Background
He was born in Alden, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, one of eleven children of Jacob W. Fine and Margaret Croop.
His father was a mine worker with supervisory duties in the Glen Alden Company mine.
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He was born in Alden, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, one of eleven children of Jacob W. Fine and Margaret Croop.
His father was a mine worker with supervisory duties in the Glen Alden Company mine.
The family moved to Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, where John completed high school in 1911.
From 1917 to 1919, Fine served as a sergeant in an engineers unit of the American Expeditionary Force and then briefly attended the University of Dublin.
His pleas for a state constitutional convention to approve a graduated income tax were rebuffed by a public ballot in November 1953.
He was subsequently elected to regular ten-year terms in November 1927 and November 1939. Governor James H. Duff appointed him to the Superior Court in June 1947, and that November he was elected to a full ten-year term.
On both courts he was often chosen to write opinions in cases dealing with labor law, compensation, real estate sales, divorce and domestic relations, evidence, and judicial powers.
Characteristically concise, these legal statements were often innovative and reflected recognition of developments in society.
Fine continued to be a political leader in Luzerne County during his years on the bench, and he is reputed to have been its Republican boss except during the governorship of his fellow Luzerne County Republican Arthur H. James (1939 - 1943), who opposed Pinchotism and was allied to Philadelphia's old machine.
Duff advanced Fine as the gubernatorial candidate to team with his own 1950 campaign for the United States Senate, and Fine won narrowly over the reform Democrat from Philadelphia, Richardson Dilworth. An increase in employment arising from the Korean War helped the Republican ticket, but Fine acknowledged the state's fiscal problems in his inaugural address.
His administration inherited an obligation to increase teachers' salaries and to provide a veterans' bonus. Fine's struggles to obtain some form of broadly based tax shaped his four-year term and fragmented the Republican party. In 1951 a flat. 5-percent income tax was defeated after a revolt by key Republican state senators.
For his second biennial budget, Fine obtained a 1-percent sales tax, but only after months of criticism and ridicule. His pleas for a state constitutional convention to approve a graduated income tax were rebuffed by a public ballot in November 1953.
In January 1954 he anticipated closing his administration with a $17 million deficit, but it turned out to be over $50 million.
The political atmosphere of open dialogue mixed with conviviality that had thus far characterized Fine's tenure ceased, and he vacated the governor's mansion in Harrisburg. At the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago he was rebuffed and vilified, a situation aggravated by television displays of his anger. The sales-tax controversy led to popular ridicule in the slogan "a penny for Fine. "
Favoring McCarthyism, Fine also made enemies by imposing a loyalty oath on state employees. He alienated others by authorizing state police raids to close down slot-machine gambling in social clubs.
The tax defeat of 1951 compelled him to ally with the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association, causing an irreparable split with Senator Duff, and he softened his attitude toward the other old guard Pennsylvania Republican backers, the Pew brothers, the Mellon family, and the Philadelphia machine.
To finance state Republican activities he collected money from state employees, insisting that these were voluntary contributions, but in 1954 a grand jury in Pittsburgh concluded that intimidation had taken place. Two of Fine's high administrators were indicted. More damaging, however, was his system of withholding funds from county and local Republican organizations.
In the primaries of 1954 his political power evaporated permanently. Fine's lieutenant governor, Lloyd Wood, became the Republican gubernatorial nominee, but only because he appeared to be a congenial bridge between party factions. Fine was asked to play no part in the fall 1954 campaign.
Sometimes seen as an extension of Duff administration progressive public policies, many of Fine's programs attacked social problems he himself knew firsthand from his Luzerne County background.
He oversaw a 25-percent increase in spending for education and the creation of vocational-technical area schools. He cracked down on gambling and liquor violations and reformed workmen's compensation and child adoption. The state took over local government welfare costs, and mental and physical health facilities were enlarged and subjected to licensing.
His administration borrowed heavily through public authorities to circumvent legal limits on state indebtedness.
He continued the highway and environmental protection policies of his predecessor. Fine assisted anthracite coal region representatives in seeking help from the federal government, and he created the Commission on Industrial Race Relations.
He constituted expert commissions to study the tax problem and government reorganization. The latter, headed by Francis J. Chesterman, suggested eliminating the Department of Commerce, which was headed by Andrew John Sordoni, a self-made entrepreneur and Fine's link with the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association.
The idea was rebuffed, but Fine passed on the final Chesterman Committee report to his successor, George M. Leader. It included a major change Leader would adopt, the creation of the Governor's Office of Administration. After his term, Fine settled in Loyalville, Pennsylvania.
In the 1957 primaries he failed to be reelected to the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas.
In 1961 he was indicted for income tax evasion, but he was eventually acquitted. Vindicated by the state's failure to continue without the sales tax, which eventually reached 6 percent, Fine was chosen a delegate to the 1968 Republican convention, where he endorsed Richard M. Nixon.
Making public appearances usually in a double-breasted suit and bow tie, he aged rapidly in appearance during the gubernatorial years.
He died in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
An active Episcopal layman and a Freemason, Fine also belonged to many national fraternal, veterans, and social organizations.
He held offices in the legislative district and county Republican committees from 1919 to 1923.
A follower of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive movement, Fine became attached to Governor Gifford Pinchot, who appointed him to fill a vacancy in the Luzerne County Common Pleas Court in January 1927.
Duff advanced Fine as the gubernatorial candidate to team with his own 1950 campaign for the United States Senate, and Fine won narrowly over the reform Democrat from Philadelphia, Richardson Dilworth.
Fine married Helene Pennebacker Morgan on December 5, 1939. They had two children.
She died on April 23, 1951, as a result of an accidental fall during the gubernatorial campaign.