In the summer of 1925, Louis Brandeis took a walk on the country road that ran outside his summer home in Chatham on Cape Cod and came across another stroller. In the course of their conversation he learned that Charles Smith, a retired railroad manager, had been born and had lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Brandeis said that he, too, came from Kentucky, and gave him his name.
“Are you connected with the great Louisville family?” Smith asked.
When Brandeis “blushingly admitted it,” the justice discovered that Smith had in mind not the well-known reformer and jurist but his father and his brother, Adolph and Alfred. “He had in mind solely the grain-dealing end,” Brandeis mirthfully told his brother, “and had never heard of the Washington end.”
For Louis Brandeis this seemed perfectly natural. He had been born and grew up in Louisville, would return there periodically throughout his life, helped shape the small University of Louisville into a first-rate local school, and, after his death, would have his ashes interred on the front portico of the University of Louisville Law School. Throughout his life he kept up with the doings of people he had known while growing up in Louisville, both in visits back home and in letters from his family. As much as his brother, Alfred, who lived there all his life, Louis Brandeis was a son of Kentucky.
THE EXTENDED BRANDEIS FAMILY came to Louisville in 1851 from Prague, after a short sojourn in Madison, Indiana. Although they were part of that great wave of central Europeans who immigrated to America after the failed liberal revolts of 1848, their circumstances differed greatly from the poverty-stricken eastern Europeans who arrived between 1880 and 1920, the “tired … poor … huddled masses” immortalized by Emma Lazarus. In Prague, Adolph Brandeis’s father owned a cotton-print mill, which Adolph managed; nearby lived Dr. Sigmund Dembitz, whose daughter Frederika would be wooed and won by Adolph.
Although not wealthy, both families enjoyed a cultured, middle-class life, replete with books, music, and, for Frederika, private tutors. In her aunt Eleanor Wehle’s house in Prague, where Frederika spent many happy hours as a child, there had been dinner parties at which she and her twelve cousins had been expected to recite in German and French and to perform on musical instruments. Although comfortable compared with the working classes, both the Brandeis and the Dembitz families confronted numerous difficulties. Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire faced restrictions on their economic opportunities, and even within the Jewish community the families belonged to a minor and despised sect, followers of the eighteenth-century pseudo-messiah Jacob Frank. Moreover, while a noted surgeon, Sigmund Dembitz apparently had a poor head for managing his money, and the family always seemed on the brink of ruin. As for Adolph, new machinery had been introduced that would soon make his father’s hand-printing plant obsolete. He left looking for work in Hamburg, where he found employment in a grocery store. But it did not pay well, and it kept him away from Frederika.
All of these factors led the Brandeis, Wehle, and Dembitz families to consider immigrating to the United States, a decision cemented by the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Following the defeat of Napoleon, the settlement of 1815 put conservative governments in place across Europe, and by the mid-1840s a surge of resentment had built up. Revolutions broke out all across the Continent, and as far away as Brazil. When Adolph heard that rebellion had erupted in Prague, he left for home, but before he could join the fighting fell sick with typhoid fever. By the time he recovered, the rebellion had been crushed; his illness saved him from being put on a proscribed list by the Austrian government.
The elders of the families now gathered to discuss leaving Prague and going to the United States. News of the young nation, with its economic opportunities and political freedom, as well as its lack of anti-Semitic laws, had been circulating in central Europe for several decades, fueled by the enthusiastic letters home from those who had already gone to the New World. But if they went to America, what would they do? Could they become farmers or reestablish their businesses overseas? They decided to dispatch an emissary to see what the New World offered, and in the fall of 1848 the twenty-six-year-old Adolph Brandeis sailed to the United States.
Adolph Brandeis, ca. 1865
He arrived in New York, traveled around the East Coast, then headed west in the company of a representative of the Rothschild bank he had met on the boat over, also sent to sound out business opportunities in the United States. As a result, Adolph not only took in what he saw but as he learned English had a chance to talk to Americans he might not otherwise have met, and thus learned a great deal about the country, its culture, and its economy. He thought Frederika would be amused that in New York housewives set out pitchers every evening on their doorsteps with three or four cents, and in the morning found as much milk as they had paid for. “Isn’t that idyllic?” Always a pragmatist, Adolph took care to answer his fiancáe’s questions about what women wore in the New World, “their dresses and lace collars.” He told her that she should make herself “some dresses and even some silk ones. Of course we really don’t know yet whether we shall live in the country or in the city, and as things are certainly much cheaper over there than here, you had better provide yourself in advance. The American farmers’ daughters are even extravagant. So provide yourself with as much as is necessary to look well, and in order not to get out of fashion you had better choose dark colors.”
Not everything he saw pleased him, and the burgeoning factories with hundreds of workers at their looms appalled him. But he also saw a country in which diligent labor would be rewarded, and wrote home that “the hard work of these people is a kind of patriotism. They wear themselves out to make their country bloom, as though each of them were commissioned to show the despots of the Old World what a free people can do.”
