by Amity Shlaes
Inspiration also came from abroad, from the intellectuals of Leningrad or Paris. After all, the thinkers of those cities understood about the Babbitts and the sometimes equally tedious classes below him. Back in the 1910s a traveler from Russia had written in the magazine Novy Mir about his own reaction to the dull expressions of New Yorkers chewing gum on the subway: “The color of their face is grayish, their hands are hanging down weakly, their eyes are dim…. Only their jaws are moving, submissively, evenly, without joy or animation…. What are they trying to find in this miserable degrading chewing?” The name of the disgusted travel writer was Lev Bronstein, but he would later call himself Leon Trotsky.
The intellectual exclusivity of the Left would also be captured many years later in a novel about Vassar College at the start of the 1930s by the author Mary McCarthy, titled The Group. Alone together, dreamers reinforced one another.
Vassar, one hour and forty minutes north of Manhattan by train in Poughkeepsie, was one of the more important refuges. There a young theater director named Hallie Flanagan created a sense of utopian experiment. Flanagan had herself visited Russia to learn from Soviet theater, years earlier, and would do so again. In May 1930, at term’s end, she would load her students onto another ocean liner, Holland-America’s Volendam, and take them to Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad to performances of the Moscow Art Theater, Proletcult, the Blue Blouse, and other revolutionary theater groups. A student influenced by Flanagan, a young woman from the Seattle area named Mary McCarthy, would later achieve a name of her own.
“The Vassar Girl is thought of as carrying a banner,” McCarthy would write—the banner of the rebel and the reformer. Now that suffrage had been gained, in 1920, women of ideas were looking for new causes. One of Vassar’s trustees, Franklin Roosevelt, would shortly run for governor of the state of New York. His wife, Eleanor, was the co-owner of a tiny furniture factory that made colonial reproductions, Val-Kill, and which counted Vassar College among its clients.
But Vassar was not the only refuge. Right in New York City, two progressive educators, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, had joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin’s wife, in purchasing the Todhunter School; in 1928, Eleanor would teach girls there Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Todhunter was rigorous—Eleanor liked rigor—but also progressive. The exam questions Eleanor and her colleagues wrote up were challenges to the America of Coolidge and the doctrines of Mellon: “What is the object today of inheritance, income, and similar taxes?” “Why is there a struggle between capital and labor?” “What is the World Court?” “Who is the dominant political figure in Soviet Russia?”
Then there was the University of Pennsylvania, where Tugwell had studied with the radical Scott Nearing, or Douglas’s university, Chicago. At Chicago John Dewey, the great philosopher of education, had established his own laboratory school on the Midway where children of professors worked in labs, shops, and kitchens. This followed Dewey’s belief that learning by doing was the best way. Shortly progressives would also come to the University of Wisconsin, where the next year educator Alexander Meiklejohn would establish an experimental college in which undergraduates looked at only one topic at a time.
AT ALL SUCH PLACES, the progressive intellectuals might make up a minority, but they still were a presence, reassuring one another. And then there was Harvard. There a few star professors encouraged their students to push for radical change—both in the law, and in government. The brightest star was Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter was an immigrant himself; he had come over as a child from Austria. His rise was the result of merit, not birth. This fact alone made him exciting, especially to his students, many of a class that had enjoyed great advantage early. Frankfurter embraced his new country and the law with passion. His respect for American law was almost like respect for a church—he would describe his feeling for Harvard Law School as “quasi-religious.” One of his heroes was Louis Brandeis, now on the Supreme Court. Brandeis might have seemed exotic to some observers—he was the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court—but his philosophy was straight Thomas Jefferson. Another Frankfurter hero was the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, again, hardly a European radical; Holmes, the son of the wordsmith Oliver Wendell Holmes, was one of the most American of Americans, buried in Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery along with Amy Lowell. Still, Frankfurter did have a European model—Britain, where labor reforms were taking place. And when thinking politically, or as an advocate, Frankfurter viewed American law as a vehicle for European-scale reform.
