Memories // Events

Get to Know the People of the Federal Bar Association

From association leaders to volunteers to members at large – these people have helped, and continue to help, shape the industry.


PROFILE

James W. Witten (1855–1943)

Founding FBA President, 1920–1921

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A strong advocate for a group to meet the needs of federal attorneys scattered throughout the country, James W. Witten was a founding member and the first president of the FBA. During his term, he was working as an attorney in the solicitor’s office at the U.S. Department of the Interior, where the FBA held monthly meetings during its early years.

Born in Grundy County, Missouri, Witten started out practicing law in Missouri and Texas, including stints as city attorney for Albany, Missouri, and prosecuting attorney for Gentry County, Missouri. He joined the federal government as a principal examiner of land claims and contests for the Interior Department’s General Land Office (GLO) in the mid-1880s, during President Grover Cleveland’s first administration. Witten moved to Washington, D.C., in 1893 and continued to blaze a trail through the GLO, serving in positions such as superintendent of the opening and sale of Indian lands and chief law officer, and in the process reviewed and settled enough property disputes in the Western territories that he became known as Judge Witten. 

Throughout his career, Witten was a vocal critic of what he saw as the low salaries of federal employees, including attorneys, and even left government service in 1916 “for the very good reason that he could earn more money in the practice of law than as an employee of the government,” according to a profile in The Kansas Chief newspaper. Returning to the Interior Department a few years later, in 1919 he submitted testimony to a congressional commission studying the reclassification of positions and salaries in the government civil service, noting: “The character and importance of the work demanded of the law service of the Government cannot be overestimated.”

Not long after, Witten became the driving force behind the FBA, culminating in its founding on Jan. 5, 1920. “Thereupon the Association — perhaps to ‘make the punishment fit the crime’ — sentenced the Judge to serve as its first president,” former Interior Department Assistant Solicitor George A. Warren wrote in The Federal Bar Association Journal in April 1940, on the occasion of the FBA’s twentieth anniversary. “As such, he took the helm, as it were, and steered the craft, then a small, frail one, between rocks and over shoals, into smoother waters.”


PROFILE

Marguerite Rawalt (1895–1989)

First Female FBA President, 1943–1944

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Marguerite Rawalt was elected the first female president of the FBA in 1943 after working her way through the ranks of the organization’s national leadership, serving as third, second, and third vice presidents and on numerous committees. A special attorney in the appeals division of the office of the chief counsel for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, she was a longtime champion of career women, serving as president of the National Association of Women Lawyers as well as the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, and becoming the first woman to be seated in the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates.

Rawalt worked for Internal Revenue for her entire 33-year career, and for several years had to hide her marriage to U.S. Army Air Corps Major Harry Secord thanks to a federal law that prohibited two members of the same family from working for the government. She joined the FBA in 1935 and got straight to work recruiting new members and volunteering for committee assignments. 

Even with World War II going on and internal grumblings that a woman shouldn’t be leading the FBA, Rawalt had a successful presidency. During her term, she increased membership by 33 percent and organized a series of highly successful luncheons with speakers such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.

Later in life, Rawalt was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and by President Lyndon B. Johnson to his Citizen’s Advisory Council on the Status of Women. A founding member and first legal counsel of the National Organization for Women (NOW), she helped establish NOW’s Legal Defense Fund, successfully pushed for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit employment discrimination based on gender as well as race, and lobbied Congress on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She also created the Marguerite Rawalt Legal Defense Fund, which focused on legal cases involving women’s equity. 

“As long as you’re right,” Rawalt told The Washington Post in a 1986 interview, “you know it’s a thing that ought to be done and you keep at it.”


profile

Hon. Tom C. Clark (1899–1977)

FBA President, 1944–1945; U.S. Attorney General, 1945–1949;
and U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1949–1967

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Of the many volunteer leaders who have served the FBA, only one has completed the federal legal profession’s equivalent of the Triple Crown: FBA president, attorney general of the United States, and justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That would be Tom C. Clark.

