cup marvel
The State He Made Josiah Marvel and the story of Delaware’s economic success By Kent Priestley
L
ate in the spring of 1902, a crowd of economics students took their seats in a lecture room on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Their guest speaker that day was Josiah Marvel, a young Delaware attorney who, despite his air of restraint, had come to Penn bearing a gospel of sorts. Incorporate your businesses, he told the young men gathered there. Better yet, incorporate them in Delaware. The state offered advantages that were hard to ignore: limits on a company’s liabilities, a simplified tax code, a business-friendly court system, and drastically lower incorporation fees (Pennsylvania was charging more than $3,000 at the time to register a corporation; Delaware, just $150). Though still in his mid-30s, Marvel had already exerted a powerful influence over his home state’s business and legal life. Born in Georgetown in 1866, as a young man Marvel first pursued a teaching career, but by his early twenties had turned his sights on law. In 1894 he was admitted to the Delaware bar; a mere five years later he was drafting language for the state’s far-reaching General Incorporation Act, the legal framework that would allow Delaware to become world leader in business formation. Name a development within the state’s business, legal and educational communities between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age, and Josiah Marvel was likely at the center of it. He prepared first drafts of Delaware’s child labor, income tax, and inheritance laws. He was first president of a reorganized Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. In 1919 he helped found Wilmington’s prestigious Tower Hill School, and in 1923 was named president of the newly formed Delaware State Bar Association. During the turbulent first year of the Great Depression, Marvel brought his talents to the national stage, serving as president of the American Bar Association. He received a commendation for his efforts from President Herbert Hoover in 1930. Marvel’s business life was no less distinguished. The same year
46
DSCC_JanFeb12.indd 46
he spoke to those students at Penn, Marvel, through his Delaware Charter Guarantee & Trust Company, drafted the formation documents of a young communications firm calling itself the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Countless other major U.S. corporations were formed with Marvel’s help. In 1920, he joined with a competitor, Christopher Ward, to found Corporation Service Company (CSC). From its headquarters in Wilmington, Corporation Service Company remains a leading provider of business and legal services, from entity formation and statutory representation to business compliance and legal matter management. Over the years CSC’s offerings have grown to include specialties its founders couldn’t have imagined, such as domain name management and online brand protection services that global companies depend on every day. Last year the Honorable Michael Castle became the most recent recipient of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s Josiah Marvel Cup Award, given annually to a Delawarean who has made “outstanding contributions to the state, community and society.” It is uncertain how many of those present at the award ceremony, or how many among the cup’s 50-odd previous winners, were aware of its namesake. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Josiah Marvel’s influence lives on every time a business—whether a start-up or an established multi-national—decides to register in Delaware. The office buildings that rise above our cities, the revenues that fill our state coffers, the more than 850,000 business entities that call Delaware their legal home—all bear the traces of a young, ambitious attorney from Sussex County. n Kent Priestley is public relations manager of Corporation Service Company.
Januar y / Febr uar y 2012 D e l a w a r e B u s i n e s s
1/11/12 1:31 PM