George Rublee

George Rublee (1868-1957) was a public-spirited U.S. lawyer who involved himself with state and national political reform during the Progressive Era (1910-1918) and with international affairs from 1917 to 1945. After serving as assistant to Wall Street corporation lawyer Victor Morawetz in the 1890s and early 1900s, Rublee entered public life when he became political adviser to Governor Robert P. Bass to establish Lafollette-inspired reforms in New Hampshire (1910-12). Rublee then served as adviser to Theodore Roosevelt on political-economic matters in the 1912 presidential campaign and as adviser to President Woodrow Wilson on anti-trust reform beginning in 1914. Rublee was the primary force behind the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, upon which he served by recess appointment from 1915 to 1917.

Rublee pivoted to international affairs when he was appointed as U.S. representative to the London-based Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC) in 1917, where Rublee became an ardent internationalist while serving with Jean Monnet and James Arthur Salter on the AMTC. Rublee became a founding partner in the Covington and Burling law firm (Washington, D.C.) in 1920 but returned to international affairs in 1927 when he became adviser to Ambassador Dwight Morrow in his mission to Mexico. Rublee served on the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Conference in 1930, where he worked to promote U.S. cooperation with the Versailles treaty security system, and he was involved in several Latin American diplomatic missions during the 1930s. His public work climaxed in 1938 when Franklin Roosevelt requested Rublee become director of the London-based Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees Coming from Germany, which attempted to arrange for the resettlement of German and Austrian Jews prior to the outbreak of World War II. He was unsuccessful in that effort other than being able secure visas for about 600 Jewish refugees to Argentina, before the Americas erected immigration barriers in the wake of the 1938 Évian Conference.

Rublee divided his time between residences in Washington, New York City, and Cornish, New Hampshire, where he had a house in the artist and intellectual community that grew up around sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens' workshop at the close of the 19th century. A genuine humanist and progressive thinker, Rublee sought to help find and implement solutions to pressing problems of his day.

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