Hurley, Patrick Jay
- Russell D. Buhite
Extract
Hurley, Patrick Jay (08 January 1883–30 July 1963), lawyer, diplomat, and secretary of war, was born in the Choctaw nation, Indian Territory, in present-day east-central Oklahoma, the son of Pierce O’Neil Hurley, a coal miner and sharecropper, and Mary Kelly. Hurley was virtually on his own after age eleven. His formal education included classes at a local night school in which he enrolled in 1897. After 1900, though not himself a Native American, Hurley studied at Indian University, a Baptist school for Indians located at Muskogee, where he completed his elementary, secondary, and college work, earning a B.A. in 1905. After serving for two years as a clerk in a law office in Muskogee, Hurley moved to Washington, D.C., and enrolled in National University law school—the only institution in that city that would accept the poorly prepared Oklahoman. He received his LL.B. in 1908....