Untermyer
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
SAMUEL, an American lawyer, born at Lynchburg, Va., in 1858. He was educated at the College of the City of New York and at Columbia University, was admitted to the bar in 1879, eventually becoming a member of the firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer, and Marshall. He organized and was counsel for many industrial and railway corporations and became especially well known for his successful efforts in reorganization, as well as for his successful merger of some of the largest copper companies in this country. He also acted as lawyer for many prominent individuals. His service as counsel for the Committee of Banking and Currency es in the of the House of Representatives in the "Pujo Money Trust Investigation" resulted in the enactment of improved remedial laws. During the World War he acted as special adviser to the Government on the interpretation of income tax and war emergency tax laws and assisted the Provost Marshal General in the administration of the Selective Service Law. In 1919 he became special counsel to the Joint Committee of the New York Legislature, investigating the building and housing conditions in New York City, and succeeded in unearthing serious scandals and in indicting a large number of individuals and corporations. He was known as an advocate of public ownership of public utilities and of a national corporations law. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1916. Besides acting as executor and trustee of many large estates, he was a member of the United States Section of the Inof many legal societies and an officer of the New York State Industrial Farm Colony and of the Andrew Freedman Home.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 Untermyer was in mid-career; he lived on until March 1940, dying at Palm Springs at 81. The two things he is now remembered for are only half-visible in the account above: his grilling of J. P. Morgan for the Pujo committee in 1912-13, which Collier's credits vaguely with "improved remedial laws" and which historians tie directly to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914; and his leadership, from 1933, of the American boycott of Nazi Germany as head of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, work that lay entirely in his future here. His Yonkers estate, Greystone, became a public park, and its walled garden has been under restoration by the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy since 2011.
Written for this edition, 2026.