Murphy, Frank

Frank Murphy (1890–1949), vocal leader and mayor of Detroit in the worst years of the Great Depression, employed aggressive and innovative policies to assist his city's unemployed. Appointed assistant U.S. attorney in 1919, Murphy lost a campaign for Congress the following year. In 1924, Murphy won election to the municipal criminal court bench. He garnered national attention—and the admiration of Detroit's African American community, particularly—for his compassion, impartiality, and courtroom management skills when a black family won acquittal on murder charges after they opened fire on an angry white mob that gathered on their lawn. Murphy won a special election for mayor in 1930, harnessing his reputation as a lawyer and judge to offer himself as the proper antidote to the climate of corruption that had plagued Detroit politics in the 1920s.

The matter of ameliorating the effects of the Great Depression dominated Murphy's short service in the mayor's office. Murphy created the Mayor's Unemployment Committee to provide social services to the unemployed, supplementing the work of Detroit's Welfare Department with a coordinated effort that involved both public- and private-sector institutions. Detroit provided its unemployed an array of services found in few other cities, including an unemployment bureau, shelters for homeless men, a school lunch program for poor children, and relatively generous emergency relief for the needy. Murphy spent much of his time lobbying for county and state assumption of welfare costs because Detroit's tax revenue was stretched thin. For the most part, Michigan's state legislature was unresponsive to Murphy's arguments for aid, and as a result, the Detroit city government ran significant deficits in the early 1930s and was always on the verge of default on its loans.

Even more important than his programmatic and administrative work in Detroit was Murphy's role as spokesman for the cities, and urban liberalism more generally, in the national arena. Murphy served as first president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Working closely with other big-city mayors, such as Michael Curley of Boston and Daniel Hoan of Milwaukee, and other urban liberals, Murphy lobbied for relief funding, federal legislation to make debt refinancing easier for municipalities, and public works spending from the federal government that would bypass state [Page 512]governments. For the most part, President Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress yielded to mayoral requests for assistance throughout the 1930s.

Murphy's early support of Franklin Roosevelt's presidential campaign opened doors for him in national politics. In 1934, Murphy left Detroit to serve as governor-general and, later, high commissioner of the Philippines. In 1936, Murphy returned home, winning election as Michigan governor. As governor, Murphy worked to reform the state budgeting system. Roosevelt rewarded his ally in 1939 with appointment as U.S. attorney general and in 1940 with appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until his death in 1949.

Frank Murphy's legacy as mayor was to focus national attention on the awful plight of urban industrial underemployed people, as well as the inability of the big-city government to provide relief to citizens without federal assistance.