John William Davis (April 13, 1873 – March 24, 1955) was an American politician, diplomat, and lawyer. He served under President Woodrow Wilson as the Solicitor General of the United States and the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 1924, losing to Republican incumbent Calvin Coolidge.
Davis was born and raised in West Virginia, where his father, John James Davis, had been a delegate to the Wheeling Convention and served in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1870s. Davis joined his father's legal practice and adopted many of his father's political views, including opposition to anti-lynching legislation and support for states' rights. Davis served in the U.S. House from 1911 to 1913, helping to write the Clayton Antitrust Act. He held the position of Solicitor General of the United States from 1913 to 1918, during which time he successfully argued for the unconstitutionality of the grandfather clause in Oklahoma's constitution, which had a discriminatory effect against African-American voters, in Guinn v. United States.
While serving as ambassador to Britain from 1918 to 1921, Davis was a dark horse candidate for the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination. After he left office, Davis helped establish the Council on Foreign Relations and advocated for the repeal of Prohibition. The 1924 Democratic National Convention nominated Davis for president after 103 ballots. He remains the only major party presidential nominee from West Virginia. Running on a ticket with Charles W. Bryan, Davis lost in a landslide to incumbent President Coolidge. Davis did not seek public office again after 1924. He continued as a prominent attorney, associated with several law firms over the years, and represented many of the largest companies in the United States from the 1920s onwards. Davis argued 140 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to his legal work, Davis was also involved in the New York City Bar Association, serving as its president from 1931 to 1933. In 1933, he represented J. P. Morgan Jr. and his companies during a Senate investigation into private banking and the causes of the Great Depression. During the last two decades of his career, Davis represented businesses before the Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality and application of New Deal legislation. He lost many of these cases but scored a major victory for "Little Steel" in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), in which the Supreme Court ruled against President Harry Truman's seizure of the steel mills. Davis unsuccessfully defended the "separate but equal" doctrine in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of the companion cases to the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Family and early life
Family background Davis's paternal family had roots in western Virginia and what became West Virginia. His great-grandfather, Caleb Davis, was a clockmaker in the Shenandoah Valley. In 1816, his grandfather, John Davis, moved to Clarksburg in what would later become West Virginia. Its population then was 600–700, and he ran a saddle and harness business. His father, John James Davis, attended Lexington Law School, which later became the Washington and Lee University School of Law. By the age of twenty, John J. had established a law practice in Clarksburg. He was a delegate in the Virginia General Assembly, and after the northwestern portion of Virginia broke away from the rest of Virginia in 1863 and formed West Virginia, he was elected to the new state's House of Delegates and later to the United States House of Representatives.
John W. Davis's mother Anna Kennedy (1841–1917) was from Baltimore, Maryland, daughter of William Wilson Kennedy and his wife Catherine Esdale Martin. Kennedy was a lumber merchant. Catherine was the daughter of Tobias Martin, dairy farmer and amateur poet, and his wife, a member of the Esdale family. The Esdales were members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, who had settled near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Reportedly they helped provide support for the Continental Army under George Washington, which had camped there in the winter of 1777–1778.Theodore A. Huntley, "The Life of John W. Davis"
Early years Davis's Sunday school teacher recalled that he had "a noble face even when small". His biographer said that "[h]e used better English, kept himself cleaner, and was more dignified than most youngsters. He was also extraordinarily well-mannered."
Education Davis's education began at home, as his mother taught him to read before he had memorized the alphabet. She had him read poetry and other literature from their home library. After turning ten, Davis was put in a class with older students to prepare him for the state teachers examination. A few years later, he was enrolled in a previously all-female seminary that doubled as a private boarding and day school. He never had grades under 94. Davis entered Washington and Lee University at the age of sixteen. He graduated in 1892 with a major in Latin. He joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, participated in intramural sports, and attended mixed parties.
Davis would have started law school directly after graduation, but he lacked funds. Instead, he became a teacher for Major Edward H. McDonald of Charles Town, West Virginia. Davis taught McDonald's nine children and his six nieces and nephews. His student Julia, nineteen at the time, later became Davis's wife. Davis fulfilled a nine-month contract with McDonald. He returned to Clarksburg and apprenticed at his father's law practice. For fourteen months he copied documents by hand, read cases, and did much of what other aspiring lawyers did at the time to "read the law".
