Cravath was a leader in the American Atlanticist movement and was a founding member and director of the Council on Foreign Relations.

His mother, Ruth Anna Jackson, was a Pennsylvania Quaker, and his father was Erastus Milo Cravath, a descendant of French Huguenots, Congregationalist minister, abolitionist, and co-founder and president of Fisk University.

[5][4] After graduation, Cravath embarked on the study of law in Minneapolis but was interrupted after three months when he contracted typhoid fever.

[9] While the patent litigation provided Cravath a steady stream of income into the 1890s which allowed him to leave Carter to start his own firm in 1891, Cravath also gained a large public profile through the so-called "war of the currents," a full-scale commercial dispute for the market for electrical power transmission with billions of dollars at stake.

[9] In 1899, Cravath joined the law firm of Blatchford, Seward & Griswold in 1899, then led by William Dameron Guthrie.

[9] His book of business included Bethlehem Steel, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Chemical Bank, E. R. Squibb & Sons, Columbia Gas & Electric, and Studebaker Corp.[10] His name was added to the firm's moniker in 1901.

[11] Cravath was the authoritative head of the firm from 1906 until his death in 1940, and his formal statement of his conceptions of proper management of a law office still controls its operations.

The organization was composed of influential lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeastern United States, who committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism.

[17] For Cravath, the First World War served as an epiphany, building a deep concern with foreign policy that dominated his remaining career.

[23] Cravath was a director of the New York Symphony Society and the Juilliard School of Music and became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera in 1931 and was subsequently profiled by The New Yorker in its first January 1932 issue.