Early Life and Career Beginnings
John Brooks Leavitt was born September 30, 1849, at Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father John McDowell Leavitt was practicing law, and his wife Bethia (Brooks) Leavitt. Leavitt subsequently attended high school in Zanesville, Ohio, where his father acted as minister of an Episcopal church after leaving his law practice. In 1868 Leavitt graduated from Kenyon College, and four years later he graduated with a master's degree. Leavitt then enrolled at the Columbia University School of Law, where he graduated in 1871.
Following his graduation from Columbia, Leavitt began clerking in a New York City law office, and shortly after hung out his shingle as sole practitioner. Leavitt's practice was meager, but gradually he found clients, usually cases he took when he felt a client had been shortchanged. An early client was a clergyman who was accused of . In a subsequent case tied to election fraud, Leavitt filed suit against the New York State Secretary of State, the state's Attorney General and other state officers for contempt of court. The state officers sued by Leavitt were heavily fined by the court for their offense.
From the beginning of his career, Leavitt was outspoken. Among his targets through the years were the telephone monopoly, fellow attorneys who abused the contingency fee system, the laws regarding the criminally insane, and the need for ballot reform in New York State.
Early on, Leavitt laid out his philosophy in simple language. "The conservatism which preaches the improvement of the individual as the sole cure for social ills," Leavitt wrote in 1902, "will never improve the world." Leavitt then launched an attack on corruption in all forms – especially corporate. "If an illustration is needed it is to be found in the conduct of directors of corporations, who, when acting as a body, countenance theft, bribery, extortion, tyranny, lawlessness, trickery and fraud, which as individuals each man would abhor.... The old common-law saying that corporations have no souls is false. Corporations have souls. Governments have souls. Society has a soul."
In another of Leavitt's articles, he cut to the chase. In writing on the church (Leavitt's client was a high churchman accused of malfeasance), Leavitt addressed the temptation to follow conventional wisdom. In his essay The Attitude of the Church Towards Things Not Seen, the New York attorney noted that while church members believed miracles which happened two millennia ago, and which they had not seen, they were skeptical of current events they had seen. "Sheep follow the shepherd," Leavitt wrote. "Many laymen echo their minister."
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