Cravath graduated from Oberlin College in 1882, where he was considered both "brilliant" and a prankster. Oberlin also awarded him an honorary A.M. degree in 1887. He embarked on the study of law in 1882, which was interrupted, three months later, when he contracted typhoid fever. Recovered, Cravath worked for the Globe Oil Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil, as a salesman, then resumed his law studies in 1884, financed by his earned wages. At school, he worked as a tutor; vacation time was spent in Minnesota, working on his father's farm and visiting Quaker relatives. Cravath graduated cum laude from Columbia Law School in 1886; he was awarded the school's first Municipal Law prize.
Law career
While at Columbia, Cravath was a law student with the firm of Martin & Smith, and was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in June 1886. An early client was George Westinghouse, who was being sued by the Edison Illuminating Company for infringing on Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp patent. He joined the law firm of Blatchford, Seward & Griswold in 1899. His book of business included Bethlehem Steel, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Chemical Bank, E. R. Squibb & Sons, Columbia Gas & Electric, and Studebaker Corp. His name was added to the firm's moniker in 1901. Cravath was the authoritative head of the firm from 1906 until his death, in 1940, and his formal statement of his conceptions of proper management of a law office still controls its operations. Cravath, Swaine & Moore endures as a leading law firm, and celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2019.
His law firm growth and operating structure remains widely known today as the Cravath System. White Shoe author John Oller credits the Cravath System as the model adopted by virtually all white-shoe law firms, 50 years before the term came into use. The Cravath System has been partially adapted by most large law firms
Foreign policy
As a leader of the Atlanticist movement, Cravath was influential in foreign policy. The organization was composed of influential lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeastern United States, who committed to a strand of Anglophileinternationalism. For Cravath, the First World War served as an epiphany, building a deep concern with foreign policy that dominated his remaining career. Fiercely Anglophile, he demanded American intervention in the war against Germany. His goal was to build close Anglo-American cooperation that would be the guiding principle of postwar international organization. He was one of the founding officers of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. The founding president of the CFR was John W. Davis, a name partner of the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, while Cravath served as the inaugural vice-president. Cravath became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera in 1931. He died in 1940.
Cravath spent most of his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father, Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath, was a co-founder of Fisk University, and served as its first president, from 1875 to 1900. Cravath later served as a member and chairman of the Fisk Board of Trustees for over 30 years, until his death in 1940.
A fictionalized Cravath is the protagonist in Graham Moore's 2016 historical novel, The Last Days of Night, which received generally positive reviews, A cinematic adaptation of the "historical thriller" is in development, starring Eddie Redmayne as Cravath.
