The Faith of Louis D. Brandeis, Zionist.

During many years, the corporation lawyer, made also by the problems of his clients into an expert of accountancy and an efficiency engineer, conformed to the forms of professional behavior prevailing at the bar, considering alone the legal import of his cases and timing the law to the best advantage of his clients, be its social and moral col1sequences what they may. Such public services as he happened to render-and they were many-figured much like a banker's philanthropies, rather acts of grace than of justice, issues of generosity, not works of righteousness. But slowly, during the third decade of Louis Brandeis' life, the alternatives were shaping to a momentous option in his heart. The time came when he could not refrain from making his choice. It was the time of Homestead Riots, He was preparing to lecture on the common law, and he found the law inadequate to that tragic reality. He threw the lectures away. He made his choice between legalism and morality, human rights and property rights, the liberties of the many and the privileges of the few. Its moral is expressed in an anecdote that an old client reports. The client asked his lawyer to pass on a contract which his firm was making with its employees. Brandeis pointed to a clause likely to mislead and injure the employees. The client retorted: "Whose welfare are you hired to represent, mine or my employees'?" "Will your welfare," Brandeis answered, "be promoted by swindling your fellow-men who are trusting you?" The client got the point and has since been a leader in the employer movement toward justice and democracy in business.

With Alice Brandeis as his sustaining comrade by his side, Louis Brandeis made his choice. That choice is the center of being of the warrior for freedom whom our generation has known and reverenced as Louis Dembitz Brandeis. It is the initiation of his faith, the final establishment of the spacious nobility, the simplicity, even the austerity, of his way of life; the combination of curiosity with patience, of deference to social facts against legal fictions -so much more in the spirit of scientific inquiry than legal disputation -of his way with the law. "In the past," he said, "the courts have reached their decisions largely deductively from preconceived notions and prejudices. The method I have tried to employ in arguing cases before them has been inductive reasoning from the facts." Following his choice, Mr. Brandeis' very considerable private fortune became to him a public trust, and all his income, save for the minimum he and Mrs. Brandeis required for their highly simplified plain living, went back to the service of the plain and simple people. With his death the capital has also gone to that service. "I have only one life," he once told an interviewer, "and it's short enough. Why waste it on things that I don't want most? And I don't want property or money most. I want to be free." "Property," he said elsewhere, "is only a means. It has been a frequent error of our courts that they have made the means an end."

To the businessmen, his one-time clients, to the attorneys, their hirelings, Brandeis' choice was a challenge and a threat. Since it raised uncomfortable questions about their privileges and profits, they took it for "a betrayal of his class." Much of their former world turned against Louis and Alice Brandeis. Louis was making the public interest his private duty; he was assuming the brief for the little men in the litigations of private business and the disputations of national affairs. When his sense of duty required that he should condemn an action he himself had taken, he condemned it. Where it required that he should fight an organization he himself had set up or a technique he himself had devised, he fought them.

Thus, when it became clear to him that however legal the leasing system of the monopolistic United Shoe Machinery Company might be, it was immoral and iniquitous, he resigned as counsel for that company, and after a certain time took the brief of an association of competing small manufacturers against the trust. Long before, in 1897, he told the members of the Senate Ways and Means Committee holding hearings in Washington on the extortionate Dingley Tariff, that he had come there "to represent those who form a larger part of the people of this country than any who have found representation here."

That declaration defined Brandeis' subsequent career as attorney and as citizen. Whether in his battles for the people's interest over charters to public service corporations in Boston, over railroad rates to shippers in Washington, over the stealing of the public domain in the Northwest, over savings bank insurance in Massachusetts, over the rigging of bank accountancy in Washington, over monopolistic incompetence of railroads in New England, over the exploitation of women in Oregon, he was representing the little people--the helpless, the unlearned, the unorganized people, who else would remain forever unrepresented.

Often, the enemy, unable to meet him fairly and without favor on their very own field, afraid to let the issue between him and them come to decision on its merits, resorted to the vilest methods of "abusing the plaintiff's attorney." Since his record was impeccable, they employed whisperings and insinuations. Once they hired Elbert Hubbard for their own ends. But Brandeis kept his watch and held to his vision disdaining to reply, undistracted from his chosen task, jealous for the genius of the plain American's own independence. The nation began to know him as "the People's Attorney."

