1912–13 Volume 37 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

THE SCROLL 447bilt University, and for several years he has been a member ofits board of trustees. His younger brother. Dr. Robert P. McReynolds,Vanderbilt, '92 and Pennsylvania, '95, is a celebrated surgeonand resides in Los Angeles.In 1884 Brother McReynolds was graduated from the law departmentof the University of Virginia. He then spent one year inWashington as private secretary to Senator Howell E. Jackson, ofTennessee, later Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of theUnited States. At the bar in Nashville he attained early a positionin the front rank. As a citizen he was celebrated for his great independenceof all narrow partisanship or unworthy concession fortemporary advantage. He took part in every movement for civicrighteousness and was notably free from the arts of the demagogue.In 1896, although he had always been a Democrat, he made a brilliant,though unsuccessful, race for congress upon the sound moneyplatform, in opposition to the regular democratic nominee. In1900 he became a professor in the Vanderbilt Law School in connectionwith his practice of law. His service as Assistant Attorney-General, continued from 1903 to 1907, when he resigned to becomeassociated with Paul D. Cravatt and others in New York.In a few weeks, however, he was again engaged by the governmentfor his whole time as special assistant to prosecute the tobacco trustand anthracite coal cases.Early efforts to enforce the Sherman law against industrial combinationshad been rendered futile by the decision in the Knight case,in which the Supreme Court held that manufacturing was not commerce,and the sugar trust emerged -unimpaired. This decision thusstood , squarely across the path of Assistant Attorney-General Mc­Reynolds in his undertaking to break up the tobacco trust. Thelabor of preparation and trial of this case was stupendous, but withhis great capacity for work without nervous strain he steadily pressedit successfully through all the courts. This prosecution precededthe Standard Oil case in the lower courts, and he succeeded in persuadingthe courts practically to reverse themselves, so that thedecision in the Knight case stood no longer seriously in the way.The American Tobacco Company case was remanded by the SupremeCourt to the lower court to devise a plan for the dissolutionof the trust. It was in his attitude toward the plan devised by thetrust's lawyers and approved by Attorney-General Wickersham thatMr. McReynolds again won the highly favorable opinion of thecountry. He wanted to make the dissolution real and complete.The essential feature to which he objected was a common ownershipof the companies which were to take over the segregated assets.His famous interview given out eighteen months ago was asfollows:Oh, yes; it is an old story to me. And, speaking, of course, only formyself, I regard it as a plain subterfuge which deserves an expeditiouscommitment to the scrap-heap.