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Paul Drennan Cravath
Find A Grave Memorial ID # 6614519
Cravath was a prominent Manhattan lawyer and the presiding partner (1906-1940) of the law firm known today as Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Biography
The earliest known male ancestor of Paul Cravath was a weaver in Germany named Kravet who in 1635 married a French Huguenot named La Bodouine. 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, Czech or Polish origin meaning "tailor" (from "kroit" to cut).
Paul graduated from Columbia Law School in 1886 and was awarded first Municipal Law prize.
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, E. R. Squibb & Sons, Columbia Gas & Electric, Studebaker Corp. 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 control its operations. Even today, that law firm structure is widely called the Cravath System.
Cravath was Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse's attorney in their battle with Thomas Edison over the patent of the lightbulb. The IP fight provided inspiration to Graham Moore, who wrote The Last Days of Night, a work of historical fiction now being made into a movie.
NOTE: The legal case was that Thomas Edison had patented a lightbulb and that George Westinghouse had invented a better one, but the U.S. patent office had ruled Westinghouse’s bulb violated Edison’s patent. Edison was demanding $1 billion in damages. Cravath’s job was to persuade the courts, despite the patent office ruling, his client’s bulb was different from Edison's bulb.
Foreign policy
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. For 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. The founding President of the CFR was John W. Davis, a name partner of the law firm now known as Davis Polk, while Cravath served as the inaugural Vice President. Cravath became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera in 1931. He died in 1940.
Fisk University
Cravath spent most of his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father Rev. Erastus Milo Cravath, D.D. was a co-founder and the first President of Fisk University from 1875-1900. Cravath served as a Trustee and Chairman of the Board of Trustee’s for over thirty years.
Other Activities:
Cravath served as a director of the the New York Symphony Society (now known as the New York Philharmonic) and the Juilliard School of Music (now known as The Juillard School). He was profiled by The New Yorker in its first edition on January 1932.
Legacy
He had a daughter: Vera Agnes Huntington Cravath (1895–1985). She was born on August 28, 1895. Vera Cravath married at least twice: to Lt. James Satterthwaite Larkin, about 1917 and to William Francis Gibbs in 1927. She died in Rockport, Massachusetts in July 1985.
| 1861 |
July 14, 1861
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Berlin Heights, Erie County, Ohio, United States
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| 1895 |
August 28, 1895
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Locust Valley, Nassau County, New York, United States
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| 1940 |
July 1, 1940
Age 78
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Locust Valley, Nassau County, New York, United States
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