Allen, Florence Ellinwood (1884–1966)

American pacifist and champion of women's rights, who was the first woman on the Ohio Common Pleas Court, the Ohio Supreme Court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals. Born Florence Ellinwood Allen on March 23, 1884, in Salt Lake City, Utah; died of a stroke on September 12, 1966, in Cleveland, Ohio; daughter of Clarence Emir (a classical scholar, congressional delegate, and mining company executive) and Corinne Marie (Tuckerman) Allen; attended New Lyme Institute in Ashtabula County, Ohio, 1895–97, and Salt Lake College, 1897–99; graduated from Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, Phi Beta Kappa, 1904; studied music in Berlin, Germany, 1904–06; granted A.M. in political science, Western Reserve, 1908; LL.B. New York University Law School, 1913; never married; no children.

Admitted to Ohio bar (1914); campaigned for municipal suffrage for women; appointed assistant county prosecutor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio (1919); elected to common pleas court (1920); elected to Ohio Supreme Court (1922), re-elected (1928); appointed to Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (1934–59), chief judge (1958); member of various professional associations, serving on several committees and attending numerous international conferences. Awards: Albert Gallatin Award, New York University (1960), and 25 honorary degrees.

Selected publications:

Patris (poems, 1908); This Constitution of Ours (1940); The Treaty as an Instrument of Legislation (1952); To Do Justly (memoirs, 1965).

Florence Allen was born into a family of pioneers. While subsequent generations had been settlers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, her parents moved to Utah when it was still a territory and brought up their six children in an adobe house. Her mother had been the first woman to enroll in Smith College, and her father was the first U.S. representative from the state of Utah, so it was natural for Florence Allen to blaze trails. She became the first woman assistant county prosecutor in Ohio, the first woman to preside over a first-degree murder trial and to pronounce the death sentence, the first woman to sit in a court of general jurisdiction (the Ohio Court of Common Pleas), the first woman to preside as a judge in a court of last resort (the Ohio Supreme Court), the first woman appointed to a Federal Court of Appeals, and the first woman to serve as chief judge of such a court. Though Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "If a president of the United States should decide to nominate a woman for the Supreme Court, it should be Judge Allen," Allen correctly supposed, as early as 1934, that she would not see such an appointment in her lifetime.

Florence Allen's earliest memory was of sitting on the lap of her father, Clarence Emir Allen, at the age of four while he taught her a sentence in Greek from the book he was reading. A year later, for his birthday present, she recited the Greek alphabet. Clarence Allen tutored the children in Latin, starting when Florence was seven. He had been a professor of classics at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, when he contracted tuberculosis and moved to Utah. His wife followed after his recovery, and he resumed teaching at Hammond Hall, one of the New West Congregational Schools, where Florence was born on March 23, 1884. Her father's health worsened again; advised to seek a less sedentary occupation, he became a mine assayer. The rapidly growing family (six children survived to adulthood) lived in a miner's cabin, where the children enjoyed the attentions of the lonely miners, the Chinese cook, and the mine donkey. The versatile Clarence studied law, was admitted to the bar, and served in the Utah territorial legislature; he was also the state's first representative to the U.S. Congress in 1895.

Her mother, too, had an important influence on Florence's education. Corinne Allen had helped establish a free public library in Salt Lake City, was president of the Ladies' Literary Club and a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, president of the State Federation of Women's Clubs, and one of the founders of the Mothers' Congress, later the P.T.A. Corinne had played piano in college, and after her husband was able to bring one out West for her, she taught Florence to play. She also coached her daughter to participate in a girls' debating society, advising her to "make your point and then sit down."

While her father served in Congress, Florence attended the New Lyme Institute in Ashtabula County directed by her maternal grandfather, Jacob Tuckerman. Her father returned to Utah after one term, and she attended Salt Lake City College. In 1900, at the age of 16, Allen entered Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where she was elected president of the freshman class. She wrote verse, performed in plays, and played the piano, but showed her early concern for social justice by writing an editorial calling for the abolition of sororities (even though she belonged to one) and resigning her post as chair of Democratic Women for Newton Baker (later Woodrow Wilson's secretary of war) because he advocated compulsory military service. Allen graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1904.

That year her family moved to Germany where her father attended the University of Berlin. Until a nerve injury to her arm put an end to a career in music, Florence was studying piano and wrote music reviews for the Musical Courier and the Continental Times. Back in Cleveland by 1906, she taught at the Laurel School for Girls. In addition to classes in Greek, German, geography, grammar and American history, she directed the drama and glee clubs, was music editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and published a book of poetry, Patris, in 1908. Apparently indefatigable, Allen also studied political science and constitutional law at Western Reserve, receiving her M.A. in 1908. At that point, she determined to make law her career.