Adolph fell in love with America, and within two months had taken out his first citizenship papers; he formally became a citizen in July 1872. He wrote enthusiastically of the freedom he saw everywhere, the compassion shown to strangers, and told Frederika that he bought a book that contained messages of the presidents. After reading of some progress in George Washington’s administration, “I felt as proud and happy about it as though it had been my own doing…. Afterwards I laughed at myself, but there is something in it. It is the triumph of the rights of man which emerges and in which we rejoice. I feel my patriotism growing every day, because every day I learn to know the splendid institutions of this country better.”
In Ohio he hired out as a farmworker and soon realized that neither he nor any of the family would be able to succeed in farming. Aside from very hard manual labor, an experience unknown to the families, farmwork proved boring, and, as Adolph told them, “this tedium can become the most deadly poison in family life … a man could sink to being a mere common beast of burden.” City people needed to live in cities, and now he began looking for a small one with a German community that would offer opportunities for commercial success. In January 1849 he took a job in a Cincinnati grocery and realized that this might well be a path he could tread successfully. He wrote home urging the families to come, and by the time he left to meet their boat in New York in the late spring of 1849, his employer had offered him a partnership. But Adolph had already decided that in America he would work for himself, not for others, and he told Frederika that he had “various plans.”
Apparently, Adolph’s suggestion that the families would do better by settling in the still semi frontier Midwest had not been received well back home. While not rich, they had led urbane and cultured lives in Prague, and had no desire to give up civilization for a wilderness. Still, the Wehles, Brandeises, and Dembitzes—twenty-six people in all—came to America on board the steamer Washington, leaving Hamburg on 8 April 1849. Unlike immigrants of a later generation, who often had little more than the clothes on their backs and a sack that held their meager belongings, the Brandeis clan came with twenty-seven great chests and cases that included feather beds, copper pots and pans, books, and two grand pianos! They did indeed yearn to breathe free, but huddled masses they most surely were not.
THE NEXT FEW HECTIC MONTHS saw the three families trying to adjust to their new country, and while they may not have been happy with Adolph’s insistence that they would do best relocating to the Midwest, he alone of them had any sense of America or the ability to converse in English. They booked passage on a barge up the Hudson River and across the Erie Canal to Buffalo, then on a steamer across Lake Erie to Sandusky, Ohio, and from there they took a train to Cincinnati, where all three families shared a large house for a while. The men quickly came to grips with the fact they had not been cut out to be farmers; the women, deprived of servants for the first time in their lives, grappled with housework. Despite these adjustments, the abandonment of older preconceptions took far less time, in fact, than Adolph had anticipated. He had told Frederika, “Our future doesn’t cause me the least worry.” But he had “great anxiety [about] the older people who have grown up under conditions over there, whose habits and customs are more fixed and will probably be changed only at a sacrifice.”
Adolph had already chosen what he thought would be an ideal place for the families to start rebuilding their fortunes, Madison, Indiana, on a bend of the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky. He believed Madison would become “the first city of Indiana,” a prediction that did not come to pass, but the town already hosted a rail terminus as well as a port for river traffic, was the largest pork-processing center in Indiana, and had become a “hotbed of commercial capitalism.” Madison also seemed to be a healthy place to live, and had completely escaped the cholera epidemic that had recently killed hundreds of people in Cincinnati. The families agreed to move, but not before Adolph and Frederika married on 5 September 1849, in a double ceremony, with Frederika’s cousin Lotti Wehle marrying Adolph’s brother Semmi (Samuel), a doctor. The two couples set up housekeeping together in a small house in Madison, not far from where the other Wehles lived.
Adolph had earlier spent time in Madison, traveling on behalf of his Cincinnati employer, and while there had made the acquaintance of John Lyle King, a cultured lawyer and later a member of the state legislature. In his diary King drew an acute portrait of his “Bohemian acquaintance,” as well as of other members of the family. Adolph he described as “well bred, and has good manners, [and] seems familiar with the great names if not the literature of Germany.” (King understandably did not know that Adolph quoted the German poet Heinrich Heine in his letters to Frederika.) After the clan had settled in, King met them all, and became their first new friend in America. The men, because they had to do business, quickly learned to speak English well enough to converse with customers and to talk politics with King. When he met the women, all they could do was nod at him and then escape into the house; they had not had any opportunity to learn more than a smattering of English and were too diffident to use it.
The families started two businesses, a factory to make starch from corn and a grocery and general produce store. The grocery business, under Adolph’s direction, prospered. He traveled throughout the Ohio valley buying stock and found nearly everywhere he went communities of German-speaking settlers. He reported that sometimes he could travel sixty to eighty miles without ever hearing a word of English. The German farmers were more than willing to give their business to a fellow migrant, especially one whose company they enjoyed and who treated them fairly.
