In the spring of 1885, Louis’s brother-in-law Charles Nagel wrote to him congratulating him on the success he had enjoyed. “You are a fortunate and a deserving man,” Nagel said, “and there is no one to envy you; unless it is perhaps some noble woman who thinks she might fairly be included in the halo of your happiness and herself intensify if not enlarge it.” This, of course, had not been the first suggestion of this kind that Louis had heard. His sisters, both of whom had married early, constantly wanted to know if any of the young women he met in his social outings interested him in a serious way. His brother, Alfred, had married their second cousin Jennie Taussig in September 1884, and Louis took great pleasure both in Al’s personal happiness and in the growing success of the firm, which Alfred had chosen to call A. Brandeis & Son. Needless to say, his parents wondered why their youngest child, as he passed his thirtieth birthday, remained unmarried.
Family mattered a great deal to Louis, and as his siblings married and had children, Uncle Louis made sure to keep up on their growth. The first of his nieces arrived the summer before he moved to St. Louis, and the young lawyer, who had probably never held a baby in his life, wrote jokingly to his sister Amy, “I hope you are bringing up little Fannie on the most approved theories of baby-training.” Science had learned a great deal in the last few years, so all the old theories and practices had to be discarded. No more cradles to hold the newborn, but baskets, and “uncles are not to be made miserable by the ‘Rock Me to Sleep.’” He worried that news of these new discoveries had not yet reached the shores of the Ohio River, and did not “want my niece to be behind the times.” When two years later the couple named their second child Louis Brandeis Wehle, he could barely contain his pride and joy. “My name is in your hands,” he declared, and sent little Louis a beautiful silver spoon, which elicited a “sisterly scolding” from Amy for its extravagance. He moved to St. Louis just in time to be there when his sister Fannie gave birth to a boy, Alfred Nagel. (Fannie, Amy, and Alfred, but not Louis, tended to name their children after their siblings.) Throughout his life Louis stayed in touch with his nieces and nephews, occasionally drafting them to help him on a pet cause or, in the case of his namesake, to act as his attorney at times.
BRANDEIS THOUGHT that his favorite sister, Fannie, had the best mind of any person he had ever known. Unfortunately, Fannie suffered not only from poor health but from a highly nervous temperament that led to frequent bouts of depression. “My life needs arranging,” she lamented to Lutz. “Inclinations & strength clash sadly, and so much is a bore.” When a few days had passed without a letter from him, she complained that she grew “so desperate in this way … that I make all sorts of desperate plans and resolutions.” In talking about a friend whom she portrayed as depressed, she described her own feelings. “When one does not like the present and has no positive wish for the future. I know so well the mood in which the life we are leading seems ‘provisional’ and I know nothing more unsatisfactory.” As for her son, Alfred, he was a “dear child,” and Charles made a very good father, but as a parent she herself made “poor work of it.”
Fannie did not live in a constant state of depression, and when she felt well, her letters reflected the fine mind that her brother later recalled. Her husband had given her a copy of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Life and Letters for Christmas one year, and she deemed it a book that should not be skimmed but really be read. She wrote with a marvelous dry wit of some of the people she had met, or of the beauty she had seen while walking in nearby woods and meadows. But far too often her letters to her siblings hinted at a growing depression at or just below the surface, and it seemed to take all of her effort to get through each day. Not to “think beyond the day is a good motto,” she told Amy, “or perhaps not to think of the next days, but of those much further off.” When she had visitors, they tired her, but if they did not come, she felt “as though the world had forsaken me.”
Fannie and Charles had another child, Hildegard, born in 1886, but as the decade passed, Fannie seemed to suffer even more from exhaustion and its accompanying depression. “I have not been well these last months,” she told Louis, “so often very, very tired.” Then, in 1888, young Alfred, just shy of ten years, came down with typhoid fever and died, and the family chose not to tell Fannie at the time lest it aggravate her depression, a decision made possible by Fannie’s own extended illness at the time. In December 1889, Louis wrote to his father urging him and Charles
to let nature take its course with Fannie—whatever that course may be. Don’t force her to eat if she does not desire to do so. If there is a Providence—(& I believe there is)—he may be offering the great corrective for the suffering which she has borne. We interfered once and have had reason to regret it. I am glad she knows of Alfred’s death. I cannot bear to be guilty of untruth with her anymore than I would interfere with her action as to herself in regard to eating. I have heard it said that with some patients the desire to refuse food was the one sane wish.
But Fannie did not recover, and on 5 March 1890 killed herself.
Louis immediately left for St. Louis for her funeral, stopping in Louisville to join his parents. While there, he paid a visit to his uncle Samuel, who he discovered had houseguests, his second cousins Henry Goldmark and his sister Alice.
THE GOLDMARK AND BRANDEIS CLANS knew each other well and were related through the Wehle branch of the family; Frederika Dembitz had often played with her younger cousin Regina Wehle in Prague. Whereas Adolph Brandeis had been prevented by illness from participating in the Revolution of 1848, Dr. Joseph Goldmark had been in the thick of it. A distinguished scientist at the University of Vienna, he became a deputy in the new Reichstag. Then the rebellion that his group had fomented got out of hand, and a mob killed the reactionary minister of war, Baron Latour. The conservative government indicted Goldmark for murder, even though he had had nothing to do with the assassination. Knowing that in the climate of reaction already setting in he would surely be convicted, he fled first to Switzerland and then to the United States in 1850. A few years later, the government convicted him in absentia for treason and sentenced him to death. He spent the next decade trying to clear his name, and when a new and more liberal government came to power, he returned to Vienna, stood trial, and won acquittal.
Joseph and Regina had ten children. Henry had been at Harvard at the same time that Louis had been in the law school, and they saw each other occasionally. After graduation Henry went to Germany for training as an engineer, became a well-known bridge and railroad consultant, and was most famous for the design of the Panama Canal locks. Helen married Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture movement, and she essentially ran the movement’s social and educational programs. She started a visiting-nurse service for poor families and wrote one of the first manuals for mothers on the proper care of children. James went into business as a wire manufacturer and was involved in a number of good-government reforms; he also helped to set up boys’ clubs affiliated with the University Settlement in New York. Josephine Clara Goldmark, known to the family as Do, became a very important part of Louis’s reform work. She provided the factual research for the Brandeis brief in Muller v. Oregon (1908) and then, as a representative of the National Consumers League, worked with him defending other protective legislation in the courts. During the New Deal she became an influential figure in the drafting of national labor laws.
Felix Adler
The two families had been in touch over the years, with the elder Brandeises occasionally stopping in New York to visit, or the two families vacationing near each other in the Adirondacks or New Hampshire. When Joseph Goldmark died in 1881, Louis sent a condolence note to Helen Adler, whom he knew well enough to call by her nickname, Nellie. But once he began to practice law, Louis found it harder and harder to get away to visit his own family on its summer vacations for more than a few days at a time, much less to visit relatives who might be nearby, and as a result he probably remembered Alice as a little girl, or at most a teenager. The poised, attractive, and intelligent young woman he met at Uncle Samuel and Aunt Lotti’s house took his breath away.
The Goldmarks, like the Brandeis family, assumed that books, art, and music constituted an essential part of one’s life. Although not formally educated, Alice had learned a great deal in her parents’ house, where conversation veered from the political to the cultural with little gap in between. Like Louis, she had read widely in classic German literature and could speak German and a few other languages as well. In the 1920s she translated the memoirs of her uncle the famous composer Karl Goldmark and also translated a small book on democracy and education in Denmark. After Louis’s death she translated Frederika’s memoirs from German into English for the benefit of her children and grandchildren. Within a very short time, Alice and Louis discovered that they shared very similar ideas on literature and the arts, the meaning of a good life, and the duty to leave the world a better place. Their correspondence over the next few months included references to Franz Grillparzer, Shakespeare, Thomas à Kempis, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, and Voltaire, to name a few. Louis had found his soul mate, and he now set out to court her.
Alice saved nearly all of the letters that Louis wrote to her from the time they met as adults until after he went on the Court and stopped traveling. The first, dated 9 June 1890, in response to an invitation to visit her and her family at their summer vacation house in Keene Valley, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, is a fairly formal and somewhat stilted note saying that he would like to come and asking whether early July would be convenient to her family. Apparently, his efforts to get away from work proved unavailing, and at the end of July, during a weekend visit with his parents on Martha’s Vineyard, he promised that he would somehow manage to get to Keene Valley before the fall. He arrived on 26 August, and as Alice noted in her diary, their conversation “picked up just where we left it in the spring.” He and Alice spent the next few days walking and having “long, pleasant and thoughtful talk, never to be forgotten.” They also went canoeing on the Ausable River, and Alice noted approvingly how Louis would take care of the small children, taking each of them out for a paddle. But whatever else they did, “his eyes are always upon me. We go down to the river and he tells me his story—we have found each other.”
After Louis returned from the Adirondacks, his brother-in-law Charles Nagel, who had brought the four-year-old Hildegard east to visit her vacationing Brandeis grandparents, immediately saw that something was up and demanded to know what had happened. When Louis wrote again, he now employed the language of an ardent suitor. “My dear, sweet Alice,” he began. Charlie Nagel had come to visit him in Boston, “and to him I could speak of you as I could speak to no one but you. Fannie’s spirit surrounds us and their ideal love brings me so near to Charlie now.” They had stayed up talking until one o’clock, since “there was so much to say of you and of Fannie, of Fannie and of you. How she would have rejoiced in you and felt with us!”
All of a sudden whole new vistas opened. Before their meeting “it appeared as if the only joy in life lay in the performance of duties as duties, and now there appears the happiness of living.” He even began to change his habits and claimed he felt her presence when he gave up his usual after-dinner cigarette because she did not like smoking. He became impatient for the mail and exulted when the post brought him three letters. He reported on a visit to the Warrens’ home shortly after the family returned from Europe with a wealth of paintings, and wished that they could have seen them together. “I am so impatient to pour out to you my thoughts and to plead for yours. I feel now that the world is so full of interest. Things which were dead to me have become instinct with life, in the thought that they will interest you.” Louis’s idealism struck a spark with Alice, and as she told Mrs. Evans, “He is so good and noble, every thought of him seems to purify, to elevate me. I feel myself so small, so unworthy, of the blessing which has come to me.”
Sometime in early September, Louis and Alice reached an understanding that they would marry. By the second week in September he had begun telling his friends and passing on their good wishes. On the fifteenth he informed Bess, and wrote to Alice, “I wish you could have seen Mrs. Glendower Evans when I told her. She fairly bounded across the room.” The legendary Charles Townsend Copeland of Harvard warned Louis, “She must like me. Tell her to—or at least to pretend to.” Louis and Alice agreed that her family would make a formal announcement of the engagement on 4 October, although the prospective bridegroom could not wait and began sending letters to his close friends outside of Boston informing them of the troth. He also reported that his friends in the city were clamoring to meet her. In fact, Louis wrote, about the only person who might not be happy about the engagement would be Jim Young, with whom he had shared lodgings since 1884 and who would now have to make another arrangement.
From Sam Warren came a letter commending Louis and rejoicing that his friend had found love. Sam told Alice that he rarely spoke about Louis, lest he appear too fulsome in his praise. But to her he wanted to say so much—”his courage is high, his fidelity perfect, and his sense of honor delicate.” The only part of Louis that he did not know about involved that on which he and Alice stood ready to embark, but he had no doubts that “the bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring.” Then, in words that later seemed hollow, he expressed his hope that he and his wife would have “the pleasure of welcoming you to Boston, and to that important part of our lives which we have in common with Louis.”
Louis Brandeis around the time of his
engagement, 1890
READING THE LETTERS, one cannot help but smile at the joy and happiness that they radiate, at the marking of their little anniversaries, at the impatience to be together, but there is also a glimpse at Louis’s inner beliefs and hopes that he had not shared with anyone else. For seventeen years, he told Alice, “I have stood alone, rarely asking, still less frequently caring for the advice of others. I have walked my way all these years but little influenced by any other individual. And now, Alice, all is changed. I find myself mentally turning to you for advice and approval.” Clearly, Brandeis had been influenced by others in his life; his jurisprudence came, at least in part, from Langdell, Holmes, and Thayer; he copied out lines from Emerson and William James; and he certainly cared about the views of his family. But now he had someone with whom he could share his beliefs, who could be a sounding board, whose opinion he would respect, not just on one matter but on everything they cared about. As he wrote, “I pour out my innermost thoughts to you…. I have longed so for the one to whom I should give all that I am, without reserve.”
While he anticipated a life of happiness and love ahead of them, he also knew that they did not live in an ideal world. “People, like us, with some experience could not look into the future from this perfect present, without some apprehensions,” he wrote, perhaps thinking of the death of his sister earlier in the year. “Only trust in me,” he pleaded, and he would do everything possible to make their lives good ones.
