From Publishers Weekly
Despite the enduring image of former Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas as the white-haired, mountain-climbing protector of individual rights and liberal causes, the man who emerges from Murphy's thorough biography is a great deal more complicated. In such books as Of Men and Mountains, Douglas himself carefully crafted the myth of the poor boy from the state of Washington who arrived in New York with just a few cents in his pocket and ended up conquering the Eastern establishment in the name of the little guy. Like so many of the stories he fostered about himself, though, this one was only partially true; others, such as a childhood bout with polio, were outright false. In reality, Douglas enjoyed tremendous emotional and financial support throughout his life from his family, friends and multiple wives. On a professional level, he achieved much that has been overshadowed by his career on the Court. As the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the 1930s, he helped to curb self-dealing by Wall Street brokers and bankers who manipulated the system at the expense of the small investor. (This discussion has obvious parallels to today's scandals, as does Murphy's examination of how civil liberties eroded during the Cold War despite Douglas's efforts to the contrary.) Murphy (Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice) does a wonderful job of providing just enough historical context to allow general readers to appreciate the complexity of his brilliant, but flawed, subject without bogging down his narrative in a crush of detail. Douglas's biography is as much a history of American politics in the mid-20th century as it is a portrayal of the man himself.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Murphy, a judicial scholar and biographer of three Supreme Court justices, this time reveals the genius and the warts of William O. Douglas, arguably the greatest influence on American jurisprudence. Douglas was one of the youngest and longest-serving Supreme Court justices, a perennial dissenter who shaped the right to privacy and attempted to halt President Nixon's Vietnam War efforts. After graduating with honors from Columbia Law School, Douglas was highly sought after and eventually settled on a professorship at Yale Law School. Attracted by the New Deal of Roosevelt's administration, he accepted the post of chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and helped reform Wall Street. Here Murphy explores new material on Douglas, including his hidden ambitions to be president. This extraordinary man, a rugged outdoorsman and master of political machinations, endured four impeachment attempts to unseat him from the court, as well as four sometimes-turbulent marriages, and yet remained an American giant. This is a well-researched and absorbing look at an enduring figure in American legal history. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for Bruce Allen Murphy
Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice
“The tragedy of Abe Fortas, who would have been one of the great chief justices ever, in my opinion, is detailed in vivid fashion by Murphy, who has a case to build and builds it well.” —Larry King, USA Today
“One of the best recent biographies I have read. It brings Fortas to life, explaining his career and how he operated. More than that, it tells the most complete story we have about the events that led to Fortas’s downfall. It will be the standard work on this personal and professional tragedy.” —Bernard Schwartz, Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law, New York University, author of Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court
“An engrossing tale. As in Greek tragedy, flaws of character and hubris led to disaster.”—Raoul Berger, Harvard Law School, author of Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment
The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices
“Murphy challenges us in this pathbreaking and thoroughly documented study to reexamine our preconceptions of the role of the judiciary in American government and society.”
—Richard Bernstein, Harvard Law Record
From the Inside Flap
William Orville Douglas was both the most accomplished and the most controversial justice ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. He emerged from isolated Yakima, Washington, to be dubbed, by the age of thirty, “the most outstanding law professor in the nation”; at age thirty-eight, he was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, cleaning up a corrupt Wall Street during the Great Depression; by the age of forty, he was the second youngest Supreme Court justice in American history, going on to serve longer―and to write more opinions and dissents―than any other justice.
In evolving from a pro-government advocate in the 1940s to an icon of liberalism in the 1960s, Douglas became a champion for the rights of privacy, free speech, and the environment. While doing so, “Wild Bill” lived up to his nickname by racking up more marriages, more divorces, and more impeachment attempts aimed against him than any other member of the Court. But it was what Douglas did not accomplish that haunted him: He never fulfilled his mother’s ambition for him to become president of the United States.
Douglas’s life was the stuff of novels, but with his eye on his public image and his potential electability to the White House, the truth was not good enough for him. Using what he called “literary license,” he wrote three memoirs in which the American public was led to believe that he had suffered from polio as an infant and was raised by an impoverished, widowed mother whose life savings were stolen by the family attorney. He further chronicled his time as a poverty-stricken student sleeping in a tent while attending Whitman College, serving
as a private in the army during World War I, and “riding the rods” like a hobo to attend Columbia Law School.