But the starch factory failed, and the prosperity that Adolph had predicted for Madison never materialized. Within two years of their arrival many of the town’s businessmen and professionals, including John King, left. Adolph’s clan chose to do so as well, and in 1851, shortly after Frederika had given birth to their first child, Fannie, Adolph took them from Madison down the Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky. There Adolph and Frederika had three more children, Amy in 1852, Alfred in 1854, and the last of their children, Louis David Brandeis, on 13 November 1856.
BY THE TIME Louis came along, the family’s fortunes had changed dramatically. In Louisville, Adolph found the economic opportunity that had eluded him in Madison, and he made the most of it. Although never a wealthy man, he built up a thriving business, raised his children in comfortable surroundings, and at his death in 1906 was praised by all as one of the city’s outstanding citizens.
Louisville in 1851 could not be described as a frontier outpost. It had been founded in 1788 by George Rogers Clark in what then constituted the western part of Virginia. After the Kentucky area became a separate state in 1792, Louisville would be its largest settlement and remains its largest city today. Situated on the Kentucky-Indiana border at the falls of the Ohio River, Louisville served as a major entrepôt for transshipping Ohio valley produce down the river to New Orleans, and from thence to Europe. In 1851, when the Brandeises moved there, the city had a population of 43,000; ten years later it had grown to 63,500, and by 1870 had reached 78,000.
Louis, Fannie, Amy, and Alfred Brandeis, left to right
Adolph, of course, knew the area well from his prior trips on behalf of the family business in Madison, and he decided to open a wholesale grain enterprise. It grew steadily, and in 1855 he undertook a venture that would make both his name and his business. That year the wheat crop in western New York failed, and Adolph seized the opportunity to ship Kentucky white wheat to millers on the East Coast. They found the grain to be of high quality, and for the next several years Brandeis and his new partner, William W. Crawford, built upon the white wheat trade to expand their holdings and branch out in other directions. At the time the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Brandeis & Crawford operated a flour mill, a tobacco factory, an eleven-hundred-acre farm, and a river steamboat, the Fannie Brandeis.
Louisville in the 1870s
The growth of the firm came in the shadow of the impending war. Although a slave state, Kentucky remained loyal to the Union and sent more men to fight in the Northern armies than in the Southern. Most Kentuckians opposed abolition, but both Adolph and Frederika’s brother, Lewis, held strong antislavery views; Dembitz, in fact, would be one of the delegates to the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln. The fortunes of war could easily have wiped out the firm of Brandeis & Crawford, but in fact the opposite happened.
Before the war the firm had carried on extensive trading in the South, but after Fort Sumter switched its business to the states north of the Ohio River. The Union army, needing large amounts of grain to feed its soldiers, signed several large contracts with Brandeis & Crawford, and the firm grew significantly between 1861 and 1865. Louisville also prospered, serving the Union as a supply base, a hospital, and a campground for soldiers preparing for campaigns in the upper South. Louis’s earliest memory involved “helping my mother carry out food and coffee to the men from the North.” On an almost daily basis in 1862, Louis, nearly six, and Alfred, then eight, carried out sandwiches prepared by Mrs. Brandeis and her cook, with Alfred handing out the food and Louis dispensing coffee from a pitcher. A few times during the war, rebel troops came so near the city the Brandeis family could hear the guns firing. On one of those occasions, Adolph took his family to safety across the river into Indiana.
Adolph and Frederika initially moved into a modest house on Center Street between Chestnut and Walnut. As the business prospered and their family grew, they moved into a larger house on First Street and then built a fashionable home on Broadway, staffed with servants, including a coachman. After the children grew up and left the house, they moved into smaller accommodations. The family took vacations and even during the Civil War went every summer for a few weeks at Newport. Adolph’s success led his brother Samuel to relocate to Louisville, and in 1853 Frederika’s brother, Lewis Dembitz, began his legal career there as well.
The children all attended school. Louis went first to the German and English Academy for a solid foundation in German and then to the Louisville Male High School. A surviving report card for the school year 1871–1872 shows young Louis getting nearly all 6s—the highest score—in his academic subjects, receiving all 6s in deportment with no demerits (one of his classmates later recalled that alone of all the children in Mrs. Wood’s class, Louis never received a caning), and, most amazingly, never missing a day of classes. At age sixteen, he received a gold medal from the University of the Public Schools in Louisville “for pre-eminence in all his studies.” The winner of the medal was expected to give a speech at graduation, but Louis, later to be renowned as a public speaker and advocate before the Supreme Court, found himself “overcome with terror at the thought of making a speech.” Fortunately, he woke up that morning with laryngitis, and so was spared the ordeal.
Frederika Brandeis with Louis, ca. 1859
Some of his instructors left lifelong impressions, and when he began to help in the development of the University of Louisville in the 1920s, he arranged for various collections to be named after his former teachers. The musical scores, for example, should be in honor of Louis H. Hast. “It is to this romantic German piano teacher,” he declared, “that Louisville owes the beginning of its appreciation of great chamber and orchestral music.” Brandeis himself studied violin with Mr. Hast, and recalled that he played second fiddle in Mr. Hast’s orchestra in the overture to Zampa. But while he admittedly had no real talent as a musician, the experience—and Hast’s example—led to his lifelong love of good music.
A private person as an adult, Brandeis rarely spoke about his youth to anyone outside the family, although he always proved willing to share memories of Louisville with correspondents who had known him or his family at that time. After his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1916, the press kept calling his secretary, Alice Harriet Grady, demanding to know more about the nominee. Finally, Brandeis gave in to Miss Grady’s entreaties, and she went down to Louisville to interview his brother, Alfred, other members of the family, and acquaintances who had known him as a boy.
As the writer for the Boston Sunday American concluded after reading Miss Grady’s report, these stories showed that “Louis D. Brandeis was just an everyday, fun-loving American BOY.” The fun-loving boy, however, almost did not get out of childhood. He and his older brother, Alfred, had gathered a good-size store of fireworks to celebrate the Fourth of July in 1864 and were using small amounts of gunpowder from a large flask as fuses. They would take some powder, dampen it to reduce its volatility, connect it to a rocket, and then light the “fuse.” They apparently got so immersed in what they were doing that they failed to notice they had come perilously close to the flask itself when it suddenly exploded, burning both boys on their faces.
Aware that their parents would not approve of their antics, neither one screamed, but each could see that the other’s face had been blackened, and they were supposed to go for a ride with their mother the next afternoon. So they went to a pump and washed off as best they could, not realizing that the application of cold water would not only remove the soot but also lead to massive swelling. Discovery could not be evaded, and upon seeing her children, Frederika immediately sent for a doctor. It would be many weeks before their faces healed properly and the scars went away.
Like any other boy his age, Louis teased girls. He and Alfred offered to teach one of their friends how to ice-skate. They helped tie on her skates, and then each took one arm and helped her to the center of a large frozen pond. They then told her to skate back to shore, and promptly left her there. She was furious at them for weeks, but did learn to skate, and, as she recalled, Louis and Alfred always claimed that they had taught her.
At a school dance, Louis apparently got into a fight over a girl named Emma, who became the object of attention of both Louis and a classmate, Julius Von Borries. Because of the presence of chaperones, they could not immediately slug it out, so they agreed to meet after school the following day. Word of the impending contest leaked out (those who recalled the incident thought that Emma leaked the news, elated that the two most popular boys in school were going to fight over her), and about two hundred boys and girls showed up to witness the fight. Julius enjoyed a slight advantage in height and weight, while Louis was quicker. No one could figure out who had won, but after fifteen minutes both had been bloodied, and their supporters carried each of them off the “field of honor” on their shoulders. Apparently, Julius and Louis became close friends afterward, while Emma seems to have been totally forgotten.
Alfred and Louis Brandeis, ca. 1863
Miss Grady also interviewed Lizzie, an African-American woman who for many years served as the cook in the Brandeis household, and who, as late as 1916, still did not warrant having her last name used in a major newspaper. Lizzie recalled how the Brandeis boys had loved hot doughnuts and waffles, and how they used to play tricks on her and the other servants. She also recalled kindness and sensitivity from both Alfred and Louis. In 1865 the Brandeises hired a former slave named Durastus as a butler at the Broadway house. It had been against the law to teach slaves to read or write, and his illiteracy appalled the two boys, so they set about teaching him his letters, either in the carriage house or in the furnace room, and these lessons continued until the family left for Europe.
In 1882 the family took Lizzie along on a vacation to the beach at Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod. By then, of course, Louis was an attorney in Boston, but he came down on the weekend to spend some time with his parents and his sister Fannie and her child. Lizzie had never been to the ocean before, and “I didn’t know how white folks went in bathing.” Fannie gave her a bathing suit and told her to put it on, whereupon Lizzie discovered that it did not come down below her knees. A modest woman, she did not want to be in the water in such an outfit, so she said she was afraid of the salt water. Louis, however, had figured out her problem, and thought that once she went in, she would see that the bathing dress worked well. So he took her hand, walked with her into the water, and held on to her until she was comfortable. After that, she said, she just could not get into the water often enough.
LOUIS BRANDEIS GREW UP in the arms of two families, his immediate one—parents and siblings—and an extended one of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and both had an impact on him. In addition, the Louisville of the 1850s and 1860s provided cultural and intellectual resources to augment what his parents taught at home.
Adolph and Frederika provided not only the material comforts but a warm, loving, and cultured environment for their children. Like many immigrant families they often used their native language at home. Adolph had early mastered English for business and public affairs; although Frederika learned the new language more slowly, she too came to speak it fluently. She did not, however, feel comfortable writing in English. When Adolph and Frederika went to Newport in the summer of 1865, they took the younger children with them and wrote frequently to Fannie and Amy. Most of the letters started out in German, and then the parents would remember that they had promised to write in English. Adolph’s English is quite good, but Frederika made the girls promise not to show her letters to her brother, Lewis, since he would tease her. “I know I will make many mistakes, as I never wrote half a dozen of english [sic] letters.” When Frederika wrote her memoirs, she did so in her mother tongue.
Like many mid century immigrants from central Europe, Adolph and Frederika remained most comfortable with German and viewed it as a language of art and culture. They took pains so that their children would be fluent in the language, sending them to an elementary school that taught in both English and German. For years, when Brandeis would take the writings of German authors whom he liked, especially Goethe, along for vacation reading, he read them in the original. Once he rather abashedly confessed to Alfred that he had read a German author in translation, and wondered what their mother would have said about that.
Adolph set an example that would greatly influence Louis’s later economic and political philosophy. In his father Louis saw a man who had bravely left his homeland and come to a new country. There Adolph had learned its language, customs, and history, and passed on his love of a free land to his children. Through hard work and perseverance he had honestly built up a thriving business that provided not only for the needs of his own family but for those of his employees as well, and which, in addition, contributed to the economic well-being of the city. Although Adolph had expanded his business as opportunities arose, he never abandoned the grain business. The mill, the farm, the riverboat, and the warehouses all served to reinforce the core business of Brandeis & Crawford—the buying and selling of grain. Adolph could and did take risks when necessary, but he did so in the field he knew; he and his partner never bought other firms for the sake of expansion or tried to monopolize a market. He left, according to one of the state’s historians, “a legacy of an incorruptible name and a first class reputation for commercial sagacity and integrity.”
Alfred and Louis often accompanied their father on his grain-buying trips in the Ohio valley, and in doing so came to know and respect the self-reliant farmers of the area. When Louis Brandeis the reformer spoke about an ideal society in which individuals could strive to succeed through their own merits, he spoke about the society in which his father, and later his brother, and their client farmers had worked; they provided the model of men achieving a great deal through their own efforts.
Within the household Frederika ruled. She had been reared in a cultured milieu, and as a matter of course she introduced her own children to the culture and literature she knew and loved. At an early age they read Schiller and Goethe in German and listened to her play Mozart and Beethoven on the piano. In order that they have more time to discuss music, books, and politics, she enforced a rule that the family could never talk of financial affairs or business matters at the dinner table. Moreover, neither Frederika nor Adolph would tolerate any personal criticism of other persons, even of people they did not know firsthand. According to Louis, his mother instilled in her children high moral standards. He later attributed a good part of his reformist zeal to her, and declared that in the end “the improvement of the world, reform, can only arise when mothers like you are increased thousands of times and have more children.”
People described Frederika as “a woman of strong personality, wellread, a good talker, a hard worker, big-hearted, and sweet and generous to a degree.” Lizzie the cook told about how she and others were trying to raise money for an orphan asylum for colored children, and each member of the committee had to raise $25, a large sum, especially for a domestic worker. Money, as Lizzie noted, “come awful hard in those days.” She tentatively asked her employer if perhaps she would be willing to donate, and Frederika sat down and wrote Lizzie a check for $25.
While Frederika did not intentionally dominate a situation, people around her found her strong willed and resourceful, leading many to defer to her judgment. People categorized her as one of the “anxious” mothers, never quite content to have any of her children out of sight for too long. Louis told Miss Grady that as a boy, and until the time he left for Harvard Law School, both he and his brother, Alfred, went to see Frederika to bid her good night personally before they went to bed. When the children went out for an evening, she would lie awake until all of them had returned home.
The two girls, Fannie and Amy, doted on their youngest brother and called him “Lutz,” a nickname that stuck until Fannie’s death. Louis forged a particularly close relationship with both sisters, and when he went off to Harvard Law School, they wrote him teasing letters about what he did outside of class and what young women he had met. What we know about Louis’s social life in Cambridge during his law school days and later in St. Louis comes almost entirely from letters he wrote to them. When Amy married a second cousin, Otto Wehle, and gave birth to a son, they named him after Louis, much to his joy. Fannie also married a second cousin, Charles Nagel, and her entreaties to Louis when he finished law school led him to take up a brief, unsatisfactory, and rather unhappy time as a young lawyer in St. Louis.
He and Alfred, his senior by nearly three years, not only were brothers but would be best friends throughout their lives. Frederika recognized the deep ties binding her two sons together, and wrote that her heart rejoiced when she saw the two of them together. “It seems to me that there were never two brothers who complemented one another so perfectly and were so completely one as you two.” As boys they played together, and occasionally got into trouble, also together. Alfred would stay in Louisville, becoming one of the city’s leading merchants, and after Louis settled in Boston, the two wrote to each other almost every day. When Alfred decided to move to the countryside just east of Louisville, Louis made him a house gift by buying up some additional acreage for what Alfred called “Ladless Hill” (he had four daughters).