It is because he Was in spirit and in truth the People's Attorney that Woodrow Wilson nominated him to be the Attorney General of the United States, and those who preferred that the United States should be without such an advocate were able to prevent his confirmation to that post. It was because he was the People's Attorney that Woodrow Wilson thereupon named him to a seat in the Supreme Court, and those who preferred that interpretations of our fundamental law by the nation's highest court-did not Mr. Chief Justice Hughes once bear witness that the Constitution is what the judges say it is?-should not be contaminated by the judgments of such man, determined to prevent this appointment, too.

During six months the great employers of legal talent and their employees fought the nomination by all the means, regardless of honor, that they could gather up. Brandeis' Jewish origins were invoked against him. It was doubted if "the Oriental mind could successfully interpret a system of law which was the product of Occidental minds." From every quarter the privileged ganged up on his reputation-his opponents, besides all the former presidents of the American Bar Association, included ex-President Taft, Elihu Root, Joseph Choate, Senator Borah, President Lowell of Harvard. They only stopped when Oscar Underwood threatened to bare their own records to the Senate. Said The New York World: "His public services have won him the hearty detestation of certain powerful corporations and financial interests. They hate him not merely because he is a radical, but because he is enormously able and efficient. To them it is indecent that a lawyer with such extraordinary ability should wantonly and deliberately use his talent to promote the social welfare of the American people when he might command princely fees in the service of privilege." Later Taft -and even Borah-apologized to Brandeis. But Lowell, whose immortality is defined by his contribution to the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti (Sacco's wife and children received asylum in the Brandeis home in Dedham during the patriotic struggle to prevent that crime) remained true to his ethical standards.

The Supreme Court had counted many able, many profound lawyers in its changing membership. It had even counted justices who were deeply concerned about justice and liberty as well as legality-indeed, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was an associate justice when Brandeis was finally enrolled among the nine. But never before or since had a lawyer been appointed who was acclaimed as the Attorney for the People and because he so served the people.

In explaining the nomination to the Senate, Woodrow Wilson wrote:

Every justice on the Supreme Court is by the necessities of his task not only the expositor of the nation's fundamental law, but the re-maker of its import and direction. He is an official philosopher of American life; his decisions, because of their enduring practical force, have a social significance far beyond the deliverances even of presidents and cabinet members. As Brandeis knew, and as he was ever warning his brethren, it is the easiest and simplest thing in the world to erect prejudices into principles, and a vigilance against one's own unrecognized propensities is as imperative as a vigilance against others.' On one thing, however, he had come to a certainty beyond all doubt -that the enduring American task, nay the enduring human task, was to preserve to each man "the genius of his own independence."

So far as I can see, Mr. Brandeis' judgments, all his opinions regarding human nature and human relations, whether in business, in government or anywhere else among the institutions of the nation, were growths of this soil and corollaries of an interest partly philanthropic and humane, he continued a Zionist the more because of his irreducible democratic humanism, because he came to apply the conceptions of the Declaration of Independence, which were among the postulates of his faith, to all sorts of human associations and groupings of individuals, as well as to individuals,-to the little societies, the unprivileged and the miserable, as well as to the great and powerful.

He had told the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, in the course of testimony concerning industrial unrest which covers 150 pages of the Commission's report, "We must bear in mind all the time that however much we may desire material improvement and must desire it for the comfort of the individual, that the United States is a democracy, and that we must have, above all things, men. It is the development of manhood to which any industrial and social system should be directed. We Americans are committed not only to social justice in the sense of avoiding things which bring suffering and harm, like unjust distribution of wealth; but we are committed primarily to democracy. The social justice for which we are striving is an incident of our democracy, not the main end. It is rather the result of democracy-perhaps its finest expression -but it rests upon democracy, which implies the rule by the people. And therefore the end for which we must strive is the attainment of rule by the people, and that involves industrial democracy as well as political democracy."

