Louis D. Brandeis

Louis D. Brandeis was a Supreme Court justice and one of the country’s most prominent Jeffersonian liberals. His importance to Harry S. Truman in this account lies not in a formal political alliance but in an unexpected personal welcome and a shared concern about the power of large corporations.

Identity and Public Standing

Brandeis was the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court. By the time Truman met him, he was in his eighties and widely regarded as a formidable public figure. Truman, who was not used to meeting people of Brandeis’s stature, initially confessed his unease to Max Lowenthal, a staff member of the railroad subcommittee who had arranged the introduction.

The meeting took place at one of the Sunday-afternoon teas Brandeis and his wife held in their old-fashioned apartment on California Street. Marquis Childs described these gatherings as a “slightly awesome institution”: Brandeis’s wife managed a kind of musical-chairs arrangement intended to give the justice ten or fifteen minutes of conversation with as many guests as possible during the hour and a half. The setting was formal and intellectually distinguished, but the carefully organized visits also made personal conversation possible.

A Welcome in Washington

Brandeis spent more time talking with Truman than he did with the other guests. He wanted to hear about Truman’s railway investigations and was pleased to learn that Truman had read some of his books. For Truman, who felt out of place at the gathering, this attention turned an intimidating encounter into a welcome one. He later recalled, “It was a rather exclusive and brainy party. I didn’t exactly belong but they made me think I did.”

The room itself sharpened the sense of history surrounding Brandeis. The two men sat in stiff, uncomfortable chairs in a large living room that had changed little since Woodrow Wilson’s time; photographs of classical ruins covered the walls. Truman remembered Brandeis as “a great old man.” The day was cold, with snow forecast, but Truman felt warmed by the experience—an emotional contrast between his initial sense of not belonging and the welcome he received.

Shared Concerns and Influence

Truman returned to the teas several times. He later wrote that he and Brandeis were “certainly in agreement on the dangers of bigness.” Their conversations connected Brandeis’s concern about concentrated power with Truman’s scrutiny of railroads and corporate finance. The book says Brandeis’s influence soon became apparent, placing their new intellectual affinity in the context of Truman’s public criticism of corporate greed.

On December 20, 1937, Truman delivered a prepared address attacking Wall Street’s power and what he saw as the larger evil of money worship. In an earlier speech, he had contrasted the $3,000 a railroad robber risked his life to steal with the $70 million modern financiers had taken from the same railroad through holding companies. Brandeis did not write or deliver Truman’s address; Max Lowenthal helped Truman prepare it. But the sequence makes clear why their agreement mattered: the justice’s critique of concentrated corporate power resonated with a line of attack Truman was already developing, even as Truman warned that the speech might label him a radical.