Four hulking steel tanks—three of them spheres, the fourth a towering fifty-foot cylinder—shone in the bright sun on a crisp Friday in October 1944. Nestled in Cleveland’s densely packed Norwood–St. Clair neighborhood, barely a block from Lake Erie,1 the tanks were the fruits of an engineering breakthrough. Several years earlier, scientists at the East Ohio Gas Company had realized that if you stored natural gas at extreme low temperatures—minus 260 degrees, in this case—the gas converted into a liquid, which compressed its volume to about 1/600th of its usual size, which meant you could store a whole lot more of it in one place. That was important, because Cleveland was booming. Its factories were churning out machinery for World War II, its population was soaring, and its needs for energy were galloping higher.
To keep up with demand, East Ohio Gas had constructed the world’s first commercial gas-liquefication facility in 1941. The first three tanks, double walled with steel, insulated with cork, each held about 50 million cubic feet of gas.2 Tank No. 4 was built two years later. Wartime rationing was in place, and to conserve scarce materials, it was insulated with rock wool rather than cork and was built in a cylindrical shape that allowed it to hold more gas per square inch of steel. It contained about twice the volume of gas as its three smaller siblings.3 Clevelanders regarded the facility with pride, “one of the scientific wonders of the country,” as the Plain Dealer newspaper put it.4
At 2:30 p.m. on Friday, October 20, the fourth tank sprang a leak. Liquid gas was escaping through a seam, mixing with air, reverting to its gaseous state. Neighbors noticed white mist circulating near the bottom of the tank.5 Then, as the volume of leaking gas increased, residents saw it pouring into a nearby sewer, flowing like water.
The explosion came at 2:41. One worker described it as “a big balloon of fire” inflating over the neighborhood.6 In an instant, the sky turned orange,7 flames leaping a half mile up.8 Red-hot shrapnel screamed through the air. As a square mile burned, the air temperature hit 3,000 degrees—hot enough to melt coins in victims’ pockets.9 “It was as if a flame-thrower had been turned on you,” a survivor said.10 Charred sparrows fell from the sky.11
Twenty minutes after Tank No. 4 exploded, one of the spherical tanks detonated. Underground blasts rumbled through the city as gas that had drained into sewers and pipes combusted. Miles from the initial explosion, car tires blew out12 and streets were torn up, manhole covers shooting hundreds of feet into the air.13
The fire smoldered for days.14 Through the smoke, shell-shocked residents confronted a scene of awesome wreckage. Much of the teeming Norwood–St. Clair neighborhood, home to a thriving community of Slovenian immigrants, was leveled. The occasional lonely tree trunk or wall stood amid endless heaps of ash and debris.15 Seventy-nine homes and two factories were destroyed, with others sustaining serious damage. One hundred and thirty people were killed, 225 hospitalized. The bodies of sixty-one people were so thoroughly incinerated that they couldn’t be identified.16 Some were found kneeling in prayer.17 It was not lost on survivors that this was the sort of devastation that European cities were enduring during the war.
The grand Union Commerce Building was nearly three miles from the site of the explosion, but the tremors almost certainly were felt inside what at the time was one of the three largest office buildings in the world.18 One occupant of the building was a fast-growing law firm: Jones, Day, Cockley & Reavis.
Jones Day had represented East Ohio Gas for decades. The company had been part of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire, and Jones Day lawyers had a long-running relationship with the mighty industrialist. Within hours of the blast, a small team gathered inside Jones Day’s offices. The lawyers’ assignment was to assess the gas company’s liability for the vast damage the explosion had caused. The lawyers spent twenty-four hours holed up in the firm’s library. Clearly their client would shoulder some responsibility for this disaster, but there were plenty of other culprits the lawyers could also blame. There was the Pittsburgh steel company that had, it seemed, cut corners on the material for the cylindrical tank. There was the manufacturer of the rock wool, which, soaked with gas, ignited and transformed into fiery projectiles that sparked blazes all over the neighborhood. There were Cleveland’s sewer and water authorities, whose networks of tunnels became channels for the gas to spread and catch fire.
In response to the inevitable flood of lawsuits against East Ohio Gas, the law firm could unleash delay-and-deflect maneuvers to wear down plaintiffs in the interest of getting them to accept the smallest possible settlements. Its lawyers could lowball the value of damaged property. They could blame homeowners for inadequate fireproofing. They could submerge plaintiffs in legal motions and other paperwork. If, that is, the law firm and its client wanted to take a scorched-earth approach.
A Jones Day lawyer named Pat Mulligan was close to East Ohio’s management. On Sunday, two days after the explosion, Mulligan met with the company’s general counsel, Bill Pringle, and explained the firm’s thinking: East Ohio’s best bet was to admit fault and make people whole.19 If the company hoped to remain in Cleveland, it had a powerful incentive—an obligation—to take care of a community that had suffered a tragedy. It might cost more in the short run, it might set a precedent of corporate culpability for out-of-the-blue catastrophes, it might mean waiving some plausible cover granted by the law, but it was the right thing to do. That was Jones Day’s counsel.
