Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,887

This is the grave of Henry Wade.

Born in 1914 in Rockwall County, Texas, Wade came from a legal family. In fact, five of his seven brothers would also become lawyers. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1939 and took a job with the FBI. Hoover assigned him to work espionage cases in the east against potential enemies in the approach to World War II. When the U.S. entered the war, Wade left the FBI and joined the Navy, serving in the Pacific and being actively involved in the invasions of the Philippines and Okinawa.

After the war, Wade returned to Texas to make his legal career back home. He became Rockwall County Attorney, but ambitious, almost immediately moved to Dallas to work in the DA’s office. He then ran for District Attorney in 1951 and won the election. He would hold this job until 1987. As such, he was involved in some of the most titanic moments in American history and you have heard of him even if you don’t think you have. First, he really wanted to try Lee Harvey Oswald for murdering John F. Kennedy in 1963. But then of course, Jack Ruby killed Oswald. So Wade had to try Ruby instead and he did so successfully.

Then came the reason you really know Henry Wade. In 1970, the pro-abortion movement was looking for a test case to challenge Texas’ oppressive anti-abortion law and thus the nation’s law. Norma McCorvey agreed to be the plaintiff against the law in a suit run by the feminist lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. For obvious reasons, McCorvey didn’t want her name being used, so she became Roe. Wade, well, he was Wade. That’s why you’ve heard of him. Off all the terrible things Wade did in his life–and he did plenty–his role here is actually relatively innocent. The lawyers filed against Wade just because he was DA of the county, not because he had really done anything around this case. He actually didn’t care about abortion one way or another, but of course he would have had no problem prosecuting someone for having an abortion and he stated. Even during the case, he would continue prosecuting anyone he found out had an abortion until it was outright illegal. In fact, the journalist David Garrow later stated that Wade had told him he supported a legal right to an abortion now that it was in fact legal. So no love or sympathy to Henry Wade here. He wouldn’t give you any. But let’s be clear, of all the things he did, his role in Roe was just about the least offensive.

Otherwise, Wade was a worthless scumbag son of a bitch. His wife openly talked about her fear of him beating her. He was known to discriminate against people of color. His office suggested, in 1963, that “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race” should not serve on a jury, since they were less likely to convict. At least there’s some good old-school anti-Italian hate there, you don’t see that term much anymore. I think he left the Irish out though. His office also suggested excluding fat people from juries. I am not precisely sure why here, but the memo stated that “You are not looking for a fair juror but rather a strong, biased and sometimes hypocritical individual who believes that defendants are different from them.” How weight matters there, I couldn’t tell you but none of this makes sense anyway.

Wade of course did not suffer from losing the abortion case. If anything, he was a hero to his voters and they continued to elect him, even if he shrugged his shoulders about the whole thing. He retired in 1985. But that wasn’t the end of his importance to American history. See, at about this same time, the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris was working on his groundbreaking film The Thin Blue Line. And Morris targeted Wade for his massive indifference to the lives of defendants. See, Wade loved putting people on death row. Were they guilty? Well, Wade probably believed any defendant was always guilty in a criminal trial, especially if they were Black or Mexican, as so many of them were. So Morris started poking around and uncovered all kinds of horrible dirt on Wade and how he treated defendants. As you know if you’ve seen the film, it focuses on the near state murder of Randall Adams, after his 1977 conviction for murdering a cop. He was about to be killed, when Lewis Powell of all justices intervened. Sam Alito never would have done that. Powell stayed the execution, Texas governor Bill Clements then commuted Adams to life in prison, and he was exonerated and released in 1988. Wade was outraged, wanting him dead for the murder he evidently did not commit.

In fact, Wade’s sins around the death penalty did a lot to lead to the Texas Innocence Project forming to investigate all the people he put on death row and by 2008, at least 15 people he had convicted were exonerated. Wade was still around when this stuff started. He got to experience DNA evidence being used to throw out his convictions, including of a man named David Pope, who served 15 years for a rape he did not commit. He also got to experience the Supreme Court throwing out his death sentence conviction of Thomas Miller-El, based on the manual to keep minorities off juries mentioned above going public.

In 2010, one of Wade’s former assistants named Edward Gray wrote a book on Wade. He basically said that while Wade wouldn’t push someone he absolutely knew was innocent toward prison or death row, the man was hypercompetitive and if there was any chance someone was guilty, he was going to do anything possible to win the conviction, details and sometimes legal niceties be damned.

In conclusion, Henry Wade was a horrible human being.

Wade died in 2001, at the age of 86. He was stricken with Parkinson’s for the last years of his life. Generally, I don’t wish that on anyone, but Henry Wade? I think we’ll make an exception here.

Henry Wade is buried in Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park, Dallas, Texas.

If you would like this series to visit other involved in our abortion history, you can cover the required expenses here. Fania Mindell, who helped found Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger, is in Mexico City and I could always use time in one of the world’s ten greatest cities. Alan Guttmacher, who was head of Planned Parenthood in the 60s, is in Baltimore and Katharine McCormick, the rich woman who used her fortune to fund research into birth control pills, is in Chicago. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.