Lloyd Kirkham Garrison (November 19, 1897 – October 2, 1991) was an American lawyer. He was Dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, but also served as chairman of the "first" National Labor Relations Board, chairman of the National War Labor Board, and chair of the New York City Board of Education. He was active in a number of social causes, was a highly successful attorney on Wall Street, and for a short time was a special assistant to the United States Attorney General.
Early life and education Garrison was born on November 19, 1897, in New York City to Lloyd McKim and Alice (Kirkham) Garrison.Current Biography Yearbook, p. 230. His great-grandfather was William Lloyd Garrison, the famous American abolitionist, and his grandfather was Wendell Phillips Garrison, who once was literary editor of The Nation (a left-wing magazine of politics and opinion). His father died of typhoid when Garrison was a child.Garrison, p. 125. His grandfather, who knew many Civil War-era abolitionists (Frederick Douglass was a frequent guest in the Garrison home in Roxbury, 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. He graduated from St. Paul's School, a college-preparatory boarding school in New Hampshire. He attended Harvard College, but quit school in 1917 to enlist in the United States Navy after the U.S. entered World War I."Labor: Majority Tool," Time, September 10, 1934. He returned to Harvard in 1919, and in 1922 he graduated with a Bachelor's degree from Harvard and a law degree from Harvard Law School.
He married Ellen Jay, a Boston socialite and direct descendant of Founding Father and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, on June 22, 1921.Who's Who in Labor, p. 408."Ellen Garrison, 96," The New York Times, June 6, 1995. The couple had three children: Clarinda, Ellen, and Lloyd.
Early career and federal service He moved to New York City in 1922, and was recruited by Elihu Root himself to join the prominent firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland.Daniels, "Lloyd K. Garrison, Lawyer, Dies," The New York Times, October 3, 1991. He joined the National Urban League in 1924, after two African American men asked him to be treasurer of the nascent organization. He immediately agreed, and later said that it was this organization which made him aware of the true extent of racial discrimination in the United States. In 1926 he opened his own practice. He investigated "ambulance chasing" and bankruptcy fraud among the city's lawyers on behalf of the New York City Bar Association, and his work became so well known that in 1930 President Herbert Hoover appointed him special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General (where he served on a federal commission investigating bankruptcy fraud nationwide).Butzel, p. 215.
Garrison was named Acting Dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1929, and Dean in 1932.Van Alstyne, p. 326. As dean, Garrison led efforts to significantly revamp the curriculum, implementing a functionalist 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.Hove and Biebel, p. 734-735. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt abolished the National 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."New Labor Board Starts Its Work," The New York Times, July 10, 1934; Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960, 1985, p. 127. Although he served on the Board for only four months, Garrison led the Board in deciding Houde Engineering Corp., 1 NLRB 87 (1934), a landmark ruling in American labor law that required employers to bargain exclusively with the representatives elected by a majority of employees.This principle of labor law was later incorporated into the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. See: Gross, The Making of the..., p. 89-92; Morris, p. 48-50. 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."Frank Says Garrison Will Return As Dean," The New York Times, September 16, 1934; "Garrison Resigns Labor Board Post," The New York Times, October 3, 1934; Gross, The Making of the..., p. 99. He served as president of the Association of American Law Schools for the 1936-1937 term.Russell Sage Foundation, p. 90. Roosevelt turned to Garrison again when he established a national mediation board in an (unsuccessful) attempt to quell the Little Steel Strike of 1937."Steel Mediators Trained in Labor Troubles," The New York Times, June 18, 1937; "Powers of Board Defined in Order," The New York Times, June 18, 1937; Stark, "Mills Are Assailed," The New York Times, June 25, 1937; "Mediation Fails, Steel Board Quits," The New York Times, June 30, 1937. Roosevelt later considered Garrison for the Supreme Court of the United States after Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter resigned on June 2, 1937.Liman and Israel, p. 18.Newman, p. 343; Frank, p. 59. Garrison received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1938."New Guggenheim Awards," The New York Times, April 28, 1938.
