Charles Pelham Curtis

Background

He was born in Boston, Massachussets on May 8, 1891, the son of Charles Pelham Curtis, who occasionally practiced law, and Ellen Amory Anderson.

Education

The scion of a prosperous and well-established family, he graduated from the Groton School and enrolled in Harvard in 1910. He completed the required course work in three years, and spent his senior year in Paris at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques.

Curtis proceeded through Harvard Law School with as brilliant an academic record as he had compiled at Harvard College, where he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Career

Upon graduation in 1917, he was elected to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention; and when that body completed its work, he entered the naval reserve program at Annapolis. During World War I he served as a gunnery officer on the U. S. S. Duncan. After the war Curtis joined the old-line Boston law firm of Choate, Hall and Stewart, but after two years he left to accept an appointment as special assistant United States attorney for Massachusetts.

In 1923 he and his brother Richard Cary Curtis opened a law office. They soon built up a prosperous practice. Curtis was a director of a number of banks and corporations. In 1930 he merged his firm with Choate, Hall and Stewart, and eventually was named senior partner. During these years he became interested in labor law, helping to draft the Massachusetts arbitration statute and serving as chairman of the state commission that revised the workmen's compensation law. Curtis was involved in the affairs of Harvard College, and at the age of thirty-three was the youngest graduate ever elected a member of the Harvard Corporation, on which he served from 1924 to 1935.

He taught at Harvard College on an adjunct basis, and with George C. Homans wrote An Introduction to Pareto, His Sociology (1934). Curtis also wrote on other topics, including lion-hunting (an account of a family trip), investment, and philosophy; but his two most widely noted books dealt with the Supreme Court and the J. Robert Oppenheimer case. In Lions Under the Throne (1947) Curtis tried to explain the workings and power of the Supreme Court in simple, nontechnical language; several reviewers suggested that this was one of the best introductions to the institution of the court yet written. In The Oppenheimer Case: The Trial of a Security System (1955), Curtis pieced together lengthy quotations from the hearings transcript to fashion an indictment of the federal security program.

After the war Curtis took the lead in drafting the Massachusetts Fair Employment Act and led the campaign for its passage in 1946.

For the rest of his life Curtis was a successful attorney. He continued to write books and pamphlets, and in 1952 caused a minor furor in legal circles when he published an article in the Stanford Law Review claiming that a lawyer had a right to lie for his clients.

Achievements

• He was a successful attorney.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Practical Cogitator or The Thinker's Anthology

    ("An anthology of important ideas and writings")

  • A Commonplace Book

    (.)

  • Hunting in Africa East and West,
  • It's Your Law

Politics

He had been a lifelong Republican (and remained so in state politics), he supported the New Deal; and in 1941 he served for several months as special assistant to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles.

Interests

• He was also well-known as a sportsman and aviator in the Boston area, and a member of sailing and athletic clubs, as well as social clubs and bar associations.

Connections

On July 17, 1914, he married Edith G. Roelker; they had five children.

On February 27, 1936, a year after divorcing his first wife, Curtis married Frances Woodward Prentice of Stonington, Connecticut.

wife (1):

Edith G. Roelker

wife (2):

Frances Woodward Prentice of Stonington

Brother:

Richard Cary Curtis

lawyer