Silas Strawn

February 15, 1866 (age 79)

Ottawa, Illinois, United States

In 1889 Strawn was admitted to the Illinois bar, practicing initially in the office of Bull and Strawn, where Lester Strawn, his first cousin, was a junior partner. Beginning in 1892, Strawn practiced in Chicago at the offices of Winston and Meagher and, in 1894, he was made a partner. His ties with the firm, like those with Chicago, were to be lifelong. Strawn's firm - Winston, Strawn, Black, and Towner - one of the oldest and one of the largest and most lucrative in Chicago, engaged in general practice. Its clientele was generally corporate, with railroads supplying a large portion of its business. At one time or another, the firm represented the Chicago Great Western Railroad Company, the Union Stock Yards & Transit Company, the Michigan Central Railroad Company, the Chicago and Alton Railroad, the Chicago, Indianapolis, and Louisville Railway Company, and the Nickel Plate Railroad. Other corporate clients of note included the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, Wilson and Company, the Pullman Company, and Montgomery Ward. Strawn and his firm's position in Chicago also led to other relationships with corporate interests. Strawn took a particular interest in Montgomery Ward, serving for twelve years on the executive board and, for a few months in 1920, as president of the corporation. Strawn was a member of the bar of the City of New York, as well as a member, officer, and active participant in the appropriate local, state, and national bar associations. His tenure in this last office was most distinguished by a continuation of his perennial campaign to raise educational requirements for admission to the bar. He attended the foreign conventions of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1923, 1927, 1931, and 1933 as an American committee delegate, an activity that helped earn his election to an honorary vice-presidency in the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1928. From 1930 to 1933 Strawn was chairman of the American committee and during those same years he was also honored as president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, serving in that office from 1931 to 1932 and on that organization's senior council from 1932 to 1940. Strawn's interest in international affairs also led in 1925 to his appointment, by President Calvin Coolidge, as one of the two American commissioners to represent United States interests at the Chinese tariff conferences at Peking, held in accordance with the provisions of the nine-power treaty adopted at the 1921-1922 Washington conference for the limitation of armaments. Apparently at Strawn's own suggestion, Coolidge also appointed him sole commissioner of the United States on the international commission to investigate extrater-ritorial jurisdiction in China. Both commissions failed in the face of the Chinese revolution, but the American delegation and Strawn acquitted themselves well at what Kellogg called an "impossible" task. Rather typically, Strawn was elected presiding officer of the Extraterritoriality Commission. However, it was not typical of Strawn to accept the China mission. Despite acceptance of elective office in private and quasi-public associations, he did not hunger for public office, either elective or appointive. The reason he and Coolidge got on so well, he once wrote Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, was that the president knew that, unlike so many others he saw, Strawn had no desire for a job. The work in China seems to have been uncharacteristically accepted because of its relatively short tenure, because of a strong interest in the legal problems of Chinese governance, and because of his friendships with Coolidge and Kellogg. Strawn much preferred to work out solutions to public problems through his established private organizations or through ad hoc committees pragmatically organized to meet specific problems. In this spirit, Strawn organized and led citizen's committees to fight organized Chicago gangsters, to straighten the Chicago River, and to provide tax relief and financial reform for Chicago citizens after the Great Depression. Strawn's later years were marked with both personal distinction and disappointment. Strawn died of a heart attack while vacationing in Palm Beach, Florida.

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