William Orville Douglas is Born

Today in Masonic History William Orville Douglas is born 1898.

William Orville Douglas was a United States Supreme Court Justice.

Douglas was born on October 16, 1898 in Maine Township, Otter Trail County, Minnesota. He was the son of an itinerant Scottish Presbyterian minister from Pictou County, Nova Scotia. As an itinerant preacher his father traveled with William as far as California later to Cleveland, Washington. William was six years old when his father died in Portland, Oregon in 1904. Afterwards his mother moved to several towns, finally settling in Yakima, Washington where he attended school. He was a valedictorian of Yakima High School, an excellent student he won a scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla. There he was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity, and student body president.

He graduated in 1920 and returned to Yakima to teach but during the summer he worked in a cherry orchard picking cherries. He said it was the source of his early desire to become a lawyer: "I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and I.W.W’s who I saw being shot by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments of the law."

Determined to be a lawyer, he rode the rails to New York to attend Columbia University. He graduated 5th in his class in 1925, was Phi Beta Kappa and went to work for a prestigious New York firm. He returned to Yakima for a year but quickly realized Yakima was not a place offering him much of a destiny. He returned east to teach at Columbia and later Yale Law School.

In 1934 he joined the Franklin Roosevelt administration as a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Early 1939 Justice Louis D. Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court On April 15, 1939 Douglas took his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. At the age of 40 he became one of the youngest justices to sit on the court. He established a record as the longest serving, 36 years, 209 days, the most opinions written, the most dissents written, the most speeches given, and the most books written by any justice.

In 1944 he voted with the majority to uphold the wartime Korematsu v. United States ordering Japanese Americans to be held in internment or concentration camps. He had planned to dissent but changed his mind and voted with the majority. He later regretted his vote and became a leading advocate of individual rights. He often disagreed with the other justices. He dissented in almost 40% of the cases. Douglas was critical of censorship stating "The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth."

At the age of 76, on December 31, 1974 he was in the Bahamas with his wife when he suffered a stroke. He insisted on continuing to participate in Supreme Court affairs. He finally retired November 12, 1975. He died January 19, 1980, age 81, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery near the graves of eight other former Supreme Court Justices.

Douglas was raised in Mount Adams Lodge No. 227 in Yakima, Washington on February 22, 1922.

This article provided by Brother Coe Tug Morgan – Honorary Grand Secretary, Past Grand Historian Grand Lodge F. & A. M. of Washington.