Rauh, Joseph Louis, Jr.

(b. 3 January 1911 in Cincinnati, Ohio; d. 3 September 1992 in Washington, D.C.), civil rights activist, labor lawyer, and a fixture in Democratic party politics who personified post-World War II liberalism.

Rauh was born into a prosperous family of German Jewish ancestry in Cincinnati. He was the youngest of three children. His mother was Sarah Weiler, a homemaker; his father, Joseph Rauh, was a shirt manufacturer who had emigrated from Germany. He attended Harvard, earning an A.B. magna cum laude in 1932. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating first in his class in 1935. After law school, he went to work as a Supreme Court clerk, first for Justice Benjamin Cardozo and then for his former law school professor Felix Frankfurter. He also worked as counsel to a number of New Deal agencies, such as the Lend-Lease Administration. In 1942 he accepted an army commission as a lieutenant and joined General Douglas MacArthur’s staff as a lend-lease expert. He transferred to the Pacific later in the war, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he was eventually awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. He was married in September 1935 to Ollie Westheimer, with whom he had two sons.

After the war, he returned to Washington, D.C. He became legal adviser to various unions, including the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He also aided those hounded by McCarthyism, most notably the playwright Arthur Miller and the writer Lillian Hellman. But he is best remembered for his activism for civil liberties and civil rights. And in this he had a near revolutionary zeal.

In 1947 Rauh joined with Eleanor Roosevelt, the labor leader Walter Reuther, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and former vice president Hubert Humphrey to create Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). The ADA was created as a liberal base to defend the Democratic Party from the growing conservative movement and to prevent liberalism’s hijacking by communists. He was ADA chair from 1955 to 1957 and remained active throughout his life. In 1992, he was an ADA vice president.

In 1948 Rauh was hired by Walter Reuther, then the president of the UAW, to be the union’s Washington counsel. At the time the UAW was the most powerful union in the United States. As the union’s point man on lobbying and legislative matters, Rauh was at the center of national policy debates surrounding issues of economic reform and racial policy.

Rauh used his position with the union and the ADA to push for a civil rights agenda in the 1948 Democratic party platform. He continued to push his party in this direction for the rest of his life. He shared his sense of mission with his client Walter Reuther and often acted as a liaison between the powerful labor leader and the civil rights movement. For example, in 1963 Rauh arranged for $160,000 in bail for civil rights activists being held in jails in Birmingham, Alabama—including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Rauh contacted Reuther, who provided the bulk of the funds and pressured other unions for the rest.

Reuther and Rauh did not always see eye to eye. During the summer of 1963, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working together with local activists, attempted to register African American voters in Mississippi, where opposition to civil rights led to the murders of three of the activists. SNCC had steady opposition from the all-white Mississippi State Democratic party, so they registered the new voters into the newly chartered Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). They planned to challenge the all-white party at the upcoming Democratic party national convention in 1964. Joe Rauh agreed to serve as the MFDP’s counsel at the convention. The Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson believed the challenge would embarrass him, and he asked for Reuther’s help. Reuther demanded that Rauh decline to serve as attorney for a group that many Democrats viewed as too radical. Rauh replied, “I am acting not as your general counsel, but as a private citizen. I’ve got a private law practice. If you want to fire me, Christ’s sake, be my guest.” Reuther, according to Rauh, was so mad “you could fry an egg on his heart.” But he did not fire him. In the end, the delegates from the MFDP walked out after Reuther worked behind the scenes with other liberals to engineer a compromise favorable to Johnson.

Although Rauh continued to work for his union clients and he backed Johnson in strenuously lobbying Congress for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Vietnam War also drove a wedge between Rauh and Johnson. On matters of civil rights, Rauh thought Johnson “near perfect.” But as the war dragged on, he and fellow liberals such as Martin Luther King, Jr. began to advocate peace. Starting in 1968, Rauh began to advocate a negotiated settlement and created a group to further that cause called “Negotiate Now!” He endorsed Eugene McCarthy for president later that year because of McCarthy’s peace platform.

Rauh gave up his law practice late in life but continued to remain active in politics. He kept up a strenuous speaking schedule and never gave up the opportunity to vocally attack the Reagan and Bush administrations—especially the choices for the Supreme Court. He had a profound belief in the future. “I’m proud of our laws,” he said, “what our generation has done is bring equality in law. The next generation has to bring equality in fact.” Several months after Rauh’s death from heart failure, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rauh is buried in Washington, D.C.

Rauh’s papers are on deposit at the Library of Congress. There are no biographies of Joseph Rauh, but he receives prominent mention in a number of important works. See David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (1978); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978); William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: AllardLowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (1993); Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (1995); and David J. Garrow’s biography of King, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). Oral histories are on deposit at the LaGuardia-Wagner Archives, City University of New York. An obituary is in the New York Times (5 Sept. 1992).

Richard A. Greenwald