Background
He was born in Seagoville, Dallas County, Texas, the son of Joseph Lawrence Fly, a farmer, and Jane Ard.
He was born in Seagoville, Dallas County, Texas, the son of Joseph Lawrence Fly, a farmer, and Jane Ard.
After graduation from high school in Dallas in 1916, he entered the United States Naval Academy and graduated in 1920.
He entered the Harvard Law School in 1923 and graduated with an LL. B. in 1926.
Fly, like Lilienthal, had studied under Felix Frankfurter at Harvard; as the TVA's chief legal officer, he recruited for his staff a number of Frankfurter students.
Fly then entered private law practice and was associated with the firm of White and Case of New York City from 1926 to 1929. In the latter year, he was appointed a special assistant to the United States attorney general, and during the next five years in this position he represented the federal government in several court cases involving questions of restraint of trade under federal antitrust laws and regulatory measures affecting interstate commerce.
When private utility companies began a systematic attack on the constitutionality of the power program of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1934, Fly was selected by David Lilienthal, a TVA director, to be general solicitor and head of the TVA legal department.
After 1937 his title was general counsel. Fly, like Lilienthal, had studied under Felix Frankfurter at Harvard; as the TVA's chief legal officer, he recruited for his staff a number of Frankfurter students. Under Lilienthal's general direction, he conducted legal work in two major constitutional challenges to TVA's power program, beginning in September 1934.
The first of these arose when George Ashwander and thirteen other shareholders filed suit to nullify a contract for the sale of electric energy from a TVA-owned dam to nearby Alabama cities.
The suit raised the issue of whether a federal agency constitutionally could sell energy (as property) to public as well as private purchasers. Fly and his staff won the suit in appeals to a United States circuit court and the Supreme Court, which ruled that the energy sale was constitutional.
In the second challenge, begun in May 1936, the Tennessee Electric Power and other companies, including five controlled by Wendell Willkie, charged coercion, fraud, malice, and conspiracy in TVA's power operations.
These charges, representing a broader challenge to TVA authority than in the Ashwander case, were fought by Fly and rejected by a panel of three federal judges, a newly required body in constitutional cases under a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1937, which Fly had helped to draft. The charges were rejected also by the Supreme Court.
By 1939, Fly's legal work had helped greatly to establish firmly the constitutionality of the TVA's power program. Fly's demonstrated legal talent in the TVA cases came to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1939 appointed him chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This agency, created to regulate interstate and foreign communication by wire or radio, had been ineffectual since its establishment in 1934.
Under Fly's direction, it conducted a strong regulatory program. The chairman initiated public hearings to obtain information for establishing federal regulation of radio networks to foster broadcast competition; he continued the hearings for several months, in spite of protests from the broadcast industry and members of Congress, who opposed stricter regulations.
As a result of the hearings, the FCC discovered a broadcasting monopoly and ordered the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America, to divest itself of one of its networks.
The order was contested by NBC in an appeal to the Supreme Court, which in 1943 upheld the order and gave the FCC broad power to regulate individual licensed broadcasting companies. Accordingly, NBC sold its Blue Network, which became the American Broadcasting Company.
As chairman of the FCC, Fly also proposed prohibiting the operation of more than one broadcast station in any service area by a single interest or group of interests, and insisted that station programming should reflect the licensee's concern for the public interest.
He conducted hearings that led to the adoption of engineering standards governing commercial and experimental television stations, the allocation of the first channels to frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting, and the approval of the merger of the Postal Telegraph and Western Union companies, which resulted in stabilization of the telegraph industry and lower rates for users.
Despite frequent criticism of Fly by some broadcast executives and congressmen, he was widely credited with greatly improving FCC regulatory efficiency and commended for his administrative competence and industry.
In 1940, Fly's responsibilities were increased with his appointment, concurrently with his FCC duties, as chairman of the Defense Communications Board, renamed the Board of War Communications in 1942.
In this position, he directed efforts to establish and coordinate priorities for use of communication facilities essential to national defense.
He resigned from the board and the FCC in 1944 with notable recognition, if not praise, for his important accomplishments in defending and promoting the mission of two controversial New Deal agencies, the TVA and the FCC.
After 1944, Fly lived in Florida, where he established a law firm and became an executive in citrus-processing and television companies.
He died at Daytona Beach, Florida.
He served with the Pacific Fleet until 1923, when he resigned from the navy, and on June 12 of that year he married Mildred Marvin Jones; they had two children.
As a private lawyer, he was a frequent critic of wiretapping by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was an active member of a national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union.
He was a member of the Federal Communications Commission
1939–1944
He married Phyllis Beckman on December 19, 1950.