Louis Brandeis reaffirmed this expression of his faith in many of his famous decisions. I cite, however, only the much quoted sentences of one of the greatest of his dissents: "The makers of the Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect. Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone-the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."

And he affirmed for the Jews but no more and no less than for the Czechs or the Yugoslavs, the Poles or the Arabs, and all the other little and oppressed peoples of the world, the equal right to be let alone. His realization of bigness as a curse sprang from this same root. "Size," he held, "brings monopoly instead of competition; size submerges the talents of millions of people, and the wealth of the nation is gauged by the capacity of great numbers and not by the few." Jefferson, it is well known, had the same feeling about bigness. Its philosophical expression is notable in William James, the philosopher of Brandeis' generation: "As for me," James wrote to a friend in 1897 "my bed is made. I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top."

Brandeis' sense of the possibilities of the under-dogs, of the possibilities in the insights, initiatives, and powers of the alternatives to the dominating organizations and their ways, underlay his deep and practical sympathy with the organization of liberty in cooperative societies both of consumers and producers, as Jewish Palestine so well knows. It governed his attitude toward the monopolistic limitation of the just initiative of the little man which he made clear in his condemnation of the National Industrial Recovery Act, and in his approval of the Florida chain store tax. He regarded all such limitations as inimical alike to the genius of each man's individuality and to the general welfare.

In his dissent from the majority regarding the tax on chain stores, he wrote: "There is a widespread belief that the existing unemployment is the result, in large part, of the gross inequality in the distribution of wealth and income…individual initiative and effort are being paralyzed, creative power impaired and human happiness lessened; that the true prosperity of our past came not from big business, but through the courage, the energy and the resourcefulness of small men; that only by releasing from corporate control the faculties of the unknown many, only by reopening to them the opportunities for leadership, can confidence in our future be restored, and the existing misery overcome; and that only through participation by the many in the responsibilities and determination of business, can Americans secure the moral and intellectual development which is essential to the maintenance of liberty."

And, of course, what was basic in the political economy of American life was absolutely indispensable in the spiritual economy, of which the Bill of Rights is more especially the guardian. With Holmes he stood out as the Court's great champion of spiritual freedom, of the freedom of the press, of speech, of conscience and of association; with Holmes he insisted on equal liberty for faiths and opinions which he deeply rejected, as well as for those that he deeply approved. So he joined with Holmes in another great dissent which vindicated the eligibility to citizenship of persons so deeply convinced of the evil of war as to be unwilling to fight in one. Holmes regarded such a faith as fantastic "but," he wrote, and Brandeis underwrote it, "if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree With us but freedom for the thought that we hate..." Brandeis knew, I think, more deeply, more ultimately than Holmes that the genius of all men's independence can only be strengthened by the exercise of that independence, and he regarded this genius as the essence of the American tradition.

"Those who won our independence by revolution," Brandeis wrote for himself and Holmes in that noble dissent against confirming the conviction of Anita Whitney for criminal syndicalism in California, "were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for free discussion.

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify suppression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. Such, in my opinion is the command of the Constitution. It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it."

I have already indicated that Brandeis came to his ultimate conception of Zionism from that invincible humanism of his, from his fighting faith in freedom, his certainty beyond all doubt that the propositions of the Declaration of Independence are valid for all the families of mankind. Regarding Zionism too, he vindicated faith, as was his wont, by "inductive reasoning from the facts."

After his appointment to the Supreme Court Mr. Brandeis' writings consisted exclusively of his judicial decisions, the best of the m being, as we have seen, his dissents. His friends and disciples have, however, assembled several collections of his utterances made before he gave up action on the field for judgment on the bench. Those consist of occasional pieces-lectures, speeches, arguments-each addressed to the analysis, elucidation or solution of some immediate and particular problem which confronted the author in his professional capacity. All of them, occasional pieces and judicial decisions alike, are communications, fitted to time and place and circumstances, of their author's democratic faith. But so far as I know, in only one piece are that faith and its philosophy expressed as such without the limitations of a particular business-like need or special professional occasion.

