Early life and career

Born on January 12, 1872, near Kingston, Tennessee, to Thomas Jefferson Littleton and Hannah G. Ingram. Martin Littleton came from a long line of mountaineers.^[1] His father had served as a federal officer during the Civil War, and had returned to Tennessee to farm and raise hogs.^[1] His mother died when he was a small child.^[2]

Martin Littleton was one of nineteen children and was born in a one-room log cabin. As a child, he did not attend school but instead worked on the family farm. His father and older sister taught him to read using the Bible and a few other books they owned. On trips to nearby Kingston with his father, he visited the local courthouse and watched cases being argued, sparking his interest in the practice of law.^[2]

When Littleton was 8 years old, his father remarried. Shortly after the marriage, in 1881, Littleton moved to Texas with his parents, eventually settling in Parker County, Texas.^[1] Littleton continued to attend legal hearings there at the local courthouse in Weatherford. In hopes of saving money to attend school, he held a variety of jobs starting at age 11, including working as a printer's devil, cattle herder, railroad track walker, baker, and road worker.^[1][2] Several of these jobs required him to be self-sufficient and be away from his family home on his own for long periods of time, despite his young age.^[2]

While working on the roads of Parker County, he attracted the attention of the county prosecutor, who offered him a job as both clerk and janitor at the county courthouse.^[2] Littleton took the job, studied law on his own while clerking, passed the bar examination, and was admitted to the bar in 1891 at age 20.^[1][2] After his bar admission, he became assistant prosecuting attorney in Parker County,^[1] and within a year had left that job and was privately defending murder cases before his twenty-first birthday. He later was an assistant prosecuting attorney in Dallas County from 1893 to 1896, where he also married.^[1][2]

New York political career

In 1896, Littleton moved with his wife to New York City to further pursue his legal career. He had $400 and a letter of introduction to banker George Foster Peabody, who helped him get a job at a law firm. Dissatisfied with his progress at the firm, Littleton asked a Brooklyn judge to appoint him as defense counsel for some indigent prisoners. His success in defending the prisoners brought him to the attention of the local Kings County district attorney's office, who eventually hired him.^[2] From 1900 to 1904, he served as assistant district attorney of Kings County.^[1] During this time, he successfully tried the case of People v. William F. Miller. Miller was one of the principals of the Franklin Syndicate, a Ponzi scheme, and was charged with the larceny of over 11 million dollars from investors. Miller was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

While establishing his practice in Brooklyn, Littleton also became known for his skill at public speaking, which led to his participation in local Democratic Party campaigns in 1897 and 1898. His voice was compared to the timbre of a cello,^[1] and he practiced his speeches until he could deliver them by memory in the same manner each time. He was the presiding officer of the New York State Democratic Convention in 1900, and its permanent chairman in 1902.

Littleton was a delegate to the 1904 Democratic National Convention, and was chosen to make the convention speech presenting the name of Alton B. Parker, who went on to win the Democratic nomination (although he lost the presidential election to Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt). Littleton's speech was a great success, and according to The Baltimore Sun, it "put him in the front rank of American orators".^[1]

He served as borough president of Brooklyn in 1904 and 1905, but declined to seek reelection because of public criticism and difficulty supporting himself and his family on the borough president's salary. He returned to private practice, and gained national attention for his successful defense of Harry K. Thaw at his second murder trial in 1908^[1] (see Notable cases).

In 1910, Littleton was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-second Congress, holding office from March 4, 1911, to March 3, 1913. He won the election by 6,000 votes despite his district — which contained the Oyster Bay home of Republican former President Theodore Roosevelt — being considered a Republican stronghold.^[1] While in office, he once "astounded Congress" by giving a three-hour-and-forty-minute speech on "his unrivalled collection of trained adjectives and awe-inspiring nouns". The speech began:

Well, well, good people, here we are again with our unparalleled aggregation of sibilant synonyms, antonomastic antonyms, contumelious caconyms and tuneful tropes. Nowhere else on earth can be found such a collection of apposite adjectives, adjutory adverbs, novitious nouns and vorticular verbs. After years of patient exploration in the jeopardous jungles of Webster, the arenaceous acres of Funk and Wagnalls, and the refreshing rosetum of Roget, I shall exhibit before you this afternoon the fruits of my toil.

— Martin W. Littleton, quoted in The New York Times, December 20, 1934

^[1]

In 1911, during his term as a Congressman, Littleton announced his candidacy for U.S. Senator from New York, a position that at that time was elected by the New York State Legislature. However, Littleton had denounced the Tammany Hall political machine, with the result that Tammany Boss Charles F. Murphy would not support Littleton's Senate bid and instead supported William F. Sheehan. A three-month-long deadlock followed, which was finally ended by New York State Senator Franklin D. Roosevelt forcing the legislature to accept a compromise candidate, James A. O'Gorman.^[1] Littleton was not a candidate for reelection in 1912 to the Sixty-third Congress, and resumed his private practice of law in the New York City area.

Notable cases

In 1908, Littleton was retained by multi-millionaire Harry K. Thaw as chief defense counsel in Thaw's second trial for the high-profile murder of prominent architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, after Thaw had learned of White's past relationship with Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbit. Thaw's first trial had ended in a hung jury. Littleton was paid the then-large sum of $25,000 to represent Thaw.^[4] Littleton developed an insanity defense for the mentally unstable Thaw, and succeeded in obtaining a jury verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.^[1][5]

During 1915 and 1916, Littleton represented producer-director D.W. Griffith in hearings in New York City and before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education, concerning proposed bans or censorship of Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation, the content of which was being protested by the NAACP and other groups. Littleton contended, among other things, that a film shown in a private theater only to paying ticketholders should not be censored, because members of any group who might be offended could avoid seeing the film by simply choosing not to attend. He also argued that films in general should not be subject to federal censorship because they "mercilessly" analyzed public questions and social and religious controversies.

In 1928, Littleton successfully defended industrialist Harry Ford Sinclair on charges resulting from the Teapot Dome scandal. Sinclair was accused of bribing United States Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall to grant Sinclair's company, Sinclair Oil, an oil field lease to government land in Wyoming without competitive bidding. He was charged with criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. Littleton managed to get Sinclair exonerated from the serious criminal conspiracy charges related to bribing Secretary Fall, although Fall was later convicted of accepting the bribe.^[1] Sinclair only served 9 months in prison on contempt of Congress and jury tampering charges relating to Sinclair's hiring of detectives to follow jurors.^[1] Time magazine hailed Littleton as "the man who last week extricated Harry Ford Sinclair from the oil scandal" and likened his legal maneuvers to Houdini. Time also recognized him as "one of the world's richest lawyers".