Arthur Larson

Who was Arthur Larson?

Lewis Arthur Larson was an American lawyer, law professor, United States Under Secretary of Labor from 1954 to 1956, director of the United States Information Agency from 1956 to 1957, and Executive Assistant to the President for Speeches from 1957 to 1958.

Lewis Arthur Larson was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He was the third of five children of Lewis Larson and Anna Huseboe Larson, both of whom were second-generation Americans of Norwegian descent. Larson's father was a family court judge in Sioux Falls. Arthur Larson attended the public schools there and the local Lutheran college, Augustana, and then studied law at Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was married to Florence Newcomb on July 31, 1935.

He then worked as a lawyer for four years with the firm of Quarles, Spence and Quarles in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When depression-era conditions led to his layoff in the summer of 1939, Larson found a job as assistant professor of law at the University of Tennessee Law School in Knoxville, Tennessee. While there, he and Florence Newcomb Larson had two children.

In 1941, during World War II, Larson moved on to Washington, D.C., when he mostly worked as a lumber industry regulator at the Office of Price Administration. In 1945 he became an assistant professor of law at Cornell Law School. Over the next seven years he produced a legal treatise on the Law of Workmen's Compensation, which led to his being named dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1953.