James Rudolph Garfield, a Columbia University-educated lawyer who began practice in Cleveland in 1888, was the first legal counsel of the Cleveland Foundation. The son of Ohio-born President James A. Garfield, he handled the foundation’s legal affairs until 1946, the year he turned 81. Garfield died in 1950.

During his 32-year tenure as legal counsel, Garfield worked with the probate and trust attorneys whose clients had bequeathed funds to the foundation to make sure that donors’ wishes were clearly understood and scrupulously observed. Untangling knotty issues (often involving misunderstandings on the part of beneficiaries with lifetime interests in the donors’ estates), he was responsible for the smooth and timely transfer of the first $10 million in endowment monies to the foundation.

Garfield’s most shining hour came during heated public debate about the findings of the Cleveland Foundation’s criminal justice survey in 1921. In his damning report about the performance of municipal and county courts, attorney-investigator Reginald Heber Smith documented a host of abuses that conspired to protect Cleveland’s criminals from conviction. Of every 100 felony cases originating with city prosecutors, Smith had discovered, only 29 on average proceeded through to sentencing. Among the causes identified by Smith for the laxity of the system were the defense of habitual criminals by a ring of attorneys with powerful political ties, underpaid prosecutors with inexperienced assistants, and the shirking of jury duty by well-educated citizens.

Members of the judiciary mounted a fierce public counterattack, labeling Smith’s investigation “unjust” and a “criminal waste of money.” Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judge Homer G. Powell went so far as to threaten to jail the foundation’s board for contempt. The board members promptly huddled with Garfield, who courageously advised his clients to inform “Judge Powell that he could send the sheriff anytime he wanted to receive us.”