Forgotten Man, The by Amity Shlaes

Todhunter School; in 1928, Eleanor would teach girls there Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Todhunter was rigorous—Eleanor liked rigor—but also progressive. The exam questions Eleanor and her colleagues wrote up were challenges to the America of Coolidge and the doctrines of Mellon: “What is the object today of inheritance, income, and similar taxes?” “Why is there a struggle between capital and labor?” “What is the World Court?” “Who is the dominant political figure in Soviet Russia?”
    Then there was the University of Pennsylvania, where Tugwell had studied with the radical Scott Nearing, or Douglas’s university, Chicago. At Chicago John Dewey, the great philosopher of education, had established his own laboratory school on the Midway where children of professors worked in labs, shops, and kitchens. This followed Dewey’s belief that learning by doing was the best way. Shortly progressives would also come to the University of Wisconsin, where the next year educator Alexander Meiklejohn would establish an experimental college in which undergraduates looked at only one topic at a time.
     
     
     
    AT ALL SUCH PLACES, the progressive intellectuals might make up a minority, but they still were a presence, reassuring one another. And then there was Harvard. There a few star professors encouraged their students to push for radical change—both in the law, and in government. The brightest star was Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter was an immigrant himself; he had come over as a child from Austria. His rise was the result of merit, not birth. This fact alone made him exciting, especially to his students, many of a class that had enjoyed great advantage early. Frankfurter embraced his new country and the law with passion. His respect for American law was almost likerespect for a church—he would describe his feeling for Harvard Law School as “quasi-religious.” One of his heroes was Louis Brandeis, now on the Supreme Court. Brandeis might have seemed exotic to some observers—he was the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court—but his philosophy was straight Thomas Jefferson. Another Frankfurter hero was the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, again, hardly a European radical; Holmes, the son of the wordsmith Oliver Wendell Holmes, was one of the most American of Americans, buried in Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery along with Amy Lowell. Still, Frankfurter did have a European model—Britain, where labor reforms were taking place. And when thinking politically, or as an advocate, Frankfurter viewed American law as a vehicle for European-scale reform.
    Frankfurter’s views on economics were near the opposite of Coolidge’s, even though they both spent much of their careers in Massachusetts. Frankfurter liked the idea of an active American government very much, and he tended to dislike, or disapprove of, business. An observer, Raymond Moley, would much later sum up Frankfurter’s worldview: “The problems of economic life were litigious, controversial, not broadly constructive or evolutionary. The government was the protagonist. Its agents were its lawyers and commissioners. The antagonists were big corporation lawyers. In the background were misty principals whom Frankfurter never really knew first hand and who were chiefly envisaged as concepts in legalistic fencing. Those background figures were owners of the corporations, managers, workers and consumers.”
    There was another element to Frankfurter’s personality that impressed his fellow intellectuals: he knew how to get along politically, no matter how unpopular radical thought was. Many at Harvard, including President Lowell, disagreed with him, yet Frankfurter managed to survive, even thrive at the university. Writing to Holmes, Frankfurter flattered the Supreme Court justice and won his friendship. He was close to Brandeis, who even subsidized him in the 1920s. Frankfurter, among all law professors, probably best knew Brandeis’s aversion to the