Born in "The Thumb" region of Michigan, Murphy graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1914. After serving in the United States Army during World War I, he served as a federal attorney and trial judge. He served as Mayor of Detroit from 1930 to 1933. A panel of 69 scholars in 1993 ranked him among the ten best mayors in American history.[7] In 1933 he was appointed as Governor-General of the Philippine Islands. He returned home in 1936 and defeated incumbent Republican governor Frank Fitzgerald in the 1936 Michigan gubernatorial election and served a single term as Governor of Michigan. Murphy lost re-election to Fitzgerald in 1938 and accepted an appointment as the United States Attorney General the following year.
Murphy was born in Harbor Beach (then called Sand Beach), Michigan, in 1890.[8] Both his parents, John T. Murphy and Mary Brennan, were Irish immigrants and raised him as a devout Catholic.[9] He followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a lawyer. He attended the University of Michigan Law School, and graduated with a BA in 1912 and an LLB in 1914. He was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity and the senior society Michigamua.[10]
Murphy was admitted to the State Bar of Michigan in 1914, after which he clerked with a Detroit law firm for three years. He then served with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I,[8] achieving the rank of captain with the occupation army in Germany before leaving the service in 1919. He remained abroad afterward to pursue graduate studies.[8] He did his graduate work at Lincoln's Inn in London and Trinity College, Dublin, which was said to be formative for his judicial philosophy. He developed a need to decide cases based on his more holistic notions of justice, eschewing technical legal arguments. As one commentator quipped of his later Supreme Court service, he "tempered justice with Murphy."[11]
Career
1919–1922: U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of Michigan
When Murphy began his career as a federal attorney, the workload of the attorney's office was increasing at a rapid rate, mainly because of the number of prosecutions resulting from the enforcement of national prohibition. The government's excellent record in winning convictions in the Eastern District was partially due to Murphy's record of winning all but one of the cases he prosecuted. He practiced law privately to a limited extent while still a federal attorney, and resigned his position as a United States attorney on March 1, 1922.[13] He had several offers to join private practices, but decided to go it alone and formed a partnership with Edward G. Kemp in Detroit.[14]
1923–1930: Recorder's Court
Murphy ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the United States Congress in 1920, when national and state Republicans swept Michigan, but used his legal reputation and growing political connections to win a seat on the Recorder's Court, Detroit's criminal court.[15] In 1923, he was elected judge of the Recorder's Court on a non-partisan ticket by one of the largest majorities ever cast for a judge in Detroit, took office on January 1, 1924, and served seven years during the Prohibition era.
While on Recorder's Court, he established a reputation as a trial judge. He was a presiding judge in the famous murder trials of Dr. Ossian Sweet and his brother, Henry Sweet, in 1925 and 1926. Clarence Darrow, then one of the most prominent trial lawyers in the country, was lead counsel for the defense.[16] After an initial mistrial of all of the black defendants, Henry Sweet—who admitted that he fired the weapon which killed a member of the mob surrounding Dr. Sweet's home and was retried separately—was acquitted by an all-white jury on grounds of the right of self-defense.[17] The prosecution then elected to not prosecute any of the remaining defendants. Murphy's rulings were material to the outcome of the case.[18]
1930–1933: Mayor of Detroit
In 1930, Murphy ran as a Democrat and was elected Mayor of Detroit. He served from 1930 to 1933, during the first years of the Great Depression. He presided over an epidemic of urban unemployment, a crisis in which 100,000 were unemployed in the summer of 1931. He named an unemployment committee of private citizens from businesses, churches, and labor and social service organizations to identify all residents who were unemployed and not receiving welfare benefits. The Mayor's Unemployment Committee raised funds for its relief effort and worked to distribute food and clothing to the needy, and a Legal Aid Subcommittee volunteered to assist with the legal problems of needy clients. In 1933, Murphy convened in Detroit and organized the first convention of the United States Conference of Mayors. They met and conferred with PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt, and Murphy was elected its first president.[19] He served in that position from 1932 until 1933.[20]
Murphy was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal, helping Roosevelt to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state of Michigan since Franklin Piercein 1852 before the Republican Party was founded.
A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists, and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Murphy ranked as the seventh-best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.[21] Holli wrote that Murphy was an exemplary mayor and a highly effective leader.[22]
1933–1935: Governor-General of the Philippine Islands
By 1933, after Murphy's second mayoral term, the reward of a big government job was waiting. Roosevelt appointed Murphy as Governor-General of the Philippine Islands.
