Lloyd K. Garrison | |
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| Born | Lloyd Kirkham Garrison (1897-11-19)November 19, 1897 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | October 2, 1991(1991-10-02) (aged 93) New York City, U.S. |
| Education | Harvard University (AB,LLB) |
| Occupation(s) | Attorney; Civil servant |
| Spouse | Ellen Jay Garrison |
| Children | Clarinda, Ellen, and Lloyd McKim |
Lloyd Kirkham Garrison (November 19, 1897 – October 2, 1991) was an Americanlawyer. He was Dean of theUniversity of Wisconsin Law School, but also served as chairman of the "first"National Labor Relations Board, chairman of theNational War Labor Board, and chair of theNew York City Board of Education. He was active in a number of social causes, was a highly successful attorney onWall Street, and for a short time was a special assistant to theUnited States Attorney General.
Garrison was born on November 19, 1897, inNew York City to Lloyd McKim and Alice (Kirkham) Garrison.[1] Hisgreat-grandfather wasWilliam Lloyd Garrison, the famous Americanabolitionist, and his grandfather wasWendell Phillips Garrison, who once wasliterary editor ofThe Nation (aleft-wing magazine of politics and opinion).[1] His father died oftyphoid when Garrison was a child, and he was largely raised by his grandfather, Wendell.[2] His grandfather, who knew manyCivil War-era abolitionists (Frederick Douglass was a frequent guest in the Garrison home inRoxbury, Massachusetts, and Wendell Garrison knew him personally), regaled young Lloyd with many stories about the great struggles for civil rights and liberties of the 19th century.[2] He graduated fromSt. Paul's School, a college-preparatory boarding school inNew Hampshire.[1] He attendedHarvard College, but quit school in 1917 to enlist in theUnited States Navy after the U.S. entered World War I.[3] He returned to Harvard in 1919, and in 1922 he graduated with aBachelor's degree from Harvard and alaw degree fromHarvard Law School.[3]
He married Ellen Jay, aBoston socialite and direct descendant ofFounding Father andSupreme Court Chief JusticeJohn Jay, on June 22, 1921.[4][5] The couple had three children: Clarinda, Ellen, and Lloyd.[4]
He moved to New York City in 1922, and was recruited byElihu Root himself to join the prominent firm ofRoot, Clark, Buckner & Howland.[1][6] He joined theNational Urban League in 1924, after twoAfrican American men asked him to be treasurer of the nascent organization.[2] He immediately agreed, and later said that it was this organization which made him aware of the true extent ofracial discrimination in the United States.[6] In 1926 he opened his own practice.[3] He investigated "ambulance chasing" and bankruptcy fraud among the city's lawyers on behalf of theNew York City Bar Association, and his work became so well known that in 1930 PresidentHerbert Hoover appointed him special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General (where he served on a federal commission investigating bankruptcy fraud nationwide).[3][6][7]
Garrison was named Acting Dean of theUniversity of Wisconsin Law School in 1929, and Dean in 1932.[8] As dean, Garrison led efforts to significantly revamp the curriculum, implementing afunctionalist approach to the study of law, restructuring the first year to emphasize the origins and development of the American legal system, and creating a number of short courses in current law topics so that students would be prepared for the legal issues they encountered immediately upon graduation.[9] When PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt abolished theNational Labor Board in June 1934 and replaced it with the "first"National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), he appointed Garrison as the Board's first chairman.[10] Although he served on the Board for only four months, Garrison led the Board in decidingHoude Engineering Corp., 1 NLRB 87 (1934), a landmark ruling in American labor law that required employers tobargain exclusively with the representatives elected by a majority of employees.[11] Garrison, however, agreed to serve as the chair only to get the board up and running, and he resigned on October 2, 1934, to resume his position at the University of Wisconsin Law School.[12] He served as president of theAssociation of American Law Schools for the 1936-1937 term.[13] Roosevelt turned to Garrison again when he established a national mediation board in an (unsuccessful) attempt to quell theLittle Steel Strike of 1937.[14] Roosevelt later considered Garrison for theSupreme Court of the United States afterAssociate JusticeWillis Van Devanter resigned on June 2, 1937.[15][16] Garrison received aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1938.[17]
Garrison took a leave of absence again from Wisconsin to serve on theNational War Labor Board (NWLB) during World War II. The NWLB was established on January 12, 1942, by President Roosevelt to oversee war-related labor relations for the duration of the war and ensure that war-related production was not disrupted by labor disputes.[18] Initially, Garrison was the War Labor Board's executive director and chief counsel.[19] He was promoted to alternative public member in January 1944.[20] A month later, he was elevated yet again to full public member.[21] In the NWLB's final year of existence, he was its chairman.[22]
Garrison did not return to the University of Wisconsin after the war. Instead, he joined the New York City law firm of Weiss & Wharton (now renamed, after the addition of several partners,Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison).[7][15] Although he primarily practiced corporate law for the rest of his life, Garrison continued to represent high-profile clients in a variety of cases. In 1945, theUnited States Supreme Court appointed Garrison as aspecial master inGeorgia v. Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 324 U.S. 439 (1945), and his hearings and report formed the basis for the Court's decision two years later inGeorgia v. Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 331 US 788 (1947).[23] In the late 1940s, Garrison served as legal counsel to theField Foundation (created by his friendMarshall Field III from funds he inherited from his father, who founded theMarshall Field'sdepartment store)[24] In 1948, Garrison served as a member of the board of directors of a pilot project established by the Foundation to build non-discriminatory low-income housing in theGreenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.[24]
