CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NATIONAL POLITICS

In 1911 and 1912, Brandeis entered a world new to him—national politics. By then he had ceased to have much to do with Boston or Massachusetts affairs, except when the odd progressive such as Eugene Foss or David Walsh came to power. Boston’s Irish population, led by James Curley and John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had taken over city politics, and the state’s Republican Party, under the control of Henry Cabot Lodge, while not overtly reactionary, had little sympathy with the type of reform Brandeis and others preached.

He continued to practice law but left more and more of the bread-and-butter business to his partners while he focused on pro bono work and national affairs. Louis guarded what time he could with his family, but calls from the garment industry board in New York, and from the Interstate Commerce Commission and progressive allies in Washington, led him to spend long stretches away from Boston. Although he had often maintained that he did not want elective office but preferred to be “the man behind,” he discovered he had a flair for politicking and took to the campaign trail as if he had been doing it all his life. By the end of the 1912 presidential campaign, Louis Brandeis stood in the forefront of national reform politics, and would remain there until named to the Supreme Court in 1916.

BRANDEIS’S ROLE in Pinchot-Ballinger brought him to the attention of many progressives in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, and during his stays in Washington he got to meet many of them. One person made a lasting impression on him, however, and he and Robert La Follette would remain close friends until the latter’s death in 1925.

La Follette as much as anyone during this period embodied the progressive spirit. He had started out as a regular Republican, and in the 1880s served three terms in the House of Representatives from Wisconsin. His sponsorship of the McKinley Tariff in 1890, however, led to his defeat in the 1890 Democratic landside. He returned to Madison to practice law, but after a few years began to argue that the Republican Party had lost its bearings; from the party that had championed anti-slavery, it had become a tool of big business. For the next several years he and like-minded Republicans fought the party regulars, whom the press dubbed “Stalwarts.” The reformers unsuccessfully challenged the Stalwarts in the elections of 1896 and 1898, but in 1900 La Follette captured the governor’s seat. He served three terms and, by forging a coalition between insurgents and Democrats, managed to force through some of the most progressive reforms in the nation, including a powerful railroad commission, direct primaries, and laws protecting consumers. In 1906 he took his seat as a U.S. senator, the position he would be reelected to three more times. There La Follette aligned himself with other reformers, such as Jonathan Dolliver and Albert Baird Cummins, and soon became the acknowledged leader of the Republican insurgents.

Brandeis first met La Follette in February 1910 and wrote to his wife, “Had a delightful evening at the La Follettes’ yesterday. They are quite our kind of people, and if I am here much shall be more apt to loaf with them than anyone else. They received me like an old friend.” Of that meeting, Belle La Follette wrote, “Bob was impressed with the personality of Brandeis from the moment he grasped his hand and looked into his keen, thoughtful face. He came to love and admire him and always found him a genial and fascinating companion.”

Louis soon had a standing invitation to drop by for dinner with Bob, Belle, and their children—Robert, Philip, and Fola. At first Brandeis felt a little uncomfortable when they discussed important and often sensitive political matters at the dinner table with the children present, but he soon learned that this was part of Bob and Belle’s philosophy of educating their offspring. Years later, when Bob junior became a candidate to fill his father’s unexpired term in the Senate, some people protested to Brandeis that the thirty-year-old was too young and had no political experience. To this the justice replied, “Bob, Jr., and Phil have had more experience in politics than any boys since the days of the Roman Senators.”

The two families got on well. The children soon came to have affection for “Uncle Louis” as well. Belle wrote to Louis that Bob junior had said, “Mother, I believe I like Mr. Brandeis the best of any one we know…. Of course, not better than Mr. Steffens but better than almost any one else.” With her husband spending more and more time in Washington these years, Alice began making regular trips to the capital, and there she and Belle grew close. Susan and Elizabeth also became frequent visitors and friends of the younger La Follettes. After Elizabeth received her doctorate and began her long teaching career at the University of Wisconsin, she and her husband spent much time with Phil La Follette and his family. Years later, after Belle had died midway through her work on a biography of her husband, their daughter, Fola, took up the work, and Louis and Alice made two significant donations to enable her to complete it.

Senator and progressive leader
Robert M. La Follette, 1911

Brandeis and La Follette did not agree on everything, but on the abuses of the financial titans, the curse of bigness, the need for honesty in government, and the desire to serve the public, they saw eye to eye. Each admired the work of the other, and Brandeis especially believed that no one else he met, with the possible exception of Joseph Eastman, stood so ready to sacrifice personal gain for the public good. Both men also shared a pragmatic rather than a theoretical view of government and social problems, and wanted facts to examine before trying to chart a solution. “They never endeavored to solve social and economic problems from the blueprint of Utopian dreams,” Belle wrote. “Neither was doctrinaire; but both had a deep conviction that industry, finance and government should be organized to serve the best interests of all the people of the country rather than the special interests of a privileged few.” It is little wonder, then, that as La Follette began to think of running for the presidency in 1912, he would turn to his friend for advice and support.

•  •  •

THE WORD “PROGRESSIVE” has been used frequently, applied both to Brandeis and to La Follette, and the reader may well ask, “What is a progressive?” Historians have been grappling with that question for years, since the record is so full of seeming inconsistencies. Various theories describe progressivism as a response to industrialism or a search for order, and the forces that called it into being have been located in the middle classes, the upper class, the lower class, a displaced elite, and business leaders. There has even been an argument that while there may have been reform during this era, there was no progressive movement because the basic characteristics of a true movement were completely missing. All of these theories have some kernels of truth in them and so cannot be dismissed out of hand, yet all have too many inconsistencies to be fully accepted. In trying to impose a coherent framework on the period, one may lose sight of key factors of progressivism—its internal dynamics, idiosyncrasies, and often confusing contradictions. No one theory can do justice to so variegated a movement.

One of the first efforts to define progressivism came in 1915, when Benjamin De Witt published The Progressive Movement and characterized it as the exclusion of privileged interests from political and economic control, the expansion of democracy, and the use of government to benefit the weak and oppressed members of American society. Even if one accepts these as basics, progressivism involved a great deal more—constraints on monopolies, regulation of railroads, protection of consumers, referendum and recall, direct election of U.S. senators, women’s suffrage, prohibition, abolition of child labor, wage and hour legislation, workmen’s compensation, pure food and drug laws, conservation, and housing, to name but a few. Perhaps most important, not all reformers agreed on all reforms. When both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who stood diametrically opposed on trust regulation, can be described as the archetypical progressive, it becomes extremely frustrating to delineate a rational framework in which the two can exist in peace and harmony. Even taking certain aspects of progressivism, such as educational reform, the landscape is too crowded with groups and figures, many promoting opposing agendas, to allow simple ordering. Men and women who agreed on the necessity for one reform might then divide over another, such as women’s suffrage or prohibition.

