business whose skills were more those of a negotiator , a facilitator and a drafter of documents than those of a trial advocate .
This new breed of high-powered corporation lawyer , originating in New York City around 1890 and flourishing there to this day , made his chief domain the conference room rather than the courtroom . The prototype was Francis Lynde Stetson , a courtly yet steely gentleman known as the “ attorney general ” for the great financier J . P . Morgan . Stetson helped Morgan form the largest companies in the world — including the biggest of them all , US Steel — and tried his best to keep his famous client out of trouble , which was no easy task .
There was also William Nelson Cromwell , the silver-tongued business lawyer from Brooklyn who specialized in forming giant new corporations and resuscitating old ones when they went bust . Some critics thought he played close to the line , but none could doubt his resourcefulness . For his role in creating the Panama Canal — and the revolution that led to it — he would become the best known of all the early Wall Street lawyers .
Elihu Root , a patrician of New England stock , was the quintessential wise man who glided easily between the highest levels of government in Washington and his private legal practice in New York . An elitist , procorporate member of the Republican establishment , and a strong exponent of an expansionist foreign policy , Root was as responsible as anyone , save the Presidents he served under , for transforming America into a world power .
Samuel Untermyer , the rare Jewish Wall Street attorney , was the anti – white shoe corporate lawyer . He became a millionaire representing large corporations , then turned on them with a vengeance to become a populist crusader for business reforms . The fresh , homegrown orchids he always wore in his lapel belied the ferociousness with which he attacked his big business antagonists .
Then there was Cravath , the youngest of the group , who launched a new model of law firm management that would be copied by nearly all major white shoe firms .
Paul Cravath , one of the new breed of Wall Street corporate lawyers who built American big business , circa 1899 .
Indeed , the name Cravath would become synonymous with the large Wall Street “ law factory ” that came into existence in the early part of the 20th century .
Paul Drennan Cravath was a classic small-town boy made good . He was born in July 1861 , a week before the First Battle of Bull Run , in the tiny hamlet of Berlin Heights , Ohio , a few miles south of Lake Erie . Unusual for the time , both his parents were college graduates , from nearby Oberlin College , the first college in the country to admit women and Blacks . Cravath ’ s father , Erastus , was a Congregationalist minister and abolitionist who made the betterment of the African American his life ’ s work . After the war he helped found a school for newly freed Blacks in Nashville , Tennessee , that became Fisk University , where he served as president for 20 years . Accompanied by his family , including 14-year-old Paul , Erastus Cravath took the Fisk Jubilee Singers on a European tour to raise funds for the university .
Cravath ’ s mother , Ruth Anna , a strong Quaker , was nearly Erastus ’ s opposite . A no-nonsense woman , and something of a worrywart , she instilled in young Paul a sense of pragmatism to complement his
Frank Stetson , photographed around the time he became president of the New York City Bar Association in 1910 .
father ’ s idealism , as well as a love of books and music .
Paul Cravath received his early education at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute while the family briefly lived in Brooklyn after the war . He attended college preparatory school in Geneva , Switzerland , during the family ’ s European excursion and toured Germany with his father .
After graduating from the religiously oriented Oberlin in 1882 ( the faculty described him as “ brilliant ” but a “ mischief-maker ”), Paul eschewed the evangelical life to pursue his ambition to become a lawyer . He studied in a law office in Minneapolis , where he intended to settle ; then , after an attack of typhoid fever , he became a salesman for the Standard Oil Company in Minnesota . With the money he earned he went east to study at Columbia Law School in New York , graduating at the top of his class in 1886 .
Upon graduation , Cravath took an apprentice clerkship with the Manhattan firm of Carter , Hornblower & Byrne , headed by Walter S . Carter , a leader of the New York bar . Dubbed by one legal historian as “ a collector of young masters ” and “ the progenitor of many law firms ,” Carter developed a reputation for attracting the
38 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2020 | www . MoAF . org