John Lathrop (1835-1910)

THE HONORABLE JOHN LATHROP, a Justice of this court from the twenty-eighth day of January, 1891, until the eleventh day of September, 1906, died at Dedham on the twenty-fourth day of August, 1910. A meeting of the members of the bar of the Commonwealth was held in Boston on the twenty-first day of October, 1911, at which a memorial was adopted, which was presented to the full court on the same day. Before presenting it the Attorney General addressed the court as follows:

May it please your Honors: We are assembled this morning for the purpose of paying deserved and fitting tribute to the name and memory of the late Mr. Justice John Lathrop, formerly an honored member of the Supreme Judicial Court, who died on the twenty-fourth day of August, 1910. In accordance with long-established custom, the Attorney General has been called upon to present to this honorable court formal resolutions adopted by the members of the bar, expressing their appreciation of and regard for the public services and judicial career of the late Justice Lathrop and their esteem for him as an honorable citizen of the Commonwealth.

In assuming the duty and privilege assigned to me, by my learned brethren of the bar, I regret that I am unable from personal acquaintance or official experience with Justice Lathrop to supplement these resolutions with recollection of personal association. While I appeared before him in numerous cases in general practice, it never was my privilege to know him intimately or otherwise than in his judicial capacity. However, those things were apparent to me that were observable by other attorneys appearing before the court of which he was an impor- tant member for so long a time. He always displayed acute interest in each proposition that was submitted for his consideration. He quickly grasped the points that were made on either side. He did not hesitate to inquire of counsel concerning that of which he had any doubt. His query was always to the point. Counsel always felt that he had been fairly dealt with and fully heard.

Under our system of appointment to the bench for life, the history of our courts has been that the service of the justices has extended, ordinarily, over a long period of years, and that the Commonwealth has benefited in a large measure by the continued service and increased efficiency necessarily resulting therefrom. This proved to be the case with Mr. Justice Lathrop. His bent of mind, his early training and his progressive professional life seemed to point naturally to his final elevation to the Supreme Judicial Court. There he displayed the results of the early training that made his appointment to that court so natural and fitting.

Although, during the period of my acquaintance with him, he was in the sunset years of his life, and despite the failing health that eventually compelled him to cease his valuable labors on behalf of the judicial service of the Commonwealth, nevertheless, he appeared to be one of those men whose active mentality kept his face ever toward the morning light of the progress of the times, and whose present vision was not dimmed by the recollection of events belonging only to the past. His exact, logical and lucid opinions may well be considered a fitting and everlasting monument to his life work.

I now have the honor to move that the memorial be accepted and made a part of the records of the court.

The Attorney General then presented the following memorial:

The members of the bar desire to place on record their appreciation of the public services and judicial career of John Lathrop, late a Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, who resigned from the bench because of continued ill health on September 11, 1906, and who died on August 24, 1910.

Born in Boston on February 8, 1835, he passed his early years in Dedham, in the County of Norfolk, and in Dedham, after an eventful life as a soldier and jurist, he died and was buried. Descended from a long line of clerical ancestors of purest English stock, his father continuing the line as a chaplain in the Navy, his early life was subject to the vicissitudes of a clergyman's career.

He was graduated from Burlington College in the State of New Jersey in 1853; he studied law in the Harvard Law School, whence he was graduated in 1855; and he was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1856. In 1906, toward the end of his creditable career upon the bench, Williams College honored itself and recognized his meritorious service in more than one walk in life by bestowing upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

He was scarcely enrolled as an attorney and counsellor upon his admission to the bar, when, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the call of duty led him unhesitatingly to give up a promising practice to enter the Volunteer Army. He enlisted in the Dedham Company which became a part of the 35th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, and was commissioned as a first lieutenant. Thrown at once into active service he developed quickly the qualities of a resourceful soldier and officer. He was brave, he was indefatigable, he was careful of his men, he had them well in hand. He was, besides, alert, punctilious, painstaking, methodical, qualities that distinguished him throughout his career. He fought at South Mountain, at Antietam, at Fredericksburg, with coolness, daring and good judgment; was promoted to a captaincy and was no mean factor in gaining for the 35th the title of a "fighting regiment." Unhappily in the autumn of 1863 Captain Lathrop contracted malarial fever, which compelled him on November 13 of that year to resign for disability; and there upon he returned to Boston, broken in health, to resume the practice of the law.