There is general agreement that the period of progressive reform, from roughly the late 1890s until the end of World War I, took place during a transitional period in American society, and that the motor force of this change grew out of the rapid expansion and industrialization of the economy, along with the transformation from a primarily rural and agrarian society into an urban and industrial one. These changes touched upon every aspect of American life, and different groups, depending on how they were affected, responded in different ways. One segment, appalled at the waste of natural resources, became conservationists. Another, frightened by the growth of large corporations, turned to antitrust activity. Still others, aggrieved by the terrible toll exacted by factory demands on human life, advocated various protective measures, including wage and hour legislation, factory safety laws, and the abolition of child labor. The list could be expanded still further, to include those who promoted urban planning, good government, prohibition, and so on.

It would be rare for reformers, even those who often fought together, to have agreed on everything. For the most part the factions operated discretely, focusing on their own pet causes. But since they often lacked the votes to secure legislation, they perforce had to form loose coalitions. These alliances came together because of men like Louis Brandeis and women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, figures who might properly be called “linchpins of reform.” Through their own efforts in particular reforms, and the respect they won from other groups and individuals, they could move easily from one cause to another, helping to create new alliances for different issues. Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson all cooperated at one time or another with Brandeis, and each recognized how important an ally he could be. For those committed to their own efforts to improve the world, and unfamiliar with the work of others, a word of support from Brandeis or Addams or Lincoln Steffens carried weight.

In some ways Brandeis could be described as a “reformer’s reformer.” We can look at the large number of reforms with which he allied himself in the two decades before he went on the Court: good government, care of the mentally ill, traction reform, education, conservation, wage and hour legislation, labor-management relations, scientific management, antitrust, monetary reform—the list seems endless. In another sense, we can refer to the respect he enjoyed among the leaders of these various movements, many of whom he worked with on specific proposals, and here too the list is overwhelming.

By moving among groups and individuals, Brandeis and others like him helped hold together an amorphous mixture of reformers and ideas and uplift we have termed “progressivism.” It appears to be less a formal movement with institutional characteristics than the collective result of many individual efforts. While it is true that progressivism may be hard to classify, there is no question that for roughly two decades it defined the public policy debate in the United States.

ALTHOUGH WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT has often been treated as a reactionary, his four years in the presidency (1909–1913) saw the passage of a number of reform measures such as the Mann-Elkins Act, giving the Interstate Commerce Commission real rate-making powers, and the Postal Savings Bank Act. These laws, however, could not have been passed without a coalition of Democrats and insurgent Republicans, and Taft, whose base lay in the conservative wing of the GOP, worried they would gain control of both the party and Congress. He tried to purge some of the rebels in the election of 1910 and failed badly, and when Congress met that December, forty-six insurgents refused to be bound by the decisions of the Republican caucus in the House, while a dozen insurgent senators held the balance of power between the two parties in the upper chamber. Taft could no longer hope to exercise any party leadership in Congress except when he proposed measures acceptable to the insurgents. Worse, the leader of the insurgents appeared ready not only to defy Taft but to challenge him for the 1912 Republican nomination for the presidency.

Robert La Follette traveled around the Midwest that winter calling on reformers to rally to his cause, to take back control of the government from the interests. In speech after speech he spelled out programs that for the most part won Brandeis’s endorsement—prohibiting unfair competition, lowering tariff rates, direct primaries, the initiative and referendum, and the development of Alaska by the government. Brandeis disagreed only with the recall of state judges, in which if a certain number of people signed a petition, at the next election there would be a question on the ballot as to whether the judge should be kept in office.

By the time he returned to Washington in January, La Follette had drawn up a declaration of principles and a plan for a National Progressive Republican League that would support reformist legislation at both the state and the national levels. He included the word “Republican” in the title to avoid charges that he wanted to launch a third-party movement. In fact, La Follette hoped to do on the national scale what he had accomplished in Wisconsin: lead an insurgent takeover of the regular Republican Party. After showing his principles to several insurgent colleagues in the Senate, La Follette adopted their suggestions and boiled his declaration down to five policies: popular election of U.S. senators; direct primaries for all state offices; direct election of delegates to national party conventions; adoption of the initiative, referendum, and recall; and a tough federal corrupt practices act. In early January 1911, Louis reported to Alice, “I signed the League, seeming the only chance for congenial political association,” and when the league elected La Follette as its head on 21 January, Brandeis sent a congratulatory telegram declaring that “no man in public office today expresses so fully the highest ideals of American democracy.”

Brandeis did so with the full realization of what it meant. He had never been a regular party man; by signing on with La Follette, he turned his back on the Democrats and the regular Republicans, and probably felt relieved to do so. In his view the Democrats still seemed wedded to the radical populism of William Jennings Bryan, whom they had run for the third time as their presidential candidate in 1908, while the Republicans had become the party of the interests, big banks, and corporations. Of the many people he met on his trips to Washington, he seemed most comfortable with the insurgents and with other reformers. The league would indeed provide him congenial associates, and on his trips to the capital he spent more and more time with the La Follettes and their allies.

The league grew rapidly, attracting new members in nearly all parts of the country outside the South, and one contemporary later described it as “the culmination of the progressive movement in the Republican Party.” The size of the league, and the prominence of many of its members, clearly worried Taft, who had assumed he would have no opposition for the 1912 Republican nomination. He rallied the conservative members of the GOP, and when La Follette demanded that progressives be given membership on Senate committees in proportion to their number—roughly one out of four—the Senate Stalwarts refused. Congress now had three warring parties, and his followers demanded that La Follette seek the Republican nomination. On 30 April leaders of the National Progressive Republican League named La Follette as their candidate for president. After consulting with his family and with close friends, including Brandeis, La Follette announced his candidacy and began a whirlwind tour of the country. Brandeis made some financial contributions, advised La Follette on antitrust and other matters, and went on a speaking tour at the end of January, starting in Chicago and traveling down through the Midwest before returning home.

