Edward Douglass White

Edward Douglass White, Jr. (November 3, 1845 – May 19, 1921), American politician and jurist, was a United States senator, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and the ninth Chief Justice of the United States, serving 1910-1921. He was best known for formulating the Rule of Reason standard of antitrust law.
He sided with the Supreme Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the legality of state segregation to provide "separate but equal" public facilities in the United States, despite protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to equal treatment under the law. In one of several challenges to southern states' grandfather clauses, used to disfranchise black voters at the turn of the century, he wrote for a unanimous court in Guinn v. United States (1915), which struck down many Southern states' grandfather clauses.

White was born in 1845 in his parents' plantation house, now known as the Edward Douglass White House, near the town of Thibodauxville (now Thibodaux) in Lafourche Parish in south Louisiana. He was the son of Edward Douglass White, Sr., a former governor of Louisiana, and Catherine Ringgold. He was a grandson of Dr. James White, a U.S. representative, physician, and judge.

On his mother's side, he was the grandson of Tench Ringgold, appointed as a U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia under the James Monroe and Andrew Jackson administrations. He was also related on his maternal side to the Lee family of Virginia. The White family's large plantation in Louisiana was based on cultivating and processing for market sugar cane, depending on extensive slave labor.

White's paternal ancestors were of Irish Catholic descent, and he was reared in that religion. He was a devout Roman Catholic his entire life. He studied first at the Jesuit College in New Orleans, then at Mount St. Mary’s College near Emmitsburg, Maryland. Last, he attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the Philodemic Society. After the American Civil War, he returned to academic work and studied law at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University).

White as he appears in Harper's Magazine in 1910.

White's studies at Georgetown were interrupted by the American Civil War. It has been suggested that he returned to Bayou Lafourche, where he purportedly enlisted as an infantryman in the Confederate States Army under General Richard Taylor and eventually attained the rank of lieutenant. This is questionable, as his widowed mother had remarried and was living with the rest of the family in New Orleans at the time. When he returned to Louisiana, it was probably to his primary home in New Orleans.

An apocryphal account states that White was almost captured by General Godfrey Weitzel's Union army when they invaded Bayou Lafourche in October 1862, but that he evaded capture by hiding beneath hay in a barn. It is possible that White enlisted in the Lafourche militia, as its muster rolls are not complete. There is no documentation, however, that White served in any Confederate volunteer unit or militia unit engaged in campaigns in the Lafourche area.

Another account suggests that he was assigned as an aide to Confederate General W. N. R. Beall and accompanied him to Port Hudson. Port Hudson had a garrison of 18,000 Confederate soldiers, but a numerically superior Union force surrounded it. After a siege lasting from May 21 to July 8, 1863 (the longest siege in North American history), the Confederate forces unconditionally surrendered after learning of the fall of Vicksburg to the Union. White's presence at Port Hudson, when he was 18 years old, is supported by a secondhand account of a postwar dinner conversation he had with Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota, a Union veteran of Port Hudson, and another recounted by Admiral George Dewey (then a Federal naval officer at Port Hudson), in both of which White referred to being part of the besieged forces. But, White's name does not appear on any list of prisoners captured at Port Hudson. According to another account of questionable reliability, White was supposedly sent to a Mississippi prisoner of war camp. (As practically all Confederate soldiers of enlisted rank of the Port Hudson garrison were paroled, and officers sent to prison in New Orleans and later to Johnson's Island, Ohio, this account is likely not true.) When White was paroled, he supposedly returned to the family plantation, to find it abandoned, the canefields barren, and the place nearly empty of most former slaves.

The only "hard" evidence of White's Confederate service consists of an account of his capture on March 12, 1865 in an action in Morganza in Pointe Coupee Parish, which is contained in the Official Records of the American Civil War, and his service records in the National Archives, documenting his subsequent imprisonment in New Orleans and parole in April 1865. These records confirm his service as a lieutenant in Captain W. B. Barrow's company of a Louisiana cavalry regiment, for all practical purposes a loosely organized band of irregulars or "scouts" (guerrillas). One organizing officer of this regiment, which was sometimes called "Barrow's Regiment" or the "9th Louisiana Cavalry Regiment," was Major Robert Pruyn. Pruyn (a postwar mayor of Baton Rouge, Louisiana) served as courier relaying messages from Port Hudson's commander, General Franklin Gardner, to General Joseph E. Johnston, crossing the Union siege lines by swimming the Mississippi. Pruyn escaped from Port Hudson prior to its surrender in the same manner. According to another account, after White was paroled in April 1865 and following the surrender of the western Confederate forces, he ended his military career by walking (his clothing in rags) to a comrade's family home in Livonia in Pointe Coupee Parish.

White's Civil War service was taken as a matter of common knowledge at the time of his initial nomination to the United States Supreme Court, and the Confederate Veteran periodical, published for the United Confederate Veterans, congratulated him upon his confirmation. White was one of three ex-Confederate soldiers to serve on the Supreme Court. The others were Associate Justices Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (II) of Mississippi and Horace Harmon Lurton of Tennessee. The Court's other ex-Confederate, Associate Justice Howell Edmunds Jackson, had held a civil position under the Confederate government.

