BRANDEIS, LOUIS DEMBITZ

BRANDEIS, LOUIS DEMBITZ (1856–1941), U.S. jurist, the first Jew to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. -Early Years Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the youngest of four children of Adolph and Frederika Dembitz Brandeis. His parents, both of whom were born in Prague, came of old and cultivated Jewish families with a deep interest in European liberalism. Apprehensive of political repression and economic distress after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, both families immigrated to America. Although they had formed the romantic idea of turning to a life of farming, they were dissuaded by Adolph, who had come in advance to explore the possibilities of life in the new country. After a short stay in Marion, Indiana, where a business venture did not prosper, the families moved to Louisville. There Adolph established a grain and produce business which proved highly successful until the depression of the early 1870s. Louis early showed himself to be a remarkable student. He was brought up in a family environment that cultivated   intellectual achievement and spiritual sensibility but in which formal religious training was eschewed. Louis' mother explained this aspect of her children's education: "I wanted to give them something that neither could be argued away or would have to be given up as untenable, namely, a pure spirit and the highest ideals as to morals and love. God has blessed my endeavors." Louis especially admired an uncle, lewis dembitz , a scholarly lawyer and author in Louisville, sometimes known as "the Jewish scholar of the South," who was to become a follower of Theodor Herzl and an active Zionist. In honor of his uncle, Louis changed his middle name from David to Dembitz. Following his graduation from high school at 15, and after the family business was dissolved because of financial reverses, Louis accompanied his parents in 1872 on an extended trip to Europe. During 1873–75 he attended the Annen Realschule in Dresden. Although he found the demands of the classroom rewarding, the repressive discipline of the place was distasteful. He was eager to return home. "In Kentucky," he said, "you could whistle." On his return, influenced by his uncle's career, Louis entered Harvard Law School. Supported by loans from his older brother and earnings from tutoring fellow students, he completed the course before his 21st birthday with an academic record unsurpassed in the history of the school. -Law Career Brandeis formed a law partnership in Boston with a former classmate, and by the age of 30 he had achieved financial independence, thanks both to the success of his legal practice and to a deliberately frugal style of living. This simplicity came to be shared and abetted by his wife, Alice, daughter of Joseph Goldmark, a noted Viennese scientist. The wedding ceremony was performed in 1891 by her brother-in-law felix adler , founder of the Ethical Culture Society. In appearance Brandeis was a figure at once compassionate and commanding – tall, spare, ascetic, with deep-set, dark, penetrating eyes. Many who saw him thought of Lincoln. President Franklin Roosevelt spoke of him as "Isaiah." As a lawyer Brandeis devoted himself increasingly to public causes and to the representation of interests that had not theretofore enjoyed such powerful advocacy: the interests of consumers, investors, shareholders, and taxpayers. He became known in Boston as the "People's Attorney." When Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912 on a platform of the New Freedom, he turned to Brandeis for counsel in translating ideas of political and social reform into the framework of legal institutions. In 1916 Wilson nominated Brandeis as a justice of the Supreme Court, precipitating a contest over confirmation in the Senate that lasted more than four months. The conservatives in that body were unprepared for a nomination to the Court so deeply innovative: the nominee was a Jew, and he was a lawyer of reformist bent. Standing firm against great pressure to withdraw the nomination, Wilson insisted that he knew no one better qualified by judicial temperament as well as legal and social understanding, and confirmation was finally voted on June 1, 1916. -Jewish and Zionist Activities Brandeis' involvement in Jewish affairs began only a few years before his appointment to the Court. He had never disavowed the faith of his fathers and had contributed to Jewish philanthropies, but his concerns had been overwhelmingly secular. In 1911, he recounted, his interest in Judaism was stirred by two experiences. One was his service as mediator in the New York garment workers' strike, in an industry dominated on both sides by Jews of humble origin in Eastern Europe. He found a strong sense of kinship with these people, who were remarkable not only for their exceptional intelligence but above all for a rare capacity to see the issues from the other side's point of view. The other experience was a meeting with jacob de haas , then editor of the Jewish Advocate in Boston, who had served as Herzl's secretary in London. De Haas was thoroughly familiar with the accomplishments of Lewis Dembitz in Kentucky, and excited in the nephew a new interest in Jewish history and particularly in the Zionist movement. Brandeis, as was his habit, read everything on the subject that De Haas could furnish, footnotes as well as text, De Haas said, and became convinced that, so far from bringing a threat of divided loyalties, American and Zionist ideals reinforced each other. "My approach to Zionism," he said, "was through Americanism. In time, practical experience and observation convinced me that Jews were by reason of their traditions and their character peculiarly fitted for the attainment of American ideals. Gradually it became clear to me that to be good Americans we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews we must become Zionists. Jewish life cannot be preserved and developed," he asserted, "assimilation cannot be averted, unless there be established in the fatherland a center from which the Jewish spirit may radiate and give to the Jews scattered throughout the world that inspiration which springs from the memories of a great past and the hope of a great future." Brandeis' rise to leadership in the movement was rapid. When war broke out in 1914 and certain leaders of the World Zionist Organization moved to America, Brandeis consented to serve as chairman of the Provisional Committee for General Zionist Affairs. He supported the convening of an American Jewish Congress representing all important Jewish groups in the country to give the widest support to Jewish interests at the peace conference. He thereby brought himself into conflict with eminent non-Zionists in the United States. His close relations with President Wilson and high administrative officials played an important part in securing support for the balfour declaration , and later for the