Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [830]
Some newcomers entered the banking world themselves. The Rockefellers cycled their oil profits into the National City Bank, Moses Taylor’s old operation until his death in 1882. From 1891 it was in the steady hands of the steely James Stillman (two of whose daughters married sons of William Rockefeller), and Standard Oil connections and cash would make National City Bank a power in the city.
Manhattan was attractive to businessmen for other reasons too, especially its great assemblage of experts. Among the vast array of talented metropolitan professionals, none were more crucial to the emerging corporate order than lawyers. Since George Templeton Strong died in 1875, firms like his had been joined by a host of crack legal firms. They specialized in providing legal, managerial, and financial advice to large corporate clients on a regular basis, not just at the point of litigation. Indeed many corporate attorneys withdrew from trial work altogether, dealing instead with the growing number of regulatory state agencies that corporations were answerable to, or serving as businessmen’s emissaries and lobbyists (shuttling back and forth between Washington or Albany and New York City), or serving in public office themselves.
Lower Manhattan grew thick with corporate law firms. Bangs and Stetson, ancestor of Davis, Polk, and Wardwell, boasted Francis Lynde Stetson, known as J. P. Morgan’s attorney general for his work counseling the financier on industrial and railroad reorganizations. When Grover Cleveland lost the White House in 1888, he moved to New York City and worked at Bangs, Stetson, forming close alliances with Morgan and other financiers before returning to Pennsylvania Avenue in 1892.
Morgan also turned to William Nelson Cromwell of Sullivan and Cromwell (1879), as did Henry Villard and E. H. Harriman. Anderson, Adams, and Young (1866)—later Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy—became the “Rockefeller firm” in 1888 when George Welwood Murray brought in John D. as a client; Murray remained his legal adviser and confidant for decades. Joseph Choate counseled Standard Oil and American Tobacco, Elihu Root advised big sugar, and future legal giant Henry Lewis Stimson got his start advising railroad and streetcar companies.
Most firms remained modest in size—five partners constituted a large operation—but some of them, Strong would have been glad to know, began to replace the old apprenticeship system, which had relied on unpaid law clerks, with a more professional approach. Walter S. Carter’s firm, Chamberlain, Carter, and Hornblower, began hiring graduates of elite law schools as paid “associates,” who specialized in particular departments (corporate, real estate, trusts and estates) and served as the pool from which future partners were drawn. Among the first recruits and graduates was Paul D. Cravath, a brilliant Columbia Law graduate who would later develop the new approach so extensively at his own firm that it became known as the “Cravath system.” At the same time, law schools and the “white shoe” firms they fed became ever more socially exclusive. There were a few Jewish or Catholic organizations, and after 1890 women were admitted to NYU Law School, but the new procedure helped make Wall Street law firms into overwhelmingly white, Protestant, upper- or middle-class, Republican, and male bastions.
New York’s attractiveness to corporations was enhanced by its advertising industry, which underwent a transformation akin to the legal profession’s. Advertising had a dubious reputation in the postwar era, due in part to its most prominent clients: the patent medicine manufacturers who laced their products with alcohol and opium. Business self-promotion seemed Barnumesque; it smacked of desperation and unsoundness. Even the best agencies, like Samuel Pettengill, New York’s and the country’s largest, shilled