This piece was a speech made on July 4th, 1915. The municipal authorities of Boston had invited Mr. Louis Brandeis, "the people's lawyer" to give the Fourth of July oration of that year. It was an exciting and anxious time. Europe was coming to the end of its first year of the Great War. The American nation, whose strict neutrality had been announced by President Wilson, was being invaded by propagandists for both sides, the Allies and the Central Powers. Demands so diverse and confusing were being made upon American citizens that it seemed desirable to the authorities to reaffirm what it means to be an American and what the true, the living import of Americanism was. Especially was this Fourth of July to be celebrated as an Americanization Day, an Americanization Day not only for newcomers but for natives. All needed to rediscover the ideals which are the soul of their country and the institutions and economy which are the necessary body of its democracy. Mr. Brandeis chose for his theme "True Americanism."

I well remember the hot afternoon in Faneuil Hall on which he delivered the oration, the stratified audience-Beacon Hill and the Back Bay; the West and the North Ends; South Boston and East Boston, distributed duly and in good order according to cash, caste and sect; the stuffy smell of the hall, the gaunt figure and the Lincoln-like mask of the orator, his vibrant voice and the measured yet passionate delivery, affirming anew, amid the perplexities and tensions of an ever-nearer world-war to make the world safe for democracy, the American faith in the Jeffersonian principles; the faith in the democracy which rests upon each man's right to be himself, the right to be different, and which itself consists in the cooperative union of the differents. Our democratic establishment, the People's Attorney pointed out, is an arrangement of devices by which every individual is a ruler in his own right, and exercises this right through his vote. Being a ruler, the equipment required for ruling is a necessity of life. This necessity of life includes those rights which our Constitution guarantees-the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life, in this connection, means living, not existing; liberty, freedom in things industrial as well as political; happiness includes, among other things, that satisfaction which can come only through the full development and utilization of one's faculties.

These determine the American standard of living. Its establishment and upkeep require continuous education and industrial liberty. Such liberty calls for the cooperation of workers ''as in trades unions"; and for the control of "overweening industrial power...Control and cooperation are both essential to industrial liberty." Nor control and cooperation alone. The industrial establishment of the nation has the duty and obligation to insure democracy by securing to the American citizen "also some degree of financial independence."

The devices whereby the citizen might provide himself with financial independence were those always advocated by Brandeis--conspicuously by the organization of cooperatives as well as labor-unions.

Men to whom the principles of the Declaration of Independence are the articles of their abiding faith, and who labor to implement them in the changing conditions of the changing times are as men reborn. They have been Americanized in their hearts and are the true Americans.

But now Brandeis carried the logic of the Declaration a step beyond where the Founding Fathers had left it. He extended the implementation of the American faith to still another dimension of the modern scene.

Jefferson and his contemporaries had above all confronted political tyranny and social caste. They sought to guarantee the individuality of the individual in and through an agricultural economy. The connection between the democratic way of life and the variety and character of various cultural associations of individuals in the making of a national being and a general civilization was not a problem for them and they gave it no attention. But in 1915 it had become a problem and Brandeis met it with the realism, the logic and the insight with which he had met less general problems of protecting the forgotten American from predacious corporations, tariff-writers, insurance companies. He extended the concept of "true Americanism" from individuals, to associations of individuals, to religious sects, churches, communities, nationalities, cultures. During a decade America had been described as a "melting pot" and "Americanization" was conceived to consist in the procedures by which individuals abandoned their different individualities, including their spiritual and cultural inheritances, and conformed to the requirements of the ruling classes of America with the same submission as the people conform to requirements of the ruling classes of Europe. In 1910 in an interview published in the December Jewish Advocate) Mr. Brandeis had set forth a democratic version of this conventional view. He warned that "habits of living, of thought which tend to keep alive difference of origin or to classify men according to their religious beliefs are inconsistent with the American idea of brotherhood and are disloyal."

