The Politician and the Priest: Paul V. McNutt, Frank Murphy, and the Age of FDR

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 45:2 (Fall 2019): 39-76©2019 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved The Politician and the Priest: Paul V. McNutt, Frank Murphy, and the Age of FDR By Dean J. Kotlowski Paul V. McNutt (1891-1955) and Frank Murphy (1890-1949) rank among the most important politicians of the New Deal era in the Midwest. Although McNutt and Murphy had little direct contact—which perhaps explains why few scholars have written about them in tandem— they invite comparison for their varied careers and shared experiences: state executives, colonial proconsuls, cabinet officials, and political stars during the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt.1 A veteran of World War I, McNutt was state (1926-27) and national (1928-29) commander of the American Legion, governor of Indiana (1933-37), and high commissioner 1 Only one study of Murphy and McNutt exists, and it covers just part of their careers. Elliot Newbold, “At the End of Empire: Frank Murphy, Paul V. McNutt, and the American Decolonization of the Philippines” (MA thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017). For McNutt’s career, see Robert R. Neff, “The Early Career and Governorship of Paul V. McNutt” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1963); I. George Blake, Paul V. McNutt: Portrait of a Hoosier Statesman (Indianapolis: Central Publishing, 1966); James H. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People 1920-1945 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982), 76-152; Iwan Morgan, “Factional Conflict in Indiana Politics during the Later New Deal Years, 1936-1940,” Indiana Magazine of History 79 (March 1983), 29-60; Ross Gregory, “Politics in an Age of Crisis: America, and Indiana, in the Election of 1940,” Indiana Magazine of History 86 (September 1990), 247280 ; Linda Gugin, “Paul V. McNutt January 9, 1933-January 11, 1937,” The Governors of Indiana, ed. Linda Gugin and James E. St. Clair (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006), 288-299; Dean J. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). For Murphy, important works include J. Woodford Howard Jr., Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Sidney Fine, Frank Murphy, Volume I, The Detroit Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975); Sidney Fine, Frank Murphy, Volume II, The New Deal Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Sidney Fine, Frank Murphy, Volume III, The Washington Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); Margaret H. Potts, “Justice Frank Murphy: A Reexamination,” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook (1982), 57-65; James Wolfinger, “The Strange Career of Frank Murphy: Conservatives, State-level Politics, and the End of the New Deal,” The Historian 65 (Winter 2002): 377-402; Gregory Parker, “Frank Murphy: A Dream Deterred,” Michigan History Magazine 98 (March-April 2014): 30-37. 40 The Michigan Historical Review (1937-39, 1945-46) and ambassador (1946-47) to the Philippines. He headed FDR’s Federal Security Agency (1939-45) and War Manpower Commission (1942-45), and in 1940 he angled to be the Democratic nominee for president or vice president. A veteran, Legionnaire, and Democrat, Murphy served as a judge on the Recorder’s Court of Detroit (1924-30), mayor of Detroit (1930-33), Philippine governor-general (1933-35) and high commissioner (1935-36), and governor of Michigan (1937-38). As a presidential or vice presidential possibility, he entered FDR’s cabinet as attorney general in 1939, before being elevated to the United States Supreme Court a year later. “No one living today,” Murphy told the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in 1946, “has had the same width of experience that I have had.”2 McNutt might have disagreed. The story of McNutt and Murphy is significant for three reasons. First, during a transformational period of American history, the two men exhibited contrasting approaches to politics—at least on the surface. McNutt proved a realistic, opportunistic politician who, according to one Roosevelt associate, “would run over his own mother in furtherance of his political ambitions.”3 He climbed the greasy pole, building a statewide machine before accepting offices from FDR as he eyed the White House, a prize that also interested Murphy. Murphy’s support of disadvantaged groups, and...