He was sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Filipinos, especially the land-hungry and oppressed tenant farmers, and emphasized the need for social justice.[23]
High Commissioner to the Philippines was the title of the personal representative of the president of the United States to the Commonwealth of the Philippines during the period 1935–1946. The office was created by the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934, which provided for a period of transition from direct American rule to the complete independence of the islands on July 4, 1946.[citation needed]
The United Automobile Workers engaged in an historic sit-down strike at General Motors' Flint plant. The Flint Sit-Down Strike was a turning point in national collective bargaining and labor policy. After 27 people were injured in a battle between the workers and the police, including 13 strikers with gunshot wounds, Murphy sent the National Guard to protect the workers, failed to follow a court order that requested him to expel the strikers, and refused to order the Guard's troops to suppress the strike.[24][25][26]
He successfully mediated an agreement and end to the confrontation, and G.M. recognized the U.A.W. as a bargaining agent under the newly adopted National Labor Relations Act. This recognition had a significant effect on the growth of organized labor unions.[27] In the next year, the UAW saw its membership grow from 30,000 to 500,000 members. As later noted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), this strike was "the strike heard round the world."[28]
In 1938, Murphy was defeated by his predecessor, Fitzgerald, who became the only governor of Michigan to precede, and then succeed, the same person.
Murphy took an expansive view of individual liberties, and the limitations on government he found in the Bill of Rights.[38] He authored 199 opinions: 131 for the majority, 68 in dissent.[39] One of the important opinions authored by Justice Murphy was Securities and Exchange Commission v. W. J. Howey Co. (1946), in which the Court defined the term "investment contract" under the Securities Act of 1933, thus giving content to the most important concept of what makes something a security in American law.
Opinions differ about him and his jurisprudential philosophy. He has been acclaimed as a legal scholar and a champion of the common man,[39] but Justice Felix Frankfurter disparagingly nicknamed Murphy "the Saint", criticizing his decisions as being rooted more in passion than reason. It has been said he was "neither legal scholar nor craftsman", and he was criticized "for relying on heart over head, results over legal reasoning, clerks over hard work, and emotional solos over team play."[40]
Justice Frank Murphy, February 1940, shortly after joining the Supreme Court
Murphy's support of African Americans, aliens, criminals, dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, Native Americans, women, workers and other "outsiders" evoked a pun: "tempering justice with Murphy." As he wrote in Falbo v. United States (1944), "The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution." (p. 561)
According to Frankfurter, Murphy was part of the more liberal "axis" of justices on the Court along with justices Wiley B. Rutledge, William O. Douglas, and Hugo L. Black; the group would for years oppose Frankfurter's "judicially restrained" conservative ideology.[41] Douglas, Murphy and then Rutledge were the first justices to agree with Black's notion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights' protection in it; this view would later become law.[42]
Murphy is perhaps best known for his vehement dissent from the court's ruling in Korematsu v. United States (1944), which upheld the constitutionality of the government's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He sharply criticized the majority ruling as "legalization of racism."
This was the first time the word "racism" found its way into a Supreme Court opinion (Murphy had previously used the term twice in a concurring opinion in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railway Co. (1944)[43] issued that same day). He would use that word again in five separate opinions before the word "racism" disappeared from Murphy's and the High Court's other opinions for almost two decades, not reappearing until the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia (1967),[44][45] which struck down as unconstitutional the Virginia anti-miscegenation statute. (See also Jim Crow laws.)
Although Murphy was serving on the Supreme Court during World War II, he still longed to be part of the war effort and so he served at Fort Benning, Georgia as an infantry officer during court recesses.[46]
On January 30, 1944, almost exactly one year before Soviet liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on January 27, 1945, Justice Murphy unveiled the formation of the National Committee Against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews. Serving as committee chair, he declared that it was created to combat Nazi propaganda "breeding the germs of hatred against Jews." This announcement was made on the 11th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany. The eleven committee members included U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and Henry St. George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.[47]
Murphy was among 12 nominated at the 1944 Democratic National Convention to serve as Roosevelt's running mate in the presidential election that year.[48] He acted as chairman of the National Committee against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews and of the Philippine War Relief Committee.[49] The first committee was established in early 1944 to promote rescue of European Jews, and to combat antisemitism in the United States.[50]
Justice Frank Murphy is buried at Our Lady of Lake Huron Catholic Cemetery in Sand Beach Township, Michigan, near Harbor Beach. He is buried near Dr. Manuel Teves, M.D. who was a town physician from the Philippines during WWII and had practiced medicine in Harbor Beach from the 1969 through the early 2000s.
Outside the Hall of Justice is Carl Milles's statue "The Hand of God".[55] This rendition was cast in honor of Murphy and financed by the United Automobile Workers. It features a nude figure emerging from the left hand of God. Although commissioned in 1949 and completed by 1953, the work, partly because of the male nudity involved,[56] was kept in storage for a decade and a half.[57] The work was chosen in tribute to Murphy by Walter P. Reuther and Ira W. Jayne.[58] It was placed on a pedestal in 1970 with the help of sculptor Marshall Fredericks, who was a Milles student.
