James N. Rosenberg (1874–1970) was an American lawyer, artist, humanitarian, and writer. In law, he is remembered for his handling of the collapsed business empire of the so-called "Swedish Match King," Ivar Kreuger. In art, he is remembered for two types of pictures, on the one hand, realist landscapes of the Adirondack Mountains in which critics saw a strong feeling for nature and a refined rather than exuberant sensibility, and on the other, dramatic scenes that, as one critic said, "recall the Wall Street crash of 1929, the triumph of 'Ironism' in his native Pittsburgh and the potential terror of 'atomism' in the nuclear age." As a humanist, he worked to protect freedom of speech, end the persecution of minority communities, aid refugees, and mitigate conflict among nations. In this work, he is remembered for leading a group of civic, religious, labor, racial, and business leaders whose single goal was the passage and subsequent ratification of the United Nations Genocide Convention.
Early life and training
Rosenberg was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania on November 20, 1874. In 1879, his family moved to a building on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. As a child, he attended nearby Ethical Culture School and later became a boarding student at Gunnery Preparatory School in rural Connecticut. Both were known for liberal educational policies. He received his undergraduate education at Columbia College and upon graduating in 1895 entered Columbia Law School from which he obtained an LL.B. degree in 1898. During the summer of 1912, he attended a session of an art school in Woodstock, New York, but, as explained below, left after only two or three weeks.
Career in law
Rosenberg partnered with other Columbia Law graduates in a career that spanned nearly half a century. His specialty was the law of bankruptcy. After receiving his L.L.B. degree in 1898, Rosenberg joined the New York Bar. In 1900 he formed a law partnership with Joseph Proskauer, an attorney who had received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia College in 1896 and his law degree from Columbia Law in 1899. In the new practice Rosenberg specialized in bankruptcy law. During the years Rosenberg was studying law at Columbia, the United States Congress debated and finally, in 1898, passed a new law, the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, to regulate the dealings of insolvent businesses and their creditors. The law gave federal courts jurisdiction to oversee bankruptcy proceedings and it established a new court-appointed law officer, the referee in bankruptcy to act as the court's agent. One of Rosenberg's earliest court appointments occurred in September 1900, when the New York Supreme Court appointed him receiver in a claim made by a brewing company against a sign painting firm. In June 1901, he was appointed referee in a claim against a life assurance society.
A few years later both Rosenberg and Proskauer joined the firm of James, Schell & Elkus. Although the firm continued to use the old name, both James (Edward C. James, 1841-1901) and Schell (Edward Paul Schell, 1836-1901) had by that time died. The firm's remaining partner, Abram Isaac Elkus, had graduated from Columbia Law School in 1888. In 1903 James, Schell & Elkus was named permanent counsel for a merchants' association that pooled its resources in order to take legal action against bankrupts who attempted to defraud their creditors. In that year Rosenberg was attorney for the creditors in the bankruptcy of a company that manufactured boilers and other steam appliances. His investigation showed that before the bankruptcy had been declared the president had taken a large sum of money out of the business for his personal use.
In 1912 Rosenberg and another lawyer left James, Schell & Elkus to form a partnership called Rosenberg and Levis. In announcing the new firm the two men said they would be taking over the Elkus bankruptcy department and would continue as attorneys for the merchants' association. Rosenberg's partner, Robert P. Levis (1878–1943) was a lawyer in the Elkus firm who had graduated from Columbia Law School in 1903. He was, like Rosenberg, a bankruptcy specialist who received court appointments to act as receiver of bankrupts' assets.
At this time, Rosenberg was named counsel for the receivers in a bankruptcy that was, as he later said, the biggest and best of his young career. The United States Motor Company was a large conglomerate of automobile manufacturers. It was deeply in debt and at the end of 1912 became insolvent. Early in 1913, the Maxwell Motor Company survived the breakup of the conglomerate (and would later evolve into the Chrysler Corporation). At this time, the head of the reorganization committee asked Rosenberg to replace Maxwell's retiring president, Benjamin Briscoe, move to Detroit, and manage the company. Rosenberg later said he rejected this "tempting proposal to become an industrial leader" from his conviction "that to accept would have meant farewell to the kind of life I wanted to lead."