During his subsequent career at the bar he had the reputation of being a conscientious practitioner and a competent adviser, while in the narrowing field of the law of admiralty, which he made his specialty, he came to be recognized as a leader.

The bent of his mind was toward the literary side of the law and this led him to accept the congenial appointment of Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Judicial Court, to which he was appointed in March, 1874.

When he entered upon his new duties he found, owing to the ill health of his predecessor, the work of his important office largely in arrears and the bar clamoring for the delayed reports. With limited assistance and lacking modern devices for hastening such work, he addressed himself vigorously to the task of closing the gap and of overtaking the court. Cases enough to make several intermediate volumes were taken in hand by scholarly lawyers by whom they were prepared and published as volumes 110 to 114 inclusive of the Massachusetts Reports. Meanwhile the new reporter addressed himself to the task of reporting the more recent decisions as promptly as the technical character of the work and the continuous and sporadic accumulation of cases in his hands would permit. One notable change in the method of grouping cases in each volume was made by him, which in itself resulted in a greater celerity in the issue of the reports. This was the abolition of a custom, which had obtained in this Commonwealth from the days of Quincy and Pickering, of grouping in each report all the cases argued at a certain law term and in a given county, the result of which was that the large number of cases which were promptly decided waited for publication upon the more or less delayed decision by the court of the last of the series. Under the new system the decisions for the first time were reported consecutively as they came down from the full bench according to the date of the rescript, which, together with the date of the argument, the county of origin and the names of the sitting justices, has since been printed under the title of each case.

Since this system was adopted by Judge Lathrop it may be confidently asserted that the reports have been placed in the hands of the profession with all reasonable promptitude considering the nature of the work, the equipment of the reporter's office, and the personal equations involved.

As a reporter Mr. Justice Lathrop was conventional and conservative, and he clung closely to the methods of his predecessors in that high professional calling, conforming religiously to the "canons of law reporting" as exemplified by the reports of the courts in England and in this country, both in this Commonwealth and in other courts of last resort, State and Federal. His marginal notes, according to the theory that such notes in each case should, instead of short statements of general principles involved, reproduce with photographic exactness the facts of the case followed by what was "held " thereon by the court were always exact, though often long; the explanatory statements of facts as drawn by him made clear every basis of contention of counsel and responded completely to the opinion of the court; while the opinions of the justices on more than one occasion gained in expressive diction, in closeness of reasoning and in authoritative force through his frank criticism, his grasp of legal principles, and his wide and increasing familiarity with the adjudged cases. His English style was simple, crisp and forcible, and his reports as issued from the press were models of typographic excellence.

Thirty-one volumes of the Massachusetts Reports, numbered 115 to 145 inclusive, were the output of his office while he occupied the responsible position of reporter.

In March, 1888, while still Reporter of Decisions, he was appointed a Justice of the Superior Court. To perform adequately the duties incumbent upon a judge of this great trial court of the Commonwealth requires, besides sound learning and abundant common sense, a wealth of experience in the practice of the law, a knowledge of human nature, a faculty for administration and a sympathetic temperament, combined with firmness, good judgment and infinite patience, qualities rare to find blended in one and the same person. If Mr. Justice Lathrop lacked some of these qualities, he at least possessed enough of them to render during his brief tenure upon that bench effective service to litigants and to the Commonwealth, while at the same time he was preparing for a different but not more important service in the court of last resort. He was industrious and painstaking in applying the law to the facts of a case, fair to counsel, protective of witnesses, considerate toward juries, and solicitous of the rights of parties.

When appointed a Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 1891, he was placed in a position more in accord with his tastes and legal training. He disclosed as a member of the court of last resort the same qualities that marked him as reporter. He wrote opinions as a Reporter of Decisions might be expected to write them. He was wont to state the facts of a case lucidly and compactly, and then to lay down the law applicable to such facts according to the adjudged cases. He was above all a case lawyer, who in all his work hewed close to the line of legal authority as laid down in the reports. Until September, 1906, when he was compelled to resign from active work because of ill health, he labored unceasingly in doing thoroughly and promptly his share of the work of the important tribunal of which he was an honored member.

