Attorney General: William F. Murphy
William Francis "Frank" Murphy was born on April 13, 1890, in Harbor Beach, Michigan. Murphy received his Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1914 and was admitted to the Michigan bar that same year. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an officer during World War I. When he returned to the United States, he was named an Assistant U.S. Attorney for Michigan’s Eastern District. He briefly taught law at the University of Detroit. Murphy was elected mayor of Detroit in 1930 and, in 1932, was the first president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Murphy served as Governor-General of the Philippine Islands in 1933, and first United States High Commissioner to the Philippines from 1935 to 1936. Elected Governor of Michigan in 1935, he served through 1938.
On January 2, 1939, Murphy was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The next year, on January 4, 1940, Murphy was appointed Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He died on July 19, 1949, in Detroit, Michigan.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1870, Augustus Vincent Tack studied in New York City and Paris. He is well known for his landscapes, portraits, and abstractions. Some of his murals are in the Nebraska State Capitol at Lincoln, while several of his portraits are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Tack painted the portrait of Attorney General Murphy in the early 1940s. He died in 1949.