Four Horsemen had been cast into the role of dissenters. In March, less than two months after President Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan, a new majority on the Court, led by Chief Justice Hughes in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), overruled
Sutherland’s opinion in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923). Thereafter, the Court repeatedly sustained the constitutionality of federal and state economic legislation. The following year, on January 17, 1938, Sutherland retired from the Court. Four years later, at the age of 80, he died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on July 18,1942.
Politics
After the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, which made U.S. senators subject to popular election, Sutherland ran again for the Senate but lost this time to William King. Instead of returning to Utah, however, he decided to remain in Washington, D.C., and to practice law there. Soon afterward, his prominence as an attorney won recognition when he was elected president of the American Bar Association. Though his senatorial loss had exiled him briefly from the political scene, the election of Warren G. Harding altered this. Sutherland and Harding had been colleagues in the Senate, and Sutherland had been one of Harding’s advisers during his presidential campaign. These ties yielded a variety of minor appointments in the first year of Harding’s administration, while the president and Sutherland bided their time for something infinitely more prestigious: a chance to place Sutherland on the Supreme Court. When Justice John Clarke resigned from the Court in September 1922, President Harding promptly nominated Sutherland to fill the vacant seat on September 5, and the Senate confirmed his appointment the same day. Thus began a 15-year career on tire Court.
Justice Sutherland, who had known several of his colleagues prior to ascending to the high Court, proved to be an amiable and hardworking justice. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes, with whom Sutherland would regularly be at odds as to the outcome of cases, valued Sutherland for his abilities as a raconteur. Holmes, on arriving at the justices’ conference room, would routinely approach Sutherland with the request: “Sutherland, J., tell me a story.” The justice from Utah invariably complied, to the great entertainment of his colleagues. But this general personal harmony overlay sharp differences among the justices over a wide range of constitutional issues. Sutherland, especially in cases involving economic matters, proved to be a consistent conservative.
In one of his first and most important opinions, Sutherland wrote the Court’s decision in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), invalidating a District of Columbia law that set a minimum wage for women for unreasonably interfering with the right to contract. Sutherland refused to characterize the issue in the case as a choice between individual liberty and the common good: “To sustain the individual freedom of action contemplated by the Constitution, is not to strike down the common good but to exalt it; for surely the good of society as a whole cannot be better served than by preservation against arbitrary restraint of the liberties of its constituent members.” His confidence in the constitutional rightness of laissez-faire economics earned Sutherland notoriety as one of the Four Horsemen who nearly stalled the progress of the New Deal, until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s threat of packing the Court and the defection of sometime-allies Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Owen Roberts finally inspired a new majority of the Court to sustain the various federal and state economic reforms of the New Deal.
Though steadfastly conservative in economic matters, Sutherland’s stance on other constitutional issues was not invariably so. For example, he wrote the opinion for the Court in Powell v. Alabama (1932), overturning the conviction of the young black men in the Scotts- boro case because they had not been afforded adequate legal representation in their trial for capital rape. Moreover, in Grosjean v. American Press Co. (1936), Sutherland’s opinion for the Court gave a liberal construction to the First Amendment by finding unconstitutional a state license tax on newspaper advertisements.
He belonged to Liberal party in 1883–1896 and to Republican in 1896–1942.
Membership
Member 1st Utah Senate, 1896, and has held other positions. Member 57th Congress (1901-1903), Utah (declined renomination).
Member of American Bar Association (President 1916-1917).
Connections
In 1883 he married Rosamund Lee. Their union would last almost 60 years and produce three children: two daughters, Edith and Emma, and a son, Philip, who died in childhood.
