Hugh M. Bland (1898–1967)

Hugh M. Bland was born in northwestern Arkansas, but his father, a poor and restless farmer, took the family back and forth between Arkansas and what is now Oklahoma in search of a better livelihood. Bland eventually settled in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), where he had a long career as a trial lawyer, government attorney, federal prosecutor, and district trial judge. Governor Orval E. Faubus appointed Bland to the Arkansas Supreme Court in April 1966 to finish the term of Justice Frank Holt, who had resigned to run for governor. Bland served the last eight months of the term and died soon after returning to Fort Smith.

Hugh Monroe Bland was born on November 1, 1898, in Springdale (Washington and Benton counties) to Addison Franklin Bland and Elizabeth Reed Bland. The family moved from their farm to the town of Oologah in the Indian Territory in 1899. Bland would give a colorful description of the move in 1937 to a writer who recorded his memoir for a historical collection on the Indian Territory. The family left northwestern Arkansas early one morning in a covered wagon behind a mule team and camped each night until they reached Oologah, where the elder Bland had a deal with the owner to be the foreman of a ranch of thousands of free-range cattle. They lived on the ranch for six years, but Bland and his sister had to walk five miles across often flooded creeks to school. His mother wanted to move back to northwestern Arkansas where the children could get a safer and better education.

The family moved back to Washington County to a community that Bland called Greasy Belly, between Prairie Grove (Washington County) and Cane Hill (Washington County). Bland’s father bought a 160-acre farm, where they grew fruit. They then moved to Cane Hill, where his father bought and sold livestock. Bland and his sister graduated from high school at Cane Hill, and the family, in the same covered wagon, then moved forty miles west to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Bland received a bachelor’s degree at Northeastern State Teachers College at Tahlequah, taught school for three months, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 toward the end of World War I. After two years in service, he returned to the college to teach mathematics. After a year of teaching, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and received a law degree.

Soon after graduation, Bland was elected the district judge for Tahlequah County, opened a law practice there, and finished an unexpired term as the county attorney. His interview in 1937 for the Oklahoma historical collection carried colorful and sad accounts of scenes in his courtroom, mainly of Cherokee defendants notorious for their drinking sprees. He started a general practice at Wewoka, east of Oklahoma City, and in 1939 he and his wife, Ann Johnson Bland, moved to Fort Smith, where he established a law practice and they lived for the rest of their lives.

His law firm had a wide practice, but he would become prominent for his work for the government. He was for a time a special assistant to the attorney general of the United States, representing the government in many condemnation proceedings, including the development of the Norfork and Bull Shoals dams. He was a special assistant to the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas in the early 1950s. He was elected chancery judge for the Tenth District in 1960 and served until April 1966, when Faubus appointed him to the Supreme Court. Frank Holt had resigned the seat to campaign for governor, losing the Democratic nomination to another Supreme Court justice, James D. Johnson, who then lost the general election to Winthrop Rockefeller.

Bland’s decisions trended toward liberal positions, particularly on matters involving workers and others who found themselves arguing against developers, contractors, or the government. He wrote for a majority of the Supreme Court in overruling a chancellor who had halted picketing by union workers at a hospital construction site. The workers had protested that the contractor was not paying the standard wages required by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The chancellor had held that the construction was not under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, which would have allowed picketing, and also that the picketing violated Arkansas’s Right to Work Law, an antiunion constitutional amendment adopted in 1944. Bland said the NLRB clearly had jurisdiction and that the picketing was perfectly legal.

He wrote a blistering opinion for the court’s narrow majority overruling the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission and a circuit court when they denied benefits to the widow of a carpenter who had died of heart disease. The worker already had heart disease, so the commission and the trial judge said his death was not a result of his work. Bland scoffed. “The workmen’s compensation commission law was adopted to give compensation to workers, not to allow insurance carriers to make fine distinctions to avoid liability,” he wrote. He said the injured-worker law was adopted with the intent that it be construed liberally for workers and not for management or insurance carriers.

He finished the unexpired term at the end of December 1966 and died on April 1, 1967. He and his wife are buried in Oak Cemetery at Fort Smith.

For additional information:
“H. M. Bland Dies; Interim Justice.” Arkansas Gazette, April 2, 1967, p. 4C.

Harris, Amelia. “Hugh Bland.” Biography for Works Progress Administration, Indian-Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, January 13, 1938, pp. 920–927.

“Retired Judge Dies, Rites Set.” Oklahoma City Oklahoman, April 2, 1967, p. 17.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas