“One of the Most Painful Experiences of a Lifetime”
Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
By John William Sullivan
This article appears in the Summer 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
One of President Calvin Coolidge’s harshest critics—in private, at least—was Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. Both men had made their names in Massachusetts: Brandeis as a prominent Boston attorney, and Coolidge by rising up the ranks of Bay State politics to become governor. The two did agree on certain principles, most notably on federalism and the vital importance of states’ rights. Over time, however, Brandeis’s assessment of Coolidge grew more severe.
Much of Brandeis’s criticism of Coolidge appears to stem from the justice’s overall frustration with the 1920s. The jurist saw it as an age of unparalleled materialism and noted with alarm how the country had pushed back against the march of progressivism. Brandeis blamed Coolidge above all others for this rollback.
A PROGRESSIVE ICON
Brandeis’s progressive credentials were well known before he arrived at the Supreme Court.
In the early twentieth century, the attorney began devoting much of his time and legal work to progressive reform. Brandeis entered national politics when he became a close adviser to, and a tireless campaigner for, Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential race. Wilson won the presidency, and in 1916 he appointed Brandeis to the Supreme Court.
Brandeis stayed active politically even after his appointment—behind the scenes, since he couldn’t do so publicly as a sitting justice. Political scientist Bruce Murphy revealed that Brandeis paid his protégé Felix Frankfurter an annual retainer to promote political and legislative programs he called “joint endeavors for the public good.” With Frankfurter—who would later become a Supreme Court justice himself—Brandeis shared many of his fiercest criticisms of Calvin Coolidge.
Coolidge emerged as a threat to Brandeis-style progressivism when the Massachusetts governor became the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee in 1920. The GOP ticket advocated a “return to normalcy” that year. Normalcy posed a direct challenge to progressives, who had held the White House since 1901.
The extent of Brandeis’s displeasure becomes clear from his private letters (collected by the historians Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy). In June 1920, Brandeis wrote to his brother Alfred, “The elevation of [Warren] Harding and Coolidge, and the rejection of [Herbert] Hoover, is a sad story of American political irresponsibility.” Hoover, much more a technocrat than Harding, was Brandeis’s friend—at least back then.
Harding and Coolidge won in a landslide. Brandeis responded to this result in a letter to Frankfurter on November 8, less than a week after the election. He wrote that “serious-minded public-spirited men”—a way to say progressives—should “devote themselves to State, City, municipal & non-political affairs.” Brandeis added, “If we are to attain our national ideals, it must be via the States, etc.”
In 1923, Harding died and Coolidge acceded to the presidency. The new president committed further to the party’s counterprogressive plan. That meant cutting taxes and vetoing proposed spending he deemed unconstitutional.
Brandeis said Coolidge’s foreign policy could be “the most shameful episode in our history.”
1924 ELECTION AS “DISMAL DELUGE”
Days before the 1924 election, Brandeis wrote to Frankfurter about a straw poll of college students that showed Coolidge winning them overwhelmingly. This was, Brandeis commented with no small amount of melodrama, “the most discouraging feature in our life.” The justice called the 1924 election itself, which Coolidge won handily, “a dismal deluge of surprises.”
In the summer of 1926, President Coolidge delivered a speech likely to trigger a response from Brandeis and anyone who claimed to be progressive. Commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, Coolidge said:
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
Coolidge attacked the great marketing point of the progressives in his day: that progressivism offered the best path to the future. Referring to the rights recognized in the Declaration, the president said:
If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Brandeis escalated his private attacks on Coolidge. The justice remarked of the Coolidge administration that “it is in some ways worse than Harding’s.” He noted that Coolidge’s enforcement of Prohibition “is said to be more corrupt, and all with C.C.’s connivance.” Brandeis observed a “tendency to repress congress” that he rated both “serious and stupid.”
