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David Cohen (November 13, 1914 – October 3, 2005), was an American lawyer, Democratic civil servant and politician. For the last 26 years of his life, he was a Philadelphia city councilman representing the northwest district. Having served a four-year term not consecutive to the other terms, he represented northwest Philadelphia for a total of 29 years. He died in office aged 90. Cohen was a local Democratic and community leader during the mayoral administrations of Philadelphia Mayors Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, a councilman during the administration of Mayor James Hugh Joseph Tate and the police commissionership of Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, and a councilman in the mayoral administrations of Mayors William J. Green, W. Wilson Goode, Edward G. Rendell, and John F. Street. He served nearly 14 full years in City Council with future mayor Michael Nutter (who was elected mayor two years after Cohen's death). His views on city issues were often at odds with the majority in city government. Rendell described him as the most tenacious political leader he ever met. Cohen supported labor unions, collective bargaining, racial integration, desegregation, and equal opportunity since the late 1930s. He claimed he had anticipated trends of increasing support for such positions. He campaigned with planks of civil rights, workers rights, good government, constituent service and geographic inclusiveness. In his first term on the City Council, he successfully sponsored in 1970 an air pollution measure, and emphasized it in his next campaign. His chemical right-to-know bill, in 1982, was one of the nation's first. He opposed waste incineration within the city, successfully in the case of a proposed plant near the Philadelphia Naval Yard. During his tenure, two long existing waste facilities were shut down. He claimed that these curtailments in waste facility operations produced a saving of $1.5 billion in trash disposal costs over thirty years and enhanced the attractiveness of the city areas of South Philadelphia, Northern Liberties, and Roxborough as targets for development. In 1995, Cohen declared himself "a Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat", and thereafter refused any other public comment on supporting political alliances in the city. At his death in 2005 at age 90, Cohen was one of the oldest American elected leaders in office, serving at large〔(David Cohen page on city government site )〕 on the City Council, and thus representing all the city's 1.5 million residents. (U.S. Senators Thurmond and Byrd each also reached the age of 90 while representing a U.S. constituency with a population of a million or more, before and after him, respectively.) ==Early political career== Cohen, a child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, was born in south Philadelphia.〔(''Jewish Exponent'', 2005 October 12 )〕 Cohen first became active in politics as a campaign worker for Democratic mayoral nominee John B. Kelly, Sr. in 1935. He was appointed an attorney for the Rural Electrification Administration in Washington, D.C. in 1938 after graduating first in his class from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1937 and winning a graduate fellowship. As a graduate fellow, Cohen did research used for upholding the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's law providing for a minimum wage equal to the federal minimum wage for some people not covered by the federal minimum wage. As a Rural Electrification Administration attorney, Cohen drafted state laws for various states and became president of the agency union and participated in negotiations with two Secretaries of Agriculture. Cohen resigned his position with the federal government in 1943, then located in St. Louis, Missouri as the federal government dispersed federal agencies around the country to forestall an enemy attack on them in World War II, to prepare to enter the US Army. Briefly working for the St. Louis Congress of Industrial Organizations while awaiting the completion of enlistment processing, Cohen made the transition from volunteer union leader to union staffer. His first job after returning from New Guinea in the South Pacific theater, where he had reached the rank of the rank of staff sergeant, the highest rank for a non-commissioned officer, after declining to attend Officer Candidate School, was to legally represent federal union employees in New York City, where his wife's family lived, and help them unionize. In one case, after independent journalist I.F. Stone interviewed him, he recruited Stone as a volunteer legal aide so that Stone could get a first hand view of the obstacles facing union workers. Cohen returned to Philadelphia in 1952 and developed a law practice representing unions, individuals, and businesses. With law partner Morton C. Jacobs, he handled an early legal case holding that computer software was patentable. When Cohen moved to the Broad and Olney area of Philadelphia, he saw a newspaper ad seeking volunteers for the Presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson. He volunteered and was appointed an assistant committeeman in Philadelphia's 49th Ward, 27th Division. After an unsuccessful run for Judge of Elections in 1953, Cohen was elected a Democratic committeeman in his division in 1954. He later became Treasurer of the 49th Ward Democratic Executive Committee, President of the Northwest Philadelphia Chapter of the American Jewish Congress, and head of the Northwest Philadelphia Chapter of the Community Chest. He also was active in the Jewish War Veterans, and often cited his experiences dealing with soldiers from rural areas in Missouri, running a health care clinic for soldiers in New Guinea and giving them legal advice as formative ones. He developed national concerns as well. He attended the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and marched with Dr. King and many others for voting rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965. He had spent the end of 1964 gathering information about violations of African-American voting rights in Mississippi in support of the challenge to the seating in Congress of Mississippi's Congressional delegation. Following the one man, one vote decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, the wards of Philadelphia were redistricted, and the 49th Ward was split in half. Cohen was elected Democratic leader of the 17th Ward in 1966, and was continuously reelected henceforth. In 2002, he became the most senior Democratic ward leader in the City of Philadelphia, and he continued to serve as the 17th Ward Democratic leader until his death. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「David Cohen (politician)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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