Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [768]
New York City, in particular, spawned many such specialists, and their growing numbers generated a reassuring sense of collective authority. Upper-echelon professionals, moreover, were independent agents, with far greater control over the nature and conditions of their labor than was usual in the now heavily proletarianized city; this too strengthened class confidence.
In the seventies confidence was reinforced by organization. Before the war many professions had been on the defensive, their efforts to set standards and control access to their ranks traduced as aristocratic. Now, newly nerved, they strengthened existing professional bodies and created new ones. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, and architects came together to restrict membership to candidates they designated as qualified and who pledged allegiance to a common code of conduct.
Lawyers multiplied rapidly in the postwar era, though firms remained relatively small. Bidwell and Strong, which represented Steinway and Sons, Wells Fargo, and Western Union Telegraph, consisted of six attorneys and four assistants in 1878. Lawyers served many functions in the new order: defending railroads in court, serving as board directors, working as lobbyists (bridging the worlds of business and government), representing speculators and empire builders, managing real estate interests, advising social and cultural organizations, and handling trusts, estates, and, especially in New York City, the complicated affairs of the new nationally oriented corporations.
Involvement in corporate warfare, however, brought the Bar into serious disrepute. Drew, Fisk, and Gould hired a team of forty-plus attorneys to run legal interference for them in the Erie War, while an opposing regiment of lawyers handled Vanderbilt’s machinations. The Bench too had been tarnished by its abetting of financial and political skullduggery: in 1867 the distinguished attorney James T. Brady accused Tweed crony Judge Barnard of corruption, to his face in open court.
Many lawyers, notably George Templeton Strong of Bidwell and Strong, blamed not corporate capitalism but the 1846 state constitution, which had abolished the old distinctions between attorneys, solicitors, and counselors, placed all lawyers on the same nominal footing, and adopted simplified and unexacting licensing procedures. It had also made judgeships elective rather than appointive positions. The result, Strong believed, had been a “progressive debasement of the Bar & Bench.” The swollen legal fraternity was no longer “learned & dignified” but rather ranked “next below that of patent-medicine mongering.” Strong believed reform required replacing apprenticeship with a law school education. He devoted himself accordingly to expanding Columbia College’s School of Law, and by the 1880s it was one of the two largest in the United States.
Other reform-minded lawyers—Samuel Tilden and William Evarts chief among them—decided that only a new and exclusive group restricted to “the more worthy of the profession” could remedy the situation, given their inability to control access to the field itself. If New York City were to remain the commercial and monetary capital of the United States, Tilden warned, “it must establish an elevated character for its Bar, and a reputation throughout the country for its purity in the administration of justice.” To police their own ranks, define the boundaries of acceptable conduct, aid attorneys in standing up to judges (and the political machines that elected them), and make the law a “noble profession” and not merely a “trade with the rest,” they and others created the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (1870). Rigorous admission procedures and hefty fees allowed the “worthy” to exclude the “uncouth in manners and habits, ignorant even of the English