The following year Rosenberg and Levis accepted Wilbur L. Ball as a partner. Wilbur Laing Ball (1874–1941), then a bankruptcy lawyer and later an insurance specialist, had been a classmate of Rosenberg's in Columbia Law School (LL.B. 1898). Rosenberg remained with Ball after Levis departed in 1917. Not long after this realignment, Rosenberg was named receiver in a stock market scandal. In 1920 a group of influential investors hired Rosenberg to counter an attempt by the head of the Stutz Motor Company to manipulate the price of the company's shares. The investors had all been short-selling Stutz, that is to say they placed bets that the share price would fall by borrowing large blocks of stock for which they promised to pay at a future date. Their gain on the short sale would be the difference between the price of shares when borrowed and the price when the borrowing period ended (and the shares were sold). After the company's president, Allan A. Ryan, used his control over the remaining (non-shorted) shares to drive the price up, the short-sellers were expected to pay a great deal more than they had hoped. Ryan's control over the remaining shares and consequent ability to manipulate their price was called a corner and thus this incident came to be known as the "Stutz Corner." The event was later called "one of the most sensational operations in market history." Rosenberg helped to engineer a settlement between Ryan and the group of investors through mediation by a committee of bankers (all of whom were to be "men of prominence and standing in the community, who would have the confidence of all parties").
In 1925, the partnership, now known as Rosenberg, Ball & Marvin, was said to be "the firm which did the largest corporation reorganization work in the United States." The new partner was William Glenn Marvin (1892–1932) who had previously headed the legal department at National City Bank. A few years later, Ball and Marvin having left the firm, Rosenberg partnered with Godfrey Goldmark (1881–1968) and Ralph F. Colin (1901–1985) to form a firm that continued to operate from 1930 until Rosenberg's retirement in 1947. Goldmark had previously been corporation counsel for the New York Transit Commission and Colin was hired into the firm after graduating from Columbia Law in 1921.
Late in his career, Rosenberg said his favorite case was the collapse of the empire of Ivar Kreuger, the so-called "Swedish Match King." Exercising what one reporter called a "mysterious fascination" over bankers in the United States and Europe, Kreuger was able to build a small Swedish sign-painting business into a global conglomerate of 150 manufacturing plants with more than 60,000 employees that was said to produce 75% of the world's matches. When this empire crashed in 1932, a New York bank, the Irving Trust Company, was named receiver and trustee for the bankrupt firm and it retained Rosenberg, Goldmark & Colin as its attorneys. Over the course of the next 13 years, Rosenberg and his colleagues unraveled the complex affairs of the conglomerate while overseeing the management of the business that it operated. They discovered that the majority of assets listed in company books were fictitious and that Kreuger himself had stolen or squandered the most valuable assets prior to the collapse. Creditors made claims for more than one billion dollars of which about one-tenth was eventually allowed. One investigator provided this summary of Rosenberg's actions in the case: "The trustee's representatives, notably the law firm of Rosenberg, Goldmark & Colin, found themselves operating for several years a match business that extended from Norway to Turkey and from Spain to Syria and reached all the way out to the Philippines. The theory held and gradually put into practice by James N. Rosenberg, the senior counsel, however, was that there was no sound basis for Kreuger's match concessions once the depression started and the economic apple cart was everywhere upset. Rosenberg insisted on liquidating the foreign companies as quickly as possible and also disposing of foreign government bonds, and his approach was vindicated in the light of wartime disruption and post-war political developments." The bankruptcy case was closed in November 1945 after $98,000,000 had been paid out to creditors.
At Rosenberg's retirement in 1947, the firm, then called Rosenberg, Goldmark, Colin, & Kaye, was succeeded by Rosenman, Goldmark, Colin & Kaye. (Sydney M. Kaye (1900–1979) was an authority on copyright law and specialist in broadcast communications. Samuel Rosenman was a prominent New Deal Democrat and Columbia-trained lawyer. In 2002, following a number of other transitions, the firm of Katten Muchin Rosenman became successor to Rosenman, Goldmark, Colin & Kaye.)
Humanitarian
Rosenberg began working to benefit humanity while he was still an undergraduate. During those years he participated in amateur theatricals and in 1895 was a member of a group called the Don Quixote Club which gave a benefit show for New York's Hebrew Charities. In 1909 he was elected to the Hebrew Charities board of directors and continued in that role for the next decade. By 1921 he had been elected vice president of the Hebrew Charities' Desertion Bureau, an organization founded in 1905 that helped Jewish immigrant women whose husbands had deserted them.