them, Frankfurter suggested, might even be easy. A student, Frances Plimpton, wrote a skeptical rhyme about Frankfurter’s crusades:
You learn no law in Public U
That is its fascination
But Felix gives a point of view
And pleasant conversation.
Lilienthal and others saw that Frankfurter and the New Republic were creating a new kind of liberalism, different from what Sutherland or Coolidge meant when they used the word. Maybe Frankfurter’s liberalism was that of the future.
Another place with the feel of radical fraternity was Columbia, to whose economics department Tugwell had come in the 1920s. In 1925, together with two colleagues, Thomas Munro and Roy Stryker, Tugwell had produced an innovative economics textbook, American Economic Life . Tugwell saw potential in Stryker, a farm boy like himself, from Kansas. The three used photos in new ways to dramatize their arguments: a picture of the tall buildings rising in Manhattan was accompanied by a didactic caption: “Collective effort built this; the inference is inescapable; but we sometimes attempt to avoid the logical further inference that more collective effort is needed. Sometimes we say that what we need is more individual enterprise. No individual,” the men concluded pointedly, “ever built a skyscraper.” Tugwell and Stryker were proud of the book; in another time, they told themselves, it could become a model.
Raymond Moley, an acquaintance of Tugwell’s, taught a course at Columbia’s sister college, Barnard, on how reformers in Britain and Bismarck in Germany had solved some of the social problems of industrialization. Moley, and Douglas as well, had become interested in the British export of the settlement house, a community center for the urban poor.
Over at the Teachers College, Columbia University, another man on the Soviet trip, George Counts, was working in a different field: education. Counts had also researched and experimented with John Dewey at his progressive Laboratory School at Douglas’s university, trying to establish a new form of child-centered education. Farther north up Lake Michigan, another man on the trip, Carleton Washburne of the progressive Winnetka school system, had also been experimenting with new methods of teaching. The educational progressives believed that competition among individuals in school—just as in Tugwell’s economy—was wrong. Instead it was time to lookfor a model of the collective school for the new society. Families mattered less in such a model—the family was an old agricultural unit, after all. And the factory mattered more. Long before this trip, Dewey and Counts had argued that the best models might be found abroad. Dewey had also argued that in a new mass society, the school must promulgate social change, not respond to it.
There were other refuges. Settlement houses had spread across the United States, and these were homes for intellectuals too. One that achieved the most was Hull House on Halsted Avenue in Chicago. For the poor of that area its resourceful founder, Jane Addams, provided everything, from piano lessons to drilling in English to health care. At Addams’s center Douglas met Europeans—“British journalists and politicians and fiery Indian nationalists”—who reinforced his sense that the United States must learn from examples abroad. At one point Addams called the Soviet revolution “the greatest social experiment in history.” For generations, progressives had gathered here.
On Halsted Street Douglas found other reformers. At least one who had paid a visit before him was an apprentice social worker—Frances “Fanny” Perkins, a young alumna of Comstock’s college, Mount Holyoke. Labor reform was deeply important, Douglas believed. He spent time familiarizing himself with the highly compelling case of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union.
In New York, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, which by 1916 was sending
You learn no law in Public U
That is its fascination
But Felix gives a point of view
And pleasant conversation.
Lilienthal and others saw that Frankfurter and the New Republic were creating a new kind of liberalism, different from what Sutherland or Coolidge meant when they used the word. Maybe Frankfurter’s liberalism was that of the future.
Another place with the feel of radical fraternity was Columbia, to whose economics department Tugwell had come in the 1920s. In 1925, together with two colleagues, Thomas Munro and Roy Stryker, Tugwell had produced an innovative economics textbook, American Economic Life . Tugwell saw potential in Stryker, a farm boy like himself, from Kansas. The three used photos in new ways to dramatize their arguments: a picture of the tall buildings rising in Manhattan was accompanied by a didactic caption: “Collective effort built this; the inference is inescapable; but we sometimes attempt to avoid the logical further inference that more collective effort is needed. Sometimes we say that what we need is more individual enterprise. No individual,” the men concluded pointedly, “ever built a skyscraper.” Tugwell and Stryker were proud of the book; in another time, they told themselves, it could become a model.
Raymond Moley, an acquaintance of Tugwell’s, taught a course at Columbia’s sister college, Barnard, on how reformers in Britain and Bismarck in Germany had solved some of the social problems of industrialization. Moley, and Douglas as well, had become interested in the British export of the settlement house, a community center for the urban poor.
Over at the Teachers College, Columbia University, another man on the Soviet trip, George Counts, was working in a different field: education. Counts had also researched and experimented with John Dewey at his progressive Laboratory School at Douglas’s university, trying to establish a new form of child-centered education. Farther north up Lake Michigan, another man on the trip, Carleton Washburne of the progressive Winnetka school system, had also been experimenting with new methods of teaching. The educational progressives believed that competition among individuals in school—just as in Tugwell’s economy—was wrong. Instead it was time to lookfor a model of the collective school for the new society. Families mattered less in such a model—the family was an old agricultural unit, after all. And the factory mattered more. Long before this trip, Dewey and Counts had argued that the best models might be found abroad. Dewey had also argued that in a new mass society, the school must promulgate social change, not respond to it.
There were other refuges. Settlement houses had spread across the United States, and these were homes for intellectuals too. One that achieved the most was Hull House on Halsted Avenue in Chicago. For the poor of that area its resourceful founder, Jane Addams, provided everything, from piano lessons to drilling in English to health care. At Addams’s center Douglas met Europeans—“British journalists and politicians and fiery Indian nationalists”—who reinforced his sense that the United States must learn from examples abroad. At one point Addams called the Soviet revolution “the greatest social experiment in history.” For generations, progressives had gathered here.
On Halsted Street Douglas found other reformers. At least one who had paid a visit before him was an apprentice social worker—Frances “Fanny” Perkins, a young alumna of Comstock’s college, Mount Holyoke. Labor reform was deeply important, Douglas believed. He spent time familiarizing himself with the highly compelling case of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union.
In New York, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, which by 1916 was sending
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