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Paul Drennan Cravath was born on July 14, 1861 in the parsonage adjoining the Congregational Church in Berlin Heights, Ohio, United States of which his father had just been appointed minister. The elder Cravath devoted his later life to the education of the Negro, as an official of the American Missionary Association and as the founder and, after 1875, the first president of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Ruthanna Jackson was of Quaker ancestry and, like her husband, a gradu-uate of Oberlin College. The family home was in Cincinnati from 1866 to 1870 and in New York City from 1870 to 1875.
Education
Paul Cravath attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute until he was fourteen years old, when his father took the family to Europe on a tour with the Fisk Jubilee Singers to raise money for the new university. Paul prepared for college at the Collège de Genève and entered Oberlin on the family's return in 1878. After his graduation from Oberlin in 1882, he began the study of law as a clerk in the office of Frank B. Kellogg in Minneapolis. He worked for eighteen months as a salesman, earning enough money to enter the Columbia Law School, from which he graduated at the head of his class in 1886.
Career
He abandoned his plan to return to Minneapolis to practise when on graduation he was offered a clerkship with the law firm of Carter, Hornblower & Byrne in New York City. Walter S. Carter was a pioneer in the organization of the modern law office, in the development of which Cravath was later to make a major contribution to his profession. Carter, known as a "collector of young masters, " wanted an office whose staff consisted neither of apprentices nor of professional clerks, but of promising young graduates recruited annually from the law schools who would spend a few years with him before undertaking their own careers: the foundation of what has since come to be known as the "Cravath system. " In the Carter office with Cravath was his Columbia acquaintance Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1888 became Carter's son-in-law and, along with Cravath, his partner in the firm of Carter, Hughes & Cravath. The firm's practice was principally in the dry goods trade. Through his uncle Caleb Jackson, an officer in the Westinghouse companies, Cravath met George Westinghouse and acquired the first of the long line of business clients with which he and his firm were identified, including Bethlehem Steel Company and other large manufacturers, a number of railroads, and the investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Cravath's business soon branched out into a separate office of the Carter firm, then into his own firm of Cravath & Houston, and then into an association with the firm headed by the prominent lawyer William Dameron Guthrie.
In a reorganization of that firm on Guthrie's withdrawal in 1906, Cravath became its head. By this time his work in setting up or reorganizing several of the country's largest corporations had made him a national figure. Cravath's career coincided with the growth of the modern business corporation, raising its capital from the sale of securities to bankers and the public and developing complex legal relationships, largely unknown to the lawyers of an earlier day, among its creditors, owners, managers, customers, and employees, and with governmental taxing authorities and regulatory agencies. Cravath's effectiveness came from his quick and firm grasp of these new problems and his ability to organize and direct the legal task forces and specialists necessary to deal with them. A capacity for delegation of detail and sharing of responsibility, along with a driving energy, enabled him to handle a large number of matters while remaining available for the counseling and conference work in which he excelled.
In 1917 Cravath was offered what was, in the opinion of his partner Carl de Gersdorff, "the really great opportunity of his career. " He was appointed by President Wilson a member of the so-called House Mission to Paris, sent to coordinate the war efforts of the United States and its allies, and spent two years in Europe, also serving as counsel to and a member of the United States Treasury Mission to the Inter-Allied Council on War Purchases and Finance.
After World War I Cravath continued his interest in world affairs, lending his support to the Council on Foreign Relations and to the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, Massachussets.
He was an early advocate of recognition of Soviet Russia. Cravath was an active supporter of the Metropolitan Opera Association, serving after 1931 as its president and chairman of its board, and he helped to bring about the union between the Philharmonic and New York Symphony societies (1928). In his later years he built a succession of country houses on Long Island, and it was in the last and favorite of them, Still House at Locust Valley, that he died after a heart attack. He was buried in the Locust Valley Cemetery.
Achievements
For his services as lawyer, diplomat, and negotiator he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal on the recommendation of General Pershing and was decorated by a number of European governments.
A Republican, he joined his party's internationalist wing in arguing in 1920 that the election of Warren G. Harding offered the best hope of getting the United States into the League of Nations.
Personality
A massive man of handsome presence, strong personality, and confidence in his own judgment, Cravath was a natural leader, though an exacting one whose decisions were not to be questioned.
Connections
In 1892 Cravath had married Agnes Huntington, an opera singer, from whom he was separated in 1926. He was survived by their only child, Vera.
