Joseph P. Cotton

For brilliant intellect, for extraordinary power of mastering and solving complicated problems, for driving force which appeared to bring immediate results with a minimum of effort, few men of our time can be matched with Joseph Potter Cotton. Six years after graduating from the Harvard Law School he was made partner in an old and important New York law firm; one year later he determined to strike out for himself; within four years he was personally engaged in some of the largest company litigation of the day. He handled such cases as if they were matters of every-day routine, for his mind seemed to work with lightning-like rapidity; it was his nature to go to the heart of every question, to dissipate all of the technical obscurities which surrounded it. His own clean-cut conclusions he was able to impress upon others. It was a saying of his colleagues that, when he left court-room or conference apparently beaten, it usually turned out that he had won. That the new Administration, two years ago last spring, should have asked him to take an active hand in the State Department work at Washington, appeared somehow the most natural step imaginable; it was equally natural that the Secretary, leaving for his long absence at the London Naval Conference, should have left in Cotton’s hands the affairs of the Department.

Cotton was alternately idol and marplot to the rest of the State Department staff. He certainly “got things done” when nothing had seemed to move under any one else’s propulsion; yet the remorselessness with which his knife cut through the most respectable red tape constantly created indignant professional resentment. But the subject of this resentful criticism took it easily, not without a sense of high amusement, and proceeded to cut with equal disregard of the proprieties the next entanglement of the Circumlocution Office. All this achievement was bound up in the personality of the man whom his friends knew affectionately as “Joe Cotton.” Those who have tried to describe him draw portraits varying in their details; President Eliot seemingly gave up the task, remarking that “there is no other person like him.” Yet somehow, taken as a whole, each of the pictures was the same; all left the suggestion of a character as unaffected as it was forceful, as gentle as it was dynamic, as full of contagious humor as of serious purpose.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1932 Century Association Yearbook