They kept tabs on each other’s health, constantly—and usually unsuccessfully—trying to get the other to slow down and rest when ill. They and their families visited often and took vacations together, and their daughters also spent much time together with their cousins. In the years when Louis traveled the country in his legal work or on political matters, if anywhere in the Midwest, he would swing down to visit Alfred in Louisville, or if that were impossible, Alfred would journey to meet him. When Louis decided to help in the development of the University of Louisville, Alfred and his family became partners in the project, believing, as did Louis, that the university would only thrive if it could foster local loyalties and support.
Whereas Louis later in life made many enemies because of his reform work and what many saw as a hard—indeed heartless—personality, Alfred, who shared nearly all of his brother’s ethical and political principles, seems to have been well liked, even beloved, not only by his friends but by business competitors as well. On his death his former brother-in-law, Charles Nagel, wrote about how Alfred had “managed, midst the turmoil of modern life, to preserve his sweet and true philosophy.” He had humor and wit without sting, strong convictions without intolerance, abhorrence of personal strife without fear of conflict for a good cause. Louis described Alfred’s “beautiful, gladsome life … a joy to all who shared in his activities or with whom he came in contact.”
IN ADDITION TO his immediate family, other members of the Wehle, Brandeis, and Dembitz clans played an important role in Louis’s life. Uncle Samuel, Adolph’s brother, and his wife, Lotti, Frederika’s cousin, lived in Louisville, and Adolph and Frederika made frequent trips to visit other family members who had settled in New York and St. Louis. Outside his immediate family, however, no one influenced young Louis as much as his uncle Lewis Naphtali Dembitz, Frederika’s brother.
After attending the gymnasium at Glogau University in Germany, Lewis Dembitz took one semester of law training in Prague before the family moved to America. A child prodigy, he spoke seven languages by his teens, read Latin and Greek, and could do logarithms in his head. Years later, using his own calculations, he forecast the 1869 eclipse of the sun to the minute. When Adolph first visited Madison, Indiana, he wanted John King to have his future brother-in-law read law in King’s office. Louis would remember his uncle as “a living university. With him, life was an unending intellectual ferment…. In the diversity of his intellectual interests, in his longing to discover truths, in his pleasure in argumentation and the process of thinking, he reminded one of the Athenians.”
Lewis Naphtali Dembitz
He followed Adolph and Frederika to Louisville, where he established a successful law practice and also gained a reputation as a legal scholar. His highly esteemed Kentucky Jurisprudence (1890) and the two-volume Treatise on Land Titles in the United States (1895) remained standard reference volumes for Kentucky lawyers for several decades. Dembitz drafted the first Australian ballot system in the United States, contributed widely to various encyclopedias as well as law journals, and translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into German. He named one son after Henry Clay and the other after Abraham Lincoln.
The diminutive Dembitz (he stood only five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds) had a way with children; he had six of his own, and his various nieces and nephews adored him. He also had a reputation for absentmindedness, and one story, perhaps apocryphal, concerns the reminders he wrote to himself, such as “Trousers on chair, shoes on floor, Dembitz in bed.” Louis so admired his uncle that he changed his middle name from David to Dembitz, and there is no question that he chose law as a profession because of his uncle. From Dembitz he also received what little contact he had with Judaism.
The Brandeises never denied their Jewishness, but with the exception of Lewis Dembitz, neither did they practice it. A thriving Jewish community existed in Louisville in midcentury, but Adolph and Frederika apparently had little or nothing to do with it. They observed what one scholar has called “the secular Christianity of the United States” and sent each other Christmas gifts and cards. In her memoirs, Frederika recalled with great joy the Christmas trees and parties of her youth. As for religion itself, she wrote, “I do not believe that sins can be expiated by going to divine service and observing this or that formula; I believe that only goodness and truth and conduct that is humane and self-sacrificing towards those who need us can bring God nearer to us, and that our errors can only be atoned for by acting in a more kindly spirit.” She deliberately did not impart to her children any formal religious teachings, since such doctrines, she believed, could be argued away. Rather, she wanted them to imbibe “a pure spirit and the highest ideals as to morals and love.” Her parents, and this would have been true for much of the extended family, “did not associate with Jews and were different from them and so there developed in me more affection for our race as a whole than for individuals.” Louis later told a newspaper reporter that his early training had been neither Jewish nor Christian. His parents “were not so narrow as to allow their religious beliefs to overshadow their interest in the broader aspects of humanity.” It might well be said that Frederika, and later Louis, subscribed to the Judaism of the prophets, with its exalted moral teachings and idealism, and not to the Judaism of the priests, with its emphasis on rules and rituals.
