page_title: John F. Godfrey
section_title: Civilian
hierarchical_section_title: John F. Godfrey / Vocation / Civilian
caption_attribution_description: English: Hon. Stephen M. White as shown in "Souvenir of Santa Clara College" published for the College's golden jubilee in 1901. Before 1923, Image of the Public Domain.
context_page_description: John Franklin Godfrey was a sailor, a soldier and officer in the U.S. Civil War, a city attorney of Los Angeles, California, and an attorney in private practice who, among other activities, represented people arrested for operating businesses on Sundays.
context_section_description: In 1866 Godfrey left Montana, worked in laboring jobs in Austin, Nevada; Marysville, California, and San Francisco, then went back to Maine to read law in his father's office in Bangor and become a lawyer.
  One of his clients was the Total Wreck Mining Company, which was seeking a patent. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in a successful urging of this claim, and returned with J.M. Requa of New York, the company president.
  In December 1876 Godfrey was elected Los Angeles city attorney on the People's ticket, and in 1878 he was reelected on the Workingman's ticket. In 1880 he received a nomination for Congress as a candidate of the Greenback-Labor Party but lost the election. In 1882 he was selected as a delegate to the state convention of the Greenbackers in San Francisco.
  Godfrey and Stephen M. White represented a group of defendants who in 1882 were prosecuted for having violated the Sunday closing laws that had been in effect in Los Angeles for the preceding nineteen years. Answering a prosecution against saloonkeeper Jacob Phillipi, who had "knowingly and willfully"  kept his business open on Sunday, Godfrey argued that the law was being enforced only against "one class" of business, that of saloons, and he compared the prosecution to that of the burning of witches in Salem, Massachusetts. The jury was unable to return a verdict, seven for conviction and five for acquittal, and it was dismissed.
caption: Stephen M. White, about 1900
exif: {}