(b. Maine, Minn., 16 Oct. 1898; d. Washington, D.C., 19 Jan. 1980; interred Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va.), associate justice, 1939–1975. Raised in straitened circumstances and afflicted by polio in youth, Douglas worked his way through college and law school, quickly became a distinguished legal scholar, was named third chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and then, as associate justice, served longer than any other member in the history of the Supreme Court. A rugged outdoorsman and individualist who delighted, especially in later years, in flouting convention, Douglas became a spokesman for personal freedom on and off the Court. Unlike Hugo L. Black, Felix Frankfurter, or William J. Brennan among his contemporaries, Douglas left little theoretical legacy after his retirement but is remembered, with both affection and anger, as a symbol of the constitutional values he came to espouse (see Judicial Activism).

Early Career

Douglas was born in Minnesota but spent most of his childhood in or near Yakima, Washington. His father, a Presbyterian home minister, died when Douglas was six and left his family virtually penniless. As therapy for polio, Douglas took to taking solitary hikes in the foothills of the Cascades, which he later reported to be the source of his lifelong love of the outdoors as well as of his devotion to solitude. He worked his way through Whitman College, where poverty forced him to live in a tent one term. After graduating from Whitman in 1920 and teaching school for two years, he “hopped a freight and rode east,” as he later recalled (with some embellishment), to attend Columbia Law School, from which he graduated near the top of his class after working almost full‐time tutoring and doing odd jobs.

He coveted a clerkship with Associate Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, which customarily went to a top Columbia graduate, and when another graduate was selected, Douglas settled uneasily for a Wall Street law firm job that he later claimed to have hated. After two years at what is now Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Douglas left Wall Street to teach, first at Columbia Law School (1927–1929) and then, after a faculty rift over selection of Columbia's new dean, at Yale (1929–1934), where he became one of that law school's youngest chaired professors. His specialty was corporate law, including agency, bankruptcy, and reorganization. Although never closely identified with the American legal realist movement, which then flourished at both Columbia and Yale, Douglas was strongly influenced by its leading figures. He came to see legal doctrines not as autonomous but as devices that could be manipulated for social good or ill. Always restless, Douglas, like several prominent legal scholars, went to Washington to work in the New Deal, and he soon became a member (1936) and then chairman (1937) of the SEC, where he pressed for reform and battled the governors of the New York Stock Exchange over its operation. All the while, he developed close friendships—galvanized, he said, at poker games—within the Roosevelt administration and its inner circle, especially with Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior.

Service on the Court

When Louis D. Brandeis retired as associate justice in February 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made clear that he wished to appoint a Westerner but that he viewed Douglas, who had been mentioned as a possible candidate, as an Easterner from Yale. While friends, especially Jerome Frank and Thomas Corcoran, lined up Western political support, Douglas privately curried favor with influential political insiders. Then, just as his chances rose, his loyalty to the New Deal became suspect, so he made a fiery speech condemning the financial community and confirming his reformist brand of New Dealism. Within a week, Roosevelt offered Brandeis's seat to Douglas, and he was confirmed 4 April 1939 by a 62 to 4 vote (with the four dissenters labeling him a reactionary tool of Wall Street). At forty‐one, Douglas was the second youngest Supreme Court appointee in history and the youngest in 128 years; only Joseph Story, at thirty‐two, was younger.

The Supreme Court that Douglas joined was in transition, both personally and philosophically. Black, Stanley Reed, and Frankfurter had all been appointed after 1937, so Douglas—with the holdover Stone—provided a solidly pro–New Deal outlook. Over the next two years, during which three more Roosevelt appointees were added, the Court consolidated the post–1937 judicial imprimatur on the remaining New Deal programs that were in litigation. Black and Douglas played central roles, providing arguments for sustaining or interpretatively expanding late New Deal legislation, especially in the areas of labor law and control of markets (see Property Rights).

Despite his later reputation as a civil libertarian, Douglas's most important and enduring work during World War II concerned the regulation of business. His greatest achievements, still essentially undisturbed, are FPC v. Hope Natural Gas (1944), which established standards for reviewing agency rate‐making, and United States v. Socony‐Vacuum Oil Co. (1940), which held that a combination to fix prices was illegal per se without further inquiry into the reasonableness of the activity. Although Douglas did not coin the “per se” test, he firmly established its authority and permanently changed antitrust analysis of price fixing. Perhaps his most pervasive influence was in the administration of bankruptcy law, where he wrote definitive opinions on most aspects of the field. Douglas explained his judicial philosophy in business cases as a function of his predecessor's views, and many of his opinions quote Brandeis's opinions and nonjudicial works. In later life he would also trace the origins of his views to Thorstein Veblen and even to an influential preparatory school teacher, but, fully formed, his theoretical outlook was entirely his own.