Frankfurter’s views on economics were near the opposite of Coolidge’s, even though they both spent much of their careers in Massachusetts. Frankfurter liked the idea of an active American government very much, and he tended to dislike, or disapprove of, business. An observer, Raymond Moley, would much later sum up Frankfurter’s worldview: “The problems of economic life were litigious, controversial, not broadly constructive or evolutionary. The government was the protagonist. Its agents were its lawyers and commissioners. The antagonists were big corporation lawyers. In the background were misty principals whom Frankfurter never really knew first hand and who were chiefly envisaged as concepts in legalistic fencing. Those background figures were owners of the corporations, managers, workers and consumers.”
There was another element to Frankfurter’s personality that impressed his fellow intellectuals: he knew how to get along politically, no matter how unpopular radical thought was. Many at Harvard, including President Lowell, disagreed with him, yet Frankfurter managed to survive, even thrive at the university. Writing to Holmes, Frankfurter flattered the Supreme Court justice and won his friendship. He was close to Brandeis, who even subsidized him in the 1920s. Frankfurter, among all law professors, probably best knew Brandeis’s aversion to the large, whether it be the large company or a large country. Brandeis would later publish a book titled The Curse of Bigness, which argued there was danger in large corporations. Brandeis was an early Zionist, liking the idea of a small Jewish state, but he also was fond of the modest Scandinavian countries, especially Denmark. (In the next decade, as the Soviet Union became more popular as a destination, Brandeis would tell young travelers to go to Denmark instead.)
In 1924 Frankfurter had supported La Follette, writing in the New Republic that both mainstream parties “have an identical record of economic imperialism,” and describing his foreign model—Labour in Britain. As early as 1906, when he first encountered the young Franklin Roosevelt, the professor began to work to influence him. The Frankfurter touch reached to the smallest detail. One of Frankfurter’s biographers reports that the pair talked about reading, and Frankfurter suggested to FDR that he indicate a significant passage with a line in the margin, like the great English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, rather than underscoring line after line.
Frankfurter could influence young Roosevelt and others because, even in Babbitt times, he was able to transmit a wonderful sense of possibility to those around him. Student after student after student came to him and stayed, sometimes simply for the pleasure of going mind against mind. One of those students was Adolf Berle, who, like Frankfurter, was not accustomed to coming in second. Berle attended Frankfurter’s course two years in a row. “What, back again?” Frankfurter had asked. “I wanted to see if you’d learned anything,” Berle replied. Another Frankfurter student was David Lilienthal of Indiana, the young man who had disliked adventurous Chicago. Lilienthal found Frankfurter so enthralling he would later describe him as a man “who could read the dictionary and make it exciting.” Others were Benjamin Cohen and Thomas Corcoran, who later would be called his “hot dogs.”
Frankfurter’s next skill inhered in this: Better than any law professor in the nation, he knew how to place his students in important jobs. From Harvard, Frankfurter sent his students to Brandeis and fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to clerk. Many of these students would later have leading roles in government or universities, among them Dean Acheson, David Riesman, and Alger and Donald Hiss. Frankfu
rter had a virtual monopoly when it came to clerk appointments at the Supreme Court. When Justice McReynolds, a few years later, selected a Harvard alumnus who was not a Frankfurter protégé as his clerk, Brandeis bluntly asked the clerk how he came to get his job. “There isn’t one chance in a thousand for any graduate of Harvard Law School to come to the Court these days without Professor Frankfurter’s approval.”
Frankfurter still believed that the era of social legislation had only begun, that the country could make numerous changes, like introducing a minimum wage. He regarded Justice George Sutherland, the author of Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, as especially retrograde. Frankfurter argued for state minimum wages before the Court, and his students had the satisfaction of knowing that at least one justice—Holmes—seemed to follow his line of reasoning. Frankfurter’s impression on his students was especially profound in the area of utilities. The rest of the country might look to Commonwealth and Southern or Insull for progress, but in Frankfurter’s course Public Utilities, the emphasis was on the “public.” Frankfurter and other progressives felt strongly that governments should not miss this opportunity to regulate, the way they had failed to regulate industry in the preceding century.
