Gilbert Holland Montague

Background

Gilbert Holland Montague was born on May 27, 1880, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was the son of Dwight Billings Montague and Sarah Helen Perry.

Education

Montague received the B. A. from Harvard College in 1901 and the M. A. in 1902. He then entered the Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1904. While in law school he also was an instructor in economics at Harvard College.

Career

Montague moved to New York upon completing his legal studies, and worked for Simpson, Thatcher, and Bartlett for six years; from 1906 to 1908 he also clerked for Justice James A. Blanchard of the New York Supreme Court. Between 1908 and 1910, in addition to practicing law, he was a special deputy attorney general prosecuting election frauds. From 1906 to 1917, Montague taught a course on the law of engineering contracts at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1910, Montague opened his own office and quickly established himself as one of the nation's leading practitioners in the relatively new field of antitrust law. Nearly all the major oil companies, as well as other large firms threatened by action under the Sherman and Clayton acts, engaged him as counsel. Montague not only acted for his clients in the courtroom and congressional and regulatory hearings but also wielded his pen to win a more liberal governmental attitude toward business monopolies. He wrote more than a half-dozen books on trusts, business, and the law, including Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company (1903), Trusts of Today (1904), and Business Competition and the Law (1917), as well as numerous articles in popular newspapers and journals, all defending business against federal antimonopoly rules and policies.

During the latter part of his professional career, Montague often appeared before congressional investigating committees, invited by conservative senators and representatives to testify on the dangers of governmental interference with business. During Republican administrations, Montague served as an adviser to several executive agencies and departments, especially Treasury and Justice. In 1953, Herbert Brownell, Jr. , appointed him to the Attorney General's Commission to Study Antitrust Laws. Two years later the group submitted a 405-page report, most of it written by Montague, calling for less governmental restriction on private enterprise. The numerous bar association panels he chaired provided another forum for Montague's views. These included the American Bar Association's Antitrust Division, the Committee on Monopolies and Restraints of Trade, and the Committee on the Federal Trade Commission. After his wife's death in 1941, Montague made many charitable gifts in her memory. He maintained their summer home, Beaulieu, in Seal Harbor, Maine, as she had planned it, and did the same with the gardens behind his New York City home, where he died.

Achievements

• Montague was a highly competent attorney, an expert in a new and rapidly developing area of great importance to businessmen. His ability brought him large fees that allowed him to indulge the passion of collecting books and manuscripts. By the early 1950's Montague's personal library held more than 15, 000 books and more than 20, 000 pamphlets. He also collected manuscripts, many of which he donated to Harvard libraries. These included a fourteenth-century copy of the Magna Charta, eighteenth-century volumes of the Abbé de St. -Pierre, materials of the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and more than 900 items of Emily Dickinson. This last collection, which Montague donated to Harvard in 1950, allowed scholars to answer a number of questions about Dickinson's life, including her mysterious love affair. Montague had a special interest in Dickinson, who was a collateral relative and was considered by many an expert on her writings.

Works

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  • The Sherman Anti-trust Act and the patent law: The Supreme Court on patents (the Dick patent case).

    ( The Making of the Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-192...)

  • The Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Business Competition and the Law; Everyday Trade Conditions Affected by the Anti-Trust Laws. New York-1917

    ( About the Book Legal history is the study of how law ha...)

  • The gist of the Supreme court dʹecision in the Dick patent case and of the proposed patent law amendments, by Gilbert H. Montague

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

Views

Montague was a firm believer in free competition and opposed the government's interference with the market.

Personality

Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of his students.

Connections

On October 3, 1907, Montague married Amy Angell Collier; they had no children.

Father:

Dwight Billings Montague

Mother:

Sarah Helen Perry

Wife:

Amy Angell Collier Montague

4 October 1872 - 22 September 1941