Donald Randall Richberg, lawyer, author, and public official, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1881 and died at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1960. Mr. Richberg grew up in Chicago and received an A.B. degree from the University of Chicago in 1901. He continued his education at Harvard Law School and received an LL.B. degree in 1904. He practiced law in Chicago from 1904 to 1933, with several associates including, John C. Richberg, his father, Harold Ickes, Morgan Davies, John S. Lord, and David Lilienthal. Being active in Chicago reform circles and the Illinois Progressive Party, Mr. Richberg worked with such figures as Harold Ickes, Charles E. Merriman, and Raymond Robins. He was director of the Legislative Reference Bureau of the National Progressive Service in New York from 1913 to 1914.
Mr. Richberg's legal activities were many and varied. He served as special counsel for the city of Chicago in public utility litigation against the People's Gas Light and Coke Company, headed by Samuel Insull, 1915-1927. He was chief counsel for the railway labor unions in the Daugherty injunction suit of 1922 and general counsel for the National Conference on the Valuation of Railroads, 1923-1933, and argued the O'Fallon valuation case as amicus curiae in the Supreme Court in 1929. He also served as general counsel for the Railway Labor Executives Association, 1926-1933.
As a politician, Mr. Richberg served as chairman of the Resolutions Committee of the Progressive Convention of 1924 that nominated Robert M. La Follette for president. He wrote speeches for Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1932 campaign and subsequently during President Roosevelt's first and second terms of office. Mr. Richberg served as general counsel for the National Recovery Administration, 1933-1935; director of the National Emergency Council, 1934-1935; and chairman of the National Recovery Administration Board, 1935. As chairman of the National Recovery Administration, Mr. Richberg argued the Schechter “Sick Chicken” Case in the Supreme Court, which concluded with the NRA's being declared unconstitutional in May, 1935.
Mr. Richberg returned to private law practice in June, 1935, but later joined the firm of Joseph E. Davies, an association he continued until his death. By the end of the 1930's, he became an active opponent of the Roosevelt administration's labor policies. He became a spokesman against what he called “labor union monopoly,” arguing that unions assisted and protected by the federal government had developed in political power so as to constitute a threat to the free enterprise system.
During his career, Mr. Richberg was co-author of the Railway Labor Act of 1926, the Norris La Guardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932, and the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, and was an advocate of the revision of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 from the late 1930's until the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.
Mr. Richberg was the author of several novels, The Shadow Men (1911), In the Dark (1912), and A Man of Purpose (1922); two autobiographical works, Tents of the Mighty (1930) and My Hero (1954); campaign documents for Theodore Roosevelt, Who Wins in November (1916), and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Guilty! (1936); several serious political and economic works, The Rainbow (1936) on the National Recovery Administration, Government and Business Tomorrow (1943), and Labor Union Monopoly (1957); and numerous speeches and articles in such scholarly journals as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Political Science Quarterly, Harvard Law Review, Harvard Business Review, Virginia Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review.
Because of his shifting views on the relationship of capital and labor, Mr. Richberg's reputation is that of a Progressive and New Dealer who later became a “conservative.” He supported Dwight D. Eisenhower in the campaign of 1952, and was an outspoken critic of Harry S. Truman and the postwar Democratic Party.