During World War II, liberal members of the Court, particularly Black and Douglas, were caught between clashing symbols: While seeking to protect civil liberties in increasingly dark times, they also wished to support the war effort of the president who appointed them. Both justices initially supported compulsory flag‐salute laws (Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 1940), quickly repented publicly (Jones v. Opelika, 1942), and enthusiastically joined reversal of the first decision in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943). Both dissented from a highly restrictive reading of treason law, and Douglas filed a jingoistic dissent (Cramer v. United States, 1945). Both supported the constitutionality of the exclusion of Japanese from the West Coast during wartime, with Black speaking for the Court and Douglas concurring—although there is evidence that Douglas's vote vacillated until almost the last minute (Korematsu v. United States, 1944).

After the war, Black and Douglas found their voice and began to write opinion after opinion upholding civil liberties claims, particularly of free speech. Douglas's most controversial opinion for the Court at the time was Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), in which a speaker's conviction for insulting a hostile mob was reversed. To hold otherwise, he wrote, “would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups” (p. 5). Black and Douglas filed spirited dissents in Dennis v. United States, the 1951 decision upholding convictions of American Communist party members for conspiracy to teach and advocate overthrow of the government.

In most cases, Douglas wrote or voted silently in support of theories developed and advanced by Black. Douglas's most famous civil liberties opinion for the Court was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which he identified a constitutional right to privacy emanating from the “penumbras” of rights enshrined in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. Although the theory, in fact, owed much to Justice Brennan, Douglas was identified with the approach, which, critics remarked unkindly, revealed that his constitutional views were more shadow than substance.

Black dissented in Griswold and again two years later in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, in which Douglas's opinion for the Court invalidated poll taxes. During much of Black's last decade on the Court, 1961–1971, the two former allies were in opposite camps as Black sought limiting principles for his theories and Douglas sought to extend his views to their logical conclusion. During the same period, Douglas's analytical habits came under sharper scholarly attack for their tendentiousness, especially in tax cases, or simply for sloppiness. Douglas, ever the rebel, seemed to relish the criticism and appeared to bait his antagonists—larding his opinions, for example, with quotations from Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay (Papachristou v. Jacksonville, 1972), or staking out the most extreme positions, such as claiming that trees have legal standing to bring lawsuits (Sierra Club v. Morton, 1972, dissent). Douglas's record, especially from the mid‐1960s onward, displays positions that often appear to be casual, even in areas that he obviously cared about. To take the most startling example, the author of Papachristou, which invalidated a vagrancy ordinance in lyrical terms, also wrote to uphold zoning ordinances preserving traditional lifestyles (Belle Terre v. Boraas, 1974). To the end of his career, many critics charged that Douglas too often took positions simply to be in the center of the action, with his last‐minute stay in 1953 of the Rosenbergs' execution representing the most distasteful incident of this kind.

Douglas's motivation in that case is not free from doubt, but it is clear that his personal style changed dramatically in the early 1950s, when he divorced his wife of twenty‐nine years and embarked on annual globe‐trotting expeditions that routinely led to popularly targeted books about his travels. He was remarried three times, the last time, when he was sixty‐six, to a woman of twenty‐two. The combination of his sensational private life, maverick views, and personalization of his ideology led in April 1970 to a call by then House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford for Douglas's impeachment. His puckishness temporarily suppressed, Douglas mounted a feverish defense, and the charges were rejected eight months later by a House judiciary subcommittee. Vindicated, Douglas reverted to form.

On 31 December 1974, Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke. He was partially paralyzed and never recovered his full capacities. He was absent for much of the rest of that Supreme Court term, and though he returned to the Court the following term, he was at far less than full strength. On 12 November 1975, he submitted a letter of retirement to President Ford after serving longer (by more than two years) than any other justice in history.

Legacy

Unlike Black and Frankfurter, who left competing theoretical legacies, or Brennan, who provided creative doctrinal dexterity, Douglas's intellectual legacy as a justice is slight. While he was sitting, Douglas's plain eloquence supported the causes of the day but now seems time‐bound, just as his voluminous occasional writing—more than thirty books and hundreds of articles—seems ephemeral.

Douglas's historical significance seems to rest on his symbolism as the personification of individualism and on his advocacy for the powerless. Yet the symbol is muddied by his own paradoxical complexity: His record is riddled with contradiction, both substantively and personally (the great humanitarian was notorious for abusing staff and for indulging his conceits). Part of the tension may have been due to his restiveness on the Court, which could not contain his vast energy and which provided less of a forum than he sometimes wished. He was a plausible vice presidential candidate in 1944 and flirted with a wildcat run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1948. After his national political aspirations were finally foreclosed in 1948, he devoted more of his time to nonjudicial pursuits, which were aimed at reaching a wide audience interested in both legal and nonlegal—especially environmental—issues.

