National Affairs: Death of an Apostle

It was in 1930, when he was running for mayor of Detroit, that Frank Murphy astonished voters with a novel slogan. He was pledged, he said, to “the dew and the dawn and the sunshine of a new era.” His enemies scoffed. But the votes of one of the nation’s toughest industrial cities swept red-haired Frank Murphy into office.

The Reformer. From boyhood Frank Murphy had had a kind of desperate intentness. He carried with him the Bible given him by his mother and read a chapter from it every day. He played football at the University of Michigan until a 220-Ib. center fell on his 135-lb. frame and broke three ribs. He studied law, served as a captain of infantry in World War I, and returned home to become an assistant U.S. attorney (in which job he convicted, among others, a young bootlegger named Sherman Billingsley, now owner of Manhattan’s posh Stork Club).

Frank Murphy was mayor of Detroit during the depression, when some 50,000 Detroit families were virtually pauperized. He opened closed auto plants as dormitories, handed out almost $30 million in relief, saving enough on the operating costs of his administration to pay for the program.

The Prosecutor. Near the end of his second mayoralty term, F.D.R. sent him off to serve as Governor General of the Philippines, where he helped reform the islands’ judicial system, improved its hospitals and pushed through suffrage. He returned in 1936 to get himself elected governor of Michigan.

It was a time of more clouds than sunshine; Michigan was the storm center of labor’s worst squalls. ‘Auto workers, fighting for union recognition, staged the great sit-down strikes. For six weeks the gentle, violence-hating Murphy sat by and refused to throw them out by force, finally settled the dispute by mediation. Michigan declined to re-elect him. But Roosevelt appointed him U.S. Attorney General.

He was responsible for the convictions of Kansas City’s Democratic Boss Tom

Pendergast and Philadelphia’s Republican Publisher Moses Annenberg for income-tax evasion. He was looking around for other victims in a field rich with game, when Franklin Roosevelt elevated him to the place left vacant by the death of the only Catholic on the Supreme Court, crusty old Pierce Butler.

The Justice. There, with an air of martyred misery in an unaccustomed role, Frank Murphy sat out the afternoon of his life. For a while he turned up regularly at Washington parties. Although gossip involved him in various romances, he never married.*

He was never a particularly distinguished jurist; it was not his game. But he did make his voice heard in defense of civil liberties—in which he included the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses even to blaspheme his own Catholic Church. He protested the court-martial of the Japanese General Homma, who ordered the Bataan death march, as no trial at all but a “revengeful blood purge.” Gradually he withdrew from social life. His heart had never been quite equal to his spiritual drive, nor was it equal to the exacting, wearing work of the court. His Bible was by now so thumbed and tattered he had to wrap it in a towel to keep it intact.

When the court recessed for the summer, Frank Murphy went home to Michigan. There, one day last week in the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, night closed over the career of the apostle of the dew and the dawn. Stricken by coronary thrombosis, Frank Murphy, 59, died in his sleep.

* He was engaged to be married in August to Joan Cuddihy, 30, whose grandfather Robert J. Cuddihy was publisher of the Literary Digest.