Edward White as a U.S. Senator

While living on his family's abandoned plantation, White began his legal studies. He enrolled at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans to complete his study of the law, at what is now known as the Tulane University Law School. He subsequently was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in New Orleans in 1868.

White briefly served in the Louisiana State Senate in 1874, a year marked by interracial violence in political campaigns and elections. He was appointed as an Associate Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, serving from 1879 to 1880. He was politically affiliated with Governor Francis T. Nicholls, a former Confederate general who served 1877 to 1880, and later was elected again, serving 1888 to 1892.

White later became famous in Louisiana for helping to abolish the Louisiana Lottery, considered a hotbed of corruption. A case challenging the lottery reached the state's Supreme Court, which in 1894 ordered the state to discontinue the gaming.

The state's legislature appointed White to the United States Senate in 1891 to succeed James B. Eustis. He served until his resignation on March 12, 1894, when he was nominated by President Grover Cleveland (D) to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1896 White sided with the six justices whose majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson approved segregation. (One justice abstained, so only eight were voting.)

In 1910, he was elevated by President William Howard Taft to the position of Chief Justice of the United States upon the death of Melville Fuller. At the time, his was a controversial appointment: first, White was a Democrat while Taft was a Republican. The media of the day widely expected Taft to name Republican Justice Charles Evans Hughes to the post. Second, White was the first Associate Justice to be appointed as Chief Justice since John Rutledge in 1795. Some historians believe that President Taft appointed White, who was 65 years old at the time and overweight, in the hope that White would not serve all that long and that Taft himself might be appointed to succeed him. Following White's death in 1921, Taft was indeed appointed as his successor, making White the only Chief Justice to be followed in office by the president who appointed him.

White was generally seen as one of the more conservative members of the court. He originated the term, the “Rule of Reason." But, White also wrote the 1916 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Adamson Act, which mandated a maximum eight-hour work day for railroad employees.

As Chief Justice at a time when the Court's work was carried out with more than 8,000 cases brought each year before the court, and only a few clerks to work for all the members of the Court, the Chief Justice held weekly meetings with fellow jurists, assigned all the cases and wrote the majority opinions in 711 cases, as well as 155 dissenting opinions, all opposing income taxes. White wrote for a unanimous Court in Guinn v. United States (1915), which invalidated the Oklahoma and Maryland grandfather clauses (and, by extension, those in other Southern states) as "repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment and therefore null and void." But, Southern states quickly devised other methods to continue their disfranchisement of blacks (and in some cases, many poor whites) that withstood Court scrutiny.

In 1918, the Selective Draft Law Cases upheld the Selective Service Act of 1917, and more generally, upheld conscription in the United States, which President Taft said was "one of his great opinions."

As Chief Justice, White swore in presidents Woodrow Wilson (twice) and Warren G. Harding.

Chief Justice White was one of thirteen Catholic justices –of 112 total through the 2010 appointment of Justice Elena Kagan – in the history of the Supreme Court.

White married Leita Montgomery Kent, the widow of Linden Kent, on November 6, 1894, in New York City.

White died in office and his remains were buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The Georgetown graveyard overlooks Rock Creek; also interred there are Associate Justice Noah Swayne and "almost-Justice" Edwin M. Stanton. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase was also buried there, but his body was transferred after 14 years to Cincinnati, Ohio's Spring Grove Cemetery.

• A statue of White is one of the two honoring Louisiana natives in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.
• A statue of him is located in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court building in New Orleans. The second statue is a local landmark on the New Orleans scene, created by Bryant Baker, who was selected for the commission by White's widow, and dedicated April 8, 1926. "Big Green Ed", as his likeness is often referred to, is a favorite of locals and tourists alike. Visitors are often seen sitting at the base of his likeness, discussing issues of the day. Moreover, local custom holds that those who run around the statue in a counterclockwise direction will not be arrested that night.
• In his honor, the Louisiana State University Law Center founded the annual Edward Douglass White Lectures. They have featured such distinguished speakers as Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.
• The play, Father Chief Justice: Edward Douglass White and the Constitution by Paul Baier, a professor at LSU Law Center, was based on White's life.
• In 1995, White was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.
• Edward Douglass White Council #2473 of the Knights of Columbus in Arlington, Virginia, is named in his honor.
• Edward Douglas White Catholic High School in Thibodaux, Louisiana, was named for him.

• Christensen, George A. (1983). "Here Lies the Supreme Court: Gravesites of the Justices". Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 1983. Archived from the original on September 3, 2005. Retrieved November 24, 2013. 
• Christensen, George A., Here Lies the Supreme Court: Revisited, Journal of Supreme Court History, Volume 33 Issue 1, Pages 17 - 41 (February 19, 2008), University of Alabama.
• "Statue to White Will be Unveiled to Ceremonies." The Times-Picayune (March 4, 1926): p. 6.
• "Edward Douglass White Council #2473". Arlington Virginia: Knights of Columbus. Retrieved February 26, 2013.