Alice Goldmark, 1890
But what constituted a good life? Not material rewards or public accolades, but service and striving counted. Louis told Alice what joy it had given him to see, on the flyleaf of her diary, paraphrasing from Matthew Arnold: “Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and becoming.” Character counted above all else, and he recalled telling an acquaintance about Eliza Ward, a friend of the Brandeis family’s in Louisville, who had that rare combination of beauty and mind, charm of manner and character. When he had “finished my rhapsody,” one of the company asked, “What has she done?” Louis said that he answered, rather heatedly, “Done? Nothing. She is!” Character more than accomplishment mattered. “Character only is to be admired.”
As for accomplishment, he told Alice that his father had recently commented on some “petty success” of his and had remarked, “You must be proud of that honor.” Louis told Adolph that he could not recall “ever having been proud of anything accomplished or to have deemed any recognition an honor. Indeed, I believe the little successes I may have had were due wholly to the pressure from within, proceeding from a deep sense of obligation and in no respect to the allurement of a possible distinction.” Results, of course, should not be despised, but while results sometimes attested to the drive that produced them, they could also be deceptive on that score. It is the effort, the attempt to do something worthwhile that matters. This should not be seen as hyperbole. In examining the Brandeis letters covering more than six decades, one finds very few expressing satisfaction and almost none expressing pride over the outcome of a particular reform. The only exception occurred when Woodrow Wilson named him to the Supreme Court in 1916, and that had to do as much with the vindication of his views regarding Zionism and Americanism as anything else.
Louis did not discount the idea that he might, in his lifetime, do great things, and he expected that with Alice’s help and encouragement much could be accomplished. But like him, Alice valued character and right living, which they agreed meant focusing on the individual. Although it would still be several years before he began to attack the “curse of bigness,” in December 1890 he told his fiancáe that “we Americans particularly have been so overwhelmed with huge figures that we are apt to underestimate the value of the unit in the great mass.” But he did not idealize the masses, as some reformers did. Most people, he told Alice, “lie powerless, motionless, dormant before the magnet” of leadership and example is applied, and whether they would move toward the good or the bad was a matter of chance. If it were to be for the good, then people of strong character had to show the way. He repeated this idea when telling her about the article he and Sam Warren had written on privacy. “Most of the world is in more or less a hypnotic state, and it is comparatively easy to make people believe anything, particularly the right.” To this extent, Brandeis indeed shared Jefferson’s faith that the people, if properly informed and led, would act wisely, but unlike the Virginian he recognized that the people could also be manipulated.
ONCE ENGAGED, Louis began commuting to New York almost every weekend, and only a pressing business matter would keep him from taking the train. He also found himself, like many a love-struck swain, having a difficult time keeping his mind on business. “I am doing many foolish things,” he told Alice. “One was telling a client he could consult me tonight, and I am sure my opinion will be of little value to him.” Although the engagement was not long by the standards of the time, Louis wanted to marry sooner rather than later, and while it is unlikely that Alice had second thoughts about Louis, she nonetheless seemed hesitant in setting an actual date. First it appeared that it would be 2 March, but when Louis seized upon that day, she wrote to him that it was “not quite definitely settled yet.” He wisely did not push her, but appeared increasingly frustrated until she agreed to 23 March, a day that to him seemingly would never come. On 13 March, he wrote that he would happily “jump the week to come. Work attracts me no longer and I do no good here.” Two days later he declared that if the date had not been immutably set, “I should feel like anticipating it, and like the Barons of old, break away and carry you off.”
During these months Alice would occasionally come to Boston, chaperoned by one of her sisters and staying with Bess Evans, who became her closest friend. There was much to do in those months, not the least of which involved finding and furnishing a house. Despite his protestations in the letter that Alice should always tell him what she thought—to “exercise the prerogatives of a partner”—they quickly fell into a pattern where he would make arrangements and then check with her to see if they met her approval, which they always did.
He soon found a house for them. By the first of October he wrote that he had bought 114 Mount Vernon Street, a few blocks from the Warren residence and next door to his good friends Lorin and Margaret Deland, the latter a well-known novelist who often addressed issues of social justice in her books. Lorin, a wealthy Bostonian interested in literature and the arts, owned an advertising agency whose profits supported several local charities. Brandeis described the place to Alice as “not ideal. Only of the possible it seemed the best for us.” Lorin, who apparently had plenty of time on his hands, became Louis’s lieutenant in the search for a home as well as in fitting it up properly, and they both hoped that when Alice next came to Boston, she would like the building.
The letters between October 1890 and March 1891 are full of details about the house, how much it would cost to buy and install wallpaper and blinds, the gift of a large hall clock from one of Louis’s clients, the offer of a dog (which they turned down), the installation of new brass and plumbing fixtures, and the like. Louis sent Alice an estimate for the shades, $25.25 for twenty-five shades, and at the bottom noted, “You & I are very economical.” Workmen installed new floors and fixed broken laths, and then painters and wallpaper hangers came in to give the whole house a shiny new interior. “The yard has been cleaned out & the carpenters are finishing the coal bin today,” he reported at the end of January. “The mantels are expected next week.” Louis sent samples of the new wallpapers to chemists to be sure that they contained no arsenic, and he rejected any that had even a trace of the poison. Since Alice did not ride, Louis bought a small buggy, as well as lap rugs and a warm red Shaker cloak, so they could go out. He and the Delands had extended conversations about servants, since Alice clearly would direct household help and not do the work herself. Louis took over these chores in part because he was on the scene, stopping in every day to remind workmen of their promises regarding completion of different tasks. When possible, he consulted with Alice, and it is clear from the letters that she had many ideas as to color, style, and furniture that he accepted. There are no letters to the effect: “I do not like your idea on this or that.”
But just as important, and as an omen of future difficulties, Alice did not, even as a girl, enjoy the robust health that one associates with a young person. Louis might complain of being tired, but one could understand that in light of the schedule of work and other activities he maintained, and as he grew older, the problem seemed to afflict him less often. But Alice lacked stamina and suffered from physical and mental exhaustion through the first three decades of their marriage, requiring frequent medical attention and stays in rest homes. This is probably the reason that while several of her sisters and brothers attended college, she did not. Louis no doubt recognized that she had a frail constitution, and so assumed the responsibility for managing their households and their lives. He dealt with the renovation of their house in Boston, arranged for the summer cottages and vacations, paid the bills, and in general took over as much of the household responsibility as he could.