The next day, East Ohio ran an ad in the Plain Dealer, inviting victims to come to the company’s offices (which weren’t near the explosion), detail their losses, and get paid.20 “It is not necessary to incur any expense or to employ anyone to aid you,” the ad explained.21 Jones Day set up desks in the building’s lobby to process the claims, and that morning hundreds of people lined up. Many had been injured; some had family members who were killed; more faced huge bills to repair their homes. East Ohio wrote checks on the spot. Within a few months, the company had paid nearly $7 million (about $100 million today) to thousands of people. Only twenty-four lawsuits were ever filed.22
The gas company, today owned by Dominion Energy, remained in the neighborhood.23 The site of the explosion became a public park. Decades later, victims perceived East Ohio’s process to have been fast and fair.24
Jones Day had been established a half century earlier under a different name by a well-regarded former judge, Edwin Blandin, and a dapper young lawyer named William Rice. Blandin & Rice hitched itself to Cleveland’s fast-growing railroad and coal companies, among others. The firm even represented a prominent actress, Olga Nethersole, who sued a local newspaper for libel for saying that her play was booed so loudly that she “had hysterics.” (The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a woman having hysterics “is so common an occurrence” that the accusation, though untrue, was not libelous.)25
Just as the firm was hitting its stride, tragedy struck. On a Friday afternoon in August 1910, Rice played a round of golf at a country club near his colonnaded hilltop mansion. After dining there and watching a few hands of bridge, he set out for home. He never made it. Around 11:00 p.m. he was found lying on his back on the side of the road, bleeding from two bullet holes near his right eye and multiple stab wounds to his chest.26
The law firm offered a $5,000 reward for information about Rice’s murder. Pinkerton detectives were hired. A loaded revolver was found under the pillow in Rice’s bed, and his colleagues speculated about the potential culprits, but no motive was ever established, and the case was never cracked.27 Generations of Jones Day lawyers would retell the story of the unsolved mystery, building a mythology about how their firm survived a calamity, defied expectations, and soared to greatness.28 (The murder also became a punchline. “It shows that there was lawlessness in Cleveland even in that early day,” one of the firm’s leaders, Jack Reavis, chuckled to a group of associates more than seventy years later.29)
At the time, the concept of a law firm was just taking root in America. Up until then, most lawyers had operated solo. They viewed themselves as “independent craftsmen who served the needs of local communities in which they were leaders,” Mitt Regan and Lisa Rohrer wrote in their book BigLaw. Lawyers who assembled into “firms” generally did so to share office expenses, not to function as a team.30 But as companies grew and their legal needs became more complex, small groups of lawyers in America’s largest cities banded together. From the get-go, this trend appalled critics who viewed the profession of law as something akin to a religious practice, not to be corrupted by the pursuit of money or clients. “The practice of law has become commercialized,” a commentator groused in 1913. “It has been transformed from a profession to a business, and a hustling business at that.”31
The profession’s response to such critiques was to institute a system of self-regulation that discouraged, and often banned, businesslike behavior by practitioners. Soon bar associations prohibited lawyers from even soliciting clients.32 But there was no way to stop firms from growing.
Tom Jones, a recent graduate from Ohio State University and the son of a judge, joined Blandin & Rice the year after Rice’s murder. In college, Jones had lettered in track and was the football team’s quarterback and captain. He was an academic star, too, elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Jones desperately wanted to be a lawyer. Blandin & Rice enjoyed a growing reputation in Cleveland’s business community; Jones showed up unannounced and asked for a job. He was told to go away. “This young man could not comprehend such an attitude, so he came to the office every day and just sat,” his widow would recount. Finally, the firm’s leader, Frank Ginn, gave him a job.33
At the time, the firm, like its peers, was little more than a collection of isolated lawyers, “each practicing his own individual law business, just as local as a country doctor,” as Jack Reavis, who joined the firm a decade after Jones, put it.34 Ginn was a stern, autocratic fellow who chopped wood for exercise and attended classical music concerts in a cape and top hat.35 With the title of managing partner, he could hire and fire unilaterally. (He refused to hire anyone who was engaged. “A young lawyer had to be married to the law before he took on a wife,” Ginn’s son explained.36) He set employees’ compensation. He was the arbiter of disputes. He could pick his successor. “He completely dominated the law firm and ran it with an iron hand,” a colleague recalled.37
Ginn established a principle that would guide the place for decades: “The firm must maintain its freedom and independence to turn down any representation.” He once declined an assignment advising a company on a merger “because he was convinced it was the result of investment bankers pushing something that could never be accomplished.” Marvin Bower, a Jones Day associate who went on to found the consulting firm McKinsey, liked to tell the anecdote. “If you are not willing to take pain to live by your principles, there is no point in having principles,” Bower would say.38
Ginn was fond of Tom Jones, and he handed ever more responsibility to his young associate. Before long, Jones represented many of Cleveland’s most iconic companies and families: industrial businesses, utilities, railroads, lenders, real estate concerns, parts of the Rockefeller empire, and the Van Sweringen brothers, owners of everything from banks to department stores.39
The lawyers viewed their firm as a brotherhood. Jones’s son joined. Jack Reavis worked alongside his brother Tat.40 The lawyers went fishing and played poker and got drunk together. “We gave more parties than a neighborhood dance club,” Reavis would recall. During Prohibition, the lawyers would buy “this god-awful alcohol from a cock-eyed bootlegger” and make gin together.41 (On one occasion, a colleague phoned Jones, pretending to be a U.S. Marshal who had been tipped off to the group’s illegal liquor purchases. Jones dumped his entire stash into a river before realizing it was a prank.42)
Before he died in 1938, Ginn selected Jones to succeed him at the helm of the thirty-four-lawyer firm.43 The power transfer led to an abrupt cultural change. Ginn had been tough, no-nonsense, “no gaiety or first-name greetings,” a secretary remembered. Jones, by contrast, was so charming he “could have been in the movies.” Ginn’s criticisms stung; Jones’s were so soft that you hardly realized he had criticized you. He insisted that everyone take their four weeks of vacation time.44 It was under Jones’s leadership that the firm advised East Ohio Gas to put principles ahead of short-term profits and to quickly compensate victims of the explosions.