Relying on fifteen years of exhaustive research in eighty-six manuscript collections, revealing long-hidden documents, and interviews conducted with more than one hundred people, many sharing their recollections for the first time, Bruce Allen Murphy reveals the truth behind Douglas’s carefully constructed image. While William O. Douglas wrote fiction in the form of memoir, Murphy presents the truth with a narrative flair that reads like a novel.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Bruce Allen Murphy
Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice
“The tragedy of Abe Fortas, who would have been one of the great chief justices ever, in my opinion, is detailed in vivid fashion by Murphy, who has a case to build and builds it well.” —Larry King, USA Today
“One of the best recent biographies I have read. It brings Fortas to life, explaining his career and how he operated. More than that, it tells the most complete story we have about the events that led to Fortas’s downfall. It will be the standard work on this personal and professional tragedy.” —Bernard Schwartz, Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law, New York University, author of Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court
“An engrossing tale. As in Greek tragedy, flaws of character and hubris led to disaster.”—Raoul Berger, Harvard Law School, author of Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment
The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices
“Murphy challenges us in this pathbreaking and thoroughly documented study to reexamine our preconceptions of the role of the judiciary in American government and society.”
—Richard Bernstein, Harvard Law Record
About the Author
Bruce Allen Murphy is the Fred Morgan Kirby Professor of Civil Rights at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the nationally acclaimed and bestselling The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices (1982) and the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice (1988), as well as other books and articles in the field of American government and constitutional law. A native of Abington, Massachusetts, he is an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots. He and his wife, Carol L. Wright, live in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, and are the proud parents of two children, Emily and Geoffrey.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
JULIA’S “TREASURE”
With a good education, you can always be free.
—Julia Bickford Fisk Douglas He arrived at Columbia Law School smelling of sheep, carrying nothing but a battered suitcase and the burden of his mother’s ambition that he should become president of the United States. With his unruly sandy-blond hair and dirty, rumpled clothes, Orville Douglas felt in mid-September 1922 a lot less like the valedictorian of North Yakima High School and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Whitman College and a lot more like one of the sheep he had tended on a train part of the way cross-country.
Now, outside of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house, Douglas knew that he would have to change everything about himself—even his name—to put all of the ghosts of Yakima, Washington, behind him. But Julia Fisk Douglas had raised her eldest son to meet such challenges.
Julia had named her son William Orville to bring honor to the two men whom she most admired: Orville Fisk, the father she adored, and the Reverend William Douglas, the husband she deified. Raised on his mother’s stories about these patriarchs, young Orville grew up believing that his very name destined him for greatness. His grandfather, he believed, had served with distinction as a member of the Union forces in the Civil War. He thought that his father had been a devoted family man. Only Julia knew that the truth was far different—and that Orville’s life thus far, filled with obstacles and disappointments, had closely mirrored the lives of the men whose names he bore.
A New England farmer, like his father before him, Orville Fisk had stood five feet nine inches tall, with an unruly tuft of light hair, a very pale complexion, and compellingly clear blue eyes. In 1861, at the age of twenty-four, he married Salome Bickford Richardson, a widowed mother of two who was six years his senior, and fully expected that the rest of his days would be spent tilling the earth. Like so many of his peers, though, when the government called for assistance in quelling the rebellion in the South, Orville enlisted for three years. On Octo- ber 4, 1861, he became a private in Company D of the Sixth Regiment of the Vermont Volunteers and was mustered into the army in Montpelier eleven days later.
But while his regiment trained, Orville quickly discovered that military life did not suit him. By February of the following year he chose to follow his own path, checking himself in and out of a series of military hospitals over the next several months without his commander’s permission, all the while complaining of diarrhea and stomach pains. The precise nature of Orville’s ailment was never fully diagnosed. Only when his exhausted unit returned on August 9 from the front for a leave at Fort Monroe, Virginia, did he feel well enough to rejoin them. Just under a month later, however, as the men of the Sixth Vermont marched off toward South Mountain in Maryland, Orville Fisk disappeared once again. And so, with his comrades on the verge of fighting in the bloody battles at Crampton’s Gap and Antietam, on September 7, 1862, Private Fisk was listed on the company muster rolls first as being “absent without leave” and a month later as a deserter—charged also with stealing his gun and equipment.
Orville convalesced for two months in the General Hospital in Steuart’s Mansion in Baltimore before moving to the Army General Hospital in York, Pennsylvania, where he was eventually taken into custody on February 7, 1863, and relieved of his gun and equipment. Orville was then put on a train to Brattleboro, Vermont, to face a court-martial. While all of the military’s records indicated that he had been a deserter since September 7, 1862, and little more than a wandering hospital patient prior to that, Orville was somehow able to persuade the military authorities to send him to a convalescent hospital at Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island in New York. There he remained until May 25, 1863.