But, between that time and the date of the Fourth of July address, there had come to his attention inductive studies of the character and condition of American culture and an exposition of the cultural forces that gave the American mind its dynamic competency, its flexibility and its richness. It was shown that each religious sect, each cultural group, is a fellowship with its own group-individuality and that this individuality orchestrates itself into the content of American civilization and plays its part in nourishing the spirit of American democracy and enriching the national achievement. Culturally, too, the American spirit expressed the principle of e Pluribus unum: it has an extraordinarily vital and flexible unity consisting in the teamwork of the different, and embodied in the mutual respect and tolerance and interpenetration which has come to be known as Cultural Pluralism.

Mr. Brandeis preferred to call that which is basic in this Cultural Pluralism "inclusive brotherhood". Inclusive brotherhood, he declared in his exposition of True Americanism, is the "one feature in our ideals and practices which is peculiarly American." It has involved "equality of nationalities as well as equality of individuals. It recognizes racial equality as an essential of full human liberty and true brotherhood, and that racial equality is the complement of democracy. America has, therefore, given like welcome to ail the peoples of Europe." "America has believed that we must not only give to the immigrant the best that we have, but must preserve for America the good that is in the immigrant and develop in him the best of which he is capable. America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered."

At the time Mr. Brandeis was expounding True Americanism to a Fourth of July audience in Faneuil Hall in Boston, he had been almost a year chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs. This Committee had been formed to take over the responsibilities of the World Zionist Organization when the First World War made it impossible for the organization's officials to function. Persuaded that here was a responsibility which the logic of democracy brought home to him in immediate and specific terms, Mr. Brandeis reluctantly assumed the chairmanship of the Committee. His practical impact on the Zionist movement, and through it on both the Jewish and non-Jewish conception of the Jewish problem is one of the most momentous in the modern history of the Jews. If his democratic faith brought Louis Brandeis to Zionism, he, more than any single individual of our time, brought democracy as an ideal and a program into the internal life of the Jewish communities of the world, particularly of the Shtadlan-dominated ones of the United States. He took a voluntary brief for ail the Jewish people as he had taken his brief for ail the plain people of our American economy. Zionism was one more obligation of the people's attorney dedicated to the security of the genius of each man's independence. He gave himself to its tasks as he did to every task he undertook. He studied with unflinching pains and thoroughness the history, the psychology, the leadership, the social, political and economic structure and conflicts of the Jewish community. He made himself expert on every aspect of the being of Palestine, and he made his argument for Zionism simply a statement of the insight into which this extraordinary knowledge precipitated. His leadership brought new blood and new standards and a new spirit into the Zionist movement in America, transforming it from an incident of Ghetto aspiration into a democratizing and liberating power. It challenged prestige and prerogative in established interests in the American Jewish community. It disputed authority, it gave point and direction to the communal unrest of American Jewry of east and central European origin and background. The old issues were raised afresh and re-debated in the new setting created by the great civil war in Europe in which the Jewish people of eastern Europe were at once made the victims of both the belligerents, laymen as well as rabbis addressed themselves to the fray, and "universal Judaism" and "the mission of Israel" were fulminated against Zionism from a hundred pulpits.

In the course of the controversy, which was an incident to far more practical issues, Brandeis took occasion to state in unmistakable terms his understanding of the view of the American Zionists regarding the Jewish problem and its solution. He demonstrated more forcefully than it had ever been demonstrated before the futility of trying to evade the problem by definition. "Councils of rabbis," he wrote, "and others have undertaken at times to prescribe by definition that only those shall be deemed Jews who professedly adhere to the Orthodox or Reformed faith. But in the connection in which we are considering the term, it is not in the power of any single body of Jews-or indeed of all Jews collectively to establish the effective definition. The meaning of the word Jewish in the term Jewish Problem must be accepted as coextensive with the disabilities which it is our problem to remove. It is the non-Jews who create the disabilities and in so doing give definition to the term Jew. These disabilities extend substantially to all of Jewish blood. They do not end with a renunciation of faith, however sincere. They do not end with the elimination, however complete, of external Jewish mannerisms. The disabilities do not end ordinarily until the Jewish blood has been so thoroughly diluted by repeated intermarriages as to result in practically obliterating the Jew." That also persons of Jewish blood recognize this situation as a constant factor in their setting and react to it thus is shown furthermore in the behavior of even the most de-Judaized Jew. It is a behavior that acknowledges the claim of the group, and willy-nilly takes an interest in its fortunes. The Jewish problem, consequently, is the problem first of securing for the members of this group, distributively and collectively, "the same rights and opportunities enjoyed by non-Jews," and second, of securing to the world "the full contribution which Jews can make if unhampered by artificial limitations."