Douglas allowed himself to become a hero to professionals and laypeople alike, and at times even appeared to cultivate the role. He wished to be remembered for his faith in the individual, in the Constitution, and in the sanctity of the environment. His lasting monument, which touched him deeply, was designation by Congress of the parkland along the C & O Canal, a favorite walking trail in Washington state, as the William O. Douglas National Park.

See also History of the Court: The Depression and the Rise of Legal Liberalism; History of the Court: Rights Consciousness in Contemporary Society.

Bibliography

• Vernon L. Countryman, The Judicial Record of Justice William O. Douglas (1974).
• William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man (1974).
• William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939–1975 (1980).
• James F. Simon, Independent Journey (1980).
• Melvin I. Urofsky, ed., The Douglas Letters (1987).
• Bruce Allen Murphy, Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas (2003)

— Dennis J. Hutchinson

William Orville Douglas (1898-1980) was one of the most liberal and activist justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and a vigorous and controversial writer.

William Orville Douglas was born on October 16, 1898, in Maine, Minnesota, where his father, a Nova Scotian missionary, had moved as an itinerant preacher. At the age of 4 William was stricken with polio; to strengthen his spindly legs he began the hiking and later the mountain climbing that became one of his characteristic signatures. When he was 6 his father died, leaving his mother and the three children to make their way on very little, so they moved in with relatives in Yakima, Washington. There William and his two siblings worked their respective ways through school in odd chores and farming jobs. William got a scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and upon graduating spent 2 years teaching English and Latin in his hometown high school.

But Douglas's aim was the law. He arrived at Columbia University Law School in 1922 almost penniless, and had to once again work his way through school doing tutoring and research for a law textbook. He was befriended by Dean Harlan Stone and deeply influenced by Professor Underhill Moore, who had a new approach to the legal sociology of corporate business, which became Douglas' focus while at Columbia. This was also the period of the creative jurisprudence on the U.S. Supreme Court of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, and this "People's Attorney" and iconoclastic judge became one of Douglas's heroes. After graduating second highest in his class and editor of Columbia's law journal, Douglas worked for Cravath, DeGersdorff, Swaine & Wood, a huge Wall Street law firm in 1925, and practiced for a year in Yakima. He was admitted to the bar in 1926. He joined the faculty at Columbia Law School in 1927 but resigned in protest against the appointment of a new dean without faculty consultation a year later. A chance meeting with Dean Robert M. Hutchins of the Yale Law School led to Douglas's appointment to a professorship there at the age of 32, and just over a year later he was made Sterling Professor of Law.

Douglas's life was transformed by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, with its sense of social urgency and unparalleled opportunity for reform. In 1934 the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission asked the young law professor for a memorandum on the abuses of corporate reorganization and how these could be remedied. Douglas's reply was an eight-volume report that led to his appointment in 1936 as a member of the Commission and in 1937 he became its chairman. He prodded the stock exchanges into reorganizing themselves and also developed the Commission's surveillance of the prospectuses for new security issues, which did much to stabilize the exchanges.

When Justice Brandeis retired from the Commission, President Franklin Roosevelt turned to Douglas, despite his youth. Justice Douglas took his seat on April 17, 1939. There was talk of Douglas's resigning for high political office on two occasions during the intervening years. One time was in 1944, when Roosevelt sent two names to the Democratic Convention managers as his preferences for vice-presidential running mate - Douglas and Harry Truman. The choice fell to Truman, partly because political moguls mistrusted Douglas just as business moguls did. The second occasion was in 1948, when President Truman, needing a strong, liberal running mate, offered the place to Douglas, who turned it down.

As a justice, Douglas was one of the hardcore liberal "activists," in the sense that he believed that judicial neutrality was a myth and that judges could not rely on constitutional precedent or hard-and-fast constitutional texts to give them the judicial answers. Douglas believed that judicial statesmanship must keep up with social change and that a judge has the duty actively to shape the law in the desired social direction. Placed for a time in a dissenting minority with Justice Hugo Black, he later found himself part of a liberal majority, as Roosevelt's appointees gradually took over the Court. He went on the defensive again in the conservative Frederick Vinson court of the cold war period but again was part of the liberal majority of the Earl Warren court.

Douglas took a strong role in desegregation cases, in the assurance of fair governmental procedures for the accused, in the freedom of religion cases, and in the cases concerning the right of access to birth-control information. In the obscenity cases he took a firm stand for the absolute freedoms guaranteed against censorship of any sort by the 1st Amendment, which to some made him a proponent of smut and "un-American" values.

