Forgotten Man, The (8 page)

Still, the expanding boom at home made these causes seem far weaker than they had even a decade or five years ago. When only two in a hundred men were out of work, it seemed absurd to preach radical reform. After college, many radicals gave up their causes, convinced that those causes were fading anyhow. That was what had happened to Wendell Willkie after the war. His solution to the prob
lems of rural America had been to escape them. Following college and the military, he taught a bit, then turned to law school at Indiana University and life as an Akron, Ohio, lawyer for Harvey Firestone, who headed up one of the new tire companies. Like Tugwell a jovial man, Willkie had married a librarian named Edith Wilk—“How do you feel about adding a couple of letters to your name?” he had asked her. For Willkie, there was no more time to think about European socialism. Akron was growing so fast that the Willkies and their baby Philip had to share an apartment with another couple. Willkie was shortly earning thousands more than most people he knew back in the agricultural towns. Some of his work was in the utilities area, for power companies.

With each year that passed, the radicals fell more out of step with the country. Tugwell, more honest than many, acknowledged that. “Life in the 1920s was often frustrating for those people of my political persuasion—political progressives or radicals,” he would later write. “We were, in fact, all but regarded as social misfits.”

ABOARD THE
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT,
the travelers settled in. Tugwell would later write of the ship that to him it always seemed “homelike,” and the others likely had the same feeling. For the boat was a version of something that had become increasingly important to the American Left in the 1920s: a refuge. Rather than give up or bemoan their isolation, people like Tugwell simply redoubled their efforts to create a parallel reality of their own. The world shut them out, so they shut out the world—with a salon, a club, a ship, a trip. Or even a new identity: the 1920s intellectual.

Just a few years before, in 1922, the author Sinclair Lewis had indirectly done much to establish that identity when he wrote
Babbitt.
Babbitt, Lewis’s protagonist, practiced a vague urban trade: he was a real estate broker. He had no high moral purpose, he “just got along” and lived a tedious life in the fictional yet typical neighborhood, Floral Heights, of a fictional yet typical American town,
Zenith. He was annihilatingly provincial. The thinkers of the 1920s loved Babbitt because he supplied them with a goal. They would be everything that he was not: urban, bohemian, anti-money, idealist.

Inspiration also came from abroad, from the intellectuals of Leningrad or Paris. After all, the thinkers of those cities understood about the Babbitts and the sometimes equally tedious classes below him. Back in the 1910s a traveler from Russia had written in the magazine
Novy Mir
about his own reaction to the dull expressions of New Yorkers chewing gum on the subway: “The color of their face is grayish, their hands are hanging down weakly, their eyes are dim…. Only their jaws are moving, submissively, evenly, without joy or animation…. What are they trying to find in this miserable degrading chewing?” The name of the disgusted travel writer was Lev Bronstein, but he would later call himself Leon Trotsky.

The intellectual exclusivity of the Left would also be captured many years later in a novel about Vassar College at the start of the 1930s by the author Mary McCarthy, titled
The Group.
Alone together, dreamers reinforced one another.

Vassar, one hour and forty minutes north of Manhattan by train in Poughkeepsie, was one of the more important refuges. There a young theater director named Hallie Flanagan created a sense of utopian experiment. Flanagan had herself visited Russia to learn from Soviet theater, years earlier, and would do so again. In May 1930, at term’s end, she would load her students onto another ocean liner, Holland-America’s
Volendam,
and take them to Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad to performances of the Moscow Art Theater, Proletcult, the Blue Blouse, and other revolutionary theater groups. A student influenced by Flanagan, a young woman from the Seattle area named Mary McCarthy, would later achieve a name of her own.

“The Vassar Girl is thought of as carrying a banner,” McCarthy would write—the banner of the rebel and the reformer. Now that suffrage had been gained, in 1920, women of ideas were looking for new causes. One of Vassar’s trustees, Franklin Roosevelt, would shortly run for governor of the state of New York. His wife, Eleanor, was the co-owner of a tiny furniture factory that made colonial
reproductions, Val-Kill, and which counted Vassar College among its clients.

But Vassar was not the only refuge. Right in New York City, two progressive educators, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, had joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin’s wife, in purchasing the 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 like
respect 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 large, whether it be the large company or a
large country. Brandeis would later publish a book titled
The Curse of Bigness,
which argued there was danger in large corporations. Brandeis was an early Zionist, liking the idea of a small Jewish state, but he also was fond of the modest Scandinavian countries, especially Denmark. (In the next decade, as the Soviet Union became more popular as a destination, Brandeis would tell young travelers to go to Denmark instead.)

In 1924 Frankfurter had supported La Follette, writing in the
New Republic
that both mainstream parties “have an identical record of economic imperialism,” and describing his foreign model—Labour in Britain. As early as 1906, when he first encountered the young Franklin Roosevelt, the professor began to work to influence him. The Frankfurter touch reached to the smallest detail. One of Frankfurter’s biographers reports that the pair talked about reading, and Frankfurter suggested to FDR that he indicate a significant passage with a line in the margin, like the great English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, rather than underscoring line after line.

Frankfurter could influence young Roosevelt and others because, even in
Babbitt
times, he was able to transmit a wonderful sense of possibility to those around him. Student after student after student came to him and stayed, sometimes simply for the pleasure of going mind against mind. One of those students was Adolf Berle, who, like Frankfurter, was not accustomed to coming in second. Berle attended Frankfurter’s course two years in a row. “What, back again?” Frankfurter had asked. “I wanted to see if you’d learned anything,” Berle replied. Another Frankfurter student was David Lilienthal of Indiana, the young man who had disliked adventurous Chicago. Lilienthal found Frankfurter so enthralling he would later describe him as a man “who could read the dictionary and make it exciting.” Others were Benjamin Cohen and Thomas Corcoran, who later would be called his “hot dogs.”

Frankfurter’s next skill inhered in this: Better than any law professor in the nation, he knew how to place his students in important jobs. From Harvard, Frankfurter sent his students to Brandeis and fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to clerk. Many of these stu
dents would later have leading roles in government or universities, among them Dean Acheson, David Riesman, and Alger and Donald Hiss. Frankfurter had a virtual monopoly when it came to clerk appointments at the Supreme Court. When Justice McReynolds, a few years later, selected a Harvard alumnus who was not a Frankfurter protégé as his clerk, Brandeis bluntly asked the clerk how he came to get his job. “There isn’t one chance in a thousand for any graduate of Harvard Law School to come to the Court these days without Professor Frankfurter’s approval.”

Frankfurter still believed that the era of social legislation had only begun, that the country could make numerous changes, like introducing a minimum wage. He regarded Justice George Sutherland, the author of
Adkins v. Children’s Hospital,
as especially retrograde. Frankfurter argued for state minimum wages before the Court, and his students had the satisfaction of knowing that at least one justice—Holmes—seemed to follow his line of reasoning. Frankfurter’s impression on his students was especially profound in the area of utilities. The rest of the country might look to Commonwealth and Southern or Insull for progress, but in Frankfurter’s course Public Utilities, the emphasis was on the “public.” Frankfurter and other progressives felt strongly that governments should not miss this opportunity to regulate, the way they had failed to regulate industry in the preceding century.

In Frankfurter’s classroom it mattered little that in the 1920s the constitutional obstacles to a grand federal program for power generation seemed greater than the boulders on the Colorado River. Removing 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.