There is another side to this, however, which perhaps contributed to the problem. Louis frequently told Alice that he wanted her to be his partner and his equal in the marriage. In the beginning of their courtship he would either jump right into the text of the letter without any greeting, impatient to tell her things, or address her as “My dear, dear Alice.” This became “My dear, sweet girl,” and then “My dear child.” Granted, Louis was ten years older than Alice, but at the time of their engagement she could hardly be called a child, even metaphorically. When he wrote to her about political or cultural or idealistic matters, he spoke to her as an equal, valued her opinion, and rejoiced that they shared the same values. But in other, more practical matters, such as the work on the house or even her clothing, he adopted a tone that, if not patronizing, seemed to be more of a lesson than a love letter.
For example, during one of his visits to New York they had discussed dress, and Alice, tired from the constant fittings she had to endure from the dressmaker in preparation of her trousseau, complained that she did not care for fashion and the need to wear the latest style. Louis agreed with her and said that he “hate[d] frivolous frills and overdressing” and thought that most women had too many dresses. But “when a woman happens to be both handsome and artistic a certain obligation rests upon her. There is a call upon her thought and taste. With a woman of mind and of taste there is the same reason why her dress should be more effective as there is that her house should be more attractive or her table better.” In other words, he expected her to dress in a manner appropriate to her station in life. Similarly, when she felt guilty about not taking her sister to hear a lecture because she had been tired, Louis instructed her, as one would a child, on the need to maintain her health. People who really loved her would understand, and he reported that just the other day he had come across an article in which the author had declared that “faithful maintenance of bodily health is as much a woman’s duty as to speak the truth.”
Louis and Alice, the products of cultured, prosperous, German-American households, reflected the attitudes of their culture and the Victorian era toward marriage. The man would be the head of the house and responsible for the economic as well as physical needs of the family. The woman would run the home, bear children, and look to the moral and emotional requirements of husband, children, and servants. In practice, Louis always treated Alice as his intellectual equal, took her advice seriously, and confided in her. He also, because of her physical infirmities, had to take over much of what would normally have been her household responsibilities.
THE DAY FIXED for the wedding, 23 March—also Alfred’s birthday—finally arrived. Louis and Alice, dressed neatly but simply, took their vows in the large sunny dining room of the Goldmark house at 473 Park Avenue. Adolph and Frederika had come from Louisville, but none of the other members of the family came, not even Alfred, nor had any of Louis’s close friends in Boston, such as Sam Warren, Bess Evans, or the Delands. On the bride’s side, her mother, brothers, and sisters attended, as well as the redoubtable aunt Julia Wehle. Neither family believed in large weddings, and the Brandeises still mourned the loss of their oldest child only a year earlier. Apparently, no one on the Brandeis side grumbled about the small ceremony, but some of Alice’s relatives, especially her uncle who had taken over the family’s business and finances after the death of Joseph Goldmark, complained bitterly to Alice’s mother about not being invited.
Felix Adler, Alice’s brother-in-law and the head of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, officiated. Given that neither family observed Jewish ritual, Dr. Adler led a brief ceremony that emphasized the need for service to one’s fellow humans. After a short reception the couple left to spend a week at the Wilder Mansion, a Massachusetts inn where they were the only guests in the off-season. Alice’s sisters then mailed out what Pauline recalled as “thousands” of wedding announcements, which they “stuffed [in] the mailboxes all around our neighborhood to the disgust of the carriers.”
After their honeymoon Alice and Louis moved into the house on Mount Vernon Street. They had sent Bess Evans a key so she could unpack Alice’s trunks and get everything ready for the couple on their return. Alice’s younger sister Pauline, then a college freshman, recalled it as “the most wonderful house we’d ever seen, so small and so quaint and with such beautiful old furniture.” From this house Louis could easily walk to his office; for recreation the Boston Common and Public Gardens were practically around the corner, with the boat club and the canoe minutes away. They lived here until they moved to larger quarters, at 6 Otis Place near Bess Evans, after their family had grown. As they had with their first house, Alice and Louis decorated it with good furniture, but little in the way of extraneous adornment. In 1916 a newspaper reporter called the Brandeis home “almost severe in its freedom from bric-à-brac and cumbersome furniture.”
From all recollections of the couple by people who knew them well, Louis fulfilled the promise he made to Alice during their engagement—that she would be an equal partner in his life’s work. As he became more and more involved in reform work, she became not only a sounding board for ideas but an adviser as well. As Belle La Follette wrote at the time of Louis’s nomination to the Supreme Court, “It would not have been possible for him to have made the great sacrifices—to have devoted so much time, energy, and money to the public welfare, if she had been different. In all his efforts she was not only willing, but has given that whole-hearted and sustaining support which can only come from inner conviction.” During his most active reform years, beginning around 1910 and ending only with his nomination, Louis was often away weeks at a time, arbitrating labor disputes in New York, advising congressional committees and cabinet officers in Washington, running the Zionist movement from wherever he might be, but he wrote to Alice every day, telling her what had transpired, whom he had met, and asking what she thought. Physically frail she may have been, but her mind proved the perfect complement to her husband’s. When home, the two invariably took a long walk each day during which they discussed the issues that mattered to them most. As Felix Frankfurter noted, “Nothing petty, nothing shallow or meretricious was ever allowed to intrude into the pattern of their life together.” Brandeis knew, Frankfurter declared, that the life he chose to pursue, with all its hardships and criticism, could not have been possible without Alice.
Although she did not have the physical stamina to accompany him on many of his outdoor activities, she did enjoy the canoe and became an avid bird lover. This sometimes annoyed Bess, with whom she would go walking, because in the middle of what Bess called “real conversation,” Alice would suddenly espy an unusual bird and insist on pointing it out to her friend, who would respond, “Oh, yes, nice little bird,” and try to get back to what they had been talking about. Whenever out in the canoe, Alice always took along a pair of field glasses so she could watch for uncommon species. Once, Louis wrote to her about a strange bird he had seen while walking to work, “chubby, about twice the size of a large fat English sparrow, with a yellow patch on top of head & somewhat yellow collar,” and wondered if she could identify it for him. Alice also loved flowers and planted them in profusion at their weekend and summer homes, first in Dedham and then on the Cape. When his wife felt too tired or ill to accompany him on a walk there, Louis would always try to find a pretty flower to bring back to her.
Over the years Alice developed many interests of her own. An early advocate of votes for women, she undoubtedly helped Louis see the error of his ways, and he too came to endorse the suffrage. She served on the executive board of the Massachusetts Civic League, helped found the Women’s City Club of Boston, and served as the first chair of the latter’s civic affairs committee. After she met Mary Follett, she began working with her on extending the reach of public schools into the community, one of the leading ideas of progressive educational reformers at the time. This eventually led to the founding of the National Community Center Association; Alice served for many years on its executive board and became its chairperson in 1930. Prior to World War I, she joined the Massachusetts chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in the 1920s became vice president of the National Council for Preservation of the Peace. During the turmoil attendant upon the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s, Alice could not participate openly, but quietly helped her friend Bess Evans, and one time, at Mrs. Evans’s request, allowed members of the Sacco family to stay at one of the rental houses that Brandeis owned.
One might have expected that given Louis’s wide range of acquaintances in Boston, Alice would have been welcomed into the city’s society. Indeed, Mrs. Henry Lee Higginson came to call on her and welcome her to the city shortly after the couple moved into their house. Friends like Sam Warren, the Delands, and Arthur Cabot, according to Alpheus Mason, eased Alice’s entrance into “cold-roast” Boston society. At least initially, Alice seemed to feel no more of the anti-Semitism growing in Boston and elsewhere than did her husband.* That, however, changed once Louis began challenging the city’s financial elite in the late 1890s (see next chapter). Then many of the men who gladly called on Brandeis for his legal skills would have nothing to do with him socially, even if they belonged to the same clubs, and their wives ignored Alice completely. According to Bess Evans, when society closed its doors to the Brandeises, Alice, whatever her private feelings, publicly did not seem to care. She stood by and supported Louis’s crusades. When Bess later asked Louis about this, he told her, “I could not have lived my life without Alice” in those days. “If my wife had been hurt, how could I have had the strength to go on?”
THE EARLY YEARS of their marriage may have been among the happiest in their lives. As Alice told Mrs. Evans shortly after the wedding, “I never dreamed that such happiness was possible.” Louis’s life also changed dramatically. Now that he had a home and no longer stayed in lodgings, Louis felt free to invite people to the house for dinner. This habit, designed to meet and learn from new and interesting people, would continue well into his years on the Court. Louis and Alice also received invitations, especially when all of his friends and many of his clients wanted to meet the new Mrs. Brandeis, but they most enjoyed a circle of close friends that included Bess Evans and their next-door neighbors, the Delands.
Mrs. Evans recalled an annual ritual held in the Brandeis house on Louis’s birthday, 13 November, every year from the time he married until he left Boston for Washington in 1916. Alice’s family had brought with them a custom from Europe in which on a person’s birthday they adorned his or her chair with a long strand of laurel and put flowers before the dinner plate. The festivities always began with Lorin Deland, one year older than Louis, saying, with a broad grin, “Well, Louis, poor fellow, how I pity you. The year ahead will be the most terrible of your life.” Thereupon, Bess Evans, also a year older than Louis, would exclaim, “Don’t you believe him, Louis, the year you are entering will be your very best!”
Their happiness grew with the births of two daughters, Susan (named after Alice’s sister) on 27 February 1893 and Elizabeth (named after Mrs. Evans) on 25 April 1896. Because of Alice’s frailty, there had been some concerns about her being able to have children, but a little after a year of marriage she conceived. A few days after Susan’s birth Louis wrote to Bess Evans, then traveling overseas, “Susan is pronounced a very fine child. She is certainly exemplary in her behavior.” The birth had been difficult for Alice and caused the doctors some alarm the first few days, but she improved steadily and then happily began to nurse the child. The proud husband described his wife as “even lovelier than before. There has been much of the time a calm madonna-like serenity and strength which seemed to lift her above things worldly.” It took Alice a long time, however, before she regained her strength.
The Brandeis household soon took on a pattern that lasted for several years. Louis normally rose around 5:00 or 5:30 and, after washing, would read or do some work in preparation for the day. He came down for breakfast a little after seven, and first Susan, and then both girls, would join him. Louis enjoyed a good breakfast—oatmeal, coffee or hot chocolate, and some kind of meat, such as a pork chop or steak—while the girls had shredded wheat. Before leaving for the office at eight, he would read to them, listen to whatever stories they wanted to tell, or, after they started school, help them with their homework. If they had a question, he would not answer it directly, but send them over to the dictionary or the encyclopedia to look it up, believing that people retained what they had to learn by themselves far better than knowledge casually handed to them by another. Alice would normally rest in bed, and one of the three servants the household employed would take her breakfast upstairs to her. These morning conversations suited both Louis’s interests and those of the girls. One morning he told them about Solon and the wise laws he had caused to be enacted. As he left the house, Susan ran after him crying out, “Tell me another law!” As they grew older, they became conversant with his reform work. Louis loved to tell the story that when Susan was about fourteen, he explained to her some of the issues surrounding the efforts by the New Haven Railroad to buy up all the other rail lines in New England. Susan thought for a moment and then declared, “The idea! Where would there then be any competition?” When Louis left for work, Susan would walk with him across Boston Common to his office, returning to the house with her nurse. Later, after Susan had started school, Elizabeth would join him. In the summer the stroll would be from their house in Dedham to the train station.
At the end of his workday, Louis left the office by five, walked home, changed his clothes, and, depending on weather and whim, would either go horseback riding, take out a canoe on the Charles, or even play tennis. While getting ready, he amused the children by telling them a story, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, in serial form, always leaving them eagerly awaiting the next installment. When he traveled, he wrote every day to Alice and took pains either to add a line for the girls or, when they grew older, to write to them separately. He had to go to the Midwest on business in the spring of 1897 and, after describing to Alice the places he had been, said, “Tell Susan there is much sand in Michigan to make cakes of, and tell Elizabeth that its inhabitants are called ‘suckers.’”
Louis and Alice “dressed” for dinner, although not necessarily in formal wear. But the clothes Louis wore to ride or canoe would be replaced with tie and jacket, and Alice would also change her dress. The Brandeises ate well, but not lavishly, although in later years they adopted an even simpler regimen that some of their guests considered spartan. Judge Julian W. Mack, whom Brandeis knew as one of the first editors of the Harvard Law Review and who later became one of his lieutenants in the American Zionist movement, enjoyed gourmet food and used to complain that when you joined Brandeis for dinner, you had to eat twice, once what they served and then a “real” meal later. But in these early years, Alice and Louis set a nice table, with meat or fish every evening, often accompanied by beer or sherry. Each of them had a sweet tooth. All his life Louis loved ice cream, while Alice enjoyed Belgian chocolates and candied fruits from S. S. Pierce.