Brandeis was certainly no stranger to public speaking. As a lawyer he had argued before judges and juries, and as a reformer he had testified before legislative investigations and spoken to various groups seeking their support. But he had never before spoken solely on behalf of a candidate seeking elected office, and he enjoyed the experience. “Two speeches at York yesterday & 2 at Hastings today and another here [Kearney, Nebraska] this evening,” he wrote to Alice, “with the thermometer today below zero.” He deemed his talk in St. Louis a success and proudly noted that he had outdrawn Taft, although many members of the sponsoring club had not received word of the luncheon until that morning. “Pretty much all the world is progressive here,” he told Alice, but privately he doubted that La Follette could succeed.

Even without the benefit of hindsight one could see a number of difficulties attending La Follette’s candidacy. Although he sought the Republican nomination, for all practical purposes La Follette ran as a third-party candidate, and faced all the problems associated with such a position, especially the impossibility of putting the political apparatus in place to support a candidacy at the local, state, and national levels in a short time. Supporters of third-party candidates are usually expressing their anger and frustration at existing policies and candidates and have little interest in engaging in the tedious work required to build a political organization. La Follette, because of his blunt language and attacks on big business, struck many people as too radical. Even friends noted his vehemence, narrowness, and lack of a sense of humor. An insurgent distrusted by regular Republicans, he nonetheless still called himself a Republican and thus could not win support from Democrats. While a few states had popular primaries to elect delegates to the national nominating conventions, most states chose their delegates through a party caucus, and over these Taft had total control. Moreover, Taft, whatever his political ineptitude at times, was no fool, and in the fall of 1911 he toured the country, attacking La Follette and bolstering his support among regular Republicans.

Both Taft and La Follette worried about what Theodore Roosevelt would do. The Rough Rider had left office in March 1909 immensely popular with the people and had not been associated with the political foibles of the Taft administration. He kept saying he did not want to run again, but many people did not believe him. As Louis told Alice in November, “The morning papers bring out a rather faint denial by T.R. which is quite aggravating.” It would be so easy, Brandeis said, for Roosevelt to give a full and sincere denial and put his “friends” at rest. A number of La Follette supporters hoped that in fact Roosevelt would decide to run in 1912. George Rublee, for one, who knew and liked La Follette, did not believe he could win and prayed that Roosevelt would run. So long as La Follette stayed in the race, Roosevelt knew he would be seen as a spoiler by many progressives if he also declared for the presidency. But by November 1911, many commentators believed La Follette had no chance, and Roosevelt began planning how he might put his name forward.

La Follette’s candidacy came to an abrupt end when he spoke at the Periodical Publishers’ Association banquet in Philadelphia on 2 February 1912. Common sense should have led him to cancel the engagement. On the following day his daughter, Fola, would undergo a serious operation, and he himself suffered not only from exhaustion but from a stomach virus that induced nausea. He nonetheless insisted on fulfilling his commitment, but instead of making the short political speech that his audience expected and then leaving, he launched into a long, rambling, and often incoherent indictment of the press in general and of the way he had been treated by it. Rumors immediately spread that La Follette had suffered a nervous breakdown, and they gained credence when he went into seclusion for the next few weeks.

Despite their friendship, Brandeis had no illusions about the chances for a La Follette victory. He had tried to interest his brother in organizing a La Follette committee in Kentucky, and in a rare disagreement between them Alfred would have nothing to do with it. Aside from the fact that he did not feel up to getting involved, he believed that the Wisconsin senator had no chance of gaining support in Kentucky, much less winning the nomination. Louis heard about the Philadelphia fiasco while in Nebraska, but not about the seriousness of the collapse. (“No New York paper since last Tuesday,” he told Alice, “and only occasional Chicago dailies.”) He hoped the trip would be worthwhile, if for nothing else than “giving La Follette some moral support when he was most in need of it.” A few days later, when he learned the full extent of La Follette’s illness, Louis wrote philosophically that while the news had proved distressing, “if the smash is not a bad one, it may be all for the best to have him completely out of the Presidential race. I was sorry when he concluded to enter it. Personally I shall be glad to have no political obligations.”

Whatever his political thoughts, Brandeis worried about his friend and immediately wrote to Belle, urging her to make sure that Bob got the rest he desperately needed. Go overseas, he urged, and “make a pleasure trip out of this necessity. When he comes back we will take up the good fight together again.” He asked Alice to go see Bess Evans and have her use her influence with the La Follettes to get them to go abroad. Bob could finish his autobiography, and if necessary, Bess should offer to go with them. “Impress Bess with this & let her hammer Belle.”

Although he never formally dropped out of the race, for all practical purposes La Follette’s campaign had ended. With the senator on the sidelines, Roosevelt threw his hat into the ring, much to the joy of his followers, and many of the progressives who had backed La Follette now deserted him in unseemly haste. A few felt some regrets, but most rationalized their choice with the argument that only Roosevelt could beat Taft. A number of Brandeis’s friends would support Roosevelt in 1912, including some younger ones he had met during his visits to Washington. None would mean as much to him in later years as a young lawyer in the War Department who had been present when Brandeis gave his talk “The Opportunity in the Law” at Harvard—Felix Frankfurter.

BORN IN VIENNA, Felix Frankfurter embodied the American success story. After education in New York City’s public schools and at City College, he went to Harvard Law School, where he had one of the highest grade averages since Louis Brandeis. He graduated from the law school in 1906 and, after a few unhappy months in a prestigious New York law firm, took a cut in salary to work for Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “I could practice law,” he later explained, “without having a client.” Brandeis first met Frankfurter while on a trip to New York and then wrote to Alice that he had dined “last evening with Felix Frankfurter & a lot of youngsters at the Harvard Club.”

Frankfurter stayed with Stimson in a variety of jobs and went to Washington with him in 1911 to work in the War Department. Between 1911 and 1914, when Brandeis came to Washington on reform business, he often stopped in at the “House of Truth,” the bachelors’ quarters that Frankfurter and a lively group of young intellectuals, many of them working in government, maintained on Nineteenth Street. Besides Frankfurter, the regular tenants included Winfred Denison, then working in the Justice Department; Loring Christie, a Canadian and one of Denison’s friends at Justice; and Lord Eustace Percy from the British embassy staff.