Western Reserve did not admit women to the law school, so she matriculated at Chicago University, one of only two women in a class of 100. After meeting activist Frances Kellor , Allen left Chicago to work with her at the New York League for the Protection of Immigrants, where Allen served as legal investigator. She transferred to New York University (NYU) Law School, but had to interrupt her studies for a time because of eye problems. Reluctant to accept more money from her father, she lectured on music in the New York City public schools and later accepted a better-paying position offered by Maud Wood Park as secretary of the College Equal Suffrage League. Allen abhorred discrimination on any grounds and declined to join the legal sorority because Jewish students were not admitted. She received a Bachelor of Law degree in 1913, graduating second in her class; later she was awarded an honorary LL.D., the first awarded by NYU to a woman.

After graduation, Allen continued to work for suffrage. In 1912, she campaigned for a suffrage bill in Ohio, speaking 92 times in 88 counties, and organizing the women in each locale. When the bill was defeated, she worked for municipal suffrage in charter cities, a strategy that proved more successful. Admitted to the Ohio bar in 1914, she gained experience as a volunteer counselor for the Legal Aid Society, as well as for the Woman Suffrage Party. In 1919, she represented women streetcar conductors who had been dismissed from their jobs to make way for returning World War I veterans. When her name was included on memorials to suffrage work in the Ohio State House and the Capitol in Washington D.C., Allen professed herself more pleased by that recognition than by any other tributes she later received.

The year 1919 saw the beginning of Allen's public career, with her appointment as assistant prosecutor of Cuyahoga County, the first woman in Ohio so named. She overcame the prejudice of the Grand Jury, mostly composed of retired police officers, who were at first opposed to a woman in the post. They later acknowledged her to be "as good as any of the men and better than some." The following year, when she campaigned for election to the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, the police as well as her suffrage contacts were important allies; she was not only the first woman elected to a court of general jurisdiction, a scant ten weeks after passage of the national woman suffrage amendment, but received the largest vote ever given to a candidate for that bench. She celebrated by climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine, where her daring impressed her guide.

Judge Allen refused to take the divorce division, and was amused when the Cleveland News applauded her decision to "decline appointment as a judge of a court of marital relations on the ground that she was ignorant of the subject." Allen's interest was in greater efficiency in the courts, believing that speed was essential to justice. In 20 months, she disposed of 892 cases, only three of which were reversed. Her actions were popular, as was her belief that while rehabilitation of the criminal was important, the "all-important purpose of the criminal law is the protection of the community." As the first woman judge to preside over a first-degree murder trial, she did not shrink from imposing the death sentence, though she received "black hand" threats on smudged letters and even on the walls of her basement. More controversial was her decision to deny the suit of an African-American woman who claimed she had suffered discrimination in college housing, and her decision to uphold the right of the state to award a contract to a non-union shop.

Judge Allen resigned from the court in the fall of 1922 to campaign for election to the Supreme Court of Ohio, touring the state in a Model-T Ford. She ran on a non-partisan platform, which irritated members of both parties; the new women voters rallied to her support by forming Florence Allen clubs throughout Ohio. Elected by a huge majority, Allen was the first woman to preside over a court of last resort, and, though she sensed apprehension among her fellow judges on the first day, she quickly put them at ease by urging them to feel free to smoke. She handled problems arising out of increased industrialization, such as workers compensation and crowded housing, as well as constitutional questions of authority. She maintained: "Justice is not, as certain people believe, a system under which they get what they want. Justice is a system under which they get the thing that they are entitled to." Allen was elected in 1928 to a second term. A penetrating and original thinker, her opinions establishing the constitutionality of the city manager plan for Ohio cities were widely appreciated, and her dissenting opinions were much admired by other lawyers and the press.

During the 1920s, Allen became active in the movement to outlaw war, seeing a need for more substantive international law. Both her younger brothers had died of wounds received in active service during World War I. She spoke to the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War chaired by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1925. The following year, Allen was moved to run for the U.S. Senate, convinced that she might do more as a senator to outlaw war, but she lost in the primary.

Florence Allen was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, where she would serve for 25 years, the first woman justice to sit on a national bench of general jurisdiction. "Allen was not appointed because she was a woman," commented U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings. "All we did was to see that she was not rejected because she was a woman." The Sixth Circuit included Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee; one judge from each state sat on the federal court. Although her three colleagues originally disapproved of the appointment, they eventually came to offer her grudging respect. Of ten circuit courts in the United States, the Sixth ranked fourth in volume of work handled in the mid-1930s.

