He graduated from BYU. Then he battled FDR’s new deal on the bench — 100 years later, his legacy still matters – By Derek Monson (Deseret News) / Nov 9, 2022
The life of George Sutherland illustrates how character and kindness among Americans and their leaders can lead to political achievements that improve our civic well-being
George Sutherland was in the mood for comedy. Taking the dais at Brigham Young University, Sutherland’s alma mater, he praised those who helped found and grow the institution from its humble origins as an academy.
The only Supreme Court Justice from Utah, and one of the four conservative “horsemen” who stood against FDR’s New Deal program, Sutherland had graduated from one of the academy’s first classes. And so, standing before the class of 1941, he remarked modestly: “I cannot claim to be a pioneer, perhaps I may call myself a ‘pio-nearly’.”
His core message was more serious, reflecting on his career entangled in some of the most controversial issues of his time:
“Good character does not consist in the mere ability to store away in the memory a collection of moral aphorisms that runs loosely off the tongue. … Character to be good must be stable — must have taken root. It is an acquisition of thought and conduct which have become habitual — an acquisition of real substance, so firmly fixed in the conscience, and indeed in the body itself, as to insure unhesitating rejection of an impulse to do wrong.”
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