Lehman at 50: Advancing Scholarship, Opportunity and Community

Herbert H. Lehman

Adapted from Herbert H. Lehman: A Life of Public Service by Duane Tananbaum
"Citizen and statesman, he has used wisdom and compassion as the tools of government and has made politics the highest form of public service." --Citation, Presidential Medal of Freedom

Mayer Lehman taught his son Herbert that he had a responsibility to help others and an obligation to do good works, and Herbert Lehman learned the lesson well.

For most of his life, Herbert Lehman was heavily involved in charitable and philanthropic endeavors, including his long involvement with Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1928, at age 50, Lehman began a new phase of his service to others when he was elected Lieutenant Governor of New York, a post to which he was re-elected in 1930. Two years later, when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President of the United States, Herbert Lehman was elected to succeed him as Governor of New York, and he was re-elected as the state’s chief executive in 1934, 1936, and 1938. After 10 years as Governor of New York, Lehman moved on to serve a larger public when Roosevelt called him to Washington in 1942 to head the State Department’s Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations. A year later, representatives of forty-four nations elected Lehman as the first Director-General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Even though Herbert Lehman was 71 years old in 1949, his public service was not yet finished as New Yorkers elected him to fill a one-year vacancy in the U.S. Senate, and then re-elected him to a full term in 1950. Senator Lehman declined to seek another term in 1956, when he was 78 years old, but that did not mean he was retiring to a life of comfort and contemplation. Instead, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, he led the reform movement that ended the grip of Tammany Hall and the political bosses on the Democratic Party in New York. When he died in 1963, Herbert Lehman was preparing to go to Washington to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoring him for his lifetime of public service.