PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN

Evans, Elizabeth Gleidower

PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN Louis D. Brandeis, Tribune of The People By Elizabeth Gleidower Evans LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, who for more than ten years has sat in the Supreme Court of the United States, is a...

...She and her husband, Paul Raushenbush, met when they were studying economics together for a Ph...
...Brandeis' first years at the bar, he^'gave himself with intensity to his practice...
...He went first to St...
...Here he and his...
...And when I was left alone, Mr...
...Never, never, he resolved, would he accept a fee out of so unequal a bargain...
...The account of this migration with its old world background and its new world adventures, is in preparation by a descendant of a member of the group, and it is a most enchanting story...
...Since he was appointed upon the Supreme Bench in 1016, for nine months of the year the Justice makes his home in Washington...
...They look like two lads—he blond-headed, she dark and beautiful—when one sees them in the summer, she dressed in shirt and knickers...
...He shares his whole mind with his wife...
...The Alaskan Land frauds, and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Merger, were measures which he fought with all the resources which he could command, and which struck back at him with all their immense power...
...The Authority of a Prophet MR...
...From this point his mind travelled further still...
...His passion for freedom is his by good right...
...wife renewed the family connections of their youth, while their children, two girls and two boys, plunged into the delights of art and music...
...He is Launched at the Bar WHEN he was nineteen years of age, Louis, the youngest of the family, entered the Harvard Law School, omitting the customary preliminary college course...
...Public Service DURING Mr...
...His ample house with trees and lawn and stable became a center for musicians and other persons of gifts and talents...
...Had his mind been for sale, he could have given points to any of the profession...
...But far off, alas, is still the day when his code is even suspected by many persons of high repute...
...He was always free from acrimonious contentions...
...Brandeis and his wife lived near me-in Otis Place, overlooking the Charles River Basin, while their week-ends and the spring and autumn were passed in their little summer home at Dedham...
...They have both taught there...
...It is not federal legislation but a quickened community within each state, which is the country's greatest need...
...nevertheless, after eight months, he turned back to Boston, drawn perhaps by something in its traditions, and drawn certainly by his friendship with a former fellow law school student, Samuel D. Warren, with whom he entered into partnership...
...Mrs...
...His mind was never more swift and more sure...
...JUSTICE BRANDEIS today is seventy years old...
...Always they have shared their father's seven o'clock breakfast...
...The size of greatest efficiency, he points out, has its limits...
...But when the day's wyork is done, it is done...
...During his years in Boston, Mr...
...If it is a minority opinion it is worth the making all the same...
...An opinion which plumbs to the depths is worth making...
...In the late '80s, he surprised me by announcng the need of labor organizations to,give the worker a chance at an equal bargaining power with his employer, and he early saw the threat to freedom from mighty aggregations of capital, too powerful to be dealt with in individual ways...
...The fierce contests which filled his earlier days are far behind...
...To persons who ask his advice as to their place of greatest service, he answers, "Go back home and tackle something which is within your power...
...D. at the University of Wisconsin, and Paul is now-one of Dr...
...When they were little, he gave himself to them on Sundays after the hours of early morning work, skating, riding, walking, playing tennis— yes, and building the playhouse and performing other carpentering feats...
...I asked of a youth whose vivid face arrested my attention...
...To think problems through to the far efid, to speak for the Right as he sees the Right, that is his greatness...
...As a Judge of the Court of las...
...Brandeis had no need of secret clients...
...The ethics of his attitude in such public matters is beyond dispute...
...He is imaginative, creative...
...he saw these things at least ten years before they were dreamed of by any of the successful class in Boston...
...He has always been an immense worker...
...Brandeis' services...
...A few old woolen suits and sweaters, a warm corner in which to rest, a canoe and some reach of water on which to paddle, and a great store of books, these are his only requisites for his holidays...
...resort, he is debarred from taking part in public-contests...
...Louis where he had both social and business contacts which led straight to influence and power...
...His words are -rmbuttressed by spoken religion...