The justice reserved special criticism for Coolidge’s judicial appointments. Brandeis wrote to Frankfurter in 1926 that “C.C. is doing quite as badly as Harding in the gradual process of undermining the Federal Courts.” In 1928 the justice wrote, “This Administration is debauching the judiciary with inexcusable political appointments.”
Brandeis deplored Coolidge’s foreign policy, saying that Coolidge’s stances toward Nicaragua and Mexico—intervention in the former, threatening intervention in the latter—could be “the most shameful episode in our history.” The same month, January 1927, the justice wrote that the State Department and Coolidge were “behaving as badly as man could conceive—it is amazing to me that Congress lets them.”
Reacting to a Coolidge speech, Brandeis said the last time he had felt so distressed was when he passed through a hospital’s syphilitic ward.
ESCALATING HOSTILITY
By far Brandeis’s most hostile statement about Coolidge came in reference to the president’s 1927 speech marking George Washington’s birthday. Coolidge emphasized the more practical aspects of Washington’s character—namely, his appreciation for thrift and sound economic policy, and his effective management of both the public purse and his personal finance. “He was an idealist…he was a prophet…but, essentially, he was a very practical man,” Coolidge said.
Brandeis wrote to his brother the next day, saying that “the President’s address yesterday, which I attended reluctantly (in robes) was one of the most painful experiences of a lifetime.” In a letter to Frankfurter four days later, Brandeis expanded: “You cannot conceive how painful, distressing & depressing it was to listen (officially) to Cal’s Washington’s Birthday address.” This stylistic echo, mentioning that he attended the speech “(in robes)” and “(officially),” demonstrates his insistence that he never would have attended such a speech but for his office.
The justice expressed alarm at the idea that Coolidge would “confiscate the whole of G.W.’s good will for Big Business.” Coolidge did this, Brandeis said, “by showing that we owe everything we value to the qualities of business efficiency, commercial courage & vision & thrift & that these were G.W.’s dominating qualities fitting him for the greatest of the World’s achievements.” The justice told Frankfurter, “There is no man in [the] U.S. [who] could have so perfectly—by looks, voice & action—have deprived G.W. of every idealistic aim or emotion.”
Brandeis concluded with a grim analogy. The last time he felt so distressed, he wrote, was when he “passed through the syphilitic ward” of a poorhouse hospital. “I had a like sense of uncleanliness.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THERE IS ANY DANGER”
As Coolidge’s administration came to a close, Brandeis took another shot at the president. In the 1928 election, Democratic nominee Al Smith carried only eight states against Coolidge’s Republican successor, Hoover. But one of the eight states was Brandeis’s—and Coolidge’s—home state, Massachusetts. “Massachusetts,” remarked Brandeis, “has redeemed herself.”
The snipes continued after Coolidge left office. In 1930, Brandeis even accused Coolidge of anti-Semitism for failing to select Benjamin Cardozo for the Supreme Court. Brandeis said he had heard from Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, Coolidge’s Amherst College classmate, that “Coolidge objected to appointing Cardoza [sic] (whom S. as Atty [General] proposed) because he didn’t want two Jews on the bench.”
On January 28, 1930, Brandeis told Frankfurter about his anxiety regarding “a persistently recurrent rumor”—“that there is a danger that Calvin Coolidge may be appointed to our Court.” Skeptical of the likelihood of this event but unnerved by its possibility, he concluded, “I can’t believe that there is any danger, but should anything be done about it?”
Whether or not Brandeis foiled Coolidge for a Supreme Court seat, the contrast between the two men illustrates a significant turning point in American legal and political history. Brandeis’s disgust for Coolidge’s emphasis on George Washington’s practical—rather than idealistic—virtues captures each man’s approach to law and government. Brandeis thought legislation and jurisprudence could and must be used to make his ideals reality; Coolidge advocated giving administration a chance to catch up with legislation. While Brandeis’s legal philosophy is now the norm, those who seek alternative solutions to our problems would do well to reexamine Coolidge’s approach.
John William Sullivan, a political consultant in Washington, D.C., served for two years as a Coolidge Foundation associate.