Richard V. Lindabury

The career of a great lawyer, no less than the career of a great soldier or a great financier, is sometimes more deeply interesting for the use that it made of circumstance and opportunity than for the story of achieved success. Richard Vliet Lindabury was born in the State of New Jersey and lived there all his life. He came from the farm and from the life of the farm. Prevented by a prolonged attack of illness from realizing his original purpose of entering the ministry, he found himself at the age of eighteen in a country law office, studying for the bar. With only the old-fashioned training of the office, reading the elementary law books, earning the money to meet his expenses by teaching in the local school, he was admitted to the bar in 1874 and began the practice of his profession on the most humble scale.

Fate and circumstance had selected for him not only the vocation suited to his talents, character and habits, but the place and opportunity in which his unusual professional qualities could have widest play. The conditions of that time were propitious to a lawyer of Lindabury’s dominant characteristics. It was an era of great expansion in corporate amalgamation. New Jersey had provided itself with a liberal system of corporate legislation which attracted the attention of the business world, and it thereby became the habitat of many corporations of the first magnitude. At the same time it was a period of alarm in the public mind over the immense development of company combination. Here was the beckoning hand for the alert, far-seeing, sagacious, resourceful, learned and constructive lawyer, not afraid of responsibility and heedless of the demands they made on time and energy. Those characteristics were the basis of Lindabury’s subsequent undisputed eminence at the bar. They made him a wise and safe adviser in the councils of business; an advocate in court who displayed the qualities of clear, forcible and compact exposition, concentrated on essentials, avoiding irrelevancies, and free from the dross of rhetoric.

In the early days of the Anti-Trust Law, and by those business groups which used collectively to be known as Wall Street High Finance, an almost superstitious reverence attached to Lindabury’s opinion; not less so, certainly, from the fact that his judgment on a proposed corporate action never avoided or minimized the awkward legal obstacles. A story often repeated in the Wall Street of that day, possibly apocryphal but certainly characteristic, described a meeting of corporation magnates called to discuss a projected step greatly desired by the eminent financiers in conference but perplexingly close to the restrictions of the law. Lindabury had been summoned; if he would tell them how to circumvent the statute, all would be well. He was late in arriving and was immediately asked, with eagerness, what would be the result if the action should be taken. As the story had it, he reflected for a moment and then answered: “Not more than six months’ imprisonment.”

Lindabury was a man of fine presence and winning personality, with attractive countenance and searching eye; ready in thought and action, alert in thrust and parry; drawing on humor sufficiently to lighten the scene without any loss of dignity. In personal intercourse he was agreeable and considerate, apt with anecdote and illustration, keen in appreciation of the wit and humor of others, a man of the world in the best sense. He was deeply interested in public affairs and at times took part in them to the extent of attending the councils of his party; presiding over its conventions, and making speeches on the real issues of a campaign. But, although often urged to run for high office, he always refused; his conviction was that his profession demanded uninterrupted and undivided allegiance.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1926 Century Association Yearbook