...He was born of parents who, revolting at the narrowness and the political oppressions of the old world, had made a romantic migration to the United States...
...But gradually his law cases aroused his wider thinking, and he discovered problems little suspected by the world at large...
...The eldest daughter, Fanny, was a girl of rare loveliness whose musical talents were so remarkable that other musicians inevitably flocked around her...
...He often was called on to act as a mediator in labor disputes...
...After two years, the authorities suspended the rule forbidding a degree to one under twenty-one years old...
...But always he returns, and tracing back his steps he builds a logical bridge in which there is no flaw...
...Do you understand that he not only has served without fees, but that he has paid the expenses of the court proceedings...
...This story brings back the repeated accusation that he mi-st have had some unknown employer in his public work...
...Mere Bigness IT IS one of Mr...
...Paul and Elizabeth have a host of friends and abundant outdoor sport to supplement their intellectual life...
...Always there was a mid-summer holiday at the mountains or on the Cape...
...Brandeis' professional career...
...Justice Brandeis tells today of the delights and the adventures of these three years in Europe...
...she had answered...
...When he had been nominated for the Supreme Court, she received a letter soliciting appointment to the place he had held as counsel for the Consumers' League...
...He left behind him the name of having been the most brilliant student who had ever attended the Law School...
...Here one can only relate that as prospective tillers of the soil, their adventure miscarried...
...He was known as a Tribune of the People, and for that very reason he was denounced as a dangerous radical...
...Meiklejohn's staff at his Experimental College at Wisconsin...
...Elizabeth, my namesake (whom I call My Twin), is likewise a professional woman as well as a supremely happy wife...
...Many of those who delight in him today are unaware of the background of his life, and have forgotten that in his earlier days he was the worst hated as well as the best loved man in the United States...
...Many are the tales which Mr...
...and great was my surprise to learn that this was the great BRANDYCE—for so I assumed the name to be spelled—of whose achievements at the Law School my husband had never wearied discoursing.^ The two men presently became great cronies...
...His conversation ranges from the times of classic history—of Egypt, of Rhodes, of Attica, o^ their trade routes and of the sources of their food supply, down to the affairs of today...
...There was almost nothing which they left undone in the way of attempting to defeat their valiant opponent...
...Institutions grown beyond the intimate touch of a directing mind, may SEEM efficient, but they seem so only because by place, by position, they are able to strangle opponents who could compete with them in a fair field...
...He is known to have said in explanation that the public discussion showed him that he had taken the wrong side...
...Brandeis gradually came to make peculiarly his own...
...even those who suspected and hated him allowed that as an attorney his talents, were unmatched...
...The unconscious recesses of his mind, aroused by some emotional experience, make a sort of instinctive leap to some far off, apparently unrelated goal...
...The Lord is in Israel, one seems to hear him say—but in imagination only...
...But the law was the career in which he was bent...
...Justice Brandeis...
...Brandeis' most cherished beliefs and one expounded by endless illustrations that mere Bigness, which so delights the mind of America, is a thing of often sinister character...
...An incident known to but a few persons which" occurred as far back as 1888, show3 the searchlight quality of his mind, and the sensitiveness of its moral fibre...
...But he does not chafe at the limitations of his position...
...BRANDEIS' home life has been tender and intimate to a very rare degree, and it has qualities which are altogether unique...
...Thus it was that he came to volunteer, unasked, and unpaid, on the side of the public in various franchise rights...
...Morning and afternoon he walks across the moors...
...Minimum wage laws for women, the preferential union shop, and savings bank insurance are devices which he championed and the latter two of which he invented...
...and it was then found that counsel for the petitioners failed to appear...
...The fight for freedom, which had driven him forth to find a new world, lay far behind, and there was no sign of the new struggles which were impending, in these affluent and happy days...
...She is making a home for her husband and child," wrote her mother last winter, "and she is quiet and controlled a I have never known her since she was a very small child...
...In 1872 came financial stresses which were met with cheerfulness and courage...
...Of the children, Susan and Elizabeth, each of them merits her own story...
...He is abstemious in his habits...
...They were a band of twenty-seven persons, three of them accompanied by affianced lovers, and they planned to earn their bread by tilling the soil...
...A protest was raised and the hearing was re-opened...
...He saw lawyers, the ablest in the land, paid big money which it was expected would be recouped out of the pockets of the people, asking franchises of the legislature of whose value it had no least conception, and with only the leg...
...If he walks alone, he observes and thinks...
...His Wife and Children MR...
...Had not these accusers been blinded by prejudice, they would have realized the absurdity of their claim: for Mr...
...Here he at once began to rise to prominence at the bar, while the most exclusive doors were opened to one whose social attractions were as great as were his mental gifts...
...And thus he came to organize a Public Franchise League, which for years examined every franchise bill which was introduced at the State House, and which saved Massachusetts from being completely corporation-owned, as has happened in many other states...
...Things chiefly bother him...
...no man was ever known to give so unstintingly of his professional services except for hire, so it was alleged...
...While in Cambridge he earned enough money to repay the advances of his family for his professional studies, and he had three hundred dollars in his pocket, with which to start out in the world...
...PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN Louis D. Brandeis, Tribune of The People By Elizabeth Gleidower Evans LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, who for more than ten years has sat in the Supreme Court of the United States, is a great figure in the Nation...
...Perhaps studying law through other people's eyes may have had a part in training his remarkable memory...
...But I was wrong...
...But no mind is big enough to run the world...
...Brandeis constituted himself, as it were, my Big Brother...
...He ponders deeply the possible world reorganizations which lie pregnant in that fact...
...If he walks with his wife or with some other chosen companion, there is the illuminating stream of his talk...
...Florence Kelley tells a story which throws a sure light upon Mr...
...There was another type of public service which Mr...
...Is that one of your little charges...
...Only the very rarest circumstances entice him into an evening conference...
...There is no criticism of judges who speak on the other side...
...They set sail in 1848, the very year of the great revolution which swept across Europe...
...islative committee to protect the public interest...
...How could it do otherwise with highly cultured city folk who had neither knowledge nor experience of agriculture ? Adolph Brandeis, Louis' father, finally located at Louisville, Kentucky, and became a grain merchant whose fortunes flourished with the abounding West...
...But more than that...
...I don't hope to convince you," I once exclaimed sarcastically, "because you don't reason, you FEEL...
...But it was his struggle between public rights and corporate power, which shaped his career...
...Such is the summer life of Mr...
...He had been retained by a church institution to secure a donation from the Commonwealth, and he had carried the petitioners successfully through the committee stage before the fact became known to the small section of the people which takes an interest in such affairs...
...He rises early and puts in several hours' strenuous work before he joins his wife for a paddle across the wide reaches of the bay or up into narrow inland wate*rs...
...Those denunciations may be now forgotten...
...Not the least of his talents has been his proven capacity for friendship...
...Of such a man any Nation may well be proud...
...But he spends money freely for things which he thinks worth while, and he is known to have poured it out like water in behalf of some cause which he had made his own...
...Friendship IFIRST met him early in 1884, when my husband and I were calling one Sunday afternoon at the house of Professor Barrett Wendell...
...No doubt the inventions of the telephone and other such devices have immensely increased the size...
...so undeterred, he hired fellow-students to read law to him, while he tutored other fellow-students...
...It had showa him that public money should not be spent for any purpose at all except under persons appointed by the Commonwealth...
...Susan, a torrent of emotion, became a lawyer and won her own self-support, is married to Jack Gilbert, a successful lawyer, and still practices law even though Louis Brandeis Gilbert is the center" of their pleasant New York apartment...
...His final opinions have all the authority of a prophet...
...He was slight of build, and his eyes were so troublesome that his medical advisor warned him against adopting law as a profession...
...Do you understand the terms of Mr...
...Well do the workers remember the young champion who sprang to their side, as it were, out of the skies, and won for them some measure of social justice...
...Temporarily suspending his business activities, Adolph Brandeis took his family to Europe...

Vol. 19 • December 1927 • No. 12


 
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