Douglas's continuous record of militant judicial liberalism was bound to awaken hostility. There were rumblings about impeaching Douglas when he granted a brief stay of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of spying on American atomic bomb technology. Anti-Douglas sentiments were fed by his three divorces and by his judicial opinions in religion-in-the-schools and obscenity cases. To a growing number of people he had offended God, the home, and the purity of the printed word. His book, Points of Revolution (1970), compared the current American Establishment with George III's, saying that unless it accepted the pressures for nonviolent revolutionary change, it would be overthrown by violence; this also stirred ire.

The impeachment movement this time gained considerable strength in the House of Representatives, fed mainly by tensions of the era and partisan politics, and a committee looking into his affairs was formed. Gerald Ford, while still in Congress, was the leading voice against Douglas. The impeachment-mongerers had their opening in Douglas's association with the Parvin fund, whose purposes were impeccable but whose money, it turned out, came from sources tainted with gambling. He collected a small fee that, despite being negligible, he still paid income taxes on, which his attackers claimed caused a conflict of interest, despite many of the other justices and government officials having received similar compensations. The impeachment attempts were all inconclusive, but persisted until Douglas retired from the Court in 1975.

An indomitable traveler, naturalist, mountain climber, lecturer, and writer, as well as teacher, administrator, and judge, Douglas reasserted the possibility of a many-faceted Renaissance existence as against a specialized, limited life. His career covered 4 decades of stormy American experience, from the early New Deal days to the tensions of the Vietnam War and the student confrontations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He brought to these years of turmoil legal and financial skills, a passion for individual freedom, and a plain-spoken brusqueness. He will be remembered as one of the few public figures who dared challenge convention and the Establishment during the middle of the 20th century. He died on January 19, 1980.

Further Reading

William Douglas wrote multiple books, though they are more centered around either law, political philosophy, or nature than himself. However, he did write a few autobiographies, including Go East, Young Man: The Early Years (1974) and The Court Years (1980). A biographical sketch and a selection of Douglas's judicial opinions are in Vern Countryman, ed., Douglas of the Supreme Court: A Selection of His Opinions (1959). Douglas and the Supreme Court are also discussed in John Paul Frank, The Warren Court (1964); Leo Pfeffer, This Honorable Court: A History of the United States Supreme Court (1965); and Henry Julian Abraham, Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States (1967). See also the chapter "William O. Douglas: Diogenes on Wall Street" in Max Lerner, Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (1939).

For more information on William Orville Douglas, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: Oct. 16, 1898, Maine, Minn.
• Education: Whitman College, B.A., 1920; Columbia Law School, LL.B., 1925
• Previous government service: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1936–39; chairman, 1937–39
• Appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt Mar. 20, 1939; replaced Louis D. Brandeis, who retired
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Apr. 4, 1939, by a 62–4 vote; retired Nov. 12, 1975
• Died: Jan. 19, 1980, Washington, D.C.

William O. Douglas served on the Supreme Court for 36 years, longer than any other justice. He wrote more opinions than any justice before or since. And he was honored, before his death, with a lasting monument: Congress designated a parkland in Washington as the William O. Douglas National Park to commemorate his concern for the environment.

Douglas overcame crushing poverty and a crippling illness in his childhood to earn the great achievements and honors of his adult life. His father died when Douglas was five years old, leaving his mother with three children and almost no money. Later, he struggled with polio, which seriously weakened his legs. He took long walks in the mountains near his home to build strength in his legs, and his contact with nature influenced him to become a lifelong advocate of environmental causes. His childhood experiences also led Douglas to have sympathy for the “underdog"—a person who copes with poverty, physical handicaps, or racial discrimination.

William Douglas was an outstanding student in school, which opened opportunities for him to become a teacher, lawyer, and government official. His achievements as a lawyer attracted the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He became a strong supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal economic recovery programs, and the President appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939, to fill the seat of Louis Brandeis, who had retired.

Justice Douglas sought to defend the constitutional rights of individuals and professed that the Bill of Rights was meant “to keep government off the backs of people.” He joined Justice Hugo Black to extend the limits of free expression and to promote “incorporation” of the Bill of Rights into Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, so that these constitutional rights could be used to protect individuals against abuses by state and local governments. Further, Justice Douglas joined with the majority of the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren to defend the rights of African Americans, as in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Cooper v. Aaron (1958).

Douglas's most notable opinion for the Court was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which he argued for a constitutional right to privacy based on his interpretation of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 9th Amendments. Although this opinion has prevailed, it also has been controversial because a right to privacy is not written specifically into the Constitution.

