Day, William Rufus (b. Ravenna, Ohio, 17 Apr. 1849; d. Mackinac Island, Mich., 9 Jul. 1923; interred West Lawn Cemetery, Canton, Ohio), associate justice, 1903–1922. Day's formative years were molded by the political environment of post–Civil War Republican party politics in Ohio. Educated at the University of Michigan, Day also spent one year in law school there. His pre‐Court career included a number of roles: trial attorney in Canton, Ohio; personal confidant of President William McKinley; United States secretary of state (1898); and judge on the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (1899–1903). Following McKinley's assassination, President Theodore Roosevelt elevated Day to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to bolster his support with the Ohio wing of the Republican Party.
During a nineteen‐year career on the Court, Day was overshadowed by prominent jurists such as Oliver Wendell
Holmes and Louis D.
Brandeis. Nevertheless, he played a significant role as a swing justice between the Court's liberal and conservative blocs, a role well suited to his finely developed social skills.
The major constitutional issues before the Court during Day's tenure involved, on the one hand, federal power under the Commerce Clause with its corollary issue of federal
antitrust policy (see
Commerce Power), and on the other hand, the scope of state
police powers under the
Tenth Amendment. Day has often been identified as a states' rights advocate who, while finding extensive powers for state progressive experimentations, narrowly construed national power under the Commerce Clause (see
State Sovereignty and States' Rights). This interpretation is based primarily on his landmark opinion in
Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) declaring the 1916 Federal Child Labor Act unconstitutional. Day's opinion defined commerce to exclude manufactured goods that were harmless in and of themselves. The impact of
Hammer lasted until 1941 and overshadowed Day's other opinions, which sanctioned federal power to reach interstate traffic of impure food, drugs, and liquor and to prosecute trusts and monopolies that wielded a potential power to restrain trade. Day fully endorsed the use of national power through the
Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In
United States v. Union Pacific Railway Company (1912), for example, he championed a vigorous exercise of federal police power against giant combinations including railroads, steel industries, lumber companies, and trusts.
Day preferred state to national regulation, however. He gave a liberal, expansive construction to state
police powers to enact laws and safety requirements for plants and railroads. His two famous dissents in
Lochner v. New York (1905) and
Coppage v. Kansas (1915) demonstrated his belief that state promotion of public welfare could override individual claims of liberty of contract and right to work (see
Contract, Freedom of). Day also championed
progressivism in
Green v. Frazier (1920), which sanctioned state taxation to create state‐owned public services. He limited state powers to discriminate on the basis of race, however. Day struck down a city residential
zoning ordinance excluding African‐Americans and a state law requiring railroads to provide segregated cars. (See
Race and Racism.)
Moving from the ideology of nineteenth‐century liberalism's laissez‐faire into the twentieth‐century's acceptance of the welfare state, Day ultimately became a moderate liberal, upholding governmental power over economic and moral evils.
Alice Fleetwood Bartee
