My Amazon Review of John Oller's "White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century"

Super Lawyers of the Gilded Age

Retired Wall Street lawyer John Oller takes us back to the turn of the 20^th Century when the modern law firm was created to service the giant industrial corporations that were taking form. Among the IVY League WASP lawyers we see Paul Cravath fresh after his winning the “current wars” for his client George Westinghouse against Thomas Edison create the model of today’s law firm. He hires associates straight out of the best law schools, trains them and puts them on a partnership track. He also creates a profit sharing system among the partners. More than 100 years later this is how corporate law firms work.

We meet Frank Stetson, JP Morgan’s lawyer, future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes, George Wickersham who would become William Howard Taft’s attorney general who brings a multitude of anti-trust lawsuits, and William Nelson Cromwell who pretty much is responsible for a coup in Panama that leads to the building of the Panama Canal.  We also meet a young John Foster Dulles, who would later run Sullivan & Cromwell and be Eisenhower’s secretary of state.

There is also one Jewish lawyer in this telling. He is Samuel Untermyer  who after making a fortune on Wall Street, he becomes a leading muckraker taking on the titans of Wall Street, including JP Morgan in very famous congressional hearing.

Out of their labors we see formulated the notions of the “rule of reason” in antitrust cases first enunciated by William Howard Taft when he was an appellate judge, the consent decree and the business judgement rule for corporate officers and directors. As the story evolves most of Oller’s protagonists make peace with the progressives they rub up against and as such they become part and parcel with the newly emerging administrative state. Of course the emergence of the administrative state would become a great boon to the super lawyers.

We also see the growing internationalist outlook among Oller’s Wall Street lawyers. They push for intervention on the Allies side in World War I and actively support the creation of the League of Nations. A generation later they would form the backbone of Wendell Willkie’s campaign for the presidency. Oller bemoans the fact that Wall Street lawyers are far less involved in Washington D.C. then they were 100 years ago. Instead we see Wall Street investment bankers taking their place.

Oller has written an interesting book highlighting the merger between law and capital. At time he gets bogged down in too many details, but on the whole his book makes for an interesting history. 

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1DA0ATSMPIED3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv