Felix Frankfurter and his Proteges: Re-examining the “Happy Hot Dogs” SUJIT RAMAN Felix Frankfurter left an indelible imprint on American history. Noted Progressive, passionate civil libertarian, prolific jurist— the immigrant from Vienna wore many hats and rose to towering heights in his nearly sixty years of public service. Frankfurter was so prominent in politics and the judiciary that, at least in the public’s imagination, his academic career as professor oflaw at Harvard between 1914and 1939 has often been overlooked.1 A British intellectual’s characterization of how Frankfurter was perceived in England in the mid-1930s—“less as an academic figure than as a man ofinfluence in Washington”2—aptly summarizes how that aspect of his career has largely been remembered. It is an assessment, however, that misses the mark, for Frankfurter arguably exerted more lasting influence from his classroom in Cambridge than he ever did in government or from his seat on the nation’s highest tribunal.3 Indeed, Felix Frankfurter’s greatest lega cy may well have been the legions ofstudents he trained and nurtured at the Harvard Law School, men (like James Landis, Dean Acheson, and Henry Friendly, among numer ous others) who, in their own right, shaped the age in which they lived. As one biographerput it, Frankfurter disciples “went into small law offices in small towns, into high-powered Wall Street firms, into town halls, state legislatures, and Congress; into teaching, journalism, industry, trade unions, business, government, social work, and the judiciary.”4 Frankfurter men immersed themselves in public life; and no era in American history is more closely identified with Frankfurter’s proteges than the New Deal. The question ofthe depth ofFrankfurter’s influence over the politics and policies of the New Deal is deeply contested. He was an acknowledged confidant of President Roosevelt, and it was no great secret that the Harvard professorplaced his students through out the government. Upon Frankfurter’s nomination to the Supreme Court in early 1939, for example, Time magazine counted “125 ‘happy hot dogs’ ... in Washington today” who owed their jobs to recommenda tions from their academic mentor.5 Frankfurter 80 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Felix Frankfurter believed his primary responsibility as a Harvard Law School professor was to recruit and train the future public servants of the republic. His critics, however, believed he was creating an empire of personal power in Washington. admittedtoplaying such a role intheNewDeal, stating simply in his memoirs: “I was the recruiting officer.”6 For Frankfurter, this was nothing remarkable; he believed his primary responsibility as a teacherwasto trainthe future public servants of the republic. Frankfurter’s critics, however, believed he was more than a mere recruiter. To them, he was a shifty operator, a shady, secretive manipulator who preserved himself in Cambridge while his pupils satisfied his thirst for an empire of personal power in Washington. The depth of his alleged influence took on legendary, even sinister, proportions: the New York American called him “the Iago of[Roosevelt’s] Adminis tration.”7 Another contemporary labeled Frankfurter “the most influential single indi vidual in the United States.”8 One federal judge, in an opinion construing the AntiInjunction Act (a landmark 1932 labor statute), even singled out the Harvard professor as a “figure” lurking in the “background” of the Act’s passage, “sinister or saintly (the reader may take his choice), . . . [who] from Mount Olympus, more than once,. . . has moved the pawns upon the nation’s chess board and, it is whispered, on occasion has even sought to check the King.”9 As the journalist John T. Flynn, a passionate critic of the New Deal, observed in his 1948 book, The Roosevelt Myth'. “From the beginning of the New Deal, Felix Frankfurter had been pictured as the mysterious being who sat off in the shadows and pulled the strings that operated all the puppets who had cooked up the NRA and invented the AAA, who was the arch Red and was in fact the unseen and unheard culprit behind most of Mr. Roosevelt’s dangerous enterprises.”10 Especially in an age when conspiracy theories targeting immigrants and Jews—“two groups that were synonymous to many Americans ofthe time with communism, FELIX...