A Dallas native who served with the Texas National Guard during World War I, Clark received both bachelor and law degrees over four years at the University of Texas at Austin and joined his father’s law firm after graduation. From 1927 to 1932, he served as civil district attorney for Dallas, returned to private practice for five years, then went to work for the Department of Justice in 1937 — moving from special assistant to the attorney general, to head of the department’s West Coast antitrust offices, to assistant attorney general for the antitrust and criminal divisions, to attorney general.

As FBA president during the closing years of World War II, Clark was known for his “easy-going Texas manner,” according to a profile in the October 1944 issue of the Federal Bar Journal that listed his accomplishments during the first half of his term, including more than 700 new members; four new chapters, in St. Louis, Indiana, Los Angeles, and Minnesota; and the expansion of the Journal into a quarterly law review. As attorney general, he prosecuted war-fraud and antitrust cases, strengthened civil-rights enforcement, supported President Harry Truman’s vigorous anti-communist agenda; and personally argued one case per term in front of the Supreme Court — a task that usually falls to the U.S. solicitor general. On the Supreme Court, “Clark was a principled man, but pragmatic in his approach to opinion writing,” according to CQ Press. “A skillful negotiator, he was always willing to accommodate another justice to achieve a majority or unanimity, even if doing so required conceding a disputed point. Clark did have convictions to which he adhered firmly, but the principles he implemented most consistently were tenets of judicial administration rather than constitutional law.”

When Clark retired from the Supreme Court in 1967, it was because his son Ramsey — another former FBA president — had just become attorney general, and he wanted to avoid conflicts of interest. But he wasn’t done working. He served as director of the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) from 1968 to 1970, and up until his death was sitting on various circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals. “He gave us a lot,” Alice L. O’Donnell, director of the FJC’s division of inter-judicial affairs and information services, wrote in an obituary in the Federal Bar News. “He gave of himself and he set an example which was both an inspiration and an image which guided the lives of many.”


profile

Louis R. Mehlinger (1882 – 1987)

First African American FBA Member

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When attorney Louis Rothschild Mehlinger died on May 10, 1987, it was big news — for many different reasons. To start, Mehlinger was 104. The son of a former slave, he grew up on a farm in Bolivar County, Mississippi. He practiced law in Washington, D.C., through the age of 100, having earned his degree at age 39. He served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in France during World War I. He co-founded the Washington Bar Association (WBA) and the Robert H. Terrell Law School, both institutions dedicating to serving the black legal community.

And Louis Mehlinger was the first African American member of the Federal Bar Association.

A senior attorney with the Department of Justice who argued cases before the U.S. Court of Claims, he was admitted to the FBA in 1945. According to a comprehensive paper on Mehlinger that Dr. J. Clay Smith, himself the FBA’s first African American national president, presented to the WBA in 1981, Mehlinger applied to the FBA unsuccessfully in 1942, when he was 62, then re-applied in 1944.

Under the FBA’s original constitution and bylaws, membership was limited to “any white person of good moral character.” “[Mehlinger] told me that he had been used as a guinea pig to apply for membership in the FBA,’” Smith wrote. In January 1945, then–FBA President Tom C. Clark appointed a special committee of the National Council to review the application, and after interviewing Mehlinger the committee recommended him for membership.

“As I close my term as president of the Federal Bar Association,” Smith wrote, “I believe that the legal profession should remember the courage of Louis Rothschild Mehlinger for daring to make the Federal Bar Association open to all races. Tom C. Clark and the other key people on the Mehlinger special committee should be given much credit also for clearing the way for Mr. Mehlinger’s approval as a member.”