The Circuit Court cases included patents, taxes, civil suits, personal injuries, forgeries, stolen cars, narcotics, admiralty law, contracts, interstate commerce, conflicts between federal and state authority, and crime in all its branches. At first, Allen was assigned no patent cases, but when she protested, explaining her family's association with industry, she was assigned to many and became recognized as an expert in patent law.

Florence Allen was able to accomplish prodigious amounts of work due to her ability to extract information from a printed page with almost a single glance and to her formidable powers of concentration. Her passion for punctuality was key to coordinating a busy schedule, which included a hike at dawn, during which she memorized poetry, and a swim at noon. At night, she relaxed by playing from memory the piano music of Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, and Chopin. Allen saved time by delegating housework and even the purchase of her clothes to other people.

Judge Allen's most notable case was a suit brought in 1937 against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) by 19 private utility concerns; one of the lawyers representing the utilities was Wendell Willkie, later Republican candidate for president. They argued that the TVA, in using its dams to generate electricity, was forcing private companies out of business and accused the TVA and the Public Works Administration of conspiracy. In preparation, Allen, one of a three-judge panel, moved to Tennessee with her cousin, put in hours of study broken only by walks on the mountain with her dogs, and found it a "fascinating and grueling experience." She would not leave even when Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to dinner at the White House. "Toward the close of the case," Judge Allen wrote, "I found myself unable to sleep, and often got up at night to work over the opinion." The other judges accepted the opinion as she had written it, insisting that her name be signed to it. The decision found that the statute creating the authority was constitutional. It was later upheld by the Supreme Court.

Although Allen ceased active participation in politics after her appointment to the federal bench, her interest in international relations continued throughout her life. Beginning in 1930, she attended seminars in Mexico to promote understanding and ease tensions between the two North American countries. From 1948 to 1956, she attended several international conferences of lawyers, believing that international arbitration and the new United Nations would make it possible for countries to settle disputes without warfare. She also served as chair for the International Bar Association's Human Rights committee and traveled to many different countries to support women lawyers and women's equal rights. She was one of the first to call for an international law to govern space exploration.

Florence Allen also traveled around the United States lecturing on the U.S. Constitution at various colleges. These talks were collected and published in 1940 as This Constitution of Ours. In 1952, under the auspices of the Kappa Delta Pi educational honor society, she published The Treaty as an Instrument of Legislation in which she pointed out that the United Nations, with no legislature, was dependent on treaties ratified by individual nations. In the United States, unlike other countries, those treaties were binding on judges in every state, and Allen was concerned that UN proposals might encroach on the domestic jurisdiction of member states. She believed the UN needed constructive criticism as well as support. After her retirement at the age of 75 in 1959, she worked on her memoir, To Do Justly, published in 1965.

Throughout her long life, Florence Allen was greatly admired and was awarded many honors. She was named the outstanding professional woman in the United States by the National Federation of Business Women's Clubs in 1926, and received the National Achievement Award from Chi Omega, the national women's sorority, in 1938. In 1960, she was the first woman to receive the Albert Gallatin Award from New York University, an honor conferred on Dr. Ralph Bunche and Dr. Jonas Salk among others. She was granted honorary degrees by 25 universities, and the Florence Allen Award for outstanding women lawyers was established in 1966.

Accounted a genial friend, Allen was also close to her family. Her parents lived with her in their old age, and she also supported a sister and a niece, despite financial strains from loss on a note she co-signed for friends just before the Depression of the 1930s.

Florence Allen's guiding principle was a quotation from Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." She believed that "to do justly is one of the highest human endeavors, and happy are they who share in it."

sources:

Allen, Florence. To Do Justly. Cleveland, OH: Press of Western Reserve University, 1965.

Izant, Grace. "The Life Story of Ohio's First Lady," in Cleveland Plain Dealer. October 6, 1935, p. 4.

Roosevelt, Eleanor, and Lorena Hickok. Ladies of Courage. NY: Putnam, 1954.

collections:

The Florence E. Allen Papers at the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio, include diaries, papers, scrapbooks and clippings. Some duplicates in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. Appellate opinions in the Ohio Reports, 1923–28, and the Federal Reporter, 1935–65.

Kristie Miller , author of Ruth Hanna McCormick: A Life in Politics 1880–1944, University of New Mexico Press, 1992