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Up for sale "Solicitor General" Frederick William Lehmann Signed Check Dated 1912.
ES-698A
Frederick William Lehmann
(February 28, 1853 – September 12, 1931) was a prominent American lawyer,
statesman, United States Solicitor General,
and rare book collector.
He was born February 28, 1853 in Prussia. His father Friedrich Wilhelm Lehmann
emigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, when Frederick was two, where
he ruled the family with an iron hand. His mother Sophia died young. At age 10,
Frederick ran away from home forever. As a vagabond, selling newspapers,
working on farms, and herding sheep, he wandered across the Midwest,
rarely going to school. In his teens, at the urging of his fellow sheep men, he
took the stump for presidential candidate Horace
Greeley and gave his first political speech. At 17 he worked as a
farm-hand for Judge Epenetus Sears of Tabor, Iowa.
Sears was impressed with the boy's ability and sent him to Tabor College, where he graduated in 1873.
After reading law
in his benefactor's office, Lehmann practiced in Tabor, Sidney,
Nebraska City,
and Des Moines, Iowa. He married Nora Stark of Indianola
on December 23, 1879, and he represented the Wabash
Railroad. A noted orator, he was active in Iowa politics, including
the election of Governor Horace Boies. In 1890 he moved with his family
to St. Louis, Missouri and continued to represent
the Wabash while building a general law practice. In 1908 he was elected
president of the American Bar Association and served twice.
President William Howard Taft named Lehmann as United States Solicitor General
in 1910. In the Supreme Court of the United States
Lehmann established the right to tax corporation
incomes. He considered national bank affiliates
to be illegal. About Lehmann's oral
arguments, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. told Felix
Frankfurter that Lehmann was so persuasive "I don't dare decide
against Lehmann. You feel as though you're ruling against God” In 1912 he
returned to practice law in St. Louis with his sons. In 1914, however, he and
Justice Joseph Rucker Lamar represented the United
States at the ABC Powers Conference in which Argentina,
Brazil,
and Chile
mediated between the United States and Mexico
on the Veracruz Incident. Cases in his private practice
established the right of the Associated
Press to news
as intellectual property, he secured the
Telephone Company's right to valuation on reproduction cost less depreciation,
and he preserved the Coca-Cola Company's right to use "Coca"
against a claim that it was fraudulent since actual cocaine
had been removed from the drink formula.
In 1918 he became counsel for the Railway Wage Commission. He supported the
forced separation of investment banks, commercial
banks and brokerages (a policy later implemented in the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933) quoting: "No
man can serve two masters." (Matthew 6:2), alluding to an inherent conflict of interest: investment banks
promote the sale of investments, even risky ones, but commercial banks have a
duty to avoid risky investments. Lehmann also vigorously opposed Prohibition.
Representing the U. S. government in the Supreme Court, he would "confess error", a practice in which the
Solicitor General admits that the government has been wrong all along and just
drops the case even when supported by a lower court's prior decision. Inscribed
in the office rotunda of the Attorney General is
Lehmann's famous saying, when a judge had remarked that he seemed to be
supporting the opposing side: "The United States wins its point whenever
justice is done its citizens in the courts." Frederick Lehmann always
refused to run for public office, especially at a party convention of the
breakaway Gold Democrats (opposed to the Free Silver
candidate William Jennings Bryan) in St. Louis which
he chaired (being foreign-born, he could not run for President anyway), and he
declined judgeships. In politics he was generally a Democrat, if sometimes a
Gold Democrat. In 1909 he drafted the charter by which the City of St. Louis is still run today. He was a founder
of the St. Louis Art Museum and the State Historical Society of Missouri,
president of the St. Louis Public Library, and a director
of the St. Louis World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) of 1904, in
which he was host of the Universal
Congress of Jurists and Lawyers. He was a bibliophile and he
collected rare first editions of Charles
Dickens, Robert Burns and others, and artworks of Aubrey
Beardsley, George Cruikshank and Thomas
Rowlandson.