Archives West Finding Aid

Attorney, civil rights activist, Jewish communal leader.

Mark M. Litchman was born in New York City in 1887. Meyer, the name by which he was known as a youth, worked his way through school as a newspaper boy on the city’s Lower East Side. In 1902, just seven days before the termination of the Philippine Insurrection, he enlisted as a naval apprentice. He was just 14 years old, having lied about his age, and became the youngest veteran of the Spanish-American War. After his discharge in 1903 he led an itinerant life. He worked as a farm hand, sailed around the Horn aboard a French windjammer, and tramped from one European port to the next in search of work.

Litchman moved to Seattle in 1908, attracted to the University of Washington’s tuition-free law school. Mark Litchman, as he was now known, passed the bar in 1913. Shortly thereafter he joined the Socialist Party, embarking upon a law career characterized by its social activism. His tramps over land and sea, he noted in the 1930s, had given him “both a heart and a viewpoint for the underdog, and my early ideal, which furnished the dynamic urge, was to become a lawyer for the downtrodden.” Early in his career, he served as advocate of socialists in cases of political discrimination; defended foreign-born radicals faced with punitive deportation during the Red Scare; advocated the eight-hour work day; represented the labor daily, the Seattle Union Record, against charges of sedition; and made an idealistic, and unsuccessful, legal challenge against a legislative enactment imposing tuition at the UW, arguing that fees imposed a discriminatory burden on the poor. In 1921 he founded and served as first president of the Seattle Labor College, which offered free courses on various subjects taught by UW professors and other community members. Sometime around 1923, however, he loosened his binding ties with both the labor and the socialist movements. He had become increasingly disillusioned by the power he believed concentrated in the hands of the “big boys” of the labor movement. Among the socialists, many radicals distrusted lawyers as inherently unsound ideologically, even if their legal knowledge could on occasion prove useful. Litchman grew tired of this distrust and the ideological dogmatism that inspired it.

The move from his formerly exclusive association with labor and socialism did not temper his desire to fight for social justice. He helped organize the Master Cleaners and Dyers Association, and represented many of its members. His success in the 1926 federal court case Stevedoring v. Haverty abolished the Fellow-Servant Doctrine for dock workers. A 1933 victory in McDonald v. Stevenson sustained the constitutionality of the first Old Age Pension Act. The same year he represented over a hundred Yakima farm workers arrested and detained on charges of assault, vagrancy, or criminal syndicalism in the notorious “Yakima 100” case. He managed to avoid a costly and prolonged trial by getting the prisoners released on the condition that they leave the county within ten days and not return for at least twelve months. (Twelve of the prisoners agreed to plead guilty to vagrancy, but were released immediately since they had already served more than the customary ninety-day sentence). He prided himself on his success in resolving the case without trial, taking great satisfaction in his “enthusiastic” support of conciliation in labor disputes. His skill in evading antagonistic trials whenever possible, he once noted ruefully, was “perhaps . . . why I am not internationally known.”

Litchman’s other legal, political and professional activities were numerous. He served as Legal Advisor to the Washington State Legislature for four sessions between 1935 and 1941, drafting over 1000 bills. In 1938, he was appointed to the state Senate, but did not stand for re-election. He served on the boards of B’nai B’rith and Seattle Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He served as program director for the Seattle Bar Association and as secretary for the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. He was appointed as a charter member of the King County Housing Authority in 1939 and served as a director for over 20 years. He was also a member of the King County Advisory Committee on Social Security. Litchman was a founder of the Seattle post of the Jewish War Veterans and was Judge Advocate of the Department of Washington and Alaska, United War Veterans. During WWI he served in the U.S. Merchant Marine.

Litchman was a sought-after lecturer and prolific writer. His works ranged in style and substance from essays on legal philosophy to pulp fiction. He had begun to work on, but never completed, a novel based on his own life. Mark M. Litchman died in 1960.