In Frankfurter’s classroom it mattered little that in the 1920s the constitutional obstacles to a grand federal program for power generation seemed greater than the boulders on the Colorado River. Removing them, Frankfurter suggested, might even be easy. A student, Frances Plimpton, wrote a skeptical rhyme about Frankfurter’s crusades:
You learn no law in Public U
That is its fascination
But Felix gives a point of view
And pleasant conversation.
Lilienthal and others saw that Frankfurter and the New Republic were creating a new kind of liberalism, different from what Sutherland or Coolidge meant when they used the word. Maybe Frankfurter’s liberalism was that of the future.
Another place with the feel of radical fraternity was Columbia, to whose economics department Tugwell had come in the 1920s. In 1925, together with two colleagues, Thomas Munro and Roy Stryker, Tugwell had produced an innovative economics textbook, American Economic Life. Tugwell saw potential in Stryker, a farm boy like himself, from Kansas. The three used photos in new ways to dramatize their arguments: a picture of the tall buildings rising in Manhattan was accompanied by a didactic caption: “Collective effort built this; the inference is inescapable; but we sometimes attempt to avoid the logical further inference that more collective effort is needed. Sometimes we say that what we need is more individual enterprise. No individual,” the men concluded pointedly, “ever built a skyscraper.” Tugwell and Stryker were proud of the book; in another time, they told themselves, it could become a model.
Raymond Moley, an acquaintance of Tugwell’s, taught a course at Columbia’s sister college, Barnard, on how reformers in Britain and Bismarck in Germany had solved some of the social problems of industrialization. Moley, and Douglas as well, had become interested in the British export of the settlement house, a community center for the urban poor.
Over at the Teachers College, Columbia University, another man on the Soviet trip, George Counts, was working in a different field: education. Counts had also researched and experimented with John Dewey at his progressive Laboratory School at Douglas’s university, trying to establish a new form of child-centered education. Farther north up Lake Michigan, another man on the trip, Carleton Washburne of the progressive Winnetka school system, had also been experimenting with new methods of teaching. The educational progressives believed that competition among individuals in school—just as in Tugwell’s economy—was wrong. Instead it was time to look for a model of the collective school for the new society. Families mattered less in such a model—the family was an old agricultural unit, after all. And the factory mattered more. Long before this trip, Dewey and Counts had argued that the best models might be found abroad. Dewey had also argued that in a new mass society, the school must promulgate social change, not respond to it.
There were other refuges. Settlement houses had spread across the United States, and these were homes for intellectuals too. One that achieved the most was Hull House on Halsted Avenue in Chicago. For the poor of that area its resourceful founder, Jane Addams, provided everything, from piano lessons to drilling in English to health care. At Addams’s center Douglas met Europeans—“British journalists and politicians and fiery Indian nationalists”—who reinforced his sense that the United States must learn from examples abroad. At one point Addams called the Soviet revolution “the greatest social experiment in history.” For generations, progressives had gathered here.
On Halsted Street Douglas found other reformers. At least one who had paid a visit before him was an apprentice social worker—Frances “Fanny” Perkins, a young alumna of Comstock’s college, Mount Holyoke. Labor reform was deeply important, Douglas believed. He spent time familiarizing himself with the highly compelling case of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union.
In New York, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, which by 1916 was sending nurses out to see 1,300 patients a day. Henry Street helped the poor, but it also served as a safe haven for some of the children of the wealthy, who turned to progressive life as much out of desire to escape as out of any dedication to social change. One of those to work there—he spent time helping out as early as the summer of 1911—was Henry Morgenthau Jr., the son of the Morgenthau who had made a fortune on Wall Street and real estate. The younger Henry was not sure which field of work to choose, and was actually attracted to the idea of farming—the rural retreat. Another to come to Henry Street was a Vassar girl, Beatrice Bishop. Bishop, an heiress from an old Dutch family like Roosevelt’s, had suffered at the hand of a vindictive mother, herself the daughter of a president of the New York Stock Exchange. Her mother, Amy Bend Bishop, had wanted to stop Beatrice attending college, predicting, “You will become a bluestocking and no one will look at you.” Beatrice had a striking, wedge-shaped face; her mother had been right only about the first part. It was Adolf Berle who brought her to Lillian Wald’s table. He described Henry Street to her as “a lay convent of sorts.” Dining there with him and other intellectuals at a dark oak table, Bishop found a refuge of idealism.