The House of Truth provided a nonstop cauldron of intellectual energy, bubbling over with ideas and political gossip, fueled by good wine, pretty girls, and above all intense conversation. Gutzon Borglum drew his sketches for Mount Rushmore there, much to the delight of Justice Holmes and his wife. Arthur Willert, the Washington correspondent for the London Times, contributed to the cosmopolitan flavor of the salon. Learned Hand and the journalist Herbert Croly often came down from New York, and Croly brought with him a younger writer, Walter Lippmann, in the process of writing one of the most memorable books of this period, Drift and Mastery (1914). They all welcomed Brandeis, then a hero among progressives for his work endorsing protective legislation and defending Louis Glavis in the Pinchot-Ballinger hearings.

Brandeis and Frankfurter soon established a special relationship that would last for the better part of the next three decades. Frankfurter had those traits that Brandeis greatly appreciated—a fierce intelligence, indefatigable energy (“Do you know what it’s like,” his wife later exclaimed, “to be married to a man who is never tired?”), and a flair for making friends, especially among people who counted. Felix knew all the gossip, and his gaiety, his talent for flattery, his mastery of detail, made him a marvelous conversationalist. Holmes once said that Frankfurter had “walked deep into my heart.” Brandeis might have said the same thing and in fact referred to him as “half brother, half son.” Frankfurter, on the other hand, while giving the impression of his wholehearted devotion to Brandeis, nonetheless held him in slightly lower esteem than the other patrons of his career, such as Stimson, Holmes, and above all Franklin Roosevelt. After a lengthy conversation with Brandeis in 1911, Frankfurter wrote in his diary, “Brandeis has depth and an intellectual sweep that are tonical. He has great force; he has Lincoln’s fundamental sympathies. I wish he had his patience, his magnanimity, his humor.” In later years, even though he claimed to have inherited the mantle of Holmes and Brandeis, he would play down the influence that Brandeis had exercised over him, maintaining that he had gotten his legal philosophy elsewhere. With the election of Wilson, Frankfurter had doubts whether he should stay on in the War Department, but he did so after both Theodore Roosevelt and Brandeis encouraged him to remain. In 1914, Frankfurter accepted an offer to teach at Harvard Law School, an offer prompted in part by Brandeis himself, and, except for brief interludes, taught there until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1939.

Their age differential—twenty-six years—helped draw them together. Brandeis throughout his reform career had often attracted young lieutenants and led them into battle, while Frankfurter always found himself drawn to older mentors. The two shared a passionate devotion to the law and looked for the improvement of both legal practice and thought through Harvard Law School. Both treasured facts, and suspected those who did not. Both knew, in varying degrees, the bite of anti-Semitism, and knew what it meant to be an “outsider” in Boston society. Both were relatively indifferent to getting money and disdained those who lived too luxuriously (although Frankfurter seemed to care more than Brandeis did about the amenities of life, such as good food and clothing). Both married high-strung women who suffered from nervous collapses, and each expressed heartfelt sympathies after the other’s wife had a “bad week” or a “decline.” Both knew a great deal about politics and, despite their frequent denials, loved the game.

Theodore Roosevelt, ca. 1912

Most important, they both had very similar political, economic, and judicial philosophies. Brandeis tended to take the long view and, even in his most impassioned days as a reformer, always remained somewhat aloof, often leading both friend and foe to consider him unfeeling. One cannot imagine Brandeis, for example, throwing everything aside to ride to the rescue of a Tom Mooney or a Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Frankfurter tended to be more excitable in everything from living-room conversations to battles in the Supreme Court, and it is hard to imagine him taking the quiet, laborious steps of building a new system of insurance for Massachusetts workers and then nursing it over several decades. On the whole, however, they agreed on the important things, feared the same evils they saw confronting American society, and shared the same hopes.

In the summer of 1912, however, while the two men enjoyed each other’s company and conversation, they disagreed on the great issue facing the country—who would be the next president of the United States. After La Follette’s collapse, Brandeis kept his own counsel. He could not, of course, bear “the fat man,” as he called Taft. Nor could he support Theodore Roosevelt, whose New Nationalism called for acceptance of big business as a fact of the modern age, with corporate behavior regulated by a powerful government agency. Frankfurter, on the other hand, as well as most of the people at the House of Truth, enthusiastically joined the Rough Rider’s parade.

TAFT’S CONTROL of the party machinery denied Roosevelt the Republican nomination, and the Rough Rider decided to launch a crusade to cleanse American politics. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” he told his supporters, and called for a convention of the “National Progressive Party” to meet in Chicago at the beginning of August. The convention appeared to many of the reporters present—as well as to the delegates—as more of a religious revival than a political gathering. When Senator Albert Beveridge concluded his keynote speech, the delegates sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and at another point they marched around the arena singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Roosevelt termed his acceptance speech a “confession of faith,” and although the party excluded Negro delegates, the platform included just about every major progressive idea put forward in the previous decade.

Roosevelt shaped much of the New Nationalism, as he called his program, on a book written by one of the young progressives, Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life (1909). Roosevelt read the book with great approval, met with Croly, and translated Croly’s somewhat abstruse language into simple political principles to take on the campaign trail. Croly took a Hamiltonian view toward American history and society, believing that the great concentration of capital and industry had been a natural and inevitable development, but that government, still shackled by Jeffersonian opposition to strong and energetic authority, lagged behind. Property had to be cherished, Croly believed, but it also had to yield to the common good. For Roosevelt this meant acceptance of, indeed rejoicing in, the great American industries, but checking their undesirable actions by a strong government to protect the people. It is little wonder that young progressives like Frankfurter went wild for the charismatic TR.

Roosevelt might have won the election had the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan again. Too many people still saw Bryan as a radical, and with Taft firmly ensconced as the conservative candidate, insurgent Republicans and reform-minded Democrats might well have chosen the Rough Rider. Bryan, however, sensed that 1912 could be the year for a Democratic victory, but not with him at the head of the ticket. He dictated most of the party platform and blocked the nomination of the conservative James “Champ” Clark of Missouri, the Speaker of the House. After attacking the money powers, he threw his support to the governor of New Jersey, Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

“The profession I chose was politics,” Wilson told his fiancáe, but “the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.” Wilson, however, loathed the law, and soon turned to political science as a vocation. He received one of the first doctorates in the country from Johns Hopkins University in 1885 and then enjoyed a spectacular career as an academic, winning fame as a teacher and writer. He first taught at Bryn Mawr and then returned to his alma mater, Princeton, in 1890. In 1902 he became president of the school and won national renown for his innovations. At the same time he became increasingly identified with the anti-Bryan wing of the Democratic Party, opposing silver, government regulation, and the restrictive practices of labor unions. In 1910, after losing a bitter battle in the university over the direction of the graduate school, he agreed to run for governor of New Jersey. To the surprise of many, he embraced progressivism and won the election by fifty thousand votes. Once in office, he captured national attention by breaking with the party bosses and pushing through the entire reform program he had championed during the campaign—direct primary, corrupt practices legislation, workmen’s compensation, and strict control of railroads and public utilities.

Brandeis learned of the Baltimore convention after returning from a yachting trip with Gifford Pinchot, and Bryan’s behavior delighted him. Bryan “has certainly handled the Convention in a masterly and masterful way,” he told a friend, “and has made an admirable beginning in his effort to purify the Democratic party and drive the moneylenders from the temple.” Although he had never met Wilson, “all that I have heard of him and particularly his discussion of economic problems makes me believe that he possesses certain qualities indispensable to the solution of our problems.” All progressives, he suggested, who did not feel bound by party affiliation ought to back Wilson.

A few days later Louis told his brother that he would come out for Wilson, even though many of his progressive friends would stand by TR. His decision at least relieved him of one problem. Insurgent Republicans in Massachusetts had wanted him to run for either governor or senator, and coming out for Wilson, as he put it, “ended that agony.” In his public statement, Brandeis called Wilson’s nomination “one of the most encouraging events in American history.” Wilson understood “the dangers incident to the control of a few of our industries and finance. He sees that true democracy and social justice are unattainable unless the power of the few be curbed, and our democracy becomes industrial as well as political.” Wilson—and progressivism—could succeed only if reformers rallied to his cause; they would falter if “progressives fail in their duty of giving Wilson their full support.”

Woodrow Wilson, ca. 1913

Many of Brandeis’s friends regretted his choice. George Rublee, an ardent Roosevelt supporter, told him, “I grieve that you are not to be in the new party, because I think it needs you more than perhaps any other man.” A newspaper report indicated that many progressives had been surprised to learn that Brandeis favored Wilson. He had, after all, supported Taft in 1908 and more recently La Follette, and many of the Wisconsin senator’s backers had now gone over to the colonel. After his friend from the New York garment protocol Henry Moskowitz also signed on, Brandeis admitted that “T.R. is pretty nigh irresistible.” The Bull Moose Party, as the 1912 Progressive Party came to be known, called upon Americans to recognize the inevitability of big business and monopoly, but also to insist that these industrial giants wield their power responsibly. To ensure this, Roosevelt proposed establishing a strong federal agency, staffed by well-trained experts, to oversee business and to have the authority to force businesses to act within the constraints of the law. In essence, the New Nationalism proposed balancing large economic power with strength elsewhere, such as the government or big labor. While this proposal offended Wilson, at least early in the campaign he had nothing to offer as an alternative.

IN FACT, only a few years earlier Wilson had sounded a lot like Roosevelt. As late as 1908, Wilson condemned any sort of government regulation as socialistic in principle and sure to be followed by government ownership. He praised the trusts for “adding so enormously to the economy and efficiency of the nation’s productive work” and blasted the Populist attack on them as socialistic. In a “Credo” written in 1907, he described the trusts as the “most convenient and efficient instrumentalities of modern business,” the vast bulk of whose transactions were legitimate. Then a new strain began to appear that was based on Wilson’s own stern Protestantism and that tracked very closely the views Brandeis would advocate. Wilson and Brandeis both spoke for a middle class that viewed the economic system not just as a means of production and distribution but also as a moral mechanism to reward desirable character traits. Success recompensed not just energy and ambition but morality as well, and business provided the arena in which such traits could be tested. Wilson and Brandeis both spoke for a middle class being squeezed out by big business; they spoke for young men with no room to rise.

Far more than Brandeis, Wilson personalized the issue and blamed the excesses of big business on individuals. Corporate boardrooms should be open to public scrutiny, because executives would not do wrong if their sins could be exposed. Time and again he emphasized the individual’s obligation to control his actions in the light of absolute standards of morality. Wilson’s secular concept of sin was selfishness, and his speeches often referred to a dichotomy between action and morality. By the time he won the Democratic nomination, Wilson had no other solution to offer to the trust problem than to enforce morality and the Sherman Act’s criminal provisions. This mattered little to most Democrats, who saw the trust issue as one facet of the tariff question, with high tariffs often described as “the mother of trusts.” But it did matter to many progressives who thought Wilson’s views simplistic at best and useless at worst. If he hoped to win them over, he needed something more specific, something grounded in a theory that rejected the notion of inevitability. Louis Brandeis would provide that, and in doing so would become, in Arthur Link’s words, “the architect of the New Freedom.”

Brandeis first contacted Wilson directly at the beginning of August 1912, congratulating him on a proposal to reduce tariffs gradually at the rate of 5 percent a year. No other plan, Brandeis declared, is “consistent with the demands of business.” Wilson’s plan, although simple, impressed Brandeis in that the candidate had not given way to the Bryanite wing of the party that wanted immediate and drastic cuts. Gradualism would allow business to adjust to the change. Wilson responded immediately that Brandeis’s letter had given him “a great deal of pleasure” and cheered him with the knowledge of Brandeis’s support and approval. “I sincerely hope that the months to come will draw us together and give me the benefit of many conferences with you.” Unbeknownst to Brandeis, Wilson had already begun to gather information about the Boston attorney and his views through a mutual friend, Charles R. Crane.

Soon after, Wilson sent word through Crane that he wished to meet with the People’s Attorney. On Tuesday, 27 August, Brandeis took the night boat down to New York, breakfasted at the Albemarle Hotel, and then caught a train to Sea Girt, New Jersey, where the governor had a summer cottage. The two men had luncheon and a three-hour talk afterward, during which Brandeis tutored Wilson on the trust issue and hammered out the basic tenets of Wilson’s economic platform, the so-called New Freedom.

At a press conference afterward, reporters asked the two men what they had discussed. “Oh, a number of bills,” Brandeis responded. “They all had to do with our industries.” He would back Wilson because the two men shared “fundamental convictions.” As for the Bull Moose Party, it “must fail in all of the important things which it seeks to accomplish because it rests upon a fundamental basis of regulated monopoly. Our whole people have revolted at the idea of monopoly, and have made monopoly illegal, yet the third party proposes to make legal what is illegal…. The party is trying to make evil good, and that is a thing that cannot be done.”

The meeting left Brandeis “very favorably impressed with Wilson. He is strong, simple, serious, openminded, eager to learn and deliberate.” On the way back he also stopped at the Democratic national headquarters in New York, where “a lot of fine fellows … very cordially received” him. Two days later he sent in a contribution of $500 to the Wilson campaign, a very sizable donation in those days (nearly $11,000 in current dollars).

Although he had only recently half-jokingly complained that he had to spend some time on his law practice (“real business—a rare occurrence since everybody works but Father”), Brandeis devoted most of the next ten weeks to helping get Woodrow Wilson elected. He gave out press statements, wrote articles endorsing the candidate’s position, and took to the campaign trail himself. But the most important thing involved giving Wilson an alternative strategy to counter TR’s New Nationalism—instead of regulating the trusts, Wilson and Brandeis proposed the regulation of competition to prevent the abuses by which the trusts had come into being.

In his first speech after seeing Brandeis, Wilson proved an apt pupil. Attacking the Roosevelt plan of regulating monopolies, he asked, “What has created these monopolies? Unregulated competition.” The answer lay in remedial legislation to “so restrict the wrong use of competition that the right use of competition will destroy monopoly.” A few days later he again attacked monopoly, this time as destructive both of economic and of political freedom. “The alternative to regulating monopoly,” he declared, “is to regulate competition.”

Although he did not say anything at the time, Brandeis sensed that Wilson had not fully understood his views. For Brandeis the problem was the curse of bigness, not the curse of monopoly. The two clearly intertwined, but a company could be very large and still not be a monopoly (U.S. Steel, for example, the biggest company in the country, never controlled more than half of the nation’s steelmaking capacity), while a company could be a monopoly and still not be large (such as a local water or gas company). As he later told Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson probably never understood the distinction and, if he did, chose for political reasons to attack monopoly “because Americans hated monopoly and loved bigness.”

It is also apparent that Wilson did not comprehend just what Brandeis meant by the regulation of competition. For Wilson this seemed to imply that the government would pass a few laws establishing basic rules of competition, with criminal penalties for those who violated them, and then leave the market to more or less govern itself. This, of course, fit in perfectly with his desire to have government as little involved in the economy as possible.

When Brandeis spoke about regulation of competition, however, he meant far more; he actually meant the regulation of competition not only by laws but by active policing on the part of regulatory agencies such as the Interstate Commerce Commission. Instead of directly regulating businesses, as Roosevelt suggested, Brandeis wanted to utilize scientific management and cost accounting (then still in its infancy) as means to ensure a competitive market. Once laws prohibited cutthroat competition, intraindustry cooperation would actually work to encourage true competition, and here the government would have a benign oversight role, leaving competitive industries to work out problems and ensuring that no one firm overstepped boundaries. Brandeis had articulated some of these ideas earlier than 1912, but he understood that it would have been too confusing to try to explain these ideas to voters while attacking the New Nationalism for its use of governmental power. When it came time to write legislation during the Wilson administration, Brandeis’s ideas played an important role.

If Wilson now argued that monopoly resulted from unrestricted competition, what did that mean in practical terms? If he now understood the causes of the problem, what did he propose as a solution? On this point the candidate’s speeches remained embarrassingly vague. In a speech at Boston’s Tremont Temple, he added a new note that he had undoubtedly picked up from Brandeis. “There is a point of bigness,” he declared, “where you pass the point of efficiency and get to the point of clumsiness and unwieldiness.” But here Wilson seemed inconsistent, since he had long maintained that he did not oppose bigness per se, only bigness attained illegally and immorally, as in a monopoly.

To clear up this inconsistency, and also to define his own views more clearly vis-à-vis Roosevelt, Wilson telegraphed Brandeis to “please set forth as explicitly as possible the actual measures by which competition can be effectively regulated. The more explicit we are on this point the more completely will the enemies [sic] guns be spiked.” Brandeis prepared a lengthy memorandum comparing the New Freedom with the New Nationalism. Although he apologized for its being in draft form, he knew that Wilson would want it before heading out on a campaign swing in the West. In it Brandeis not only listed those points that he and Wilson agreed upon but also explained how they differed from those of Roosevelt:

The two parties differ fundamentally regarding the economic policy which the country should pursue. The Democratic Party insists that competition can be and should be maintained in every branch of private industry; that competition can be and should be restored in those branches of industry in which it has been suppressed by the trusts; and that, if at any future time monopoly should appear to be desirable in any branch of industry, the monopoly should be a public one—monopoly owned by the people and not by the capitalists. The New Party, on the other hand, insists that private monopoly may be desirable in some branches of industry, or at all events, is inevitable; and that existing trusts should not be dismembered or forcibly dislodged from those branches of industry in which they have already acquired a monopoly, but should be made “good” by regulation. In other words, the New Party declares that private monopoly in industry is not necessarily evil, but may do evil; and that legislation should be limited to such laws and regulations as should attempt merely to prevent the doing of evil. The New Party does not fear commercial power, however great, if only methods for regulation are provided. We believe that no methods of regulation ever have been or can be devised to remove the menace inherent in private monopoly and overweening commercial power.

Brandeis then went on to list specific proposals so that Wilson could remove some of the ambiguities from his speeches. These included strengthening the Sherman law and removing some of its uncertainties; making it easier to enforce the antitrust law in the courts; and establishing a board or commission to aid in administering the Sherman Act. Although Wilson accepted these ideas, he and Brandeis agreed that it might be best if the candidate did not state them too boldly. William Gibbs McAdoo then suggested that Brandeis work the memorandum into articles; this way the ideas could be circulated without Wilson’s incurring any political liability. Brandeis, already under pressure from Norman Hapgood to contribute some articles to Collier’s, readily agreed. Over the next few weeks several articles appeared over Brandeis’s signature, while others manifested themselves as editorials in Collier’s.

The memorandum and articles argued for a small-unit, highly competitive economy. In the past, such competition had been ruthless, leading to a survival of the fittest. But the most fit in terms of survival may not have been the most fit in terms of moral needs. When the country underwent the pains of economic maturation, many unethical practices prevailed, and the unfair advantages these practices generated led to monopolization in a number of industries. Brandeis and Wilson understood the connection between economic freedom and political independence. “No nation can remain free,” Wilson declared in words that echoed his mentor’s, “in which a small group determines the industrial development; and by determining the industrial development, determines the political policy.”

Nothing could have been more repugnant to Wilson and Brandeis than the idea of accepting the great trusts and then using government to regulate them. To the evil of monopoly would be added the evil of big government controlling the market. The market had to be free so that men could test themselves. “What this country needs above everything else,” Wilson declared, “is a body of laws which will look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already made.” Where Roosevelt argued for the greater efficiency of the big unit, Wilson spoke for the democratic value of the small unit. These smaller entities, as Brandeis recognized, could be inefficient and wasteful at times, but democracy itself is a wasteful system; people cheerfully put up with it because their liberties more than compensate for the wastage. Brandeis and Wilson feared big and ruthlessly efficient government as much as Roosevelt opposed excessive individualism. The former called for greater individual liberty under a simple government, the latter favored a stronger, more efficient social organism, superior to any combination of selfish individuals.

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE once remarked that “between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that always had existed between Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” with Roosevelt and Wilson each setting forth, albeit in different phraseology, essentially similar programs. There is more than a little truth in this remark, because, as numerous commentators have suggested, the legislation passed by the New Freedom might well have come from the new party. Certainly the things Wilson and Roosevelt agreed upon were more important than those that divided them. Both urged reform within the traditional political system, both upheld corporate capitalism, both rejected socialism and radical labor groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World, both wanted to strengthen democracy. But for the participants in the election, and for the voters, Roosevelt and Wilson differed from each other not only in style but in substance as well. (There were, of course, two other candidates, the Republican William Howard Taft, whom the reporters ignored, and the socialist Eugene V. Debs.)

It has been argued that Roosevelt and Wilson stood as early-twentieth-century analogues to Hamilton and Jefferson. Roosevelt had been and remained an aristocratic conservative and had originally fashioned his New Nationalism to preserve a dominant Republican Party. If those who enjoyed the country’s largesse did not respond to those whom they had disadvantaged, there would be social upheaval. Like Brandeis, Roosevelt believed in Burke’s notion that true conservatism rested upon a commitment to traditional values while addressing current social demands. Many of those who followed Roosevelt wanted to go much further than he did in reshaping American society, and he often referred to them as a “lunatic fringe.”

Wilson, despite having lived in the North his entire adult life, still identified himself with the hardworking, upwardly striving white people of the South and the West. When he spoke about keeping the American economy open for the young men on the make, he meant people like himself as well as the small-business men and farmers of the South and the West. Bryan’s followers had no trouble shifting their allegiance to Wilson because, once the silver issue no longer mattered, the reformers in the Democratic Party wanted pretty much the same things he did—lower tariffs, restraints on big business, reform of the currency—and like them he opposed big government, a trait that had influenced the South since the Revolution. Just as Hamilton and Jefferson had shared much in common, so did Roosevelt and Wilson, and, like their forebears, they believed that a great gulf existed between them, as did their followers.

So, too, did their chief intellectual advisers, Herbert Croly and Louis Brandeis. In addition to advising the candidates, both assumed the task of answering the other side on the question of trusts. The Democrats consistently repeated their position that they stood for the restoration of competition while the new party endorsed both monopoly and big government. This put the Democrats in the long and honorable American political tradition of championing the little man, and their appeal to fairness in the marketplace and equality of opportunity resonated strongly among voters. At the same time Wilson, following Brandeis’s lead, worked on maneuvering Roosevelt—who had earned the disdain of big business as a trustbuster during his presidency—into the unpopular position of defending big business.

In mid-September, Judge Learned Hand wrote to Felix Frankfurter from Cornish, New Hampshire. “I am up here for two or three weeks visiting Croly,” he reported. “We are each independently trying to say something about the trust plank to meet Brandeis’s effort to throw us into the camp of the monopolists. Without in the least meaning to question their good faith, I thoroly believe they are falsifying the actual issue, which is a thoroly good one and upon which we are in our proper position and they in theirs.” Frankfurter wrote back congratulating them on the task they had undertaken. “Brandeis, in my opinion, has given, with his wonted power, a very unfair slant to the Progressive position on the issue.” (Frankfurter, not at the time as close to Brandeis or his point of view as he later would be, expressed disappointment and occasional anger about him in the fall of 1912.)

Croly, in fact, had tried to tangle with Brandeis’s position a year earlier, especially Brandeis’s belief that big business could not be efficient, and argued that expert opinion deemed large-scale production to have economic advantages. Whether or not big business could be more efficient did not really matter. The basic issue between the two men, as between Roosevelt and Wilson, involved values. Brandeis and Wilson wanted to maintain economic democracy, a system in which individuals would not be deprived of opportunity by business behemoths. A wide-open competition between individuals, on a level playing field, had contributed greatly to American freedom as well as prosperity. Croly and Roosevelt considered the desire for a small-unit economy naive as well as nostalgic, a scenario that had long since departed from America if it had ever been there at all. Instead of seeing the market as a place where men could test their talents, Croly believed such a scheme to be nothing more than demeaning economic warfare among greedy individuals, far less desirable for the country than a system of efficient large businesses regulated by a government staffed by experts.

A few months after the election, Brandeis explained his opposition to the idea of experts determining the government’s policy. In order to succeed, he explained to Felix Frankfurter (who had resented what he took to be Wilson’s “sneer against government by experts”), policy had to be developed democratically, and not handed down from on high. Experts had a very important purpose, in that they should maintain an open and critical discussion of legislative proposals, encouraging those with merit and discouraging those that are unsound, but one had to look to the people for the ultimate decision. Brandeis as much as any progressive valued expertise; that had made him a champion of scientific management. But unlike some reformers, he believed in democratic decision making, and the fact that the people could sometimes choose poorly did not trouble him.

Croly may also have had a hand in several editorials that appeared in the Outlook, the journal that carried most of Roosevelt’s pieces. While expressing high regard for Brandeis personally, the editors took him to task for distorting the new party’s program, especially the claim that Roosevelt and his allies embraced monopoly. The “Taft-Wilson” plan involved prosecution after evil had been done, and caused more harm than good; the new party, through regulation of the big companies, would prevent the evil in the first place. In fact, Brandeis, in so many of his speeches, seemed to embrace so much of the new party’s platform regarding social issues that they wondered why he did not recognize the fact that he ought to be backing Roosevelt.