Davis graduated with a law degree from Washington and Lee University School of Law in 1895 and was elected Law Class Orator. His speech gave a glimpse of his advocacy skills: [The] lawyer has been always the sentinel of the watchtower of liberty. In all times and all countries has he stood forth in defense of his nation, her laws and liberties, not, it may be, under a shower of leaden death, but often with the frown of a revengeful and angry tyrant bent upon him.
Fellow classmates of 1895, shall we ... prove unworthy?
Early legal career After graduation, Davis obtained the three signatures required to receive his law license (one from a local judge, and two from local attorneys, who attested to his proficiency in the law and upstanding moral character) and joined his father in practice in Clarksburg. They called their partnership Davis and Davis, Attorneys at Law. Davis lost his first three cases before his fortunes began to turn.
Before Davis had completed his first year of private practice, he was recruited to Washington & Lee Law School as an assistant professor, starting in the fall of 1896. At the time, the law school had a faculty of two, and Davis became the third. At the end of the year, Davis was asked to return but demurred. He decided that he needed the "rough & tumble" of private practice.
Family connections
On June 20, 1899, he married Julia T. McDonald, who died on August 17, 1900. They had one daughter together, Julia McDonald Davis. She later married Charles P. Healy, and then William M. Adams. The widower Davis married again, on January 2, 1912, to Ellen G. Bassel. She died in 1943.
Davis was the cousin and adoptive father of Cyrus Vance, who later served as Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter. Vance, born in Clarksburg in 1917, lost his father in 1922 and was sent by his widowed mother to study in Switzerland. The much older and by then quite prominent Davis, referred to as an "uncle" within the family, mentored young Vance and adopted him.
Davis's daughter Julia was one of the first two female journalists hired by the Associated Press in 1926. (The other was probably Marguerite Young.) Julia married first Charles P. Healy and later William McMillan Adams, president of Sprague International, the export subsidiary of Sprague Electric. He was the son of Arthur Henry Adams, president of the United States Rubber Company. Both father and son were aboard the luxury liner RMS Lusitania when it was sunk by a German submarine in 1915. Arthur Adams died; his son survived.
Julia and William divorced, and both remarried. She divorced again, and later they remarried in their old age. Adams had two sons by his second wife, John Perry and Arthur Henry Adams II. Julia died in 1993 with no natural children but claimed six "by theft and circumstance."
Political and diplomatic career
Early career Davis's father had been a delegate to the Wheeling Convention, which had created the state of West Virginia, but he had also opposed the abolitionists and Radical Republicans, and opposed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Davis acquired much of his father's southern Democratic politics, opposing women's suffrage, Federal child-labor laws and anti-lynching legislation, and Harry S. Truman's civil rights program. He defended states' rights to establish the poll tax by questioning whether uneducated non-taxpayers should be allowed to vote. Davis was as much opposed to centralism in politics as he was to the concentration of capital by large corporations, supporting a number of early progressive laws regulating interstate commerce and limiting the power of corporations. Consequently, he felt distinctly out of place in the Republican Party, which supported free association and free markets, and maintained his father's staunch allegiance to the Democratic Party, even as he later represented the interests of business opposed to the New Deal. Davis ranked as one of the last Jeffersonians, as he supported states' rights and opposed a strong executive (he would be the lead attorney against Truman's nationalization of the steel industry).
In 1898, Davis was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates, ending a 20-year Republican hold on the seat. Even though Davis had argued in behalf of some railroad companies during his legal career, he was elected by denouncing them, as his opponent had made enemies by supporting railroad interests. He was touted for speaker, but ended up becoming the Democratic floor leader. He became well known in the legislature, as few, if any, in the body could match his legal abilities.
After his one term in the legislature, Davis became the Harrison County party chairman for 12 years. He was also a delegate to the 1904 Democratic National Convention and voted for the more conservative candidate, Alton B. Parker. The populism of William Jennings Bryan never appealed to him, and he was pleased to see the Democrats moving in Parker's direction.
He represented West Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1911 to 1913, where he was one of the authors of the Clayton Antitrust Act. Davis also served as one of the impeachment managers in the successful impeachment trial of Judge Robert W. Archbald. He served as U.S. Solicitor General from 1913 to 1918. As Solicitor General, he successfully argued in Guinn v. United States for the unconstitutionality of the grandfather clause in Oklahoma's constitution. It exempted residents descended from a voter registered in 1866 (i.e. whites) from a literacy test that effectively disenfranchised blacks. Davis's personal posture differed from his position as an advocate. Throughout his career, he could separate his personal views and professional advocacy.