serious moment was at the beginning and then the civil war and since then we've had some serious moments, i don't think this is the worst. maybe it's bad. we'll see. we don't know the future. that's the one thing that we just don't know. >> thank you. >> thank you. thank you. >> dale gregory has some announcements. before you leave, dale gregory has an announcement. >> i'm gail gregory vice president for public program, two very quick announcements. our museum store is in this direction on the 77th street side. you can purchase your books there. the book signing is taking place at the table directly out the back doors. and if you'd like to participate in a virtuous act tonight or soon, that combines private interests and public good, you can take your seat in history,

one of these beautiful seats are available for your name, your name, a friend's name, to honor and support wonderful programs like these. thank you, again, so much rick brookhis brookhiser. >> tha y. each week at this time "american history tv" features an hourlong conversation from c-span's a sunday night interview series "q and a." here's this week's encore "q and a" on "american history tv." >> this week on "q and a," a new biography of supreme court justice louis brandeis, the author is melvin urofsky.

>> melvin urofsky, can you remember when you first thought you might like louis brandeis? >> in fact, it's a memory that's well seared into my consciousness. i was a graduate student at columbia in the early '60s and the great biographer, woodrow wilson, arthur link, had written in one of his books that louis brandeis was the architect of the new intellectual freedom. so i did all the paperwork, you know, and researched brandeis a little bit. got it approved. and then in the fall of 1964, i moved to columbus, ohio, for my first teaching job at ohio state. a few months later i went down to louisville where the brandeis papers are. and this i made two discoveries. the first one was there wasn't enough information on that particular topic to support a

dissertation, but the brandeis letters were a gold mine of information. so, david levy, who was a colleague of mine at ohio state, and i began work to get the commission to edit the brandeis letters. as my wife says, louie has been loving with us ever since. >> how did you get permission and from whom? >> well, the papers are in the possession of the university of louisville law library. and as it turns out the dean of the library knew a member of the brandeis family who knew one of our senior professors at ohio state mary young. they'd gone to college together. so, after a series of phone calls to say are these people okay, we got the permission. the following summer we were interviewed by brandeis' daughters who then gave their blessing for us to go ahead. and then we started what ultimately would be seven volumes of letters and on my part some other books that were related to brandeis plus a mid-life crisis trip to law

school. >> mid-life crisis, what year? >> i was 40. it would have been 1979. i got contact lenses which i still wear. i bought a sports car, which my son totaled, and i went to law school. >> why? my grades were decent, they weren't spectacular. i may have been the only person in law school at that time that enjoyed myself. >> where did you go to law school? >> university of virginia. >> so, you taught most of your life. >> i taught all my life. >> and where?

>> my first full-time teaching job was at ohio state. then i went to state university of new york at albany, and the bulk of my teaching career was at virginia commonwealth down in richmond, virginia. i'm now a visiting professor of history at american university here. what's the thing you like about louis brandeis himself? >> his integrity. he was an idealist that was also a pragmatist. he didn't have his head in the sky. this is where we live. this is what's wrong. this is how we need to try and make it better. he once told somebody don't believe in isms, they don't work. >> he was born in -- >> 1856. >> and died? >> 1941. >> was on the court what years? >> 1916 to 1939. >> he was born in louisville. >> yes. >> where did he live mote of his life? >> well, he lived in louisville

until 19 -- 1873. then his father sensing the great panic that was coming closed down his business and took the family to europe for three years to visit relatives and to teach their children about their lives there. when brandeis came back, he entered harvard law school. and after he graduated harvard except for one year in st. louis he practiced law in boston until his appointment to the court in 1916. then he lived in washington the rest of his life with a summer home on cape cod. >> did he actually get an undergraduate degree anywhere? >> no. he didn't. and you didn't need an undergraduate degree to get into harvard law in those days. he did go to a german school for a while. and at that time it would have been a cross somewhere in between high school and college, though, he got some post-high school training, if you will,

but he never had a b.a. >> how many of the -- i know he has two daughters. did you meet either one of them? >> i did. i met them in the 1960s. we went up to cape cod to the summer home which is still in the family. and we met susan and elizabeth. susan's husband was already dead at that time, but we met e.b.'s husband. elizabeth was always known as e.b., and at that point -- my favorite story is we were sitting outside on an august afternoon on cape cod and the mosquitos are eating us alive, but they didn't dare come near her. she was totally oblivious to them. she was quite a character. both of the daughters made quite good records for themselves. one is a lawyer, one is an economist. >> there's a lot you can talk about obviously, you have a huge biography of him.

but one thing that caught my attention in the book didn't have to do with the law. it was the salon that he had. you don't see that much anymore. explain what those were and why they happened and all that. >> brandeis from the time he and alice were married and he had a place of his own where he can invite people was always inviting people who came to t n town, reporters, politicians, reformers, to come have dinner with him. when they moved to washington, he and alice had a monday afternoon tea and they would invite young people who worked in the government, other members of the court, reporters going through town, people from louisville whom happened to be coming through, professors from harvard were always welcome. dur

you ought to do this or you ought to do that, but i interviewed some of them later on, they said, he would talk to him and ask us questions and when we left him a problem that was bothering us would go away. i can give you one example of this. this was a woman who was heading a branch -- the theater branch of the works project administration. and she had this problem, under the law they could not pay royalties to the authors of plays and she felt this was unfair. and so she goes -- her husband had been a classmate of one of brandeis' clerks at harvard, so she goes to the monday afternoon

tea and brandeis is quizzing her, and she said, mr. justice, i have a problem. he said, what's the problem? and she explained, we can't pay royalties. and he says, rent the place. which was the ideal solution because that way they could pay the authors. it wasn't royalties because it wasn't based on the number of performances or anything like that, they would just pay a weekly rental and it was fair for everybody concerned. and he apparently did that hundreds of thousands of times. >> were there many accountings that you could find about those salons? >> oh, yes. >> who wrote them down and who -- >> well, the clerks were always pressed into service to help serve tea and to make sure that no one monopolized brandeis' time. alice kept a very close eye, and when she thought that one person had enough time, she would tap the clerk, send them over with the next person to introduce, and the clerks in their reminisces have spoken about this a great deal.

and a number of other people in their autobiography, william o. douglas, for instance, writes about going there. he was a great fan of brandeis, and brandeis thought of him a hell of a fella. >> you say that he owned -- alhia alice brandeis only served tea and -- >> cookies. >> gingersnaps, that's all. >> that's all. they were not cheap in a sense, they were aesthetic. and as he got older, he grew more aesthetic. and julian mack, julian mack who was a gourmet used to say that if you ate at brandeis, you had to eat twice, once when you went there and then afterwards to get a really good meal. one time was it dean achison or one of his clerks who had grown up on a farm was there for

dinner and they were passing the asparagus around, and so he took a farm portion not realizing that what was on the plate was all there was, so by the time it got to the end of the table, there wasn't asparagus for the remaining guests. he didn't make that mistake again. >> explain this. you say in the book he told his wife that they were going to live well but simply. >> yes. they bought at good stores in boston. they bought good clothes and kept them. he was not a slave to fashion. after one of his suits wore out, he replaced it with essentially the same suit usually from filene's. they bought in good furniture stores. he once told his brother, don't buy any furniture that your grandchildren can't use. and they 97 owned a car. he finally had to give up his horse and they made an arrangement with what was essentially a limousine service or it was an individual driver who owned a big black packard to

come get him. he gave up his horse only when car traffic in washington made it dangerous. but there's a picture in the book of him and alice in a little one-horse buggy in 1921, so he was still using his horses. he was still riding late in life. he only owned one house -- or two houses i should say. he only bought the place on cape cod because the owner from whom he had rented for a number of years wanted to sell it and brandeis liked it too much and he didn't know if the new owner would rent to him, so he bought it. but otherwise he didn't believe in owning things. things had no appeal to him at all. >> how much money did he make? >> a lot. he was successful almost from the time that he and sam warren opened business in boston. the best numbers i can give you, in the 1890s when most lawyers in the country were making less than $5,000 a year, he was making over $50,000 every year. that would be the equivalent of about $900,000 today with no taxes.

he was a millionaire by 1907. when he went on the court, he was worth $2 million, when he died he was worth $3 million. during the depression his very conservative investments took the mildest of hits. and so he had the money. and he gave very generously to relatives, to causes he believed in. to zionism, to other groups. but he said once i have enough money that i can take care of my family, i want to do more and more public service. i don't want to be a slave to my law practice. >> you say at one point in your book that he was a republican, but he was a democrat. >> he was always a small "d" democrat. he was in the republican party for a long time because the democrats when he was growing up was the party of romanism and rebellion of the party of the south. he was opposed to william

jennings bryant. but he breaks with the republican party when woodrow wilson comes to run, and from that time on he is a member of the democratic party at least until he goes on the court. but he was always a small "d" democrat. >> you say he was conservative but liberal. >> he always described himself as conservative, and one of the paradoxes that i try to explore in the book is how a man who saw himself as conservative became a liberal icon. and part of it is that he appears liberal in comparison to some of the rockbound reactionaries like mcreynolds and taft and sutherland with whom he served. he was a berkian conservative like theodore roosevelt with whom he had far more in common than either one of them probably would have admitted who believed that if you wanted to keep the best of the past, you had to adopt it as a current reality.

