Frederick William Lehmann Papers, 1756-1929
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Administrative/Biographical History
Frederick William Lehmann (February 28, 1853 – September 12, 1931) was an American lawyer, statesman, United States Solicitor General, and rare book collector. Born in Prussia, Lehmann and his family immigrated to the United States in 1855 to Cincinnati, Ohio. At age 10, he left home and traveled across the Midwest working on farms, selling newspapers, and herding sheep. At 17, Lehmann worked as a farm-hand for Judge Epenetus Sears, who sent him to Tabor College, where he graduated in 1873.
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 he was elected president of the American Bar Association in 1908. In 1909, he drafted the charter by which the City of St. Louis is still run today. 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. 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, and he secured the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company's right to valuation on reproduction cost less depreciation. In 1918, he became counsel for the Railway Wage Commission.
Lehmann 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. He and industrialist William K. Bixby started the Burns Society; he was twice president of the University Club of St. Louis. His published works included: John Marshall (1901); The Lawyer in American History (1906); Abraham Lincoln (1908); Conservatism in Legal Procedure (1909); Prohibition (1910); and The Law and the Newspaper (1917).
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Accession number 775
Accession number 1024
Accession number 1428
