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Frank Murphy

William Francis Murphy (13 April 1890-19 July 1949) was the Democratic Mayor of Detroit from 23 September 1930 to 10 May 1933 (succeeding Charles Bowles and preceding Frank Couzens), Governor General of the Philippines from 15 July 1933 to 15 November 1935 (succeeding Theodore Roosevelt Jr.), Governor of Michigan from 1 January 1937 to 1 January 1939 (interrupting Frank Fitzgerald's terms), United States Attorney General from 2 January 1939 to 18 January 1940 (succeeding Homer Stille Cummings and preceding Robert H. Jackson), and an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 5 February 1940 to 19 July 1949 (succeeding Pierce Butler and preceding Tom C. Clark).

Biography[]

William Francis Murphy was born in Harbor Beach, Michigan in 1890, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants. He became a lawyer in Detroit in 1914 before serving in the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I and achieving the rank of captain before leaving the service in 1919. After receiving his collegiate education in London and Dublin, he returned to the United States to serve as the first Assistant US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 1919 to 1922, as an Associate Judge of the Detroit Recorder's Court from 1924 to 1930, as Mayor of Detroit from 1930 to 1933, as Governor General of the Philippines from 1933 to 1935, as High Commissioner to the Philippines from 1935 to 1936, as Governor of Michigan from 1937 to 1939, as Attorney General from 1939 to 1940, and as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 1940 to 1949, having a long and uninterrupted career of public service. He was ranked among the ten best mayors in American history by a panel of 69 historians in 1993, as he enthusiastically supported the New Deal and worked to ameliorate the mass unemployment experienced by Detroit during the Great Depression. Murphy also advocated for social justice for Filipino tenant farmers during his governorship over the Philippines, and, as Governor of Michigan, he refused to authorize the US National Guard to suppress the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936, instead ordering the National Guard to protect the workers. While a Supreme Court justice, he took an expansive view of individual liberties, and he supported the rights of African-Americans, foreigners, criminals, dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, Native Americans, women, workers, and other outsiders, and he had a consistently liberal record; he criticized Japanese-American internment as a "legalization of racism" in the first time that "racism" found its way into a Supreme Court written opinion. He died in 1949.

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