Martin Thomas Conboy was born on August 28, 1878 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the second son and second of three children (the oldest of whom died in infancy) of Martin and Bridget (Harlow) Conboy. Both parents were natives of County Roscommon, Ireland. Conboy's father, a Civil War veteran who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor, worked for a time as a government clerk and later as a member of the police department of Washington, D. C
Education
Conboy attended Gonzaga College in Washington (A. B. 1898, A. M. 1899) while taking night school law courses at Georgetown University (LL. B. 1898, LL. M. 1899).
Career
He returned to New York in 1900 and worked as a law clerk before being admitted to the New York bar in 1903. Although Conboy was somewhat humorless and literal in his approach to the law, his thoroughness early gained the respect of his colleagues. In 1905 he became a member of the firm of Griggs, Baldwin & Baldwin, of which John W. Griggs, a former governor of New Jersey and United States Attorney General, was the senior partner. He remained with the firm until 1929. During World War I, as director of selective service for New York City, Conboy supervised the registration of almost 1, 500, 000 men; by effectively publicizing the efficiency of his office, he greatly enhanced his stature in legal circles and in local affairs. His Catholicism deeply colored his approach to public issues; he often insisted that government must be based upon the morality of the Church. In the aftermath of World War I, as counsel to the judiciary committee of the New York State Assembly, Conboy prosecuted five Socialist assemblymen who were eventually expelled from the legislature. He argued that the defendants posed a threat not only to property rights and the constitution, but also to the family and the church, and to laws prohibiting the dissemination of birth control information through the mails. Two years later he sought court action in an attempt to have the novel Ulysses and the film Ecstasy--which he viewed at a special screening--banned as obscene. He then lobbied in the legislature for a "clean book" bill to counter liberalizing court decisions on censorship. Within the legal profession, he led the attack on the Eighteenth Amendment, which he called the work of "religious bigots and narrow-minded reformers. Conboy later worked closely with Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, at first as chairman of the governor's advisory committee on narcotics and then in 1932 as special adviser in the investigation of the affairs of Mayor Walker, a politically delicate case which culminated in the mayor's resignation. After Roosevelt became president, Conboy praised his leadership and defended the New Deal as both constitutional and in accord with papal encyclicals. Roosevelt frequently conferred with Conboy on patronage matters, and in 1933 appointed him United States Attorney for the southern district of New York. In that capacity Conboy won test cases involving the New Deal's laws against gold hoarding and certain provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act. He resigned after seventeen months to return to his lucrative private practice. In 1929 he had joined a firm which now became Conboy, Hewitt, O'Brien & Boardman. In the years that followed, Conboy handled some of New York's most sensational cases, serving as a special prosecutor in the income-tax case against Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer and as counsel for Charles (Lucky) Luciano, George E. Browne, and Michael J. Beirne. At the same time he maintained friendly relations with the Roosevelt administration, and in 1936 he won for the government a decision before the Supreme Court upholding the federal arms embargo. Later he grew more critical of Roosevelt, charging that the administration had become coercive and personalized. His belief that only strict neutrality could keep the United States out of war, as well as his Catholicism, drove him into further opposition when he feared that the United States might send arms to the Spanish Republic. He nevertheless returned to government service in 1940 and 1941, serving as coordinating adviser to the New York State Director of Selective Service. In the summer of 1943 he underwent a gall bladder operation. He died while hospitalized again the following winter at the New York Hospital, New York City.
Achievements
Politics
Conboy supported the presidential bid of Alfred E. Smith in 1924 and bitterly attacked the Democratic convention for refusing to condemn the Ku Klux Klan by name. He backed Smith again in 1928. An independent Democrat, Conboy sought for many years to remove judicial nominations from politics, proposing instead to base selection on professional qualifications as determined by the bar associations. His stand brought him into occasional sharp conflict with Tammany, and in 1929 he was seriously considered as a "fusion" candidate for mayor against James J. Walker.
Connections
On July 31, 1912, Conboy married Bertha Letitia Mason of McLean; they had four children: Roger (who died in 1918), Catherine, Constance, and Marion.