Moorfield Storey

Moorfield Storey.

Moorfield Storey (March 19, 1845 – October 24, 1929) was an American lawyer, anti-imperial activist, and civil rights leader based in Boston, Massachusetts. According to Storey's biographer, William B. Hixson, Jr., he had a worldview that embodied "pacifism, anti-imperialism, and racial egalitarianism fully as much as it did laissez-faire and moral tone in government."[1] Storey served as the founding president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving from 1909 to his death in 1929. He opposed United States expansionism beginning with the Spanish-American War.

Early life

Moorfield Storey was born in 1845 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. His family was descended from the earliest Puritan settlers in New England and had close connections with the abolitionist movement. He graduated from Harvard in 1866, and then studied at Harvard Law School. From 1867 to 1869, Storey was clerk for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, effectively private secretary to its chairman, Senator Charles Sumner. He accepted the position as it seemed the best route to continue his law studies.[2] During his tenure, he initially supported the removal of President Andrew Johnson from office but soon became disenchanted by what he viewed as the corruption and opportunism of politicians on both sides. He was admitted to the bar in 1869.

Career

Storey established a law practice in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1873 to 1879 he was editor of the American Law Review.[3] He was elected president of the American Bar Association in 1896,[3] and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[4]

He was a well-known person in the "Mugwump" movement of 1884, and actively supported Grover Cleveland. As a strong believer in the gold standard, freedom of contract, and property rights, Storey opposed the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan and supported the National Democratic Party (Gold Democrats) third-party ticket in 1896.[5] In 1887 he built a house on Great Cranberry Island.

Storey spoke at the first anti-imperialist mass meeting in Boston in June 1898, called because of the Spanish-American War. He was a vice president of the New England Anti-Imperialist League. In addition, he wrote a book brief for the Lodge Committee summarizing the war crimes of the Philippine–American War. From 1905 until its dissolution in 1921, he was president of the national Anti-Imperialist League. He perceived that "national subjugation overseas and racial persecution at home were related," which drove his efforts at reform in the United States.[6]

1900 Congressional campaign

Late in the campaign of 1900, Storey seriously pondered running for president on a third-party ticket but decided against it as impractical. Instead, he ran a losing, but spirited and high-profile campaign for Congress as an independent anti-imperialist candidate. Other planks in his platform included support for the gold standard and free trade.

Champion of civil rights

Storey consistently and aggressively championed civil rights, not only for blacks but also for American Indians and immigrants. He opposed immigration restrictions and supported racial equality and self-determination.[6] "When the white man governs himself, that is self-government," he declared, "but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government–that is despotism."[5]

Storey was the first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from its founding in 1909 until his death in 1929.[7] According to his biographer Hixson, he "launched and maintained the effective to achieve the total destruction of the legal embodiment of white supremacy."[6] He guided NAACP legal challenges to discriminatory laws that violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, especially related to disenfranchisement and segregation of blacks in the South, and led several important NAACP legal victories. Most notably, he was lead counsel before the United States Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). In that case, the Court unanimously overturned a Louisville law that racially segregated blacks by specific city blocks. The Court's opinion reflected the jurisprudence of property rights and freedom of contract as embodied in the earlier precedent it established in Lochner v. New York.

Storey was on the conservative side in the Sacco and Vanzetti case.[2]

In 1920 Storey led the NAACP to take on the defense of the Elaine Twelve in their appeals from convictions of murder and the death penalty.[8] The NAACP raised $50,000 for their defense, hiring two attorneys to manage the appeals in Arkansas. The cases were broken into two tracks because of technical trial issues, and six men (Ware et al.) were retried beginning in May 1920 after their defense team won the first appeal at the state supreme court. Storey worked with the team as the cases of six other men (Moore et al.) later reached the United States Supreme Court. In its ruling in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the Court set an important precedent for reviewing state criminal cases against the standard of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and application of Bill of Rights to state actions.[9]

Later life

In the 1920s, Storey served as the chairperson of the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society and on the advisory committee of the American Fund for Public Service Committee on American Imperialism.

He died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, survived by four of his five children with Gertrude Cutts, whom he had married in 1870. She had died in 1912.[2]

Legacy

Damon W. Root touted Storey as an historical role model for libertarian Democrats in a December 2007 article for Reason Magazine.[10]

Bibliography

Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Moorfield Storey

Notes

  1. ↑ Hixson (1972), p. 39.
  2. 1 2 3 Sidney Gunn (1936). "Storey, Moorfield". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
  3. 1 2  Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Storey, Moorfield". Encyclopedia Americana.
  4. ↑  Reynolds, Francis J., ed. (1921). "Storey, Moorfield". Collier's New Encyclopedia. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company.
  5. 1 2 David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900," Independent Review 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75
  6. 1 2 3 Gerard W. Gawalt, "Reviewed Work: Moorfield Storey and the Abolitionist Tradition by William B. Hixson, Jr.", The New England Quarterly Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sep., 1972), pp. 451-453, via JSTOR, accessed 17 February 2016
  7. ↑ Bliss Perry, "Moorfield Storey as a Man," The Crisis, May 1930, pp. 156-57.
  8. ↑ Walter L. Brown, "Reviewed Work: A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases by Richard C. Cortner", The Arkansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 48, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 289-291, via JSTOR, accessed 17 February 2016
  9. ↑ "Elaine Massacre". Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Retrieved 2012-07-07.
  10. ↑ Root, Damon W. (December 2007). "The Party of Jefferson: What the Democrats can learn from a dead libertarian lawyer". Reason Magazine.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, April 11, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.