Brandeis: A Free Man's Life

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THE formulator of no revolutionary creed, the discoverer of no revolutionizing principle of knowledge, Louis D. Brandeis is nevertheless clearly one of those central figures who must be understood if their age is to be understood. In some respects the most remarkable man he had met in America, was Arthur Balfour’s judgment. “We of the inner circle,”Franklin Roosevelt said, “call him Isaiah.”

Professor Mason has laid his material before us in great fullness and intimacy, drawing on correspondence, diaries, and memoranda, the flavor of which he has generally refrained from flattening by paraphrase. The turbulent years before the Supreme Court phase are re-created in the richest detail. If wisdom is absorbed by a study not of wise saws but of modern instances, then surely this account of how Brandeis grappled with the perennial, or at all events recurring, dilemmas of our national life is a source book unsurpassed.

The problems are familiar, some of them painfully so: regularity of employment, bigness in government and business, cooperation and the competitive system. The solutions— or resolutions — are devised with the utmost resourcefulness and ingenuity, but they proceed from the simplest and most passionately held premises: that the development of men is the basic aim of organized society, and that responsibility is the great developer just as excessive power is the great corrupter.

Brandeis was not a professional student of foreign affairs. Perhaps, like some of our early Western judges, he did not know enough to reach a wrong conclusion. At any rate, this is part of what he wrote, in the third person, for Herbert Hoover in November, 1918, in response to a request for advice on the eve of the Paris Conference: “The urgency of the Russian question, and the fact that upon its settlement rests inevitably the proper functioning of economic interdependence in Europe, indicates to him the necessity that it should be the first matter to be settled by the Powers at the forthcoming Conference at Paris. Any delay in facing the situation will postpone the restoration of normal world conditions and will allow the focus of disorganization to fester and spread.”

Biographers, emulating dramatists, are tempted to find in their subject a major conflict to serve as a unifying theme For that function Professor Mason appears to have fixed upon the asserted inconsistency of Brandeis. It is to be doubted, however, that the theme is worthy of its place in the biography. To be sure there are a number of interesting issues of another sort which emerge from a study of this career: whether Brandeis placed too much reliance on human perfectibility; whether he unduly neglected the force of mass movements (save perhaps in his Zionist activity); and how he managed to accommodate the legislative zeal of his years at the bar to the judicial restraints of his Justiceship — where suppressing, and where reinforcing, his convictions about wrongs and remedies in the social order. These are vital and complex issues, and by comparison that of inconsistency seems rather wooden.

Indeed, the essential symmetry of Brandeis’s life transcends his own life span. In the first chapter of the biography we are introduced to Frederick a Dembitz (Louis’s mother) reading Goethe in Prague; and in the last chapter the son, summing up the problem of man and the machine, recalls a favorite line from Goethe’s The Magician’s Apprentice:—

“Even if we had the wise man s stone, the stone would be without the wise man.”

PAUL A. FREUND