Louis Brandeis

Louis Brandeis appears in the book as both an exposer of concentrated financial power and a defender of judicial independence. His writing helped bring the “money trust” under scrutiny, while his later opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s court-reorganization plan illustrated how constraints on political power could survive even when a popular president sought to remove them.

Financial Criticism and the Money Trust

Brandeis was a lawyer and author whose book Other People’s Money and How Bankers Use It set out a series of financial scandals. Its critique of the “money trust”—the spread of monopoly into the financial industry—helped give substance and impetus to the investigation led by Louisiana congressman Arsene Pujo. The inquiry placed financial concentration within the wider Progressive-era challenge to monopoly, rather than treating it as a matter that markets would correct on their own.

The book connects this scrutiny to institutional action. Woodrow Wilson moved to regulate the financial sector after the Pujo Committee’s investigation, creating the Federal Reserve Board in 1913 to regulate monopolistic activity in finance. Brandeis’s contribution was therefore not confined to criticism in print: his account of financial abuses helped inform a public investigation that fed into a new regulatory institution.

Journalism, Public Knowledge, and Reform

Brandeis’s work belonged to a broader current of exposure that the book associates with muckraking. Ida Tarbell’s history of Standard Oil helped turn public opinion against John D. Rockefeller’s business interests; William Randolph Hearst’s publication of David Graham Phillips’s articles, “The Treason of the Senate,” galvanized support for direct election of senators; and Brandeis’s writing on bankers contributed to the scrutiny of the financial industry. These efforts made concentrated power visible to a public that could then press political institutions to respond.

The book’s argument is that free media helped sustain a virtuous circle: inclusive political institutions allowed journalists and critics to speak, while the information they supplied made threats to inclusive economic and political arrangements harder to conceal. Brandeis’s work sits at the junction of those forces. His criticism helped expose financial concentration, and the resulting investigation and regulation demonstrate how public information could be converted into institutional checks.

Supreme Court Justice and the Court-Reorganization Plan

By the time Roosevelt proposed reorganizing the judiciary, Brandeis had become a Supreme Court justice. He sympathized with much of Roosevelt’s legislation, but opposed the president’s effort to erode the Court’s power and rejected the claim that its justices were overworked. The disagreement was not presented as a simple contest between a reformer and an opponent of reform: Brandeis could support substantial legislation while resisting a plan that would weaken the judiciary’s independence.

Roosevelt’s proposal would have imposed compulsory retirement on judges at seventy and allowed him to appoint as many as six new justices. The plan could have removed older justices who had most strongly opposed New Deal legislation. Although Roosevelt sought popular support, polls suggested that only about 40 percent favored the measure. Brandeis spoke against it even though he sympathized with much of the president’s program, separating support for particular reforms from acceptance of an attempt to alter the balance of power.

Institutional Limits and Significance

The bill met resistance in Congress. The House largely refused to deal with it; the Senate Judiciary Committee held contentious hearings and returned it with a negative report, calling it a “needless, futile and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle” and saying it lacked precedent or justification. The Senate voted 70 to 20 to send the bill back for revision. Its court-packing provisions were stripped away, and Roosevelt did not obtain the power to remove the constraints the Supreme Court placed on his administration. The Court subsequently upheld the Social Security and National Labor Relations Acts, showing that judicial constraint did not prevent all New Deal legislation from surviving.

Brandeis’s role illuminates the book’s distinction between pursuing policy and undermining the institutions that make political power pluralistic. The Democratic majorities might have benefited immediately from changing the Court, but doing so would have weakened the institutional balance that also protected Congress from presidential power. His opposition thus links his earlier scrutiny of concentrated financial influence to a later defense of the judiciary as a limit on executive authority: in both episodes, the central question is whether power can be checked rather than simply exercised by whoever holds it.