He was ever a man of a self contained, dignified and impassive demeanor, who treated that portion of the public which came in contact with him with an even-handed justice, and with a reserved and somewhat formal courtesy. In the social and club life of Boston, in which he was always a considerable figure, he was considerate of the rights and feelings of others, and on occasion an interesting even charming companion. To a small circle of contemporary friends, of which he was nearly the sole survivor, did he alone reveal his real and kindly self, and to them he was united by ties the most friendly, even tender and affectionate.

Never in full or robust health, he strove through life to do every task laid upon him thoroughly and ungrudgingly, and, though at times a great sufferer, carried himself with unflinching fortitude and without complaint.

He was a brave and self-sacrificing soldier, a conservative and patriotic citizen, a careful and industrious lawyer, a diligent and high-minded judge, a most useful public servant.

CHIEF JUSTICE RUGG responded as follows:

Brethren of the Bar: It is altogether fitting, and in accordance with time honored usage, that the court pause in its regular business to join with the bar in a tribute of respect and appreciation to the memory of one of its Justices, who has deceased. Nothing which can be said or done on such an occasion will much affect the position of the one who has gone, in jurisprudence or in the history of the law of the Commonwealth. Any one who has been long upon this bench has written, in its opinions, his own record, where it is beyond the reach of praise or detraction. But there is a just satisfaction in a delineation by friends and associates of the salient facts of the life, the personal traits and marked characteristics of one who has rendered valuable public service.

John Lathrop, for many years and in different capacities, was active in living the full life of a devoted servant of the State. He was born in Boston on February 8, 1835, where he lived during most of his life, and died in Dedham on August 24, 1910, where his ashes lie buried. He inherited a name already rendered distinguished in the annals of the Commonwealth by more than one forebear. His first ancestor on this continent was Rev. John Lothrop, who came here in 1634, and became the first minister at both Scituate and Barnstable, while his great-grandfather, also of the same name, was minister of the Second Church in Boston for almost half a century.

Graduating at Burlington College, New Jersey, and at the Harvard Law School, be entered upon the practice of his profession in 1856 in Boston. His sense of patriotic duty impelled him to volunteer in the war for the preservation of the Union, where he rose to the rank of captain. After zealously performing this duty, he returned to the practice of the law, and continued the consideration of legal questions without interruption until the infirmities of age compelled his relinquishment of them in 1906. He gave special attention to praetice in admiralty, and had attained some distinction in that branch of law, when in 1874 he was appointed Reporter of Decisions of this court. The headnotes of the cases in our reports, the work of his hand, during the fourteen years he held this office, from volume 115 to volume 145 inclusive, are plain, concise and accurate. His reputation for sound and comprehensive learning is attested by the fact that he was lecturer upon different branches for several years in the law schools of Harvard and Boston Universities.

The training gained in the careful performance of these important duties was helpful in his years of judicial work. He was a Justice of the Superior Court from 1888 until his appointment to this bench in 1891, where he served fifteen years. The first opinion of the court written by him is found in 153 Mass. 215, and the last in 192 Mass. 451. In these forty volumes are the visible evidences of his achievements upon this court. His memory of cases was remarkable in fulness and correctness, and was constantly exercised in performing his judicial duties. His decisions were firmly grounded upon precedents. The characteristics of his opinions were accuracy of citation and purity of style. In these respects they are among the best. They are clear in statement, and confined closely to the points actually in issue. He did not attempt to write an exhaustive exposition of the questions of law involved, and he thereby avoided indulging in dicta which not infrequently become troublesome to the bench as well as to the bar. His method of thought was direct and incisive, and his expression of it was in simple language. His opinions are easy of comprehension, and cannot well be misunderstood.

He loved the city of his home, and was fond of her history. Quiet and unobtrusive in his mode of life, he was scholarly in his tastes, and cherished a fondness for choice and rare books. His long experience as Reporter of Decisions and Justice in each of the higher courts gave him an intimate acquaintance with almost a generation of judges and an unusual familiarity with the judicial traditions of the Commonwealth. He was fond of friends, and in social organizations, enjoyed the companionship of gentlemen of refinement and learning.