Finally, in June 1863, the itinerant private, now listed on the muster rolls as being “gained from desertion,” rejoined his regiment for active military service. But his time with the regiment near and at Gettysburg, at Funkstown, Maryland, and in various locations in Virginia did not change his mind about the desirability of military service. In March 1864, after reenlisting for another three years as a “veteran volunteer”—entitling him to receive a month’s pay in advance, be promised a bounty of $402 (sixty dollars of which would be paid immediately), and get a month’s furlough home—Orville left for Glover, Vermont, and was never seen by his regiment again.
Knowing that the Union bounty hunters would be looking for him, Orville and his wife packed up all their belongings and traveled thirty miles, past the Canadian border to the tiny township of Bolton Centre in Brome County, Quebec. There, Orville used his reenlistment money and Salome’s savings to pay one hundred dollars for forty acres of land from Elbridge L. Loyal on June 27, 1864. While his old army comrades were fighting in such places as Ream’s Station, Virginia, Charles Town, West Virginia, and Opequon, Virginia, Orville and Salome built a new home and began farming in Canada. And six months later, in December 1864, with the men of the Sixth Vermont welcoming a respite from the shooting in their winter camp south of Petersburg, Virginia, the Fisks were welcoming their first child, Alice. Over the next four years, they would be blessed with two other children, May and Walter.
After nearly eight years of life in Canada, in the spring of 1872 Orville and the again-pregnant Salome decided that it would be safe to return to the United States, but only if they moved to the frontier state of Minnesota. Salome’s nephew, E. A. Bickford of Glover, Vermont, had already been lured to the area by the promise under the Homestead Act of 1862 of eighty acres of free land to anyone who would live on and “improve” it for at least five years. Ten years later, the Fisks obtained full ownership of their land in the tiny community of Maine, Minnesota, just eighteen miles northeast of the growing city of Fergus Falls.
Soon after their arrival, tiny twin girls, Julia and Jennie, were born to the Fisk family on June 24, 1872. Julia came to be nicknamed Mite because she was so small that she had to be carried around for months on a pillow and was not able to walk until after her third birthday. Only through exercise and sheer force of will was she eventually able to overcome her physical inadequacy and run “like a deer.”
While Salome raised the children, including her youngest son, Milo, who was born in 1874, and supported the family by tilling the wheat fields, milking the cows, tending the vegetables, and cutting the firewood, the perpetually sickly Orville went into politics, winning election year after year as the town clerk. Besides keeping the small town’s modest records, Orville spent his time sitting on a rocking chair on the porch of the town hall, telling harrowing stories of his “distinguished” military service during the war. But even this limited amount of activity proved to be too rigorous for Orville, as he came down with pneumonia and died at age forty-eight on May 15, 1885. The local paper hailed Orville in its obituary as one of the town’s “most prominent citizens” who “took an active and brave part” in the Civil War.
Despite the undistinguished nature of her husband’s military service, Salome came to believe that as a veteran’s widow she had a government pension coming to her. So she hired Washington attorney P. J. Lockwood to file for one on May 18, 1888. Despite Salome’s diligent two-year effort gathering supportive affidavits, her petition was denied when the Pension Board discovered that her husband had deserted the army not once but twice.
Not satisfied with this response, in December 1888 Salome instructed her attorney to seek a removal of the desertion charge from her husband’s record in order to reestablish her eligibility for a pension. She argued that her husband had left his post because he “had been sick a great deal, was in several hospitals, the last one was Brattleboro, Vt. Was sick after he came home his mother was sick and on account of his own health and his mother’s he never went back he was the only child of a widowed mother whose mind was not right” [sic]. Not only did Salome fail to mention their move to Canada during the war, she also failed to mention that Orville’s sister Emma had been able to care for their mother. Even without these facts, though, the two-man appellate panel in the army adjutant general’s office denied her petition.
While for most people this would have been the end of the issue, such was not the case for the determined Salome Fisk. She commissioned the building of a grand new farmhouse. By the time the masons had finished what was described as “one of the best houses in town,” all the neighbors marveled at what a large pension Orville must have received, providing so well for his family even after his death.
But that did not mean success would be enjoyed by all their children. The oldest son, Walter, would one day inherit the family homestead, so Julia and her sisters each began to chart different courses for their lives. All of them decided to pursue one of the few options open to them: a teaching career. Twenty-one Maine residents, including all the Fisk girls, took the state teacher’s exam on March 7, 1889, in order to gain admission to the state-run institute for teachers. A passing grade there would result in the issuance of a teacher’s certificate and eventually a job.
But on October 24, when the Fergus Falls Weekly Journal proudly listed the dozens of people who had passed the exam, Julia’s was the...
