39 Facts About Louis Marshall

Louis Marshall was an American corporate, constitutional and civil rights lawyer as well as a mediator and Jewish community leader who worked to secure religious, political, and cultural freedom for all minority groups.

Louis Marshall was a conservationist, and the force behind re-establishing the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, which evolved into today's State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Louis Marshall was born on December 14,1856, in Syracuse, New York, to two Jewish immigrants, recently arrived from Germany.

Louis Marshall had one brother, Benjamin, two years younger, and four sisters: Marie, Bertha, Clara, and Ida; 13 years separated Louis and his youngest sister, Ida.

From childhood, Louis Marshall was both a scholar and a linguist.

Louis Marshall attended "the Seventh Ward Public school" and later Syracuse High School, from which he graduated in 1874, one of eight males in a graduating class of 22.

Louis Marshall was recruited by Samuel Untermyer, a classmate at Columbia, to join the law firm of Guggenheimer and Untermyer in New York City.

Louis Marshall was involved in alternative dispute resolution, acting with Louis Brandeis as the mediator in a strike of 60,000 to 70,000 cloakmakers in New York City in 1910, and in 1919 was the arbitrator in a clothing-workers' strike.

Several of Taft's prominent friends urged him to appoint Louis Marshall, who had the reputation of an outstanding Constitutional lawyer and public citizen.

Louis Marshall initiated an ultimately unsuccessful appeal of the case to the United States Supreme Court.

Louis Marshall was active in protecting the human and civil rights of Jews and on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and fought major legal battles on behalf of all minorities.

In 1905, Louis Marshall was promoted to chairman of the board of directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Conservative Judaism's rabbinical school.

In 1906, with Jacob Schiff and Cyrus Adler, Louis Marshall helped found the American Jewish Committee as a means for keeping watch over legislation and diplomacy relevant to American Jews, and to convey requests, information, and political threats to US government officials.

Louis Marshall was a strong advocate of abolishing the literacy test and said, "We are practically the only ones who are fighting [the literacy test] while a 'great proportion' [of the people] is 'indifferent to what is done'".

Louis Marshall was the leader of the movement that led to the abrogation, in 1911, of the US-Russian Commercial Treaty of 1832.

Louis Marshall fought a proposal to have the US Census Bureau enumerate Jews as a race.

Louis Marshall was instrumental in organizing the American Jewish Relief Committee, which brought together Zionists and non-Zionists for the management of Jewish colonization efforts.

In 1920, Louis Marshall attempted to stop a newspaper owned by Henry Ford, The Dearborn Independent, from spreading anti-Semitic propaganda.

In 1902, Louis Marshall was appointed chairman of a commission investigating the slum conditions on New York City's Lower East Side, where many Jewish immigrants had settled.

In 1910, Louis Marshall was appointed a trustee of Syracuse University.

At the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1915, Louis Marshall again served as a delegate, this time being elected to an at-large position.

In 1923, Louis Marshall was honored with an appointment as a director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Louis Marshall had both a public and a personal interest in conservation.

Louis Marshall was a framer of Article 14, the "Forever Wild" clause, in the New York State constitutional Amendment to the New York State Constitution, which went into effect on January 1,1895.

Louis Marshall was a driving force behind the establishment of the New York State Ranger School in Wanakena, New York, which was founded in 1912, and a similar school was established at Paul Smith's College.

At a more personal level, Louis Marshall took a keen interest in the natural environment.

Louis Marshall became a member of the Adirondack Mountain Club after its founding in 1922.

Additionally, Louis Marshall was consistently opposed to any attempt to create a unified Jewish vote, claiming that while Jewish individuals could interface with politics, the community as a whole should not.

Louis Marshall was a good pal to his boys, and used to play baseball with them, the sport which he most admired.

Louis Marshall married Lenore Guinzburg, who became noted for her writing as well as discovering and editing the work of author William Faulkner.

The sprawling Bob Louis Marshall Wilderness, comprising over a million acres of pristine wilderness straddling the continental divide in northwestern Montana, is named after Bob, who was director of the Forestry Division of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, head of the US Forest Service Division of Recreation and Lands, and co-founder of The Wilderness Society.

Louis Marshall died on September 11,1929, at age 72, while attending a Zionist conference in Zurich, Switzerland.

The occasion of his visit to Switzerland was perhaps deeply ironic, as Louis Marshall had been a non-Zionist for most of his life.

Louis Marshall was in Zurich for the first gathering of the Extended Jewish Agency, an institution organized by him and Chaim Weizmann to enhance Zionist perspective and foster diaspora-Jewish identity.

The University of Pennsylvania's first Jewish student organization, which was organized in 1924 and initially generically named the Jewish Students' Association at Penn, after the death of Louis Marshall was renamed after him as the Louis Marshall Society.

On January 19,2001, Marshall Hall was rededicated to Marshall and his son, Bob, by SUNY-ESF President Cornelius B Murphy, Jr.

Louis Marshall was recruited by Chancellor Day in 1910 to make the concept of the 'forestry college' at Syracuse University a reality.

Louis Marshall was tenacious, prodding both the Governor and the Legislature to take action.

The Louis Marshall Award is presented to individuals who demonstrate the exemplary ethics and philanthropic commitment embodied by Louis Marshall, an esteemed constitutional lawyer and former board chair of JTS.