The Public Life of Justice Brandeis
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
The Public Life of Justice Brandeis Brandeis: A Free Man's Life. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson By Alpheus Thomas Mason. Former chairman, English Viking. 713 pp. $7.50. Department, Brooklyn...
...The major theme running through the cases is the effort to control monopolistic big business...
...Much later, when Brandeis was on the Supreme Court, he showed the same intellectual ambivalence when he upheld the Government's uncompensated destruction, under the Volstead Act, of the business of the brewers and distillers...
...The book thus becomes almost a compendium of American constitutional law during the first four decades of this century...
...It is a learned, illuminating, and frequently exasperating book...
...Almost always Mr...
...Fifty years ago, the New Haven Railroad, under the guidance of the elder J. P. Morgan, set out to corner all means of transportation in New England...
...But in much of his legal and social thinking he was far ahead of his time...
...After he became nationally famous, we are still shown little of his private life, though whole pages are devoted to verbatim transcripts of testimony from some of his more dramatic court cases...
...Mason presents the public fagade rather than the man behind it...
...Most of the famous cases in which Brandeis participated as counsel or judge are outlined, sometimes in a section, sometimes in a whole chapter...
...As an ardent Zionist, for instance, he believed Jews and Arabs could dwell together in Palestine without friction...
...it has been reissued for the centenary of the Justice's birth, which fell on November 13...
...In the New Haven contest, Brandeis was on the side of the people, but simultaneously, with the mental agility of a trained corporation lawyer, he was defending the United Shoe Machinery Company, whose machinery contracts made it impossible even to walk without paying tribute to monopoly...
...Department, Brooklyn College This monumental study of Louis Brandeis was first published a decade ago...
...We are told practically nothing about the first twenty years of Brandeis's professional career, when he was a corporation lawyer of such repute that he left an estate of more than three million dollars...
...Rising from his perusal of some 700 pages of text, the reader fully agrees that Brandeis was a great man...
...Mason admits all this, but makes little effort to explain it...
...Occasionally, though, his emotions colored his reasoning...
...Mason has accumulated massive documentation...
...fifty years ago, he realized what union leaders are only recognizing now: that continuity of employment is as important as hourly wagerates...
...His passion was always for facts, not for abstract theories, and frequently in cross-examination he proved more familiar with the financial details of corporations than did the men who were running the businesses...
...But he still doesn't know what made Brandeis tick...
...His subtitle, in fact, is misleading: The book might better have been called "The Public Life and Opinions of Louis Brandeis...
...It succeeded, and went bankrupt...
...From family papers and private letters, through newspaper files from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, to the records of Congressional hearings and court decisions, Mr...
...Five years before it happened, he accurately foretold the crash of 1929...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 5