During a long and laborious life, he bore his part with courage, faithfulness, ability, learning, soundness of judgment and steadfast adherence to high ideals. He was modest and unpretentious in the incumbency of high office, but he was mindful of the responsibility and dignity which accompany the proper administration of justice.

An order may be entered that the memorial be recorded, and the court will now adjourn.

Arthur D. Lathrop

Name	Relation	Marital Status	Gender	Race	Age	Birthplace	Occupation	Father's Birthplace	Mother's Birthplace
Arthur D. LATHRAP	Self	M	Male	W	28	CT	Bookkeeper In Store	OH	MA
Alice M. LATHRAP	Wife	M	Female	W	26	OH	Keeping House	OH	MA
Florence A. LATHRAP	Other	S	Female	W	1	MI		CT	OH
Anna GORMAN	Other	S	Female	W	19	IRE	Servant	IRE	IRE

Census Place 4th Ward, Jackson, Jackson, Michigan 1880

son John Howland Lathrop

A. A. Lathrop

A. A. LATHROP	Self	M	Male	W	33	MA	Lawyer	MA	MA
Adaline F. LATHROP	Wife	M	Female	W	34	NY	Keeping House	NY	NY
Francis E. BRIGHAM	MotherL		Female	W	63	NY	At Home	NY	NY
Anna HARRIS	Other		Female	W	19	IA	Servant	IA	IA

Census Place 2nd Ward, Ottumwa, Wapello, Iowa 1880
source: familysearch.org

John Howland Lathrop (1880-1967)

John Howland Lathrop (1880-1967) was a distinguished Unitarian minister, social activist and peace advocate. He said in 1936, "Human associations are all precious, but none reaches as deep as the gatherings together in a church, where we share with one another the holiest experiences of life, and strive to fan the flame of the spirit within to an ever brighter light." His own activities in his neighborhood, in the Unitarian Association and internationally best illustrate what he meant by "brighter light."

Lathrop was born in Jackson, Michigan, the son of Arthur D. Lathrop, a banker, and Alice McDora Osborne. At seventeen Lathrop became a Unitarian. While working in a wholesale grocery house in Cleveland, Ohio, he attended the church of Marion E. Murdoch, the first woman to receive a B.D. degree from Meadville Theological School. Influenced by her, he went to Meadville the next year. There Francis A. Christie became his mentor. Lathrop called him, "the greatest thing that happened to me in the educational world." After receiving a B.D. from Meadville in 1903, Lathrop went to Harvard University as a junior and received a B.A. in 1905.

At Harvard Lathrop had his greatest religious experience while listening to William James lecture on the religious implications of his philosophy. As a student he met Florence Kelley and Fannie Fern Andrews, with whom he later worked in the Consumers' League and the peace movement, and also started his ministry, assisting Louis Craig Cornish at his church in Hingham, Massachusetts. Lathrop was called to the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley, California. In 1906, his second year there, he coordinated relief efforts for the 20,000 San Francisco Earthquake refugees.

In October, 1907, he married Lita Schlesinger. They had three children, two of whom reached adulthood.

In 1911 he moved to the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, the pulpit from which Samuel Eliot had been called earlier to head the American Unitarian Association. Arriving in Brooklyn a liberal humanist, grounded in transcendentalism during his Meadville training, he gradually became more traditional. Influenced by his new congregation's Christocentric theology and its beautiful Gothic Revival church, he fell in love with the language of the Bible, which he had seldom read earlier. He wore in the pulpit the same style cassock worn in Boston's traditional King's Chapel. He worked on Samuel Eliot's committee for a new denominational service book and helped produce a widely used volume. In 1935 he wrote "Hosanna in the Highest," a beautiful Palm Sunday Hymn, sung on the Ford Hour, a popular radio show, on Palm Sunday, 1939. The lyrics proclaim, "But when a brother spirit/ Arises from the plain/ The men of power tremble/ And crucify again."