Liberalism, through which, at the beginning of the last century, it was hoped both these ends should be realized, had failed. Anti-Semitism remained, "universal and endemic", and the Jewish Problem, with all the diversities between the conditions that determine its manifestation, remains one and the same. The failure of liberalism is coincident with the oppression of nationality: "enlightened countries grant to the individual equality before the law; but they fail to recognize the equality of whole peoples or nationalities. We seek to protect as individuals those constituting a minority, but we fail to realize that protection cannot be complete unless group equality also is recognized." The Zionist movement is dedicated to the consummation of this recognition for the Jews. It is a movement essentially "to give the Jew more, not less, freedom; it aims to enable the Jews to exercise the same right now exercised by practically every people in the world-to live at their option either in the land of their fathers or in some other country; a right which Irish, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, or Belgian may now exercise as fully as Germans or English." The struggle for this right, involving as it must and does the recovery of group self-respect and the revitalization of the tradition and idealism of the fathers, is the chief, perhaps the only bulwark against the demoralization which Jews have, since the French Revolution, been undergoing in America and Europe both, and which yields an excuse to the anti-Semite. "The sole bulwark against demoralization is to develop in each new generation of Jews in America the sense of noblesse oblige, a sense which can be best developed by actively participating in some way in furthering the ideals of the Jewish renaissance; and this can be done effectively only through furthering the Zionist movement."

Zionism, thus, is in Brandeis view, the salvation of the Jew who elects to build his life elsewhere than in Zion, no less than of the Jew who chooses the destiny of a Judaean. And not merely this. Zionism is demanded as well in the interest of all mankind. The satisfaction of these interests is possible only through organization. "Organize," Brandeis urged, "in the first place so that the world may have proof of the extent and intensity of our desire for liberty. Organize in the second place so that our resources may become known and be made available. But in mobilizing our forces it will not be for war. The whole world longs for the solution of the Jewish Problem. We have but to lead the way, and we may be sure of ample co-operation from non- Jews. In order to lead the way we need not arms, but men; men with those qualities for which Jews should be peculiarly fitted by reason of their religion and life, men of courage, of high intelligence, of faith and public spirit, of indomitable will and ready-self-sacrifice; men who will both think and do; who will devote high abilities to shaping our course and overcoming the many obstacles which must from time to time arise. Organization, thorough and complete, can alone develop such men and the necessary support."

Within three years the Zionist organization was transformed from a loose federation of societies into an integrated association of individuals; from a somewhat timid Ghetto enterprise seeking largesse for Palestine and aghast before a budget of $15,000 to a clear-sighted democratic undertaking, aiming at $3,000,000 for the year's work in hand; the democratic Congress movement developed to challenge and to conquer the old oligarchic control; the powerful support of the American interest was brought to bear on the negotiations regarding Jewish claims in Palestine and assured the making of the Balfour Declaration. Attention was assured by the powers to the claims of the Jews of Europe in a peace program aiming at a democratic implementation of the "principle of nationality". And the Zionists were committed to a certain method and form of organization which should, so far as possible, assure the new development of Jewish Palestine as a democratic economy and culture. The commitment is known as "the Pittsburgh Program." It is a body of seven "resolutions bearing on Palestinian policy" adopted by the Zionist Organization of America at its convention in Pittsburgh in July 1918. Mr. Brandeis had the decisive voice in their final formation.

In 1897, the Resolutions declared, the first Zionist Congress at Basle defined, the object of Zionism to be "the establishment of a publicly recognized and legally secured homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The recent Declaration of Great Britain, France, Italy and others of the allied democratic states have established this public recognition of the Jewish national home as an international fact.

