\"Solicitor General\" Frederick Lehmann Signed Cjeck Dated 1912 For Sale

Up for sale "Solicitor General" Frederick William Lehmann Signed Check Dated 1912.

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Frederick William Lehmann

(February 28, 1853 – September 12, 1931) was a prominent American lawyer,

statesman, United States Solicitor General,

and rare book collector.

 He was born February 28, 1853 in Prussia. His father Friedrich Wilhelm Lehmann

emigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, when Frederick was two, where

he ruled the family with an iron hand. His mother Sophia died young. At age 10,

Frederick ran away from home forever. As a vagabond, selling newspapers,

working on farms, and herding sheep, he wandered across the Midwest,

rarely going to school. In his teens, at the urging of his fellow sheep men, he

took the stump for presidential candidate Horace

Greeley and gave his first political speech. At 17 he worked as a

farm-hand for Judge Epenetus Sears of Tabor, Iowa.

Sears was impressed with the boy's ability and sent him to Tabor College, where he graduated in 1873.

After reading law

in his benefactor's office, Lehmann practiced in Tabor, Sidney,

Nebraska City,

and Des Moines, Iowa. He married Nora Stark of Indianola

on December 23, 1879, and he represented the Wabash

Railroad. 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 continued to represent

the Wabash while building a general law practice. In 1908 he was elected

president of the American Bar Association and served twice.

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. He considered national bank affiliates

to be illegal. About Lehmann's oral

arguments, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. told Felix

Frankfurter that Lehmann was so persuasive "I don't dare decide

against Lehmann. You feel as though you're ruling against God” 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, he secured the

Telephone Company's right to valuation on reproduction cost less depreciation,

and he preserved the Coca-Cola Company's right to use "Coca"

against a claim that it was fraudulent since actual cocaine

had been removed from the drink formula.

In 1918 he became counsel for the Railway Wage Commission. He supported the

forced separation of investment banks, commercial

banks and brokerages (a policy later implemented in the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933) quoting: "No

man can serve two masters." (Matthew 6:2), alluding to an inherent conflict of interest: investment banks

promote the sale of investments, even risky ones, but commercial banks have a

duty to avoid risky investments. Lehmann also vigorously opposed Prohibition.

Representing the U. S. government in the Supreme Court, he would "confess error", a practice in which the

Solicitor General admits that the government has been wrong all along and just

drops the case even when supported by a lower court's prior decision. Inscribed

in the office rotunda of the Attorney General is

Lehmann's famous saying, when a judge had remarked that he seemed to be

supporting the opposing side: "The United States wins its point whenever

justice is done its citizens in the courts." Frederick Lehmann always

refused to run for public office, especially at a party convention of the

breakaway Gold Democrats (opposed to the Free Silver

candidate William Jennings Bryan) in St. Louis which

he chaired (being foreign-born, he could not run for President anyway), and he

declined judgeships. In politics he was generally a Democrat, if sometimes a

Gold Democrat. In 1909 he drafted the charter by which the City of St. Louis is still run today. He 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.