Notes for a Lost Memoir of Louis D. Brandeis

Abstract

Notes for a Lost Memoir of Louis D. Brandeis PETER SCOTT CAMPBELL Woodrow Wilson’s January 28, 1916, nomination of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court hit the nation like a bombshell. Nominees from the previ­ ous few decades tended to be corporation lawyers with conservative backgrounds, and Brandeis’s progressive views and public service background galvanized the American public into opposing camps. While many citizens voiced their support for Wilson’s choice, many large financial and political interests began a campaign against Bran­ deis’s confirmation. The Senate confirmation hearings lasted for eighteen weeks. As nominees at the time were not invited to testify before the committee, Brandeis remained in Boston and coordinated a response to the campaign against him. One strategy was a public relations drive designed to humanize him and showcase his legal career. Instrumental to this effort was Alice H. Grady. Grady had been hired by Brandeis to be his secretary, but she had proved to be so competent that her duties continually expanded. She ended up in charge of Brandeis’s firm’s secretarial pool and worked closely with Brandeis on his many public service crusades. Grady became so invested in one of Brandeis’s causes, savings bank insurance, that she ended up working for the Massachusetts agency involved in regulating the service, eventually becoming a deputy commissioner. Grady also helped do research for the team representing Brandeis, gathering infor­ mation about old cases to refute accusations made against him during the hearings. She also collected information about his personal life and career for journalists covering the nomination. At one point, she even traveled to Brandeis’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to interview his family members and childhood friends. The following document appears to have been part ofthat effort. It is hard to know with certainty, however, as there is next to no background information about it. Presumably donated by someone related to Grady, it is housed in the Robert D. Farber University 28 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Archives and Special Collections department at Brandeis University. Given the dearth of accession data, any information about the document has to be gleaned from the text itself. On the surface, the document is a first person narrative of Brandeis’s life up to his nomination to the Supreme Court. However, rather than proceeding in a straight chrono­ logical order, the text jumps around and frequently doubles back. Near the end, the narrative thread simply stops as Brandeis seems to free-associate facts, with little context to connect them, almost as if he was expecting Grady to fill in the gaps. Given the disjointed nature of the text, and the fact that Brandeis once uses the second person, it would appear that the document was dictated to Grady, presumably during a number of sessions. The manuscript is typewritten, with numerous penciled edits (presumably made by Grady): dates and names are inserted, and in one section, the tense of the narrative has been changed from the first person to the third. It would appear that this material was gathered for use in a newspaper or magazine, but, for whatever reason, most ofit was never published, although a few paragraphs about Brandeis’s school days in Germany and at Harvard were converted into third tense and used in a profile of Brandeis published in the June 4, 1916, issue of The Boston American. Various other facts and anecdotes found their way into the published records of Brandeis’s life, but as no researcher appears to have seen this document before, many facts and incidents related here have yet to make it into any of Brandeis’s biographies. Brandeis describes in detail the many factors that influenced his life: the loss of his family’s fortune while he was growing up; his years alone as a teenager in Germany where he had to talk his way into admission to a school there; and the various ailments and illnesses that affected him throughout his life. He relates with pride his successes in the early years of his career and in his public service efforts. And a note of wistfulness appears to creep in when he describes the social...