They entertained regularly, not in large parties, but one or two people for dinner, because in small groups they could indulge in the wide-ranging and informative conversations they both loved. As the years went by, many of the guests collaborated with Louis in one or another of his reform activities, and the talk would, of course, concern politics and strategies. But history, books, music, and occasionally even gossip filled the dinner hour. According to his niece, Louis loved jokes, although, despite his reputation as one of the ablest courtroom lawyers in the nation, he could not tell a joke very well. He anticipated the punch line and would start laughing far too soon. But even if he could not tell stories well, he could listen, ask questions, and draw out from his guests information he needed to understand current public issues. This habit persisted throughout his life. Stories abound of the teas he and Mrs. Brandeis held at their Washington apartment during his tenure on the Court. He made it a point to invite young men and women who had just entered government and worked on important matters like securities regulation and social security, ask them to draw up a seat, and then proceed to grill them about their work. And many would report that problems that had confused them at the office took on a new clarity after these meetings. When they had no guests, after dinner Louis would lie down on the sofa, and Alice would read to him. On vacations he would also read to her, a pastime they both enjoyed. After a while Louis would doze off, and Alice would put the book away. In a little while he would awaken, read the Boston Evening Transcript, and go to bed by ten.
Alice and Louis had determined, even before their marriage, that they would live simply, and well below what his income could have afforded. Neither cared for frills, but neither did they choose shoddy. They bought clothes and furniture with an eye to quality and a style that would not go out of season in a few months. Louis had once advised Alfred to buy nothing for his house that his grandchildren could not use. He and Alice wanted the financial independence to be free to do what mattered most to them—to spend additional time with family, to engage in public works, to enjoy literature and music. Once he made enough to ensure the financial security of his family, money became not an end but a means, and he and Alice used it to support causes they believed in and to provide assistance to poorer members of the family. Financial freedom was the prerequisite to personal independence.
Brandeis also bought a small house at 194 Village Avenue in Dedham, then a rural outpost of the city frequented by many upper-class Bostonians, including Sam Warren. Later he rented summer homes on Cape Cod, finally buying one in Chatham that he kept until his death and is still in the family. Here he and Alice would indulge their passions for walking and canoeing, and here he taught these and other skills to his daughters. The family used the Dedham house not only in the summer but in milder weather in the winter as well.
One area of Louis’s life Alice could not join. He had loved to travel ever since the family had gone to Europe in the 1870s, and had she had a stronger constitution, there is no doubt that the two of them would have traveled not only across the United States but to Europe as well. Brandeis often traveled on business, and as his practice expanded, these trips took him far from Boston. He and Alice planned a trip abroad for the summer of 1892 but, when they discovered she was pregnant, canceled it on the doctor’s advice and rented a cottage on the beach. In 1899, before the full extent of her illness manifested itself, he had to go to Nebraska. He wrote how exciting it had been to head west from Chicago in the Portland sleeper, which made one believe one could sniff the Pacific. “Only three days from Chicago to the Pacific,” he told her. “Shall we do it soon?” In 1909 he finally got to California and wrote glowing letters to Alice of the sights he saw.
Alice would accompany him on only one major trip, when he went to Europe after World War I on Zionist business. But he so loved traveling, especially into wilderness areas, that Alice encouraged him to go with his friends. He did this up to the time he went on the Court, and as the girls grew older, they became his camping companions in Maine and in Canada. Although he never owned any boat larger than a canoe, his friend Herbert White owned a yacht, the Frolic, and each summer Louis would spend some time at sea with White. In 1899 they sailed the Frolic through the wild waters of eastern Canada, stopping to fish, walk, and canoe. He wrote to Alice from Campobello, “Off the coast we had superb cod fishing. The day before we fished for flounder at Cuthie. And for several days I have been sailing much—and alone—in the Cat boat, which is a very pleasing occupation that one can spend the whole day at it. I am not a great sailor man yet, but I understand enough to know that the art can be compassed.” Just as Louis needed time away from work to recharge his mental batteries, so he needed time away from Boston and its civilization to recharge himself physically.
ALTHOUGH THEIR LOVE LASTED throughout their lives, the idyllic early years of their marriage soon gave way to a lengthy period of stress and illness. As Louis became more involved in reform activities, he incurred the wrath of Boston’s powerful, who objected to his attacks on their pet projects and his accusations of financial improprieties. This in turn led to increasing social exclusion, as some men and women who had once welcomed Louis and Alice into their homes closed their doors to them. Anti-Semitism, which had been growing as part of the nativist backlash against the great influx of immigrants from eastern Europe, became pronounced in a city whose ancestors had patterned themselves on the ancient Hebrews. True friends, such as Sam Warren (but not his wife), the Delands, and Bess Evans, of course, never deserted them. Under these attacks Alice bore up well. Years later, during the confirmation fight, Belle La Follette wrote in indignation at the scurrilous accusations being thrown at Louis. Recalling some of the charges made years earlier, Alice responded, “As far as mud-slinging goes—well, you and I know what such things are and it doesn’t and never can trouble the spirit.”
Sometime after the birth of their second child, Alice began showing symptoms not just of physical tiredness but of emotional exhaustion as well. She needed more time to rest and found it increasingly difficult to deal with the children (who had a full-time nurse) or with anything else. Eventually, she could do nothing during these “dark” days, and doctors prescribed a rest cure—she would enter a private sanitarium and be free from any responsibilities until she could regain her physical and mental strength. It is not clear exactly when Alice first took these cures, or how often she resorted to them. The first time we have clear evidence is in January 1900, and it would appear that over the next twenty or so years she entered a rest home on a dozen or more occasions.
Whenever this happened, Louis would spend more time with the children, but in the first decades of the twentieth century he faced ever-greater demands on his time from the various reforms that he joined. The family did, of course, have servants. Alice’s sisters, especially Josephine, came as often as possible to help out, but Louis encouraged his daughters to be self-sufficient. At the time of the first known stay, Susan was seven and Elizabeth four, and as in most families one expected the older child to help take care of the younger. Louis wrote to Alice, “Susan says she is mistress of the house until Aunt Jo comes, and in her literalness insists upon occupying your chair. Sister [Elizabeth] is playing Susan, but poetic license permits her to keep her own seat, which she prefers.” How long Alice stayed in the sanitarium that first time is impossible to tell, but she had returned home by the summer. In September, Louis wrote to her, “I trust you and the children will have a beautiful tomorrow. It was a beautiful day ten years ago [when they agreed to marry], and you have more than fulfilled the promise to me which your ‘yes’ implied. You have had many hard days in these years, and we shall hope that this may come otherwise, but we shall indeed be fortunate if another ten years of such happiness is granted to us.”
Unfortunately, Alice soon relapsed, and at the end of 1900 she and Louis were trying to decide what steps to take next. While she thought that going off by herself would allow her to regain her strength sooner, she also did not want to leave her family again. “You will know better than anyone else,” Louis assured her, “whether you should leave the children at home, separating yourself entirely from them, or try to get the rest cure having them nearby. Think that over very carefully.” Alice decided to go by herself (she told Bess Evans, “Getting away from home was such a dreadful wrench and my first days here anything but cheerful”), and Louis took as much time as he could from work and other activities to be with Susan and Elizabeth. They loved to hear him tell stories about ancient Greeks and Romans, and he proudly reported to Alice how much the girls, especially Susan, recalled from earlier stories. “Today we talked about Lucius Maulius Toruatus who sentenced his son to death for disobeying general instructions given regarding the relations of the Romans to the Capuans,” Louis wrote, without commenting on what a strange choice of stories this appeared to be for an eight-year-old. He then asked Susan if she remembered what other Roman had acted similarly, and she immediately answered, “Brutus.” They then moved on to the adventures of Odysseus, and Louis stretched out the story of the Greek hero’s return by telling it in installments. Susan and Elizabeth apparently could barely wait for him to return each day to tell them what happened next. As he told Alice, “I think a continued story has a great advantage over short stories.”
All the stories could not disguise Alice’s absence, and one day when Louis returned to the house, Susan cried, “Mamma has been gone two weeks today. She said she would come back in two weeks, and I want her.” Her father explained that Mamma had not yet gotten well, and “her ill-humor disappeared. She is certainly the most rational child.” But while he could calm them and try to explain why their mother could not be there, the children often engaged in small arguments and temper displays. “Susan broke out Saturday in cruel protest about ‘always having to read aloud to Sister.’” The next year, when Alice went away again, Susan protested against having to read to Elizabeth all the time, and in turn Elizabeth objected to running errands for her older sister. While Louis described the two as “sweet,” he also told Alice that both girls reached their limits. He had to reason with them, and they soon returned to their sweet ways.
For the most part, however, the girls grew to accept their mother periodically going away, and as they got older, Louis taught them to assume some of the household duties. In 1907, the fourteen-year-old Susan went through the household papers to see if a bill from the Boston Electric Company had been paid. But they and Louis missed Alice very much. On some of her stays the family went to visit her, and sometimes Louis arranged for just Susan and Elizabeth to go. To Alice he kept up a steady stream of encouragement. “Don’t lose your courage, dear, which has been so fine,” he wrote. “The good times are coming.” On another occasion, in tones reminiscent of his courting, he suggested that her “esteemed doctor must do a hurry-up job.” He and the girls did not propose to leave her in the sanitarium much longer. “Indeed I felt quite like carrying you off with us.”
One cannot be sure at the distance of so many decades exactly what afflicted Alice. Members of the family, when queried about it by scholars in later years, tended to downplay the problem, ignoring both its severity and its frequency. One historian reported that the “family described her as ‘having the vapors,’ which was the general nineteenth and early twentieth century description for any mild and debilitating illness of unknown cause that affected women.” Philippa Strum suggests that like many other women of her generation, Alice was a victim of lack of exercise and lack of knowledge about illnesses and infections specific to women.
Recent scholarship in the field, especially by feminist historians, raises other possibilities. Great changes in society in general, and in women’s roles in particular, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries placed immense strain on traditional middle-class families. As more women (mostly lower-class) went into the workplace, middle-class women felt increasing pressure to adhere to the “cult of domesticity,” in which women carried the role of emotional, moral, and domestic arbiters of the household. Society also viewed women as a weaker sex in every way—physical, mental, and emotional—and many women in the late nineteenth century saw themselves as ill, and society encouraged women to think of themselves that way. Society did not think badly of women who suffered physical and psychological depression, the so-called fashionable disease. It is not that women chose neurasthenia, as it is now termed, so much as that they unconsciously retreated into it in the face of the many pressures confronting them. Society, in fact, accepted neurasthenia—a condition of the genteel classes—as proof of delicacy, femininity, and sensitivity; the lower classes did not suffer from “nerves.”
Alice Goldmark Brandeis had a frail constitution, but that by itself does not fully explain her illness, because much of what afflicted her seems to have been more psychological than physical. A protected child of a well-to-do family, she married a successful attorney who provided her with a house and servants. While the bearing of two children put a strain on her, as it does on most women, she did not have to take constant care of Susan and Elizabeth, clean the house, do the laundry and the cooking, or work outside the home to put food on their table. Louis cosseted her, and her exhaustion cannot be ascribed to physical demands on her. If, as many scholars suggest, neurasthenia resulted from social and psychological pressures, what might they have been? The attacks on her husband for his reform work, and the accompanying social ostracism, may also have accounted for some of the pressure later, but her initial episodes came well before these assaults began.
The experience of two other women in similar situations, Fanny Dixwell Holmes and Marion Denman Frankfurter, is informative. Like Alice, both women came from upper-middle-class homes and were very intelligent, cultured, and well-read. Both had been passionately courted by extraordinary men, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Felix Frankfurter. Although they belonged to different generations, both succumbed to neurasthenia a few years into their marriages, and it is certainly possible that marriage to high-powered men, with few outlets for their own intellectual or creative impulses, led them to retreat to their bedrooms and hide from the world. Fanny Holmes and Alice Brandeis, however, emerged from their shells when they moved to Washington and, because of their husbands’ status as justices on the Supreme Court, immediately joined the highest social echelons of the nation’s capital. Fanny again became the bright and clever personality she had been before her marriage, trading quips with Theodore Roosevelt as he escorted her into the White House dining room, while Alice also dined at the White House and went to the theater with Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. Marion Frankfurter, who once complained to a friend about being married to a man who was never tired, unfortunately did not recover, and in later years sank into a severe case of mental illness.
For all his love of her, which no one could deny, Louis Brandeis must at times have struck Alice as overwhelming, someone who could seemingly do everything—be a successful lawyer, a social activist, a good father to their children, a man who enjoyed strenuous physical activities, and who could run their household better than she could. The fact that Louis adored her, valued her advice, and, at least intellectually, truly did see her as his partner and equal did not relieve her anxieties that she could not live up to the high standards he set. Moreover, his treating her at times as if she were a child could not have helped. In the end, Alice would emerge as a person in her own right, with causes of her own. That, however, would take time. Between the late 1890s and the early 1920s, Alice, despite her frequent relapses, did begin to carve out this personality, with the help of Bess Evans and others. When not ill, she became an active participant in programs she cared about. Her illnesses—and the strains they put upon the family—only made the bonds between her and Louis stronger.
