Plenary Session Transcripts

Governors Attending:

Guests:

Discussion Subjects:

Modern penology; state income tax; inland waterway development; uniformity of marriage and divorce laws; rural credit; and problems associated with population shifts from rural to urban areas

Points of Interest:

With respect to crime, Governor John Shafroth of Colorado spoke of equalizing sentences for people convicted of the same crime. Governors also discussed capital punishment, the advisability of indeterminate (minimum and maximum) sentences, prison labor, and the volatile subject of lynching.

As requested in 1911, a committee prepared a Supreme Court brief regarding intrastate railroad regulation.

Memorable Quotes:

Former Governor Augustus Willson of Kentucky said this about the 16th Amendment awaiting ratification: "If this amendment goes into effect, our consideration of any State income tax will be almost academic, for no party could hold power in any State if it should uphold a State income tax on top of a federal income tax..."

In discussing the issue of lack of uniformity of divorce laws, Governor Tasker L. Oddie of Nevada defended his state's liberal divorce law: "In a social age when woman was a chattel...there was little necessity for divorce, since the wife could be coerced to submit tamely to the husband's pleasure...But since wife slavery has gone out of fashion and the Anglo-Saxon woman has begun to assert her natural rights...the demand has come for a new adjustment of privileges...the convention that a woman at marriage is expected to be chaste while no such expectation relates to the man--two sets of morals sanctified by convention and acquiesced in by church and state--is robbed of a good deal of its inherent validity."

In contrast, Governor James H. Hawley of Idaho said: "With the divorces in some communities numbering as high as a ratio of one to three marriages, and with the general ratio throughout the nation increasing with alarming rapidity, and some of the States seemingly endeavoring to build up a legal industry by means of laws that tend to make divorce easy of attainment, we realize the time is at hand for drastic legislation and united action...no state should permit its courts to become the agency for washing the dirty linen of another commonwealth." In addition, reference was made to a Massachusetts law under which: "...an inhabitant of [Massachusetts who] goes into another State...to obtain a divorce for a cause which occurred here while the parties resided here and for a cause which would not authorize a divorce by the laws of this community, divorce so obtained shall be of no force or effect in this Commonwealth."

Resolutions:
Governors adopted a resolution that the power of states should be used to protect people accused of crimes from mobs and to provide for speedy orders and impartial trials. This resolution was provoked by the words of South Carolina Governor Cole L. Blease, who had expressed his personal view that lynching was justifiable. But its adoption was not unanimous. Other southern Governors objected to directing action against someone's first amendment right of freedom of thought and expression, and to imposing the will of the majority on a minority view in contravention of the Conference's purposes. Governors also adopted a resolution to appoint a committee to prepare legislation for consideration by state legislatures on establishing rural credit banks and land mortgage and cooperative associations.

Presidential Addresses: