ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville saw the American legal profession as providing an aristocratic anchor in our egalitarian and drifting democracy, all too prone to anarchic individualism. Most of the metropolitan bar associations were founded and more or less dominated by wasp elites until World War I, after which most of them became inclusive and democratic. The abcny, a conspicuous exception, was dominated by New York City’s wasp upper-class until the end of World War II. The first Jew, Louis Loeb, was elected to the presidency in 1956; by this time, fifteen percent of the abcny membership was Jewish in a bar which was 60 per cent Jewish. In 1964 another Jew, Samuel Rosenman, son of an immigrant and born in the South, became president; a friend of Franklin Roosevelt who placed him on the state supreme court while Governor, Rosenman was an active Democrat and New Dealer, and later a close ally of mayors Wagner and Lindsay.