Douglas was a frequent writer of dissenting opinions, usually in defense of the rights of unpopular persons. He dissented, for example, in Dennis v. United States (1951), to protest the Court's decision to uphold convictions of American Communist party members for stating and writing that the U.S. government should be overthrown and replaced by a communist form of government. Douglas believed that the 1st Amendment forbade all government limitations upon the content of speech, or what a person could say. According to Justice Douglas, the Constitution gives the government power only to regulate the conduct of the speaker, that is, actions that pose a serious threat to the safety or property of people.

Justice Douglas often spoke and wrote about his beliefs on many topics. Many of his public statements were controversial or in opposition to commonly held viewpoints. As a result, many people disliked Douglas. He faced three attempts to impeach him, the last and most serious occurring in 1970, five years before his retirement from the Court.

Justice Douglas suffered a stroke on Dec. 31, 1974, which partially paralyzed him. Nearly a year later, Douglas left the Court. He died some four years later, a hero to many for his unyielding advocacy of individual rights, especially the rights of persons disliked or neglected by a majority of the people.

See also Griswold v. Connecticut; Incorporation doctrine; Privacy, right to

Sources

• Howard Ball and Phillip J. Cooper, Of Power and Right: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and America's Constitutional Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
• William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939–1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas (New York Vintage, 1981).
• James F. Simon, Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
• Melvin I. Urofsky, “William O. Douglas, Common-Law Judge”, Constitution 4, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 48–58

(1898-1980), associate justice, U.S. Supreme Court. Douglas served longer on the Court (1939-1975) and wrote more opinions and more dissents than any justice before or since. He was an academic founder of the influential legal realist movement, probably the finest New Deal administrator as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and an internationalist. He aspired to the presidency, but turned down an offer of the vice-presidential nomination in 1948. He was an ecologist years before the term was generally known. In his later years, when American youth proclaimed you couldn't trust anyone over thirty, he was a political hero on college campuses. He had an extraordinary intelligence, an excessive work ethic, the ability to see larger issues when contemporaries could not, and the willingness, maybe even the need, to be different. Underlying his character were the experiences of his youth when he had lived in poverty and had battled the effects of polio.

Douglas had an integrated judicial philosophy based on the belief that the Bill of Rights existed "to keep government off the backs of the people"--even in times of severe crisis. Douglas and Hugo Black stood alone during the McCarthy era in dissenting from the Court's decisions sustaining the loyalty-security measures. Unlike Black, however, Douglas's view of appropriate dissent was not narrow, and he easily accommodated the novel tactics of civil rights and antiwar activists to his First Amendment positions. His reputation as an uncompromising defender of the individual rests on his First Amendment opinions, especially his classic dissents in the Smith Act convictions of the Communist party leaders (Dennis et al. v. United States, 1951) and a jailhouse sit-in case (Adderly v. Florida, 1966).

Douglas looked upon work as having a constitutional dimension, believing it was essential for a person's fulfillment. Like other New Dealers, he believed that governments had to exert control over the economy; yet he distrusted bureaucracies, whether corporate or governmental, saying they would create "a nation of clerks." For Douglas, all individuals, regardless of race, religion, or status, were entitled to all the rights that the privileged, by virtue of their money, traditionally enjoyed, a view that eventually paved the way for the Court's controversial 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.

Douglas was a complex, driven man who changed significantly over the years. Until he was fifty, he was so politically attuned that Franklin D. Roosevelt made him the youngest Supreme Court nominee in over a century and he was a serious candidate for the presidency. Yet by the time he was seventy, he had become known for his injudiciousness and disdain for convention. He was a man with few friends (he publicly called his generation "bankrupt") and four wives (the last two in their early twenties), who faced a serious, albeit unsuccessful, impeachment attempt by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Despite eventual acceptance of many of his constitutional positions, Douglas has a mixed reputation because of his extrajudicial activities and his seeming scorn for lawyerlike analysis. Most believe he could have been an all-time judicial great, but few hold that he achieved his potential. Whatever the evaluation, his personality and varied interests ensure that there will never be another like him.

Bibliography:

James Simon, Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas (1980).

Author:

L. A. Powe, Jr.

See also Securities and Exchange Commission; Supreme Court.

1898–1980, American jurist, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1939–75), b. Maine, Minn. He received his law degree from Columbia in 1925 and later was professor of law at Yale. A Democrat, Douglas was appointed (1934) to the Securities and Exchange Commission; as chairman (1937–39) he pursued a vigorous policy of reform. He was prominent as a proponent of the New Deal and was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He became known on the court for his fervent support of civil rights, conservation, and civil liberties, particularly the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press. Consistently liberal, in 1953 he granted a stay of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and were subsequently executed (see Rosenberg case). The House of Representatives made an unsuccessful attempt to impeach Douglas for this act.