Garrison took a leave of absence again from Wisconsin to serve on the National 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.Gross, The Reshaping of the..., p. 243. Initially, Garrison was the War Labor Board's executive director and chief counsel."Rotating Chairman Proposed on Labor," Associated Press, January 7, 1942; "President Names Labor Alternates," The New York Times, January 27, 1942. He was promoted to alternative public member in January 1944."T.W. Kheel Named Director of WLB," The New York Times, January 2, 1944; "Garrison Is Put on WLB," Associated Press, January 3, 1944. A month later, he was elevated yet again to full public member."Names Garrison to WLB," The New York Times, February 10, 1944. In the NWLB's final year of existence, he was its chairman.Polenberg, p. xxxi; Dorsen, p. 46.
Later career 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). 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, the United States Supreme Court appointed Garrison as a special master in Georgia 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 in Georgia v. Pennsylvania Railroad Co., 331 US 788 (1947).Coleman and Bliss, p. 101. In the late 1940s, Garrison served as legal counsel to the Field Foundation (created by his friend Marshall Field III from funds he inherited from his father, who founded the Marshall Field's department store)Schwartz, p. 139. 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 the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.
In 1953, as a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's National Legal Committee, Garrison advised Langston Hughes when Hughes was subpoenaed by Senator Joseph McCarthy to appear before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to testify about communist influences on his writings.Hughes, De Santis, Hubbard, and Rampersad, p. 12; Trussell, "Dashiell Hammett Silent At Inquiry," The New York Times, March 27, 1953.Rampersad, p. 209. That same year, he hired Pauli Murray, one of the first female African American lawyers in the country, as an associate at his firm.Gaines, p. 112. With John W. Davis, he represented Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer before a panel of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954. Oppenheimer had met Garrison in April 1953 when Garrison had joined the board of directors of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Garrison brought Davis in as Oppenheimer's co-counsel. Their defense of Oppenheimer was unsuccessful, however, and Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. Along with Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., Garrison also represented playwright Arthur Miller before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and in Miller's fight against his contempt of Congress conviction in 1957.Bernstein, p. 153; Parrish, p. 293; Glassman, p. 71; "Miller Declines to Identify Reds," United Press International, July 8, 1956; Lewis, "House Unit Asks Miller Citation," The New York Times, July 11, 1956; "Miller and Nathan Disavow Contempt," The New York Times, March 2, 1957. In the 1950s, Garrison was also a supporter of the Highlander Research and Education Center, a liberal leadership training school and cultural center.Adams and Horton, p. 126-127; Glen, p. 220.
Garrison also remained active in areas outside the law after 1945. From 1947 to 1952 he served as President of the National Urban League. He was a close friend of Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, and strongly supported Stevenson's campaigns for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956. From 1958 to 1961, Garrison worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Finletter, and Herbert H. Lehman to break the power of Tammany Hall-backed politician Carmine DeSapio in New York City politics.Newfield and Barrett, p. 113-114. 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.Hunt, "Gains in Primary Claimed For Governor and Mayor," The New York Times, September 7, 1963; Arnold, "Koch Keeps Leadership of 'Village' by 164 Votes," The New York Times, June 3, 1964. Garrison was a long-time member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served on its board of directors from the late 1930s until at least 1965.Stern and Green, p. 241.Bennett, p. 48-49.Markmann, p. 441; Kutulas, p. 31. Over the years, he was also a member of the board of trustees for Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Howard University. While serving on the Howard board, he helped write a report which significantly restructured the school's administrative procedures.Niehoff, p. 129. He was also a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the New York City Bar Association.
New York City public school service From 1961 to 1967, Garrison served on the New York City Board of Education, and was its president from 1965 to 1967. In 1961, the New York State Legislature enacted legislation dissolving the existing New York City Public Schools school board and establishing a new, nine-member "reform" Board of Education.Ravitch, p. 263-264. On September 18, 1961, New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. appointed Garrison to be a member of the new board.Crowell, "Mayor Appoints 9 Civic Leaders As School Board," The New York Times, September 19, 1961. The Board of Education elected Garrison its president and chair on July 21, 1965.Currivan, "Garrison to Head the School Board," The New York Times, July 9, 1965; "Garrison Elected School Board Head," The New York Times, July 22, 1965.