Louis Marshall
Louis Marshall was an American corporate, constitutional and civil rights lawyer as well as a mediator and Jewish community leader who worked to secure religious, political, and cultural freedom for all minority groups. Among the founders of the American Jewish Committee, he defended Jewish and minority rights. He was also a conservationist, and the force behind re-establishing the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, which evolved into today's State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Early life and education
Louis Marshall was born on December 14, 1856, in Syracuse, New York, to two Jewish immigrants, recently arrived from Germany. Founded just eight years earlier, in 1847, Syracuse was a booming transportation, financial, and manufacturing hub on the Erie Canal, as the United States expanded West. On the brink of the American Civil War, the city was also a well-known stop on the Underground Railroad.Marshall's father, Jacob Marshall, had arrived in New York City at 19 years of age on September 1, 1849, from Neidenstein, Bavaria, in Germany; his mother arrived from Württemberg, Germany, in 1853. According to Louis Marshall, the family name had been spelled "Marschall", with a "c", in "Rhenish Bavaria... near the French boundary". Marshall's friend and colleague, Cyrus Adler noted in his remembrances of Marshall that the latter's "father migrated to the United states in 1849, the year which marked the beginning of migration from Germany following the failure of the revolutionary movements of 1848." From New York City, Jacob Marshall had "worked his way up the Erie Canal to Syracuse, where he opened a hide, fur, and leather business. It was marginally profitable."
Louis was the eldest of six children. He had one brother, Benjamin, two years younger, and four sisters: Marie, Bertha, Clara, and Ida; 13 years separated Louis and his youngest sister, Ida. The family resided at 222 Cedar Street, "in the old Seventh Ward of Syracuse", an area today approximately where the Onondaga County Justice Center is located.
From childhood, Marshall was both a scholar and a linguist. His first language was German: "I spoke German before I knew a word of English, and so long as my mother lived I never spoke to her otherwise than in German." Louis' mother, Zilli, was "well educated for her times... reading to in German, Schiller, Scott and Hugo, the standard literature of mid-century."
Marshall attended "the Seventh Ward Public school" and later Syracuse High School, from which he graduated in 1874, one of eight males in a graduating class of 22. In addition he attended German and Hebrew schools along with his sisters. In his various school settings, Marshall applied himself to studying French, German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The latter he also learned from his father. Later in life, Marshall taught himself Yiddish.
Upon high school graduation, Marshall "began the study of law, in accordance with the fashion of that day, in a lawyer's office, that of Nathaniel B. Smith", where he served a two-year apprenticeship. This under his belt, his next step towards a career in law was to "enroll in Columbia University's law school ". According to Marshall, "I really do not know if I am considered an alumnus of the Law School at Columbia University or not. If I am, then it is very peculiar that it has not been until I arrived at the mature age of seventy-two that I should have received a letter which is addressed to me as a 'Dear Fellow Alumnus'. I attended the Law School from September, 1876, to June, 1877.... I never received a degree because two years actual attendance was required."
Career
Lawyer
After completing his legal studies on January 1, 1878, Marshall joined the law firm of William C. Ruger in Syracuse. A few years later, in 1885, he became a member of the New York State Bar Association. According to Adler, "the day he was admitted to the Bar, Marshall became a partner in Ruger's firm". Later, when Ruger was appointed chief justice of the New York State Court of Appeals, "the law firm became Jenny, Brooks & Marshall." During this period, Marshall rose to prominence not only in New York, but nationally: "In 1891 he was part of a national delegation that asked President Benjamin Harrison to intervene on behalf of persecuted Russian Jews." Before the age of 40, Marshall had argued over 150 cases before the Court of Appeals.Marshall was recruited by Samuel Untermyer, a classmate at Columbia, to join the law firm of Guggenheimer and Untermyer in New York City. Moving there in February 1894, he became heavily involved in Jewish religious and political affairs. He also was involved in alternative dispute resolution, acting with Louis Brandeis as the mediator in a strike of 60,000 to 70,000 cloakmakers in New York City in 1910, and in 1919 was the arbitrator in a clothing-workers' strike.
As his life became stable and more organized he acquired a circle of intimate friends. It was his habit to have lunch and relax at Monch's Restaurant with a group of lawyers during the work-week, where they would debate each other, with Loewenstein, the waiter, serving as Judge and jury.