IN THE MIDST OF Alice’s problems, Louis suddenly had to confront the mortality of his parents. At the turn of the century, Frederika had lived for seventy-one years and Adolph for nearly eighty, well above the average life spans of the time. In the summer of 1901 they came east, as they had for many years, and rented a place in Petersham, in central Massachusetts, a location convenient enough to Boston that Louis could come down to see them fairly often. He found his father had aged, but appeared to be in relatively good health, good enough for him to go horseback riding with Louis, although at a sedate pace. Frederika, however, had an advanced stage of cancer and knew that this would probably be the last time she saw her favorite child. Louis read aloud to her and to Adolph, with some of the same stories he told his daughters from Greek and Roman history. He reported that because of the morphine, his mother did not have great discomfort, “but is very tired of the whole business. She talks much of wanting to die, but also of wanting to get well.” She also wanted to see Alice and her grand children, which Louis promised “shall be later.”
Upon learning that Frederika wanted to see her and the children, Alice immediately offered to come over with them from the vacation house she and Louis had rented in Manomet Point, a few miles below Plymouth on Cape Cod Bay. Louis thanked her but immediately said no. His mother was failing rapidly, the children could not and should not be in the house, and no rooms could be found in any nearby hotel. Louis no doubt also thought the trip might be too much for Alice, and that his mother might not live long enough to see them. In fact that is what happened; a few hours after he wrote to Alice, his mother died in the early evening of 21 August 1901. She had been unconscious all day, much to her family’s relief, since they felt she had suffered enough. Adolph, as Louis noted, bore up well, as he had been expecting Frederika’s death for a while. But when Louis suggested that they have her body cremated, Adolph said no; he wanted her buried in Louisville. Since Adolph wanted to stay on in Petersham rather than return to Louisville in the summer, they placed Frederika’s body in a vault in a nearby larger town for eventual shipment back home.
Susan and Elizabeth Brandeis, 1900
Adolph continued to come to Petersham for the next few years. Aside from the pleasant memories he had of the years he and Frederika had vacationed there, Louis would brighten his day by taking an afternoon train over and staying overnight or even for two days from time to time, and apparently brought the girls with him occasionally. These visits gladdened Adolph enormously, and once, in 1904, when a train delay had caused Louis some problems in getting to Petersham, Adolph wrote to him that I “only hope you will not allow yourself to be discouraged from coming here by these little discouragements as your visits give charm to my life here which I could not well spare.”
That would be the last summer Adolph came east. The following year he began to decline perceptibly, and in the summer of 1905 Louis spent a few weeks in Louisville with his family, visited some old friends, and rode with Al around the Kentucky countryside. He found his father just “so-so,” and it appears that Adolph may also have suffered from cancer. In addition to pain medication to help him sleep, the doctors prescribed some form of stimulant that Adolph took regularly during the day, when he appeared to be more like his old self. At night, though, he grew tired and lethargic. For the most part, Louis told Alice, “he is quite his charming self and appreciative of the attentions of those about him.”
Then, on 27 December 1905, Louis received an urgent telegram from his brother, reporting that Adolph had become quite ill. “Think no physical discomfort but pronounced mental confusion,” Al reported. “Do not believe end can be far off.” Alice and the girls had already gone to New York to spend some time with the Goldmarks, and Louis decided that as soon as he could wind up a few pending matters, he would go to Kentucky. Two days later Al sent another wire: “[Dr.] Weidner says if you want to see father so that you can talk to him better come at once.” Louis immediately left Boston and arrived in time to see and talk with his father. Then the elder Brandeis rallied, and Louis returned home. A few weeks later, on 20 January 1906, Adolph Brandeis died.
The deaths of Louis’s parents, while saddening, came as no surprise, since both had lived long lives. It came as a great shock, however, on his trips to Louisville to discover that his sister Amy, only three years older than he, suffered from congestive heart failure. On 17 February, only a few weeks after Adolph’s death, Amy passed away. Louis did not go to her funeral, but later in the summer he took the train to Louisville to spend some time with Alfred, his one remaining sibling, and with Amy’s family.
Louis Brandeis with friends at a shelter in the Adirondacks
Louis and his daughters on a croquet field in Dedham, ca.1899
AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, had Louis Brandeis been the introspective type and had he stopped to take stock of his life, he would have found little to complain about and much to be thankful for. He had succeeded in his profession and, along with other leaders of the bar, helped to transform the practice of law. In doing so, he had become one of the top earners not just in Boston but in the country, and if he had not yet achieved his goal of financial freedom, he was well on the way. He had married a woman whose political, intellectual, and cultural interests matched his own, who had given him two bright and precocious daughters, and who shared his dream of public service. His place in Boston’s legal and social hierarchy seemed secure, and he had even begun to dabble in local politics and reform. For a man in his forties, he had achieved a great deal. Now he stood poised on the threshold of a second career, one that would take him from the parochial confines of Boston to the stage of national affairs, and, although he did not realize it, also cost him a great deal.
* The only scholar to report that the Brandeises faced overt anti-Semitism in these days is Allon Gal, who claims that for all their weekend trips to Dedham, the locals ignored the family. Louis, according to Gal, had been admitted to the Dedham Polo Club at the behest of Sam Warren, but as one Brahmin wrote in 1916, “It was a club of gentlemen, and Brandeis was soon conspicuously left to ‘flock by himself,’ with the result that he ceased to frequent the club and his absence was not regretted.” Neither Brandeis daughter recalled, other than going out to Dedham when they were children, having anything to do with the local Yankee community, which viewed the Brandeises as southern and non-Christian. Even Alice’s accent (presumably not a northeastern twang) worked against her. There were a few friends there, such as the publisher Herbert Maynard, but Gal claims their families did not visit with the outsiders (Brandeis of Boston, 38–39). This may or may not be true, but Louis never wrote anything in his letters to Alfred about such bias at this time, though later he did. Nor did Alice ever talk about any sense of ostracism to Elizabeth Evans, her closest friend, with whom she discussed everything. Moreover, Louis and Alice were not the types of people to deliberately flaunt their “otherness,” and it is curious that if, in fact, the Yankees of Dedham disliked them so much, they kept their house there for many years and spent not only weekends but sometimes even weeks there in the winter as well as the summer. The fact that they did not partake of the social activities at the Polo Club is not surprising either. Louis made it plain that he valued the facility for its stable, where he could keep his horses and have them well tended. The Brandeises never belonged to any club for socializing purposes.