Michael E. Parrish – författare

In the convulsive years between 1920 and 941, Americans were first dazzled by unprecedented economic prosperity and then beset by the worst depression in their history. It was the era of Model T's, rising incomes, scientific management, electricity, talking movies, and advertising techniques that sold a seemingly endless stream of goods. But is was also a time of grave social conflict and human suffering.The Crash forced Hoover, and then Roosevelt and the nation, to reexamine old solutions and address pressing questions of recovery and reform, economic growth and social justice. The world beyond America changed also in these years, making the country rethink its relation to events in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The illusion of superiority slowly died in the 1930s, sustaining a fatal blow in December 1941 at Pearl Harbor.

"Joe Rauh was the type of lawyer who comes along maybe once in a generation---talented, politically astute, effective, and stubbornly devoted to principles, the type of person who not only could but did make a difference. He deserves a biography that explores not only his persona, but the America in which he lived and worked, and how he made a difference to so many people. Michael Parrish has given us just such a book, an exceedingly fine, well-written story that will make clear to another generation not only who Joe Rauh was, but why we as a nation will always need someone like him."---Melvin I. Urofsky, Professor of Law and Public Policy, Virginia Commonwealth University"Michael Parrish has captured the life of this great civil libertarian in splendid fashion. His biography of this energetic New Deal liberal weaves effortlessly between public and private, friend and foe, victory and defeat. With Parrish as a sure guide, Citizen Rauh transports the reader through an American history that begins with Sacco and Vanzetti and ends as he battles CIA skullduggery in the 1980s. This biography should be on your shelf and in your heart."---Nelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, University of California, Santa Barbara"Michael Parrish has fashioned a biography filled with Rauh's spirit, achievements, his losses, and above all, the importance of his presence. This is a wonderful account of a giant of late 20th century political and legal affairs."---Stanley Kutler, E. Gordon Fox Professor Emeritus of American Institutions, History, and Law, University of Wisconsin, MadisonCitizen Rauh tells the story of American lawyer Joseph L. Rauh Jr., who kept alive the ideals of New Deal liberalism and broadened those ideals to include a commitment to civil rights. Rauh's clients included Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, A. Philip Randolph, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. With good reason Freedom Rider John Lewis once called him "the blackest white man I ever knew."No lawyer in the post-1945 era did more to protect the economic interests of working-class Americans than Rauh, who fought for the unions as they struggled for legitimacy and against them when they betrayed their own members. No lawyer stood more courageously against repressive anticommunism during the 1950s or advanced the cause of racial justice more vigorously in the 1960s and 1970s. No lawyer did more to defend the constitutional vision of the Warren Court and resist the efforts of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to undo its legacy.Throughout his life, Rauh continued to articulate a progressive vision of law and politics, ever confident that his brand of liberalism would become vital once again when the cycle of American politics took another turn.Michael E. Parrish is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, where he has taught for forty years. A specialist in the legal and constitutional history of the United States, he has also taught at Nanjing University in the People's Republic of China, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Helsinki, where he was the Fulbright Bicentennial Professor of American Studies.Parrish is the author of five other books: Securities Regulation and the New Deal; Felix Frankfurter and His Times; Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression; The Hughes Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy; and The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment: Judging Death. His articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Historian, Diplomatic History, the Journal of the Supreme Court Historical Society, and the Yale Law Journal.Jacket design by Paula NewcombJacket photograph: Joseph L. Rauh Jr. with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Courtesy of the Estate of Olie W. Rauh.