During the years 1910 and 1911, while William Howard Taft was president, two openings occurred on the United States Supreme Court. Several of Taft's prominent friends urged him to appoint Marshall, who had the reputation of an outstanding Constitutional lawyer and public citizen. A justice of the Supreme Court was the only elected or appointed office Marshall had ever wanted or sought; Taft eventually chose two other men for the positions.
In 1914, he was part of the legal team representing Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old employee named Mary Phagan. Marshall initiated an ultimately unsuccessful appeal of the case to the United States Supreme Court.
Marshall was active in protecting the human and civil rights of Jews and on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and fought major legal battles on behalf of all minorities. By the end of his legal career, Marshall had "argue more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other private lawyer of his generation."
The Syracuse Post-Standard's editorial on Marshall, written upon his death in 1929, portrayed his motivation as: "Always, it was justice... Justice to all who were in need of justice... justice to the people who, like himself, were of Jewish origin.... His was an intense Americanism.... He was a man who helped humanity... unafraid, a man whose hand was ready to lift a load... necessary for the lessening of misfortune or oppression, a worker in our common life who because he was a worker, became a leader, a man who crowded his years with service for the benefit of those about him—altogether an eminent American citizen whom a multitude will hold in grateful remembrance."
Jewish leader
In 1905, Marshall was promoted to chairman of the board of directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Conservative Judaism's rabbinical school. After serving as an officer for several years at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, a Reform congregation, he became its president in 1916. Despite the implicit contradiction, to Marshall there was only one Judaism.In 1906, with Jacob Schiff and Cyrus Adler, Marshall helped found the American Jewish Committee as a means for keeping watch over legislation and diplomacy relevant to American Jews, and to convey requests, information, and political threats to US government officials. Marshall eventually became the AJC's primary strategist and lobbyist. After being elected its president in 1912, he held the post until his death. In this position, he opposed Congressional bills that would prevent many illiterate Jews from entering the US. Despite a Presidential veto, one of the bills was enacted in 1917, after a Congressional override.
Marshall was a strong advocate of abolishing the literacy test and said, "We are practically the only ones who are fighting while a 'great proportion' is 'indifferent to what is done'". Marshall was also the leader of the movement that led to the abrogation, in 1911, of the US-Russian Commercial Treaty of 1832.
At the end of World War I, Marshall attended the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles, France, in 1919, as President of the American Jewish Committee and Vice-President of the American Jewish Congress. There, he helped formulate clauses for the "full and equal civil, religious, political, and national rights" of Jews in the constitutions of the newly created states of eastern Europe. These provisions Marshall believed to be "the most important contribution to human liberty in modern history."
He fought a proposal to have the US Census Bureau enumerate Jews as a race. Although he had some differences with political Zionists, Marshall contributed to efforts that led to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He was instrumental in organizing the American Jewish Relief Committee, which brought together Zionists and non-Zionists for the management of Jewish colonization efforts.
In 1920, Marshall also attempted to stop a newspaper owned by Henry Ford, The Dearborn Independent, from spreading anti-Semitic propaganda. Marshall and Untermyer entered the fight against the alleged libelous attacks featured in the paper, which led to a 1927 lawsuit against the automaker in federal court.
Public servant
Over the course of his career, Marshall served in a variety of notable public service positions, at every level. "In 1890, at the age of thirty-four, he was appointed by Governor Hill to a special commission to revise the judiciary article of the constitution...". In 1894, was elected to serve as delegate to the New York State Constitutional Convention, representing the 24th District.In 1902, Marshall was appointed chairman of a commission investigating the slum conditions on New York City's Lower East Side, where many Jewish immigrants had settled. In 1908, he was appointed chairman of the New York State Immigration Commission.
In 1910, Marshall was appointed a trustee of Syracuse University. In 1911, he became president of the board of trustees of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, a post he kept until his death in 1929.
At the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1915, Marshall again served as a delegate, this time being elected to an at-large position. According to Adler, Marshall "was the only man who sat in three constitutional conventions..."
In 1923, Marshall was honored with an appointment as a director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In that post, "he fought against racial segregation in housing and against the disenfranchisement of the white primary.... Defending the rights of Negro voters, he secured a ruling of the Supreme Court in the case of Nixon v. Herndon that the Texas white primary law was unconstitutional."