British Mandate, with adequate boundaries. -Conflict within the Zionist Movement A turning point in Brandeis' leadership developed out of his relationship with chaim weizmann . The two met for the first time in London in the summer of 1919, when Brandeis was   making a trip to Paris, site of the peace conference, and then to Palestine. In Palestine he was exhilarated by the spirit of the settlers but distressed by the debilitating prevalence of malaria and by the lack of business methods and budgetary controls in the handling of Zionist funds. He insisted that priority be given to remedying these physical and financial troubles. In the summer of 1920, at a meeting of the World Zionist Conference in London, Brandeis sought agreement on a plan to concentrate Zionist activity on the economic upbuilding of Jewish settlement in Palestine and to conduct that activity with efficiency and in accordance with sound financial principles. He proposed a small executive body that would include Weizmann and several men of great business experience, including Sir Alfred Mond and James de Rothschild, together with Bernard Flexner, an American lawyer, and others to be co-opted with the aid of Lord Reading. Weizmann was at first attracted to the plan because of the new strength it would give to the movement; but when he found his old colleagues from Eastern Europe offended because of their exclusion from the executive, he felt the tug of divided loyalties and expressed misgivings to Mond and de Rothschild, who withdrew because of the prospect of internal strife. Brandeis was deeply disturbed by these developments and decided that he could not accept responsibility for the work of the World Organization; he consented to continue as honorary president only when persuaded that his withdrawal would have serious implications for the safety of the Jews in Eastern Europe. In June 1921, at a convention of American Zionists, the controversy brought serious repercussions. Many delegates had strong ties of loyalty to Weizmann and other Eastern European leaders, and shared Weizmann's view that the financial autonomy Brandeis desired for the American organization would weaken the strength of the World Organization. When a majority of the delegates refused a vote of confidence to Brandeis' position, he resigned from any position of responsibility, although not from membership in the organization. In this action he was joined by his principal supporters, including Julian W. Mack, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Szold. The ardor of Brandeis' commitment, however, did not slacken. He inspired the organization of the Palestine Cooperative Company, which became the palestine economic corporation , to work in the investment field on projects that could become self-supporting, and the establishment of the Palestine Endowment Fund to administer bequests and trust funds primarily for projects not expected to yield a financial return. Brandeis contributed generously of his spirit and fortune. In his will the largest bequest was to the Zionist cause. He continued to receive frequent calls for counsel, which he would give, consistent with his judicial office, generally in the form of searching questions that would clarify the problem for the inquirer's own good judgment. -Supreme Court In his judicial career, as in his Zionist activity, Brandeis was preeminently a teacher and moralist. His important judicial opinions are magisterial in character, notable not merely for their solid craftsmanship and analytical power but for their buttressing with data drawn from history, economics, and the social sciences. At a time when a majority on the Court was striking down new social legislation, Brandeis (together with his colleague Justice Holmes) powerfully insisted that the U.S. Constitution did not embody any single economic creed, and that to curtail experiment in the social sciences, no less than in the natural sciences, was a fearful responsibility. Not only did Brandeis vote to sustain such measures as minimum wage laws, price control laws, and legislation protecting trade unions against injunctions in labor disputes; his dissenting opinions in these cases served to illuminate their basis in experience and in social philosophy. These controversies arose under the vague constitutional standard of "due process of law." Another notable category of cases concerned the distribution of governmental powers between the national government and the states. Brandeis believed that the American federal system was designed to encourage diffusion and sharing of power and responsibility, so he was receptive to the claims of the several states to engage in experimental legislation unless Congress itself had plainly exercised authority over the subject matter. Deeply convinced that responsibility is the greatest developer of men, and that even in the ablest of men the limits of capacity are soon reached, he regarded the dispersal of power within a continental domain to be both a moral imperative and a practical necessity. In one important field Brandeis saw a duty incumbent on the Court to be less hospitable to legislative intervention: the area of freedom of thought and expression. Only when speech constituted a genuinely clear and imminent danger to public order would he uphold its suppression. He believed that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people;… that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones" (Whitney v. California, 274, U.S. Reports 357, 375 (1927). By the time of his retirement in 1939, he saw the Court well on its way to the adoption of the positions he had for so long taken in dissent. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Goldmark, Pilgrims of 48 (1930); A.T. Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1946); J. De Haas, Louis D. Brandeis (1929); O.K. Fraenkel (ed.), Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1934); E. Stern, Embattled Justice (1971); M. Urofsky, A Mind of One Piece, Brandeis and American Reform (1971); Y. Shapiro, in: AJHSQ, 55 (1965/66), 199–211; E. Rabinowitz, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the Zionist Chapter of His Life (1968); A. Friesel, Ha-Tenuah ha-Ẓiyyonit be-Arẓot ha-Berit ba-Shanim 1897–1914 (1970), index; E. Stern, Embattled Justice (1971). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: M.I. Urofsky and D.W. Levy (eds.), Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, 5 vols. (1971–78);   idem, Half Brother, Half Son: The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter (1991); idem, Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (2002); G. Teitelbaum, Justice Louis D. Brandeis: A Bibliography of Writings and Other Materials on the Justice (1988); M.I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis (1981); idem, Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition (1981); N.L. Dawson, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and the New Deal (1980). (Paul A. Freund)