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Salmon Oliver Levinson was born in Noblesville, Indiana, the second son and youngest of five children of Jewish parents, Newman David and Minnie (Newman) Levinson, both natives of Germany. He was originally named Solomon but later changed the spelling. His father, who had come to America in 1848, owned a general dry goods store and had a reputation as a scrupulously honest merchant. His mother was active in local charities.
After attending public school in Noblesville, Levinson applied to Yale, but was rejected for lack of Greek. He entered the University of Chicago in 1883, but after dropping out in 1886 to earn money, he again applied to Yale and was admitted as a senior. Later he studied at the Chicago College of Law, from which he received the LL. B. degree in 1891.
In 1888 Levinson read law in the firm of Moses and Newman in Chicago, of which his uncle Jacob Newman was a partner. Forming a legal partnership in Chicago with Benjamin V. Becker, he built up a successful practice, and soon became a specialist in the financial reorganization of business corporations. In 1908 he straightened out the personal affairs of George Westinghouse and soon afterward those of the troubled Westinghouse companies. From his legal fees and from investments in the corporations he organized, he amassed a large fortune. Levinson did little trial work, preferring to negotiate a reasonable settlement by informal discussions out of court. He regarded a lawsuit as a miniature war, in which there was waste of every kind; it was to this conviction that he later attributed his interest in the settlement of international disputes. That interest took shape during World War I.
With the outbreak of the war, although his legal career was then at its peak, Levinson diverted his energies to the promotion of peace. At first he tried to bring together the two main bodies of neutral opinion in America, led by the pro-German financier Jacob Schiff and the pro-Allied educator Charles W. Eliot; but the increasing rapacity of German submarine warfare soon ended this effort. He then turned to the idea to which he was to devote the remainder of his life. As set forth in a New Republic article ("The Legal Status of War, " Mar. 9, 1918), this was the concept that war should be stripped of its legitimacy by making it illegal. For a time Levinson hoped that such a provision would be embodied in the peace settlement at Versailles, but when the covenant of the League of Nations failed to embody his principle, he bitterly opposed the treaty and the League, and, later, the League-affiliated World Court. To Levinson the "outlawry" of war was the basic first step to peace. Beyond that he envisaged a plan, never clearly spelled out, for the codification of international law. The third step in his peace program was the establishment of an international court, an independent institution to be modeled on the Supreme Court of the United States. Those nations which refused to recognize the "inherent and affirmative jurisdiction" of the court and resorted to war would outlaw themselves, thereby enabling the community of nations to invoke against them the inalienable right of self-defense. Levinson supported Warren G. Harding in the presidential race of 1920, despite that candidate's reluctance to endorse his idea of the outlawry of war; and in 1921 he vainly attempted to persuade participants in the Washington Disarmament Conference to consider his proposals. That December he organized the American Committee for the Outlawry of War and launched a campaign to carry the issue to the public and the molders of opinion.
Over the next few years he gained important adherents--the philosopher John Dewey, the reformer Raymond Robins, Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century, and Senator William E. Borah. Levinson wrote innumerable letters and interviewed scores of public officials; in 1923 he hired a publicist to spread his views in Europe. His group did not always enjoy the support of other peace workers--a "harmony agreement" in 1925 with the pro-League forces led by Prof. James T. Shotwell of Columbia proved short-lived--but the outlawry advocates made up in persistence what they lacked in numbers.
In April 1927 Levinson went to Europe and for the next year worked actively to effect a Franco-American agreement embodying the principle of outlawry. His efforts were finally rewarded when the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in 1928. This multinational treaty was ratified by the United States Senate in 1929. When President Herbert Hoover proclaimed the pact in a White House ceremony, Levinson was the only invited guest.
He adhered to the Jewish religion, but in later life belonged to the Community Church in New York City as well as to Sinai Congregation in Chicago. Levinson died at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago of coronary sclerosis and was buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago. Outlawry of war failed in the 1930's because of the lack of machinery for enforcement, but the failure was not merely Levinson's; it was that of his generation, for after World War I many people believed that it was possible to rid the world of war through words.
Levinson was an initiator of the “outlawry of war” campaign in the United States and was instrumental in drafting the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928). In 1929 he donated $50, 000 to the University of Idaho to establish the William Edgar Borah Outlawry of War Foundation. He was twice proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Levinson was twice married: on August 9, 1894, to Helen Bartlett Haire, by whom he had three children, Horace Clifford, Ronald Bartlett, and Helen Winthrop; and on January 10, 1914, ten years after his first wife's death, to Ruth Langworthy, by whom he had one son, John Oliver.