The children had no idea of the Jewish holidays, and one Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the girls had heard that the service at a nearby synagogue included some beautiful music. Fannie and Amy got permission to attend, and Frederika dispatched the boys and the carriage to pick the girls up when services concluded at dusk. The two boys drove the carriage down Broadway and waited in front of the synagogue until Fannie and Amy should appear. When the congregation started coming out, several people who recognized the Brandeis boys immediately began berating them; Jews did not ride on the Day of Atonement!
Lewis Dembitz, on the other hand, studied not only Jewish law and custom but its history and theology as well. Unlike his assimilated relatives, he lived life as an observant Jew, following the prescribed laws. Louis had no experience of the Jewish Sabbath in his parents’ home, nor did he later observe it in his own. Years later he recalled vividly the Sabbath in his uncle’s house, “the joy and awe with which my uncle welcomed the arrival of the day and the piety with which he observed it. I remember the extra delicacies, lighting of the candles, prayers over a cup of wine, quaint chants, and Uncle Lewis poring over books most of the day. I remember more particularly an elusive something about him which was spoken of as the ‘Sabbath peace.’ … Uncle Lewis used to say that he was enjoying a foretaste of heaven.”
Nor did Dembitz restrict his Judaism to the house. He served as a member of the commission that drew up the plan of study for the Hebrew Union College, but after the Reform movement became overtly anti-Zionist, he affiliated with what became known as Conservative Judaism and helped establish the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. A scholar of religion as well as law, Dembitz translated the books of Exodus and Leviticus for the revised English Bible of the Jewish Publication Society. A half-dozen years after his uncle’s death, the comment that Lewis Naphtali Dembitz “was a noble Jew” and a Zionist piqued Louis Brandeis’s interest, and started him down the road to Zionist leadership.
The sixteen years of Brandeis’s childhood in Louisville left an indelible mark on him, both physically and intellectually. Although he spent the rest of his life in Boston and Washington, he never completely lost the soft accent of his native city. Malaria and the constant dosing of drugs such as quinine left him with a slight olive tone to his skin, which led many people on first impression to believe he had come from the Mediterranean. Brandeis never forgot the lessons in manners he learned at home and in southern society, and even in his old age would not sit either at the dining table or in the parlor until all the women present had been seated.
More important, the social philosophy he absorbed there manifested itself in all of his future reform activities. Louisville at the time seemed the quintessential democratic society, in which individuals, like his father and Mr. Crawford, could do well by dint of their intelligence and perseverance. There were no large factories employing thousands of people, but rather many small endeavors—farms, stores, professional offices. People knew one another, their lives entwined in a strong sense of community. Later, after he had seen the devastating effects that industrialization had on American society, Brandeis would look back to what he considered an idyllic era, one free from the curse of bigness.
More than part of this rosy recollection may have been true, but the young Brandeis, like most white southerners, ignored the large African-American population that supported much of the area’s economy. Kentucky had been home to 200,000 slaves prior to the Civil War, and although the Brandeis family supported abolition, civil rights did not play a major role in the family’s thinking. Although Louis left the city as a boy, it is improbable that he abandoned many of the racial attitudes that permeated it. Later, as a reformer, he never became involved in groups such as the NAACP, and while on the Supreme Court tended to go with the conservative majority in cases involving race.
BUSINESS HAD BEEN GOOD for Brandeis & Crawford, fueled first by Union demand for grain during the Civil War and then by the growth of the country in the years following Appomattox. But that same growth led to the over-construction of railroads, inflation, and speculation; the collapse of a number of eastern banks in 1873 led to a terrible depression that lasted through much of the decade. The agricultural sector had been suffering since the late 1860s, and in 1872, a harbinger of things to come, a number of southern clients went bankrupt, wiping out large sums of money owed to Brandeis & Crawford. Adolph saw that there would be greater distress in the next few years, and, unwilling to take further losses, he and Crawford chose to close the firm. They liquidated the assets and decided to await the return of better times before reopening. Adolph, prodded by Lewis Dembitz, decided to take the family to Europe, so that he and Frederika could visit relatives and friends who had not emigrated and the children could see their roots in the Old World. They left Louisville in May 1872 for a fifteen-month trip. Once in Europe, however, they kept delaying their return because of the illness of their oldest child, Fannie. It would be three years before they returned to America.
Louis, not yet sixteen, found the whole enterprise a great adventure. The family sailed from New York on 10 August 1872, aboard the SS Adriatic. He began a diary that went into great detail about the ship, its crew, and, its passengers. “Our ship was a large ocean steamer,” he wrote, “4,000 tons, four hundred feet in length and said to be the fastest between England and America, having made one trip in 7 days and 8 hours. Our captain, a stout six-footer, is a jolly looking man and makes himself as agreeable as possible.”