and that was what the liberals fastened on. during his ascendance in the 1920s in which he is arguing that the court should exercise restraint, should allow, you know, legislatures to try to do what they're permitted to do, his opinions on privacy and free speech -- this is what the liberals made of him. >> i wrote down a number of things that you said about him. including, we've talked about never owned a car. but that he didn't belong to a synagogue and yet he was very active in the zionist movement. >> there are two types of zionisms, one is religious zionism, one is secular zionism. he was a secular zionism. >> define it. >> zionism was a movement started by theodore hertzle to return the jews to a homeland in palestine. >> where was hertzle at the

time? >> hertzle was a nonpracticing jew but he was a reporting at the dreyfus trial in paris and that awakened his jewish sensibility and in 1897 he writes "the jewish state." at first he was willing to have the jewish state anyplace until more religious jews convinced him that the only place jews would be really going to would be back to israel, to the land of the bible. and brandeis' uncle was a zionist, so brandeis did not know it at the time. and he first becomes aware of zionism in 1910 when a reporter, jacob dehas, interviews him. brandeis then studies and eventually comes to the conclusion that zionism is a type of idealistic form that he could support. now, he never was religious. he says that his mother did not

believe that anyone should be bound to any one religion, rather, they should be aware of and sensitive to all religions and treat them all with respect. he never denied his judaism, but considering he was one of the most successful lawyers in boston, he had very little to do with the jewish community in boston. he made donations to various jewish charities, but they were for the amounts of money he had nominal compared to some of the money he put into other reforms. >> tell us about the dreyfus trial just for a moment. >> alfred dreyfus was a captain in the french army. and there was a scandal in which it was determined that a spy had stolen military secrets for the germans, france's age-old enemies. and dreyfus although innocent was blamed for it and his main problem was not that he was a spy but that he was about the only jewish officer, and it

there was virulent anti-semitism in france at that time. and a number of accused the french of a mock trial, that it was a farce, and, of course, the most important result that comes out of that was hertzle's book. eventually dreyfus is exonerated and the real culprits who were french officers were found. >> this is somewhat of a non sequitur, but he later got involved in the saco vangezeti case. how did he get involved in that? >> their trial was a farce. evidence that might or might not have exonerated them was kept there, the judge was prejudiced, he kept referring to the anarchist bastards and

practically ordered the jurors to find them guilty. and after the trial a number of people, most notably felix frankfurter began a long and arduous task to show that the trial was not fair and there was no justice there and trying to get a new trial for them. frankfurter was a professor at harvard law at that time and brandeis provided him with an annual stipend which later aroused, you know, some eyebrows, raised some eyebrows, but was not either illegal or immoral at the time. brandeis was able to give -- i have to digress a little bit here. brandeis was able to give so much of his time to reform work because he was rich. he made a lot of money as a lawyer. he had invested it soundly. he had a good return. frankfurter was a professor at harvard law school at a time when the law schools did not pay the high salaries they do today. he had a wife who was often sick

so all of his salary was essentially going to support his family. what brandeis gave him was an annual stipend which at first frankfurter didn't want to take. but there were no strings attached to it. essentially he told frankfurter, you're now doing reform work. it costs, and you should be free to take on whatever causes you want without having to worry whether they can afford your services or not. when frankfurter became -- frankfurter became involved with the trial because of elizabeth evans was a close friend of brandeis and the brandeis family and brandeis sent them some extra money to help de48 tfray expenses, but perhaps most importantly brandeis agreed that one of the houses he owned as a rental property that could be used by the family because mrs. evans was concerned they had no place to stay where people weren't constantly pointing at

them and reporters showing up and it became essentially a safe house. brandeis was aware of this. it also made him unable later on to interfere in the case at all when lawyers came for a last-minute stay of execution. >> what happened later? >> they were both executed. subsequent research is still divided over they were guilty or not. there are some books who are quite sure that at least one of them was guilty, and others they both were, but it's still not clear. >> have you written any -- much about frankfurter? >> i have read a great deal about him. in fact, i wrote a biography, a short biography of him as a justice. >> what's the connection between the two? and you suggest in the book, i believe you quote brandeis as saying frankfurter was a half brother -- >> half brother, half son. >> -- half son. >> they met when frankfurter was still relatively young and brandeis was already an established reformer, lawyer. they met at the house of truth in washington, which was a house