In 1953, as a member of theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People's National Legal Committee, Garrison advisedLangston Hughes when Hughes was subpoenaed by SenatorJoseph McCarthy to appear before theSenate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to testify aboutcommunist influences on his writings.[25][26] That same year, he hiredPauli Murray, one of the first female African American lawyers in the country, as an associate at his firm.[27] WithJohn W. Davis, he represented Dr.J. Robert Oppenheimer before apanel of theAtomic Energy Commission in 1954.[7] Oppenheimer had met Garrison in April 1953 when Garrison had joined the board of directors of theInstitute for Advanced Study atPrinceton.[28] Garrison brought Davis in as Oppenheimer's co-counsel.[29] Their defense of Oppenheimer was unsuccessful, however, and Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. Along withJoseph L. Rauh, Jr., Garrison also represented playwrightArthur Miller before theHouse Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and in Miller's fight against hiscontempt of Congress conviction in 1957.[26][30] In the 1950s, Garrison was also a supporter of theHighlander Research and Education Center, a liberal leadership training school and cultural center.[31]
Garrison also remained active in areas outside the law after 1945. From 1947 to 1952 he served as President of the National Urban League.[7] He was a close friend ofIllinois GovernorAdlai Stevenson, and strongly supported Stevenson's campaigns for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956.[6] From 1958 to 1961, Garrison worked closely withEleanor Roosevelt,Thomas Finletter, andHerbert H. Lehman to break the power ofTammany Hall-backed politicianCarmine DeSapio in New York City politics.[6][32] The efforts of Garrison and the other finally broke Tammany Hall's grip on the city for good:Ed Koch defeated De Sapio by 41 votes in 1963 and by 164 votes in a rematch in 1964, and De Sapio's political career ended.[32][33] Garrison was a long-time member of theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, and served on its board of directors from the late 1930s until at least 1965.[28][29][34] Over the years, he was also a member of the board of trustees for Harvard University,Sarah Lawrence College, andHoward University.[6] While serving on the Howard board, he helped write a report which significantly restructured the school's administrative procedures.[35] He was also a long-time member of theCouncil of Foreign Relations and the New York City Bar Association.[6]
From 1961 to 1967, Garrison served on the New York City Board of Education, and was its president from 1965 to 1967. In 1961, theNew York State Legislature enacted legislation dissolving the existingNew York City Public Schoolsschool board and establishing a new, nine-member "reform" Board of Education.[36] On September 18, 1961,New York City MayorRobert F. Wagner, Jr. appointed Garrison to be a member of the new board.[37] The Board of Education elected Garrison its president and chair on July 21, 1965.[38]
The 67-year-old Garrison was president of the Board of Education during a time of significant change for New York City public schools. In 1961, teachers in the city schools had struck and won the right to form alabor union, and subsequently they elected theUnited Federation of Teachers to be its collective bargaining representative. Major corruption scandals had also rocked the school system, and for the first time the schools revealed that the quality of education in the system had slipped badly at the same time thatwhite flight had taken most high-performing middle-class students out of the system while large numbers of educationally disadvantaged minority and immigrant children entered it.[39]
Due to his age and declining health, Garrison retired from the Board of Education in the summer of 1967.[40] The city's new Mayor,John Lindsay, appointed Garrison to a Mayor's Advisory Panel on the Decentralization of the New York City Schools.[41] The Advisory Panel recommended extensive devolution of control over the city's public schools to locally elected neighborhood school boards. One locally controlled board in theOcean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood began violating the union's contract in order to bring in a new teaching staff. This led tothree strikes which engulfed the entire city school system.[42] The devolution experiment ended after the strikes. The result was not unsurprising. Garrison had chaired a highly structured public hearing on devolution in 1966. After a local African American woman attempted to speak (even though she was not on the witness list), Garrison ruled her out of order—causing the hearing to dissolve into a near-riot which required police (and for Garrison and the other Board members to scurry out a back door for their own safety).[43]
Also in the mid-1960s, Garrison was also involved in a landmark court case on environmental law. In May 1963, theConsolidated Edison energy company proposed constructing ahydroelectric power generating station on top ofStorm King Mountain, a famousHudson River valley landmark.[44] The Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference formed to oppose the project.[45] In March 1965, theFederal Power Commission, which had licensing authority over all hydroelectric projects in the United States, granted approval for the project to proceed.[46] The Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference asked the agency to reconsider, based on the significant environmental impact and harm to scenic vistas the project would create, but the agency refused.[47]
The Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference hired Garrison as its attorney, and he quickly filed suit in a federal court of appeals to stop the project.[48] The court of appeals blocked the project on December 29, 1965, but the energy company appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.[49] The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the injunction against the power plant to stand.[50] The decision inScenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, 354 F.2d 608 (1965),cert. den'd., 384 US 941 (1966), is a landmark case inAmerican environmental law, because it established for the first time that citizens do not need to show economic harm from a project but havestanding to sue merely if the project creates environmental and aesthetic harms.[51]
Garrison remained active in his law firm until the end of his life. He died at his home inManhattan in New York City of aheart failure on October 2, 1991.[6] He was survived by his wife and three children.[6]
The New York City Bar Association established the Lloyd K. Garrison Student Leadership Program after his death. The program awards internships to about 15 students from alternative New York City high schools each year.[52]
In the 2023 filmOppenheimer, directed byChristopher Nolan, Garrison was portrayed by actorMacon Blair.[53]
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