At Christodora House on Tompkins Square, yet another young idealist, a Grinnell graduate named Harry Hopkins, worked with boys’ clubs. Hopkins found himself intrigued with Europe in a more personal sense, secretly courting and marrying a bright young social worker who had emigrated from Hungary, Ethel Gross. Nor was he the only social reformer to take his romance with the European East to a personal level. Nearing the age of sixty, John Dewey in 1917 fell in love with Anzia Yezierska, a redheaded social activist from Russia who was also known as the “sweatshop Cinderella.”
And of course there were the magazines where the intellectuals found one another: the New Republic, the Nation. The audiences were small but the editors were friendly. Earlier in 1927, Tugwell had written a desperate article in the Nation titled “What Will Become of the Farms?” His conclusions were gloomy, but having an outlet and collegial editors consoled him. Two brothers, Carl and Mark van Doren, held spots on the masthead; so did Mark’s wife, Dorothy. Carl’s wife, Irita, had already gone over to the Herald Tribune as an editor. But they all knew one another.
TO MAKE LANDFALL IN EUROPE was a relief for the travelers. Here at least the economic facts did not contradict their reform concepts so profoundly. There were some bumps along the road. In Warsaw they felt a jolt when their guide, Albert Coyle, acknowledged that he had misplaced the trip funds. In Dortmund, Tugwell got bored and skipped a meeting with trade union people at a steel plant to go to an art gallery. But from the time they met Soviet trade union leaders at the Polish-Soviet border, the travelers felt their spirits rise. This would indeed prove the junket of all junkets. It didn’t hurt that their hosts gave them first-class treatment—free transportation, cheap or free hotel service
, and so on. And there were to be meetings with leaders—Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, the Russian prime minister, Leon Trotsky, already out of the Kremlin’s inner circle but not yet exiled, and others of high rank. For the travelers, who were at best respectable but not themselves of national rank at home, these introductions in and of themselves made for a high. There is nothing headier than finding one is more recognized abroad than at home. And that was not all: rumor had it there would be meetings at the highest level, perhaps even with Stalin himself.
The travelers’ enthusiasm was only strengthened by what they saw in the first few days. The failures of the economy were not all visible. Indeed, if one squinted, things looked almost reasonable in Soviet Russia. Lenin, before dying, had instituted his New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed the survival of small artisans. The economy had finally begun to regain pre–World War I levels. The brutal collectivization of agriculture and the famines of the 1930s were still to come. The Soviets for their part tried to burnish their own reputation with unfavorable references to America. Everywhere the travelers went, Brophy would later note, they heard about Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed while the travelers were in Russia, just as predicted. For days after the execution, the towns the travelers arrived in were draped with banners hung in honor of Sacco and Vanzetti, “victims of ‘American capitalism.’” To the travelers it seemed that Russia understood what the land of Babbitt did not.
Roger Baldwin, who had corresponded with Vanzetti until his death, was deeply impressed with what he saw. Baldwin understood that Stalin’s Russia had a dark side. He didn’t enjoy his time in what he called this “irritating place.” But Russia still seemed somehow farther along than the narrow Massachusetts that could put the anarchist pair to death. Baldwin gave Leo Tolstoy’s son letters he had received from Vanzetti so that Tolstoy might post them for Russians to see at a state bank. As he wrote of Russia, Baldwin’s own conclusions were hopeful. “Everybody is poor together,” he wrote to his mother. “There is much discontent, much regulation of life, but not much terrorism or repression except of the old upper classes.”