Lathrop worked tirelessly to improve social conditions. In 1916 he helped found the Brooklyn Urban League, which grew out of a meeting in his church office, and was its president for many years. He was a member of the state Tenement House Commission; the first president of the Brooklyn Council on Social Planning; and as president of the Brooklyn Health Council improved the lighting in Brooklyn public schools. Lathrop was also president of the National Consumers League and of the Euthanasia Society of America. He was asked by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey to help draw up the Fair Employment Practices Commission law, which was enacted in 1945 and made New York the pioneer state in this legislation.

A strong peace advocate, Lathrop belonged to the minority of Progressives who opposed America's entering World War I. He courageously voiced his opinion despite his church's trustees' strong disapproval. Once his country had entered the war, however, he donned a naval uniform and became the Red Cross' director of Naval Affairs, introducing the army-oriented Red Cross into the navy. At the close of the war he helped found the American Committee on the Rights of Religious Minorities and became its president. He was also president of the International Association for Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom (IAEF). In 1927 he headed a 5-member commission to report on the treatment of religious minorities in Rumania. On this trip he made the first of many visits to both the church in Transylvania his Brooklyn church was helping to support and to Czechoslovakia. In that country he bolstered the existing ties of his church to Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, American wife of its founder and first president, who had been part of the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn. Upon returning from this trip he gave fifty talks alerting Americans to the growing anti-Semitism sweeping Europe.

In late 1928 and early 1929 he traveled in India, where he represented the American Unitarian Association at the centenary celebration of the Brahmo Samaj, a liberal Hindu society. While there he arranged for his church to help support a Brahmo Samaj congregation of outcasts in Alleppey. Lathrop was president of the National Peace Conference, formed by forty-five local organizations, and (because Unitarians were denied membership) he worked as an affiliated member on the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ's Committee for a Just and Durable Peace. In 1946 after World War II he directed a relief project in Czechoslovakia which included a medical mission, chaired by Dr. Paul Dudley White of Harvard, to update Czech doctors on medical advances made during the war years. The committee later gave rise to the Unitarian Service Committee. In 1951 he was the first Unitarian elected to the board of the local Protestant Council of Churches. As a result of his election the organization was dropped from the National Council of Churches.

Lathrop's travels and work abroad enhanced his determination to keep his Brooklyn congregation on the cutting edge of social change and its building "a still nobler temple of the liberal faith." In 1928 he completed a Side Aisle Chapel of All Faiths, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and looking to all the world's religions, hailed as the nation's first. In 1929 he began a project to portray the history of liberal religion in a series of twenty clerestory portrait windows in his church's sanctuary, including Jan Hus, Michael Servetus, Joseph Priestley, William Ellery Channing, and Emerson. Interrupted by the Great Depression, the windows were not completed until 1957.

From 1930 to 1953 Lathrop pioneered in providing counseling services for his parishioners. The support facility included premarital counseling and a parents' discussion group. Counseling was first conducted by Beatrice Bishop Berle, a psychiatric social worker who would become the director of the Federal Employees Health Service, and later by Horatio W. Dresser, who had studied with Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Dresser set up a clinic, later called Federated Counseling Service, which for the first time combined religion, psychology, and medicine in a unified treatment.

Lathrop's vision, spirit, and energy made him appreciated at home, abroad and in his denomination. He received honorary doctorates from Meadville in 1923 and Franz Joseph University in Hungary in 1938; the Order of the White Lion from Czechoslovakia in 1951; the John Haynes Holmes-Arthur Weatherly Award for "distinguished service in the cause of social justice" from the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice in 1951; and the Annual Unitarian Award in 1956. As he contemplated the end of his life, "no world" interested him "so much as this world with all of its problems." Having spent his life searching for solutions to these problems, his wish was to "live to see the gradual lines along which" they would be solved.

Lathrop's papers are in the First Unitarian Church Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, N.Y. See also "Reminiscences of John Howland Lathrop," Columbia University Oral History Project (1953), American National Biography, s.v. "Lathrop, John Howland," and Olive Hoogenboom, The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn: One Hundred Fifty Years (1987). An obituary is in the New York Times, August 23, 1967.

Article by Olive Hoogenboom