Max Lowenthal

Max Lowenthal was a former labor attorney and staff member of the Senate railroad subcommittee whose research and counsel helped Harry S. Truman turn railroad oversight into a wider challenge to concentrated financial power. He brought subject expertise to the investigations, warned Truman when their findings threatened political embarrassment, and helped revise the prepared address that made the senator’s critique of Wall Street national news.

Railroad Expertise and Truman’s Investigation

Lowenthal’s role joined legal and labor experience to the subcommittee’s scrutiny of railroad finances. He had written The Investor Pays, a critical analysis of railroad reorganization, and understood how closely the inquiry could touch powerful interests. As the investigation focused on financial dealings behind the bankrupt Missouri Pacific Railroad, he cautioned Truman that the hearings might uncover material capable of causing trouble for him in Missouri.

Truman told Lowenthal and the staff to proceed as they would with any other investigation. The resulting pressure on the senator to halt the hearings or soften their course became intense. Lowenthal later judged that few senators could have withstood the pressure Truman endured. His warning thus marked the stakes of the inquiry, while his account of Truman’s response emphasized the senator’s decision to keep it moving.

Brandeis and the Politics of Concentrated Power

Lowenthal also helped connect Truman to Justice Louis D. Brandeis. He invited the senator to one of the Sunday teas Brandeis and his wife held at their apartment on California Street. Truman initially admitted that he was not accustomed to meeting people of that standing. Brandeis, however, took a particular interest in his railway investigations and in the books Truman had read; the encounter left Truman feeling unexpectedly welcome.

Truman returned to the teas and found common ground with Brandeis in their concern about the dangers of bigness. Lowenthal’s invitation therefore opened a relationship that resonated with Truman’s developing criticism of concentrated corporate and financial power. The evidence establishes Lowenthal as the person who arranged the introduction, while the intellectual affinity that followed was between Truman and Brandeis.

Preparing the Attack on Wall Street

On December 20, 1937, Truman delivered a prepared address attacking Wall Street’s power and the broader worship of money. Lowenthal helped him write and revise it several times. The speech drew on Truman’s railroad inquiries to argue that financial manipulation and excessive debt had helped bring on the Depression, and that even carefully devised formulas would fail without people of sound character to manage the railroads and enforce the law.

The address belonged to a larger effort to expose the costs of railroad receiverships and reorganizations. Truman had already contrasted the small sums Jesse James risked in robbing a railroad with the far greater sums financiers could extract through holding companies. In the December speech, he named powerful law firms, detailed fees paid in receivership proceedings, and described privileges enjoyed by lawyers and a federal judge connected with bankrupt rail lines. Lowenthal’s documented contribution was the close preparation of the address; the book does not assign him sole authorship of its arguments or evidence.

Fairness Under Pressure

Lowenthal remembered Truman’s questioning of witnesses as courteous but persistent. In his assessment, Truman understood what fairness required, exercised restraint while holding investigative power, and allowed witnesses all the time they wanted. That judgment contrasts with the aggressive subject matter of the inquiry: Truman was pressing into corporate reorganizations and financial practices even as the hearings drew pressure to ease off.

The speech reached the front page of The New York Times and attracted labor leaders and reform-minded citizens across the country. The hearings also helped establish Truman as a capable investigator, despite the suspicions attached to his own political background. Lowenthal’s part in this development was both practical and evaluative: he helped prepare the public case against financial abuses and later described the fairness with which Truman pursued it.