Brandeis did, in fact, agree with many of the social justice planks of the new party, but for him bigness in industry constituted the overriding issue in 1912. The concentration of power in industry had grown alarmingly since the turn of the century, when monopolistic groups already accounted for nearly one-third of the annual value added by industry to the gross national product. The concepts of “concentration, combination and control” dominated American industry, and the debate in the 1912 election did involve real questions. Should the country follow Roosevelt and Croly in accepting the facts of large-scale monopolization and subject it to governmental regulation, or should it follow Wilson and Brandeis in their call to reverse this trend, reestablish a basically competitive society, and then regulate that competition?

Had it been only a question of economic policy, it would not have mattered. But the trust “was just as much a psychological creation of the American Progressive mind” as an economic creation of American history. Those who voted for Wilson expressed a choice not only of economic policy (wishful as it may have been) but of moral and psychological imperatives as well. Just as Andrew Jackson a century before had rooted up and destroyed the monstrous Bank of the United States, so they hoped that Wilson, by restoring competition, could root up and destroy the trusts. Wilson and Brandeis may have believed this possible, but it was an exercise in futility. The conditions that had made the big corporations possible also guaranteed their continuance. Even Wilson recognized that the trend toward large businesses could not be stopped. “Nobody can fail to see that modern business is going to be done by corporations,” he said. “The old time of individual competition is probably gone by, [and] we will do business, henceforth, when we do it on a great and successful scale.” Perhaps, he hoped, competition might be established between the giant corporations.

Driven by the necessities of political expediency to counter Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, lured by the hope Brandeis held out, Wilson in fact attempted to do the impossible. He wanted to turn back historical progress, but he was too much the historian not to realize such efforts were likely to end in failure. He wanted to punish those who had succeeded too well, although as the son of a Calvinist minister he appreciated that material reward signified spiritual salvation as well. While he deplored big business and monopoly, as an American he could proudly boast of their achievements. Brandeis, on the other hand, truly believed that the big trusts, if prevented from acting in a predatory and illegal manner, could not compete against efficient smaller businesses. A man whose whole life was devoted to the pursuit of facts to bolster his arguments had examples of inefficiency in big corporations such as railroads. But the facts that held such great importance to Croly and Roosevelt meant little to him. He did not believe in the inevitability of bigness, and he certainly did not believe in the so-called benefits that bigness had brought. Instead, he saw the diminution of opportunity, the stifling of democracy, and the threat that large concentrations of private property posed to liberty. In 1912 he, too, believed that the American people stood at Armageddon, and hoped they would make the right choice.

TO HELP VOTERS make that choice, Brandeis took to the hustings. By now he had become a seasoned campaigner whose name meant a great deal to progressives, and the Democratic National Committee wanted to send him everywhere. In October he took a three-week swing that started in Massachusetts, then went down through New England and out to western New York and the Ohio valley. He worked hard, as he wrote to Alice, but it is also clear that he had a lot of fun. From Cleveland he told Alice, “I am being complimented quite as much upon my youth & fitness as upon my speaking, which is not bad now. Indeed 12 miles a day [on horseback], at a good clip, in the sunshine, & the good sweat & baths, is bringing out my complexion so that a debutante might be proud.” At the halfway point he told Alice that he had “been thinking this morning about what I shall say to the students of University of Minnesota whom I am to address next Thursday. I have concluded that such seed so sown is, on the whole, most fruitful.” Brandeis finished his tour speaking at the Economic Club in New York, where the speech “apparently went off well.” He then went home to Boston to catch up on “the abundance of letters which had accumulated,” to cast his own vote, and to await the returns. “It looks pretty certain Wilson-way now,” he told his brother, “but I shall feel relieved when the vote is in. The redoubtable Colonel is too formidable an opponent.”

On 5 November, the American people went to the polls. Although Woodrow Wilson only received 41.9 percent of the popular vote, he had an easy victory, carrying 40 states and 435 electoral votes. Theodore Roosevelt received 4.1 million votes, or 27.4 percent, and carried 6 states and 88 electoral votes, the best showing of a third party in American history. Taft, as he had expected, finished third, with 23.2 percent of the vote, 3.5 million ballots, and only 2 states—Utah and Vermont—with 8 electoral votes. Eugene Debs received 900,000 votes but carried no states. The combined vote of Roosevelt and Taft (7.6 million) exceeded that of Wilson (6.3 million), and it is possible that had Roosevelt received the Republican nomination, he might have won. Had Roosevelt not run, the election might have been closer, but Wilson would still have carried the day; many of the progressives who supported the Bull Moose ticket would have voted for him.

Once the results became certain, Brandeis sent off a series of telegrams. The first one went to the president-elect. “My dear Governor Wilson: Your great victory, so nobly won, fills me with a deep sense of gratitude, and I feel that every American should be congratulated except possibly yourself. May strength be given to bear the heavy burden.” To Bob La Follette, who remained neutral during the race, Brandeis wired: “All true Progressives owe you deep gratitude for yesterday’s victory.” With much satisfaction Louis wrote to Alfred that what pleased him “most is T.R.’s defeat in the really progressive strongholds—Oregon, California, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and our eastern Progressive New Hampshire. Most of the Progressives who went over to T.R.—little Governors and the like—are left without support.”

The election left Brandeis exhilarated, and while he had no idea what role he would play in the Wilson administration, he had the presidentelect’s trust and confidence. He believed that Wilson, as much as any politician he had known, would try to do the right thing, a belief buttressed after he heard Wilson speak at the Southern Society dinner in mid-December. Refreshed from a postelection vacation in Bermuda, Wilson set out to rally progressives, both Democrats and those who had supported Roosevelt, to his side. In a widely quoted phrase, he promised “a gibbet as high as Haman” for any financial oligarchs who tried to oppose reform. “Men have got to stand up and be counted,” he said, “and I want to appeal to you, gentlemen, to conceive of yourselves as trustees of those interests of the nation with which your personal interests have nothing to do.” It was a noble utterance, Louis told Alfred, “worthy of the man & the cause. A declaration of purpose—not a speech or a sermon. It could leave no man in doubt that he proposes to carry out his promises in letter & spirit, without fear or favor. It was all simple & conversational, almost as if he were talking to his intimates—the people of the United States.”