In 1982, The Washington Post interviewed Mehlinger two weeks before his 100th birthday. He shared that his philosophy of life was rooted in something he learned while attending Mississippi’s Tougaloo College, from which he graduated in 1905: “"What does the Lord require of the old man? But to love mercy, do justly and walk humbly with thy God.”


profile

Dr. J. Clay Smith Jr. (1942–2018)

First African American FBA President, 1980–1981

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It’s no slight at all against the Federal Bar Association to say that becoming the FBA’s first African American national president was simply one of Dr. J. Clay Smith Jr.’s top five accomplishments. Smith was just that good.

Throughout his career, he served as associate general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, commissioner and then interim chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and dean of Howard University School of Law, his alma mater. He wrote Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944, with a foreword by Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first African American justice, and edited Rebels in Law: Voices in History of Black Female Lawyers and Supreme Justice: Speeches and Writings by Thurgood Marshall. And he was an accomplished musician and composer, proficient on drums and piano.

A native of Omaha, Smith didn’t think small. In his first Federal Bar News column as FBA president, he announced that the theme of his term would be “A New Federal Agenda.” He wrote: “The Federal Bar Association must take an aggressive lead to identify ways and methods to: (1) foster peace on earth and on planets of other worlds, (2) lift the poor and the abandoned from the concrete jungles of our cities, (3) restore the confidence of the public in the legal profession and to enhance the respect of the population in the judicial system, (4) advocate against all forms of authoritarian rule and to speak out for the rule of law tempered by reason and justice, and (5) manage our vital resources and increase our productivity.”

But as much of a trailblazer as Smith was, he insisted that he was following in the footsteps of people like Louis Mehlinger, a senior attorney with the Department of Justice and the first black member of the FBA. “As the twentieth century closes and as the twenty-first century is born,” Smith wrote in a paper about Mehlinger in September 1981, “the Federal Bar Association must continue to be faithful to the principle of race and sex diversity in its leadership ranks at the local and national levels.”


Earl W. Kintner(1912–1991)

FBA President, 1956–1957, 1959–1960; Founding President, Federal Bar Building Corporation

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If James W. Witten laid the groundwork for what the Federal Bar Association might become, Earl W. Kintner helped build the FBA into what it eventually became. Literally. The foremost proponent for a national headquarters, Kintner served as the founding president of the Federal Bar Building Corporation (FBBC), overseeing construction of the FBA’s Federal Bar Building at 1815 H Street NW in Washington, D.C., in 1962, followed by the Federal Bar Building West at 1819 H Street NW in 1967— “both of which he financed,” according to an obituary in the Federal Bar News & Journal, “without any financial contribution or obligation from the Association.”

Kintner contributed to the FBA in innumerable other ways. As chair of the Membership Committee, he increased membership by 40 percent, to 2,600, from 1953 to 1954. He completed two separate terms as national president, and served as president of the FBBC, the Foundation of the FBA, and the National Lawyers Club — the elegant lounge, restaurant, and meeting space in the Federal Bar Building — simultaneously. Throughout his service, the Federal Bar Building remained his true passion. He told the Federal Bar News in October 1956: “A House of the Federal Bar in Washington would give the Association a permanent home, enhance its prestige, and provide facilities for meetings, study, and social activities for all Federal lawyers.”

But the FBA was just one facet of a richly distinguished life and career. Kintner was born on a farm in Indiana, attended Indiana University School of Law, and worked in private practice and as a prosecuting attorney in Princeton, Indiana, before resigning in 1944 to join the U.S. Navy, where among other assignments he served as deputy U.S. commissioner of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Discharged from the Navy in 1948, he joined the staff of the Federal Trade Commission, working as a trial attorney, adviser, general counsel, and, from 1959 to 1961, chair.

In 1974, the FBA established the Earl W. Kintner Award for Distinguished Service, which every year recognizes a member who has made longstanding contributions to the organization, and an oil painting of Kintner, presented at the dedication of the Federal Bar Building in 1962, still hangs in the FBA’s national office. As then–FBA President Alfred F. Belcuore said when Kintner passed away in 1991: “We will never forget his commitment to Federal law and the Federal lawyer, and his dreams that are our legacy.”