The Mormon Education of a Gentile Justice: George Sutherland and Brigham Young Academy

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The Mormon Education of a Gentile1 Justice: George Sutherland and Brigham Young Academy EDWARD L. CARTER AND JAMES C. PHILLIPS To the man ofdetermination there is no such word as Fate or Chance.2 —George Sutherland to Daniel Harrington, 1881 Even within the eclectic group ofmen and women who have sat on the U.S. Supreme Court, Associate Justice George Sutherland (1922-1938) was truly one ofa kind. The only Justice ever to come from the state of Utah, he grew up as a non-Mormon in a cloistered nineteenth-century Mormon society—and yet he rose to become one of the community’s most popular and even beloved political fig­ ures. As a lawyer, Sutherland defended Mor­ mon men charged with “unlawful cohabita­ tion” for polygamous lifestyles—and yet as a U.S. Senator he championed women’s rights, including suffrage. As one ofthe “Four Horse­ men of the Apocalypse,” along with Justices James McReynolds, Willis Van Devanter, and Pierce Butler, Justice Sutherland has been pil­ loried for striking down portions of the New Deal3 —and yet some scholars in recent years have reappraised his role in achieving progres­ sive judicial outcomes.4 Virtually no aspect of Sutherland’s life, however, couldhave been more unique than his education. He received only three years offor­ mal schooling after age twelve. The Englishborn Sutherland, brought to Utah as a toddler by his Mormon convert parents, spent two of those formal school years at a four-year-old, barely surviving Mormon frontier academy. Subsequently he attendedjust one year of law school at the University ofMichigan. Notwith­ standing his unlikely academic record, how­ ever, Justice Sutherland was a brilliant thinker and polished orator who had strong command of philosophy and an uncanny understanding of politics. His own scant education and vir­ tually non-existent experience as an academic did not stop Sutherland, in his later years, from becoming a sought-after informal advisor to deans and university presidents. Perhaps most remarkable of all, Justice Sutherland maintained throughout his life that THE MORMON EDUCATION OF GEORGE SUTHERLAND 323 no institution had so profound an influence on him as the little school in Provo, Utah, then known as Brigham Young Academy (now Brigham Young University). And no individual atthe Academyhad a greater impact on Suther­ land than Karl G. Maeser, a Mormon immi­ grant from Germany who was the Academy’s principal. Along with Sutherland’s own fa­ ther, also a Mormon convert and himself a prominent Utah frontier lawyer, Maeserhelped shape the Justice’s lifelong views of the law and the U.S. Constitution. And Maeser’s im­ pact on Sutherland’s outlook on life and on his very character may have been even more significant.5 For this article, the authors reviewed pri­ mary historical documents on Sutherland in the U.S. Supreme Court Library, the Library ofCongress, the L. Tom Perry Special Collec­ tions at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, and the Church History Library and Archives ofThe Church ofJesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although there are at least two fine published biographies of Sutherland, these and other accounts do not include exten­ sive information about the future Justice’s edu­ cational activities at Brigham Young Academy from 1879 to 1881. Thus, this article focuses on the formative experiences of Sutherland, then between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, at the Academy. Clearly, his relationships with classmates and faculty left a lasting impres­ sion that affected the rest of his life, includ­ ing his work on the Court. The article also de­ tails for the first time the Sutherland family’s close relationship to the Mormon Church from 1849 to approximately 1870; although Suther­ land himselfneverjoined the Church, he main­ tained strong relationships with Mormons and Brigham Young University throughout his life. Mormonism and the Sutherlands When famed British author Charles Dickens arrived at the Liverpool shipyard “on a hot morning in early June”6 of 1863 to survey the emigrant ship Amazon bound for the United George Sutherland was born in England, but his par­ ents brought him to Utah as a toddler. Although his parents were Mormon converts, Justice Sutherland never formally joined the Church of...