Among Douglas's published works are case books on business law and volumes on American law and civil rights, including We The Judges (1956) and A Living Bill of Rights (1961). An advocate of outdoor life and an enthusiastic traveler, Douglas wrote many books on these subjects, including Men and Mountains (1950), Russian Journey (1956), My Wilderness (1962), and The Three Hundred Year War: A Chronicle of Ecological Disaster (1972). He also wrote the autobiographies Go East Young Man (1974) and The Court Years (1980). Douglas was sometimes critized for various ethical lapses in his personal life, and the heroic image that emerges in his autobiographical works has been somewhat tarnished by discoveries that he had bent the truth on a number of details, e.g., his youthful health and social status, his military service, and his academic record. Nonetheless, his reputation as an outstanding jurist, staunch protector of privacy and civil rights, and defender of the environment remains intact. An anthology (1959) of Douglas's Supreme Court opinions was compiled by V. Countryman.

Bibliography

See biographies by J. F. Simon (1980) and B. A. Murphy (2003); H. Bosmajian, Justice Douglas and Freedom of Speech (1980).

A justice of the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was a committed liberal, who urged that the Court take bold steps in the application of the Constitution.

Douglas served for thirty-six years, longer than any other justice in the history of the Court.

William Orville Douglas, a legal educator, New Deal reformer, environmental advocate, and prolific author, was an outspoken and controversial associate justice to the Supreme Court in the twentieth century. For thirty-six and one-half years, under six presidents and five chief justices, Douglas's opinions—including an unequaled 531 dissents—touched and shaped the momentous constitutional questions and crises of the Depression, World War II, the cold war, the Korean War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of the welfare state, and the fall of Richard M. Nixon.

Asserting that the purpose of the Constitution was to "keep the government off the backs of the people," Douglas became a champion of civil liberties on the High Court in seminal cases interpreting freedom of speech, the right to privacy, pornography, treason, the rights of the accused, the limits of the military, the limits of Congress, and even the limits of the president of the United States. As an outspoken New Deal reformer and a popular libertarian, he was courted by the Democratic party for high political office, and likewise excoriated by leading Republicans who three times tried to impeach him. A man of enormous energy, he did not confine his public views to opinions from the Supreme Court alone, but wrote over thirty books on a variety of legal and social topics. As an engaging storyteller, vigorous outdoorsman, and blunt social critic, he was irresistible to the liberal press, under whose influence he was named Father of the Year in 1950. At his death in 1980, he was lionized as an outstanding protector of U.S. freedoms.

Since his death, however, historians have criticized both his public career and his private life. From his position on the Supreme Court, he twice flirted with a place on the presidential ticket—with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 and with Harry S. Truman in 1948—despite the clear opposition of his Court colleagues. He wrote his opinions faster, and with less scholarship or collegial cooperation, than any of his fellow justices. His lifelong stream of books, bearing the cover commendation Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, showed a similar haste to regard primarily his own views as he exhorted the nation impatiently on foreign policy, anthropology, religion, history, law, economics, and the environment. Unprecedented for a Supreme Court justice, he advocated public issues in extralegal activities around the world, creating difficulties for both the Court and the government. He claimed that J. Edgar Hoover had bugged the inner conference room of the Supreme Court Building and had had Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents plant marijuana on his mountain retreat property in Goose Prairie, Washington; when no evidence of these activities was ever found, he refused to recant. When a stroke at age seventy-five left him paralyzed in a wheelchair, wracked with pain, and periodically incoherent, he nonetheless refused to resign his seat in the High Court until forced to do so through the extraordinary efforts of his colleagues. And even then he insisted on lingering in his judicial office for months, demanding attention as though he were still on the Court.

This brilliant and complex man was born October 16, 1898, in Maine, Minnesota. He grew up in small towns of rural Minnesota, California, and Washington as his family moved in search of a climate that would preserve the frail health of his father, a hardworking Presbyterian minister of Scottish pioneer ancestry. Douglas's father died in Washington when the boy was five, leaving the family with only a meager inheritance, which a local attorney immediately squandered on a foolish investment. Douglas's widowed mother, Julia Bickford Fiske Douglas, had saved just enough to buy a house for the family in Yakima, across the street from the elementary school, where she raised Douglas and his two siblings on the virtues of hard work and high ambition as preparation for success in life. All three of the children achieved success in school and in professional life, but Douglas was brilliant: valedictorian of his high school class, Phi Beta Kappa at Whitman College, and second in his class and on law review at Columbia Law School.