Murphy is also honored with a museum in his home town, Harbor Beach, Michigan. Housed at his former residence, it contains numerous personal artifacts from his life and career, most notably from the Philippines. The Murphy Museum is open during the summer months, by appointment.
Murphy's personal and official files are archived at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and are open for research. This also includes an oral history project about Murphy.[59] His correspondence and other official documents are deposited in libraries around the country.[60]
In memory of Murphy, one of three University of Michigan Law Schoolalumni to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Washington, D.C.-based attorney John H. Pickering, who was a law clerk for Murphy, donated a large sum of money to the law school as a remembrance, establishing the Frank Murphy Seminar Room.[10]
Murphy was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Law degree by the University of Michigan in 1939.[14]
The University of Detroit has a Frank Murphy Honor Society.[61]
The Sweet Trials: Malice Aforethought is a play written by Arthur Beer, based on the trials of Ossian and Henry Sweet, and derived from Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice.[62]
Attorney General Frank Murphy and Miss Ann Parker on March 24, 1939
Murphy never married nor had children. He was the subject of "[r]umors of homosexuality [...] all his adult life".[64] According to Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. The Supreme Court:
[a] gay reading of [biographies of Murphy] suggests that Murphy's homosexuality was hiding in plain sight. For more than 40 years, Edward G. Kemp was Frank Murphy's devoted, trusted companion. Like Murphy, Kemp was a lifelong bachelor. From college until Murphy's death, the pair found creative ways to work and live together. [...] When Murphy appeared to have the better future in politics, Kemp stepped into a supportive, secondary role, much as Hillary Clinton would later do for Bill Clinton.[65]
As well as Murphy's close relationship with Kemp, Murphy's biographer, historian Sidney Fine, found in Murphy's personal papers a letter that "if the words mean what they say, refers to a homosexual encounter some years earlier between Murphy and the writer."[66] The writer of the letter implied that he and Murphy had become lovers while Murphy was governor-general and congratulated Murphy on his appointment to the Supreme Court.[65]
Murphy did have at least two female companions of note. Ann Parker was frequently seen horseback riding with Murphy in Washington during his tenure as U.S. Attorney General, leading to speculation of a romance in the press. At the time of his death, Murphy was engaged to Joan Cuddihy; the wedding was scheduled for the following month.[67]
^ abc"Justices 1789 to Present". Washington, D.C.: Supreme Court of the United States. Archived from the original on April 15, 2010. Retrieved September 20, 2019.
^Vander Hill, Warner, C. Warren, Robert Mark (1974). Michigan Reader: 1865 to the Present. Eerdmans. ISBN9780802870308.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Melvin G. Holli, The American Mayor: The Best and the Worst Big-City Leaders (Pennsylvania State UP, 1999), p. 4–11.
^ abc"Frank W. Murphy, 1940-1949". supremecourthistory.org. Washington, D.C.: Supreme Court Historical Society. Archived from the original on September 21, 2019. Retrieved September 20, 2019.
^"Frank Murphy". Encyclopedia of World Biography. Archived from the original on September 21, 2019. Retrieved September 20, 2019 – via encyclopedia.com.
^See generally, Norris, Harold (1965). Mr. Justice Murphy and the Bill of Rights. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications; includes some of Murphy's opinions, as well as a biography.
^Christensen, George A. "Here Lies the Supreme Court: Gravesites of the Justices". Yearbook 1983 Supreme Court Historical Society. 1983. Washington, D.C.: Supreme Court Historical Society: 17–30. Archived from the original on September 3, 2005. Retrieved September 20, 2019.
^Lidén, Elisabeth (1986). Between Waters and Heaven: Carl Milles, Search for American Commissions. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International.
^Zacharias, Pat (September 5, 1999). "The Monuments of Detroit". The Detroit News'. Archived from the original on July 8, 2012. Retrieved September 25, 2011.
Friend, Theodore, Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946 (1965).
Hall, Kermit L. (2005) "Murphy, Frank." The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press 1150 pp. ISBN978-0-641-99779-2; ISBN978-0-641-99779-2.
Lunt, Richard D., The High Ministry of Government: The Political Career of Frank Murphy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965) (PhD diss. University of New Mexico).
Nawrocki, Dennis Alan, Art in Detroit Public Places (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), p. 63, biographical material on Frank Murphy.
Norris, Harold, Mr. Justice Murphy and the Bill of Rights (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1965).
Ossian Sweet Murder Trial Scrapbook, 1925. Scrapbook and photocopy of the November 1925 murder trial of Ossian Sweet. Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University.
Roche, John P. "Mr. Justice Murphy", Mr. Justice, Dunham, Allison and Kurland, Philip B., eds, 281–317 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, rev. edn 1964).
Toms, Robert, Speech on the Sweet murder trials upon retirement of the prosecuting attorney in 1960, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University.
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