They arrived in Liverpool eight days later and, after a brief stay in London, made their way to the Continent. Originally Louis had planned on enrolling in the gymnasium in Vienna, but despite his gold medal from Louisville he failed the entrance examinations. He spent most of the winter in Vienna taking private lessons, attending lectures at the university, and enjoying German music and theater. In March he started off for Italy and then spent the summer in Switzerland, hiking the Alps with his father and brother. Despite the great stamina he would show in later life, especially as a canoeist, that summer found him tiring much sooner than Adolph or Alfred. On one of their excursions they sought to find the source of the Inn River. On a break, Alfred suggested that they also look for the beginnings of the Adda, to which Louis responded, “I don’t see why I should have to find the source of every damned river in Europe!”
Memories of the years he traveled around Europe would remain with him his entire life, and letters to Alfred, decades after their time abroad, were full of references to places they visited and events they witnessed. “This day will remind you of Liverpool,” Louis wrote on the anniversary of their arrival, and when he saw a clipping about the statue of George Washington in Lugano, he sent it to Alfred with a note, “Do you remember the thrill which we experienced when we came upon this?”
IN THE FALL OF 1873, Alfred, then nineteen, returned to Louisville to seek work. The rest of the family had intended going home then also, but Fannie’s illness once again led them to defer the voyage until she had recovered. Louis decided to seek entrance to the Annen-Realschule in Dresden by having the authorities waive the entrance examination. Because of Fannie’s illness, he had to make the trip to Dresden alone, and then when a family friend, who had promised to give him an introduction to the rector, proved late in arrival, Louis decided to go to the official himself. Herr Job told him straight-out that he could not be admitted without examination, and would also have to provide birth and vaccination certificates. To the latter Louis replied, “The fact that I am here is proof of my birth, and you may look at my arm for evidence that I was vaccinated.” The boy who had been terrorized by the thought of giving a speech to his high-school classmates had found his tongue and the courage to argue with the rector, and he so impressed Herr Job that he was permitted to enter without the examination and the certificates.
Louis stayed at the Annen-Realschule for three terms, taking twelve courses at a time in French, Latin, German, literature, mineralogy, geography, physics, chemistry, and several branches of mathematics. He never received a grade less than 2, denoting gut, and in most courses he earned the top grade of 1, sehr gut. At the end of the third term, he won a prize, which he could choose for himself. He selected a book on Greek art by A. W. Becker, Charakterbilder aus der Kunstgeschichte. The German inscription on the flyleaf notes that the prize went “to the honor student, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, for industry and good behavior.” Sensitive to the diminishing family fortunes, Louis earned some money by tutoring students who wanted to learn English. In Dresden, he also met Ephraim Emerton, who would become one of his best friends in Cambridge, and who suggested to Louis that he attend Harvard University.
The three terms in Dresden affected Brandeis in several ways. For the first time in his life he lived and worked outside the protective shelter of his home. Although German schooling, like that of elsewhere at the time, consisted of a great deal of memorization and rote recitation, the intellectual rigor of the school taught Brandeis a great deal. Years later he told his law clerk Paul Freund that at the Annen-Realschule he had discovered the deductive process. He said that “although he had done well in his studies theretofore,” Freund recalled, “it was not until he went to Dresden that he really learned to think. He said that in preparing an essay on a subject about which he had known nothing, it dawned on him that ideas could be evolved by reflecting on your material. This was a new discovery for him.” The lesson proved invaluable to Brandeis for the rest of his life, as he realized that thinking about material could lead to the resolution of a problem. He would need the facts to master, and the time to absorb and analyze them. Felix Frankfurter noted that Brandeis did not enjoy “the windfall of inspiration.” Rather, “thought for him was the product of brooding. He believed in taking pains, and the corollary of taking pains is taking time.”
The stay in Germany, although it reinforced the lessons of language and literature that Frederika had taught at home, also deepened Louis’s love of America. A child of the frontier in many ways, he disliked the formalism and the rigid discipline that smacked more of military training than of humanistic education. Students had to tip their hats to the professors, a symbol of authoritarianism that irked him greatly. “I was a terrible little individualist in those days,” he told Ernest Poole, “and the German paternalism got on my nerves.” One night he found that he had forgotten his key and, standing outside his window, whistled loudly enough to wake his roommate, who came down to let him in. For this infraction of the rules he received a severe reprimand. “This made me homesick. In Kentucky you could whistle! I wanted to go back to America and I wanted to study law.”
Shortly after he finished the third term of school, he joined his parents in returning to the United States. They sailed from Le Havre on 5 May 1875 under somewhat straitened circumstances compared with the trip over. Frederika and Fannie traveled second class, while Adolph, Amy, and Louis occupied third-class cabins. They reached America on 18 May, and after a visit with friends in Brookline, Massachusetts, returned home to Louisville on 1 June 1875, nearly three years after they had left. The trip allowed the adults to renew old acquaintanceships, and to see not only their homeland but also parts of Europe they had only heard about. For the children, it was a great adventure, with many of their parents’ stories now made more real. But while they delighted in Europe’s art and culture and physical beauties, they all returned home more devoted than ever to the United States.
While in Brookline, Louis Brandeis made arrangements to enter Harvard Law School in the fall semester of 1875.