Polio had stricken Douglas when he was an infant, and the local doctor had advised the family that he would never fully recover the use of his legs and would probably be dead by age forty. His mother, who favored her firstborn with the name Treasure, went to work massaging the muscles of his legs vigorously in two-hour shifts around the clock for months, telling him that he would recover to run again "like the wind," the way she had as a girl. He not only recovered the use of his legs but, as an adolescent, put himself on a merciless discipline of hiking miles a day in the mountains under full pack, to strengthen his legs to the point of outstanding endurance, determined that no one would ever call him puny.

In 1920 he graduated from Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington, and returned home for two years to teach English, Latin, and public speaking in Yakima High School. He pursued a Rhodes Scholarship unsuccessfully, and then decided to hitch by rail across the country to enter Columbia Law School, although he did not yet possess the money for tuition. While in law school, in 1924, he married Mildred Riddle, with whom he had his only two children, Millie Douglas and William O. Douglas, Jr. The marriage ended in divorce twenty-nine years later.

After graduating from Columbia Law in 1925, he practiced in a Wall Street firm for one year before joining the faculty at Columbia and a year later at Yale, where he specialized in corporate law and finance, writing respected casebooks and gaining recognition as an expert in the field. Desperate for a cure to continuous headaches and stomach pains that had plagued him since Wall Street, he briefly undertook psychoanalysis at Yale.

Following the stock market crash of 1929, he did original and painstaking work with the help of sociologist Dorothy S. Thomas, interviewing failed businesses in bankruptcy court to determine the causes of their loss. He was asked to head a study committee of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934. In 1936 he became a member of the SEC, and in 1937 he was appointed chairman with the mandate from Franklin D. Roosevelt to reform practices of the stock exchange that had led to the great crash.

In 1939 Roosevelt had Douglas, then chairman of the SEC, hailed off a golf course to meet immediately with him at the White House. "I have a new job for you," the president said in the Oval Office. "It's a job you'll detest." Pausing dramatically to light up a cigarette, the president continued, "I am sending your name to the Senate as Louis Brandeis' successor." Douglas was stunned. At forty, he was about to become the second-youngest Supreme Court justice in history.

Douglas was sworn in on April 17, 1939, and quickly helped constitute a new majority on the Court that supported Roosevelt's New Deal laws regulating the economy. Within two years he had opposed the Court's leading personality, Felix Frankfurter, and its reigning philosophy of defending civil liberties from the Bill of Rights in cases involving religious freedom and the rights of the accused. It was the beginning of a two-decade battle with Frankfurter and his philosophy of judicial restraint. This conflict did not end amicably, but it helped transform Douglas into a champion of civil liberties. After World War II, Douglas joined forces frequently with Justice Hugo L. Black and later Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in applying the Bill of Rights to protect individual liberties.

In 1951, when fears of Communism exacerbated by the public ravings of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy overtook the nation, Douglas's dissent in Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 71 S. Ct. 857, 95 L. Ed. 1137 (1951), defended the First Amendment free speech rights of Eugene Dennis and ten other members of the American Communist party who admitted teaching the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin. Douglas argued that despite current fears of Communist influence in U.S. society, their speech alone presented no "clear and present danger" to the nation. Similarly, in dissent, he defended the First Amendment rights of several New York schoolteachers who challenged the state's Feinberg law (Educ. Law N.Y.S. 3022) giving authorities the right to compile a list of subversive organizations to which a teacher could not belong. Douglas wrote that teachers need the guarantee of free expression more than anyone and that the Feinberg Law "turn[ed] the school system into a spying project" (Alder v. Board of Education of City of New York, 342 U.S. 485, 72 S. Ct. 380, 96 L. Ed. 517 [1952]).

During this same period, he vigorously opposed the expanding use of government wire tapping enabled by the 1929 Olmstead decision, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 48 S. Ct. 564, 72 L. Ed. 944 (1928). Writing for the public in his book Almanac of Freedom (1954), Douglas declared that "wire tapping, wherever used, has a black record. The invasion of privacy is ominous. It is dragnet in character, recording everything that is said, by the innocent as well as by the guilty. … wire tapping is a blight on the civil liberties of the citizen."

In 1953 Douglas single-handedly halted the execution of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg, the defendants in the most sensational spy trial of the cold war (Rosenberg v. United States, 346 U.S. 273, 73 S. Ct. 1173, 97 L. Ed. 1607 [1953]). After voting four times not to hear the case, he finally ordered a stay at the last possible minute, and then headed off on vacation. Unable to reach Douglas en route, the other justices called a special session to vacate the stay, and the Rosenbergs were executed. His colleagues accused him of grandstanding. His enemies in Congress accused him of treason, and he survived three impeachment attempts led by Gerald R. Ford. Ford, eager to be rid of Douglas, declared that "an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." But Douglas was not a traitor but an adamant civil libertarian, unwilling to let the heavy hand of the government crush any individual's rights.

