Thurman Arnold

Thurman Wesley Arnold (June 2, 1891 – November 7, 1969) was an iconoclastic Washington, D.C. lawyer. He was best known for his trust-busting campaign as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Department of Justice from 1938 to 1943. Before coming to Washington in 1938, Arnold was the mayor of Laramie, Wyoming, and then a professor at Yale Law School, where he took part in the legal realism movement, and published two books: The Symbols of Government (1935) and The Folklore of Capitalism (1937). A few years later, he published The Bottlenecks of Business (1940).

Life and career

Thurman was born in the frontier ranch town of Laramie, Wyoming, which grew to be a small city and location of the University of Wyoming. He was the son of Annie (Brockway) and Constantine Peter Arnold. He began his university studies at Wabash College, but transferred to Princeton, earning his B.A. in 1911. He earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1914. He served in World War I, rising to the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Army (Field Artillery) and worked briefly in Chicago before returning to Laramie, where he was a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives in 1921 and then mayor from 1923-1924. He developed a reputation as a maverick lawyer.