One of Jones’s first big moves, the autumn after he took over, was to merge with an eight-lawyer Cleveland firm run by Luther Day, who was regarded at the time as “possibly the greatest trial lawyer in Ohio’s history,” in the words of a federal judge.45 With the addition of Day and his team, the firm’s roster of clients expanded to include out-of-town goliaths like General Motors. In 1939, the merged firm was rechristened Jones, Day, Cockley & Reavis. Aside from that merger, Jones didn’t try to expand. He focused on keeping clients and ensuring that the quality of services was top-notch.46
In 1932, Chapman Rose—everyone called him Chappie—was the last clerk to serve under Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.47 The famed jurist was ninety and in his final term. Holmes’s eyesight was failing, and he asked the pale-eyed, fair-haired Rose to read to him. Against all better judgment, Rose picked the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “Sonny, we will not be finishing this book,” Holmes remarked. “Dullness is not diminished by pornography.”48
As Rose’s clerkship ended, the young lawyer asked Holmes for advice. It was the middle of the Great Depression, but he had two job opportunities. One was in the Roosevelt administration. The other was in his native Ohio at the firm that would become Jones Day. Holmes didn’t equivocate: Get real-world experience. “Sonny, go home,” he advised.49
Rose joined Jones Day; his starting salary of $200 a month was swiftly sliced to $140 as the Depression deepened.50 After a decade in Cleveland, he decamped to Washington to join the War Department. He helped it procure wartime supplies, eventually earning the rank of colonel.51 When World War II ended, Rose realized that Washington was poised to become the center of the free world.52 He thought Jones Day had an opportunity to prosper in the capital. He explained this to Tom Jones and his underlings back in Cleveland. There was a fair amount of skepticism; did a midwestern firm really need a beachhead on the East Coast? Jones, however, was sold. He authorized Rose to open a Washington office in 1946.
Jones Day was already building a national reputation, representing storied companies like American Greetings Corporation, J.M. Smucker, and Sherwin Williams.53 But the move into Washington vaulted Jones Day into a rarefied position. It was one of the only law firms in the United States with a presence in more than one city.
It would soon attract even more attention. In 1952, Harry Truman issued an executive order to seize the nation’s steel mills. Republic Steel had been a client of Luther Day’s, and the D.C. presence made Jones Day a natural choice to represent the company as it battled the White House. At the law firm’s behest, the Supreme Court struck down Truman’s order.54
Around the time that Tom Jones signed off on the foray into Washington, he had a heart attack. The doctors prescribed bed rest. When his son Brooks visited him in the hospital, he found Jones lying on his back, perfectly still, except for his fingers, which were moving vigorously.
“What in the world are you doing?” Brooks asked.
“This is the only exercise I’m permitted to do,” he replied.55
Two years later, when Jones was sixty, he was hospitalized again with more heart troubles. He was released after several weeks. Jones sat on the boards of directors of several companies that his law firm represented, and in April 1948 he and his wife drove to Baltimore for a board meeting of the Glenn L. Martin aircraft company. “They thought it would be a good opportunity to get away from the tensions of business in Cleveland,” Brooks wrote in a notebook that he gave his daughter decades later. After the board meeting, the Joneses checked into a hotel. Around 8:00 p.m., Jones phoned Brooks to inquire about the status of his younger brother’s divorce proceedings. “I couldn’t give him a very happy report,” Brooks recalled.
A half hour later, the phone rang again, and this time Brooks felt a sense of foreboding as he picked up. His mother was on the line. “Your father is dead,” she said.56