Follow Us
Like Us
Historical records matching Joseph Louis Rauh, Jr., PhD.
view all
Immediate Family
-
wife -
Privatechild -
Privatechild
-
mother -
father -
brother -
brother
About Joseph Louis Rauh, Jr., PhD.
Joseph L. Rauh Jr., for decades one of the nation's leading champions of civil rights and liberal causes, died Thursday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. He was 81 years old. Americans for Democratic Action, which Mr. Rauh helped found 45 years ago, said he died soon after suffering a heart attack at his Washington home.
For almost half a century Mr. Rauh was among America's foremost civil liberties lawyers, battling McCarthyism, laying the foundation for much of the civil rights legislation of the 1960's and serving as a leader not only of the A.D.A. but also of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
'Never Lost His Zeal'
"Joe's imprint was all over the civil rights era," Benjamin L. Hooks, the N.A.A.C.P.'s executive director, said yesterday. Mr. Rauh (the name rhymes with "brow") went to Washington to "work for the New Deal," as he once put it, and in a sense he never stopped doing so. A number of his old associates later despaired of the fight for groundbreaking social programs, and some turned their backs on liberalism entirely. But as Mr. Hooks noted, Mr. Rauh "never lost his zeal for the battle."
Much of his work was performed for little or no pay. "Other people may have made more money," he said in 1985, his 50th year in Washington. "But no one has had more fun."
From Harvard to Washington
Joseph Louis Rauh Jr. was born in Cincinnati on Jan. 3, 1911, where both his father and his grandfather, German-born immigrants, had settled and begun manufacturing shirts. He entered Harvard University, majored in economics, played center on the basketball team and, in 1932, graduated magna cum laude.
After graduation from Harvard Law School, where he was first in his class,he served at the Supreme Court as a law clerk, first to Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo and then to Justice Felix Frankfurter. During this period he also counseled several New Deal agencies as well as the Lend-Lease Administration.
Commissioned an Army lieutenant in 1942, he joined Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff as a lend-lease expert. He was reassigned to the Pacific Command's civil affairs section, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and won decorations, including the Distinguished Service Star (Philippine Islands). After the war Mr. Rauh returned to Washington, went into private practice and undertook his civil liberties career in earnest. The Founding of the A.D.A.
He was a member of a small group of people who in 1947 founded Americans for Democratic Action, which they conceived as a liberal stronghold that they would prevent from being hijacked by Communists. Mr. Rauh was the organization's chairman from 1955 to 1957 and remained active in it for the rest of his life. At his death, he was an A.D.A. vice president.
Mr. Rauh was a regular participant at the Democratic National Convention, a role that in 1948 allowed him to make a milestone contribution to civil rights. That year he had a leading part in writing a strong civil rights plank that was adopted in the party's platform and provided a foundation for much of the Federal rights legislation that would be enacted in the decades ahead.
But he was perhaps better known for his strenuous Capitol Hill lobbying on behalf of such bills. That lobbying was prominent in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. By the 1950's Mr. Rauh was the nation's premier civil liberties lawyer, and he took aim at efforts, then in full swing in Congress, to compel testimony as a way of identifying Communists across a broad spectrum of American life.
Among his clients were the writers Lillian Hellman, who was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, and Arthur Miller, who was indicted on contempt charges in 1956 for refusing to identify for the committee former associates with left-wing sentiments. Mr. Miller was convicted of the charges but was later cleared by a Federal appeals court. Backer of U.M.W. Reforms
Another Rauh client, in the early 1970's, was Joseph A. Yablonski, the challenger to W. A. (Tony) Boyle's corrupt leadership of the United Mine Workers. After Mr. Yablonski, his wife and their daughter had been found slain at their Pennsylvania home, Mr. Rauh was among those who pressed for a Federal investigation that ultimately found that Mr. Boyle had ordered the slayings. In April 1974, Mr. Boyle was convicted of first-degree murder.
At various times Mr. Rauh also represented Walter Reuther's United Automobile Workers; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed as a counterpart to the state's segregationist Democratic Party, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella organization for which he was general counsel for more than 40 years. He also sat on the executive board of the N.A.A.C.P.
But of the many figures he encountered over the decades, he said in 1985, he was perhaps most fond of A. Philip Randolph, longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. "Mr. Randolph -- I never called him anything but Mr. Randolph -- was the most dignified man who ever lived," he said.
Mr. Rauh had abandoned the practice of law in recent years but to the end kept an active schedule as a public speaker. He also continued to lobby strenuously against the Reagan and Bush Administrations' conservative nominees to the Supreme Court. And he remained mindful of a national legacy that he helped create. "I'm proud of our laws," he once said. "What our generation has done is bring equality in law. The next generation has to bring equality in fact."
Mr. Rauh is survived by his wife of 57 years, the former Olie Westheimer; two sons, B. Michael Rauh and Carl S. Rauh, both lawyers in private practice in Washington, and three grandchildren.
-- The New York Times, September 5, 1992
view all 11
Joseph Louis Rauh, Jr., PhD.'s Timeline
| 1911 |
January 3, 1911
|
Cincinnati, Hamilton County, OH, United States
|
|
| 1992 |
September 3, 1992
Age 81
|
Sibley Memorial Hospital, Washington, DC, United States
|
|
| ???? |
Harvard School of Law, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
|
||
| ???? |
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
|