During the tenure of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-69), Douglas found more frequent majorities for his activist philosophy. He took a leading role in reaching a majority for the 1954 Brown decision (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 [1954]) desegregating public schools, telling his colleagues simply that "a state can't classify by color in education." He argued in dissent in several cases that the Bill of Rights was applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, an argument the Court finally accepted in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S. Ct. 1684, 6 L. Ed. 2d 1081 (1961), which held the Fourth Amendment provision prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures applicable to the states. He supported each of the Warren Court's major decisions extending the rights of criminal suspects, including the right to counsel, in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S. Ct. 792, 9 L. Ed. 2d 799 (1963), and the right to know your constitutional rights before being interrogated, in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966).

In 1965 Douglas wrote for the majority in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S. Ct. 1678, 14 L. Ed. 2d 510, striking down a state law that prohibited the use of contraceptives. In the opinion, he argued that, taken together, the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments created a constitutional right to privacy. This may have been Douglas's most influential single opinion on the Court. He argued that the government did not belong in the bedroom, which was one of the "zones of privacy" protected by "penumbras" emanating from the specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights. Criticism of the Griswold opinion was fierce. But based on this right to privacy, a majority of the Court, Douglas concurring, would vote for a woman's right to have an abortion in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973).

Douglas made no secret of his long-standing dislike for Nixon and the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1967, he dissented from the Court's decision not to review several cases that might have raised the issue of the legality of the Vietnam War. On August 4, 1973, in a solitary performance reminiscent of the Rosenberg stay of execution, acting from the Yakima courthouse near his summer vacation home, Douglas reinstated a lower-court order to stop the Nixon administration's bombing of Cambodia and, in effect, bring the Vietnam War to a halt by judicial decision. Douglas wrote that only Congress could declare war, and Congress had not done so. Six hours later, eight members of the Court reversed him by the telephone polling of Justice Thurgood Marshall.

In his most personal relationships, Douglas was a tyrant. He sternly demanded the backbreaking sixteen-hour days and six-day weeks from his law clerks that he loved to put in himself (when a clerk asked for time off to get married, he granted him twenty-four hours), but never allowed them significant responsibilities for his opinions. One clerk said, "It was a master/slave relationship" (Simon 1980). He married four times while serving on the Supreme Court, to successively younger women: after Riddle, Mercedes Davidson (1953), whom he met in Washington, D.C.; Joan Martin (1962), a twenty-three-year-old college student who had written her senior thesis in praise of him; and Catherine Heffermin (1965), a twenty-one-year-old college student whom he met while she was working as a waitress. Most of his wives found him distant, demanding, and faithless. The 860 pages of his two-volume autobiography (The Court Years, 1980) are filled with revenge upon his personal and political enemies, but contain less than a page for his wife of twenty-nine years, Riddle. He was so inept and cold as a father that his two children fled him. As his son put it, "[F]ather was scary."

Felled by a stroke in 1974, he became confined to a wheelchair pushed by an aide, wracked by constant pain, glazed by medication, and increasingly incoherent. But he would not resign. He tried to return to the Court in 1975, refusing all advice to the contrary. His presence was embarrassing to the Court and impossible to sustain. He officially resigned on November 12, 1975, but tried to hang on to an unofficial role as the Court's tenth justice. When even his clerks would not support his fantasy, he prepared a statement of farewell to be read for him to the justices while he sat in his wheelchair. His farewell compared the relationship he had shared with his Court colleagues to the slow warm growth of friendships on a camping trip in the wilderness. His colleagues wept.

Douglas died on January 18, 1980, in Washington, D.C.

The view of the High Court as a somber gathering of old people in black robes pondering the weighty truths of the Constitution was shattered by Douglas. His irrepressible personality, extralegal activities, popular book writing, and serial marriages brought unprecedented color and controversy to the Court. A libertarian by disposition and principle, he would not easily allow the government to abridge the liberties of others, nor would he conform to the traditional role of Supreme Court justice.

Quotes:

"The constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

"The search for static security -- in the law and elsewhere -- is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts."

"Ive often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers."

"There are only two choices: A police state in which all dissent is suppressed or rigidly controlled; or a society where law is responsive to human needs. If society is to be responsive to human needs, a vast restructuring of our laws is essential. Realization of this need means adults must awaken to the urgency of the young peoples unrestin other words there must be created an adult unrest against the inequities and injustices in the present system. If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing."

"Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response."

See more famous quotes by William O. Douglas