Frederic René Coudert was born on May 7, 1898 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Frederic René Coudert, Sr. , and Alice Tracy Wilmerding. He was a member of a prominent American family, and his father was a distinguished international lawyer.
He attended the Browning School in New York City and the Morristown School in New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University with a B. A. in 1918 and from Columbia Law School with an LL. B. in 1922.
From 1917 to 1918, he served as a first lieutenant in the Twenty-seventh Division of the 105th United States Infantry.
Admitted to the bar in 1923, Coudert first joined the New York City firm of Cravath and Henderson.
In 1924, he entered his family's international law firm, Coudert Brothers.
In the period 1924-1925 he served as assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and in 1929 was the Republican candidate for district attorney of New York County.
Coudert was elected to the New York State Senate in 1938, representing New York City's seventeenth congressional district until 1946. He served as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee and the Committee on General Laws.
He sponsored legislation establishing faculty tenure at the city colleges (1938) and a law prohibiting multiple jobs in the schools intended to broaden the employment base (1939). He also sponsored bills to remove notarization of income tax returns, to repeal the one-cent city cigarette tax, and to reorganize the city's health department pension fund.
The Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Procedures and Methods of Allocating State Moneys for Public School Purposes and Subversive Activities, which was established by a legislative resolution of March 29, 1940, consisted of a subcommittee on allocation of state funds chaired by Assemblyman Herbert Rapp, and a subcommittee on subversive activity, chaired by Coudert.
In September 1940, the Coudert subcommittee began interviewing or interrogating nearly 1, 000 individuals in private sessions. The text of these sessions was never made public. Fewer than one hundred witnesses testified at public hearings beginning December 2, 1940. When the subcommittee released names of individuals, it insisted that it was citing only those who had been identified as Communists by at least two persons, generally former party members. Students were not asked to testify in public.
The Coudert subcommittee publicly identified as Communists sixty-nine public school or college teachers, primarily at Brooklyn and City Colleges, and stated that it had information on more than four hundred others who had been identified by one individual during the private sessions. Coudert pointed out that the subcommittee's investigation affected only a small percentage of teachers. The subcommittee sought to subpoena the membership list of the New York Teachers Union of the American Federation of Teachers, but the union refused until forced to do so by the courts. The teachers union itself came under suspicion. Although the list was never released to the public after being turned over to the subcommittee in January 1941, witnesses were directed to review it prior to their testimony. The subcommittee's work was supported by the boards of education and higher education, but when the subcommittee refused to provide more information on its findings, several officials, including the presidents of the board of education and Brooklyn College, were provoked. The subcommittee concluded that neither of the boards had really faced the issue, nor had they properly disciplined the officer of the Teachers Union who had withheld the membership list.
As reported in the New York Times, board of education president James Marshall wrote in a letter to the editor that the subcommittee's report had "done far more to break down American morale and the confidence of our people in American institutions than the handful of Communists in a system of more than 30, 000 loyal teachers. " Of the sixty-nine publicly named teachers, eleven resigned, the contracts of six who never had tenure were not renewed, nine were dismissed, and twenty underwent trials at City College. The cases of a number of the remaining accused individuals were reopened by the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in the early 1950's.
Along with the subcommittee counsel, Coudert was the only subcommittee member to attend the hearings on a regular basis. When he was invited to run for Congress after a member's death, he declined because of the hearings. He then was elected to Congress in 1946.
Representing the traditionally Republican seventeenth ("Silk Stocking") congressional district located on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Coudert compiled a conservative record. While serving on the Appropriations Committee, one of the key House committees, Coudert was able to focus particular attention on limiting federal spending. Winning reelection by increasingly smaller majorities, Coudert retired in 1958 after his sixth term.
He then served as a member of Governor Nelson Rockefeller's Temporary State Commission on Governmental Operations of the City of New York from 1959 to 1961. He was chairman of William F. Buckley, Jr. 's New York City mayoral campaign in 1965. Coudert retired from Coudert Brothers in 1972 due to declining health.
He died in New York City.
His first marriage, to Mary K. Callery, a sculptor, took place on June 23, 1923. They had one child and divorced in 1931. He married Paula Murray in October 1931; they had two children.