that frankfurter and a number of other single young men shared. holmes would stop by, brandeis would stop by when he was in town, and brandeis took frankfurter under his wing to some extent, helped to arrange a professorship at harvard for him. and was the only person to whom he would talk-freely and openly about events on the court. there's a wonderful series of notes that frankfurter left of conversations that he had with brandeis in which they would discuss court cases, it's one of the few glimmers that we really get into the inside of brandeis about what he thought about his colleagues on the court. and after brandeis could no longer do the reform work that he had been doing, frankfurter had already gotten involved to some extent. the problem was where brandeis could afford to take any case he wanted, any reform he wanted,

because he was paying his own way, frankfurter couldn't. frankfurter just didn't have that cash, if you will, to be able to lay out -- for instance, have a brief printed cost money. he didn't have that. and brandeis wanted to make sure he did. so, from 1917 on until late 1930s, when frankfurter himself went on the court, brandeis gave him what would average out to about $50,000 a year in terms of our money. it was much less then. but, you know, if you're talking about printing briefs, if you're talking about travel, if you're talking about hiring research assista assistants, none of it went into frankfurter's pocket, nor did brandeis ever tell frankfurter i want you to "x" or i want you to do "y," it was always left to frankfurter's discretion. and when it became known about 15, 20 years ago, it was never a secret at that time. i spoke to some people, older

professors at harvard, who had been there and knew frankfurter, and they said we all knew he was getting help from brandeis on a number of things so he could do this. so, it wasn't really a big secret. >> when he died in 1941, how much money did he have when he died? >> his total estate was $3 million, after taxes, it still came out to $1.9 million. >> '41 or dollars today? >> this is '41 dollars. today it would be quite a bit more. he'd invested very conservatively. he said he didn't want to have to watch his investments. he had a woman who had come to him as a young girl in his law office in boston. she had a head for numbers which he recognized. he soon put her in charge of office finances and after he went on the court, she continued to handle his personal portfolio, and he, you know, paid her a fee for that every

year. >> one of your chapters where you talk about how he got involved, i don't remember if it was the new haven railroad or which it was, you'll remember, but it was all about bigness and it reads like today, right now, this very day, every problem we have today in that time period read like it does today. what was that? >> it was probably the insurance scandal, because the headlines there were so similar, ceos using company money to buy persian rugs. one of them paid for a big coming out costume party for his niece out of corporate funds. the same sort of headlines just with different names that we have today. and new england policyholders in these big three companies were very upset. they wanted to know if their -- you know, for many people in those days an insurance policy was their cheap investment. the stock market had not become what it is today. so, if you were, let's say, a doctor or a lawyer around 1904,

1905, your big investment aside from, say, the purchase of a house would have been an insurance policy, which would have provided for your family if you died or because these were whole life policies would have been your retirement, you know, if you lived long enough. and they were extremely worried about the value of these investments, so they hired brandeis to look in to this for them. about this same time charles evans hughes is conducting public investigations in new york -- he's a lawyer at that time -- in to the insurance thing. he's coming up with one scandal after another that's just like today. >> put him in context, by the way. >> hughes was a lawyer in new york. eventually became governor of new york. he was appointed to the supreme court by taft. resigned. later became secretary of state. and then was named chief justice by hoover. and brandeis thought the world of him. they didn't agree on everything, you know, juries prudencecial.

his investment into the insurance industry was exactly the way he would have done it and he liked the way hughes ran the conference. he thought hughes was the best chief justice, you know, he'd ever met. >> in the context of the insurance business back there, i wrote down that you said he had a strong aversion to the curse of bigness. but what impact did he have on it, and what -- the whole business of becoming a consumer's lawyer? >> in the chapter on -- which i call "perfect reform", what i tried to do brandeis the epitome of what made him such an effective reform. he's opposed to bigness. he's opposed to bigness in business. he's opposed to bigness in government. he always says man is a weak thing and has limited ability. and while he recognized that in modern society you had to have delegation, you had to have, you

know, one person couldn't do everything, the idea of a factory that hired 10,000 people, he said no one can have any idea what their business is when it gets to be that big. there's inefficiency of bigness. he opposed much of the new deal personally, not as a justice, but personally, because he was opposed to big government. labor had a very mixed reaction to him. on the one hand he was a strong proponent of labor's right to organize and bargain collectively. on the other hand, he wanted to put limits on unions so that they would be responsible. and this, of course, was anathema to people like samuel gompers and others. >> and who is samuel gom percenpercen gompers? >> he was head of labor at the time. but when it came to the confirmations, labor lined up