Background
Cravath, Paul Drennan was born on July 14, 1861 in Berlin Heights, Ohio, United States. Son of Erastus M. and Ruth (Jackson) Cravath.
Cravath, Paul Drennan was born on July 14, 1861 in Berlin Heights, Ohio, United States. Son of Erastus M. and Ruth (Jackson) Cravath.
Educated Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Studied 2 years in Europe. Bachelor of Arts, Oberlin, 1882, Master of Arts, 1887.
Bachelor of Laws, Columbia, 1886, Doctor of Laws, 1923.
Admitted to bar, 1886.
The family subsequently moved to Wales where the name "Kravet" was changed to "Cravath". The weaver"s son, Ezekiel, emigrated to Massachusetts in the middle of the 17th century. The word Kravet is of Sorb, Czechoslovakian or Polish origin - meaning "tailor" (from "kroit" to cut).
He joined the law firm of Blatchford, Seward & Griswold in 1899.
His book of business included: Bethlehem Steel, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Kuhn, Loeb & Company, Chemical Bank, East. R. Squibb & Sons, Columbia Gas & Electric, Studebaker Corporation His name was added to the firm"s moniker in 1901.
Cravath was the authoritative head of the firm from 1906 until his death in 1940, and his formal statement of his conceptions of proper management of a law office still controls its operations. Even today, that law firm structure is widely called "the Cravath System."
Foreign Cravath, the conflict served as an epiphany, building a deep concern with foreign policy that dominated his remaining career.
Fiercely Anglophile, he demanded American intervention in the war against Germany.
His goal was to build close Anglo-American cooperation that would be the guiding principle of postwar international organization. He was one of the founding officers of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. Cravath became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera in 1931.
He died in 1940.
Cravath served as a member and Chairman of the Fisk Board of Trustee’s for over thirty years and until his death in 1940. He had a daughter: Vera Agnes Huntington Cravath (1895–1985). She was born on August 28, 1895.
Vera Cravath married at least twice: to Lieutenant
James South. Larkin, about 1917, and to William Francis Gibbs in 1927. She died in Rockport, Massachusetts in July 1985.
Cravath was highly influential in foreign policy as a leader of the "Atlanticist" movement, comprising influential upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeast, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism.
Member Cravath, de-Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood. Member, representing United States Treasury, of “House Mission” to the Inter-Allied War Conference, Paris, December 1917.
Married Agnes Huntington, November 15, 1892.