"George Sutherland, adopted son of Utah, lawmaker, jurist, gentleman, is dead," the newspaper informed its readers. " . . . he passed into the Great Beyond as quietly and calmly as he had gone from one position of eminence to another during his long life . . . one of the ablest men ever to come out of the West."
With such accolades the Deseret News noted the passing of the only Utahn ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. He was appointed to that position on Sept. 5, 1922, by President Warren G. Harding, whose campaign he had assisted. Earlier, he had been a Utah state legislator and the state's representative to both the U.S. House and Senate.Named to the high court to fill the vacancy created when John H. Clarke resigned, he was the first foreign-born justice since 1794. During the 16 years he served on the high court, he earned a reputation for conservative interpretations of the Constitution and his ardent defense of individual rights and limited government powers. His signature went onto 295 majority opinions and 24 dissents.
His term coincided with a national shift from conservative to liberal philosophy, and he was one of the "nine old men of the court" who thwarted some of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's more liberal ideas. When FDR tried to pack the court with justices whose views more closely coincided with his own, the sitting conservative justices made it impossible.
Sutherland was born March 25, 1862, in Stoney Stratford, Buck-inghamshire, England. He came to Utah as a baby with his parents, who had joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The elder Sutherland soon left the church, and George was not reared as a Latter-day Saint. His politics, however, were strongly colored by his Utah experiences. He fought against polygamy but supported the church in many of its political positions. He was never viewed as an enemy to the church and in fact, benefited from the Mormon/non-Mormon split in the state, since he had friends in both camps.
His circumstances dictated that he begin to make his own living from the time he was 12. At 16, he enrolled in Brigham Young Academy in Provo, where he was profoundly influenced by one of Utah's pre-eminent early edu-cators, Karl G. Maeser, then its principal.
Maeser introduced the young man to the works of Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher who was Maeser's favorite writer. Spencer's ideas on liberty, evolution and progress and his method of deductive reasoning helped set a course for Sutherland's political ambitions.
After studying law at the University of Michigan, Sutherland returned to Utah and practiced for a time with his father in Provo. In 1894, he helped organize the Utah Bar Association. He did additional law studies at Columbia and George Washington universities. In 1883, he married Rosamond Lee, a Beaver, Utah, girl.
In 1880, at age 18, he was secretary of Utah's Liberal Party convention. The party had evolved in opposition to Mormon economic practices, which tended to create monopolies for some goods and services. The party also fought against polygamy and was opposed to statehood for Utah as long as the practice continued.
With the church's issuance of the Manifesto, which marked the end of church-sanctioned polygamy, the Liberal Party lost its focus and dwindled. Sutherland aligned himself with the Republican Party and was one of the few Republicans elected to the House of the first Utah Legislature. He later was elected to the state Senate and served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, as well as on several other powerful committees.
In 1900, he was elected as Utah's sole representative to the U.S. House. He was sensitive to Utah needs and opposed measures such as Theodore Roosevelt's proposal to remove the tariff from Cuban sugar, recognizing its potential harm to Utah's sugar beet industry. He also became deeply involved in public land issues and successfully proposed that the federal government sell arid lands and use the proceeds to fund irrigation, a benefit to Utah.
With Democrats gaining the upper hand in Congress, Sutherland was defeated in 1903-04, but he returned to the body after the 1904 election as a senator, having defeated Thomas Kearns. He served two terms in the Senate, concentrating his efforts on judicial reform and women's suffrage.
"Any argument which I may use to justify my own right to vote justifies the right of my wife, sister, mother and daughter to exercise the same right," he said in support of his position.
During the administration of Woodrow Wilson, he parted company philosophically with the president on his isolationist responses to brewing world problems. Sutherland championed the assertion of American rights and found Wilson's position contemptible.
After losing his Senate seat in the 1916 Democratic landslide, Sutherland practiced law in Washington, D.C. He became president of the American Bar Association in 1917, lamenting in his acceptance speech the "growing control of federal government. . . . We are creating an army of official agents, governmental bureaus and all sorts of commissions to pry into our affairs, smell out our shortcomings and tell us what we may and what we may not do," he said.
Among the most notable cases he judged as a Supreme Court justice were:
-Adkins vs. Children's Hospital, a case regarding a minimum- wage law for women in Washington, D.C. His opinion was that it was unconstitutional to provide a legal wage for workers of one gender only.
-Tyson Brothers vs. Banton, which involved the rights of business owners. An effort was being made to prevent theater ticket brokers in New York from selling tickets for more than 50 cents over the box office price. Sutherland said it was the right of businesses to sell their products for whatever they could get.
-U.S. vs. MacIntosh, which ruled that a conscientious objector who refused to bear arms in defense of his country could not remain a citizen.
In all his decisions, Sutherland's underlying premise was that the Constitution was "the people's law and the only authentic expression of their political will." He refused alterations to the document to "suit the whims" of those sitting on the court. "If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch, as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned," he proclaimed.
With the rise of a more liberal judiciary, some of Sutherland's positions lost their luster and in time some of his decisions were overturned. He retired Jan. 6, 1938.
Speaking to a Brigham Young University audience when he was awarded an honorary doctorate at that institution, he said that "character, to be good, must be so firmly fixed in the conscience and, indeed, in the body itself, as to ensure unhesitating rejection of any impulse to do wrong."
At his death, he was lauded as a man whose public legacy was his historic defense of traditional social values.