William O. Douglas

Douglas's father, an itinerant Presbyterian preacher, died in 1904 after a botched stomach surgery, leaving a widow and three children Douglas insisted were desperately poor, though his mother's finances were not as ruined as he later described. The family settled in North Yakima, Washington, where a small, sickly boy who had nearly died of a raging fever before his second birthday grew up mocked for his thin legs. He started climbing a nearby hill to build them up, then kept going into the Cascades. Valedictorian of his high school class, he won a scholarship to Whitman College and worked as a janitor, a jeweler's clerk, and a waiter to send money home to his mother.

Douglas taught at Columbia and Yale law schools before Franklin Roosevelt made him chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission at 38, then put him on the Supreme Court in 1939 to replace Louis Brandeis. He served 36 years and 209 days, longer than any justice before or since, writing the 1965 opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut that found a constitutional right to privacy in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights, and dissenting in 1972's Sierra Club v. Morton that trees and rivers should be able to sue for their own protection. He survived two attempts to impeach him, one in 1953 over a stay he granted the Rosenbergs, another in 1970 led by House Republican Gerald Ford. A stroke on New Year's Eve 1974 forced him off the bench in November 1975, four decades after he arrived.

Much of what Douglas said about himself was not true. He told colleagues and audiences for decades that he had survived childhood polio and had lived in a tent as a Whitman undergraduate to save money; records his biographer Bruce Allen Murphy examined support neither claim. Colleague John Marshall Harlan once told him, You've told that story so often, you're beginning to believe it. Married four times and divorced three, Douglas would go silent with his children for days when angry, and when his first wife died in 1969, his own son felt no urge to tell him. Justice William Brennan complained about the slovenliness of his opinions, and appellate judge Richard Posner later called him one of the most unwholesome figures in modern American political history.

Douglas died on January 19, 1980, in Washington, D.C., and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The privacy right he found in Griswold became the legal foundation the Court cited eight years later in Roe v. Wade, and though his standing-for-nature dissent lost the vote, it has been cited by federal courts and environmental scholars ever since as the intellectual opening for the field. Congress named the William O. Douglas Wilderness in the Washington Cascades for him in 1984, and hikers still walk the C&O Canal towpath he fought to save from a highway in 1954, now a national historical park. His judicial record and his private conduct get weighed separately now, and neither cancels the other.

William O. Douglas's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Griswold v. Connecticut case
  Majority opinion finding a constitutional right to privacy 1965
• Of Men and Mountains book
  Memoir of his Cascades boyhood and case for wilderness 1950
• C&O Canal preservation hike other
  185-mile, eight-day hike that helped block a highway and save the canal 1954
• Sierra Club v. Morton dissent case
  Argued that natural objects like trees should have legal standing 1972

• October 16, 1898 aged 0 Born in Maine Township, Minnesota
• August 12, 1904 aged 5 His father dies after surgery for stomach ulcers
• 1920 aged ~22 Graduates Whitman College
• 1937 aged ~39 Named chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
• April 17, 1939 aged 40 Sworn in as a Supreme Court justice at 40
• March 20, 1954 aged 55 Begins an eight-day, 185-mile hike of the C&O Canal towpath to block a highway
• June 7, 1965 aged 66 Writes the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut
• November 12, 1975 aged 77 Retires from the Court after a debilitating stroke
• January 19, 1980 aged 81 Dies in Washington, D.C.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. appointed
• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. succeeded
• Gerald Ford 1913–2006
  38th president who restored basic governmental stability after Watergate and controversially pardoned Richard Nixon. opposed
• David Brower 1912–2000
  Conservation leader who transformed the Sierra Club and helped build the modern American environmental movement. influenced
• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. succeeded the movement of