"Therefore we desire to affirm anew the principles which have guided the Zionist Movement since its inception, and which were the foundations laid down by our lawgivers and prophets for the ancient Jewish state, and were the inspiration of the living Jewish law embodied in the traditions of two thousand years of exile.

"1st. Political and civil equality irrespective of race, sex, or faith, for all the inhabitants of the land.

"2nd. To insure in the Jewish national home in Palestine equality of opportunity, we favor a policy which with due regard to existing rights shall tend to establish the ownership and control of the land and of all natural resources, and of all public utilities by the whole people.

"3rd. All land, owned or controlled by the whole people, should be leased on such conditions as will insure the fullest opportunity for development and continuity of possession.

"4th: The cooperative principle should be applied as far as feasible in the organization of all agricultural, industrial, commercial and financial undertakings.

"5th. The fiscal policy shall be framed so as to protect the people from the evils of land speculation and from every other form of financial oppression.

"6th. The system of free public instruction which is to be established should embrace all grades and departments of education.

"7th. The medium of public instruction shall be Hebrew, the national language of the Jewish people."

This Program might be said to sum up and to crystallize Louis Brandeis' fundamental faith-that the inwardness of the social enterprise is to secure to each man, to each association of men "the genius of his own independence." In all his subsequent relations with Zionism, Zionists and Palestine; in his differences perhaps even more than in his agreements, he was guided by this faith. It may be read in the famous Zeeland Memorandum, and in the character, the organization and the methods of the Palestinian enterprises which received his interest and support. In due course, the Palestine Development Council, the Palestine Cooperative Company, later unified into the Palestine Economic Corporation and this again differentiated into the Central Bank of Cooperative Institutions in Palestine, the Palestine Mortgage and Credit Bank, and the like, were conceived and developed by Mr. Brandeis' friends and followers as instruments for turning the Pittsburgh Program as nearly as possible from a program into an achievement. The bulk of his fortune he has left as a trust for this end. Ever Louis Brandeis' aim was, in Palestine as in America, a free society of free men, enhancing the genius of one another's independence.

The American Jewish Congress is the first democratic consequence, in the Jewish communities of the United States, of this undiscouraged striving after a free society of free men enhancing the genius of one another's independence. The Jewish Problem being "universal and endemic," being the problem of every individual Jew and every group of Jews, it could be met, Mr. Brandeis pointed out, only as these individuals and groups freely and openly came together to take counsel and reach decisions. Inasmuch as such a direct coming together was not practically possible, it had to be achieved through representatives directly elected and responsible to their electors. The project to create a body of such representatives came from a group of devoted Jewish liberals and workingmen; but it was the insight and leadership of Brandeis which turned the project from a wishful aspiration into a dynamic actuality against the passionate opposition of Jewish interests both of the right and the left-the same interests which persist in opposing the Congress effort to democratize the Jewish communities of the United States today. After much heated argument and redundant negotiation, elections were held by every Jewish community in the land and the chosen delegates assembled as the first session of the American Jewish Congress. The date was December 15, 1918.

In the course of the long discussion preceding the creation of the Congress Mr. Brandeis, in three public statements, developed the implications of "True Americanism" for the pattern of Jewish communities if they were to be developing modes of our American way of life. He made it clear that one could not have it both ways: that one could not accept democracy as a citizen of the country arid reject or frustrate democracy as a member of one of its .Jewish communities. "Among a free people," he declared, "the body which makes a decision must necessarily be democratic, since among the free people there can be no self-constituted body of men possessing the power to decide what the action of the people shall be."

For a leadership can be responsible only insofar as it is democratically chosen, and is by reason of such choice answerable to its ejectors. Such a responsible leadership can be created only through the methods of democracy. It can lead only by means of the democratic methods of free and open discussion and open decisions openly arrived at. "Secrecy," said Mr. Brandeis, "leads necessarily to suspicion and misrepresentation of Jewish purposes, and deprives us of non-Jewish support. We seek action in the open so that there will be no misunderstanding, either among our own people or among our fellow-citizens, as to our aims and methods. We need to avoid any real or seeming secrecy of action and of aim which might cause mistrust and which might breed prejudice. The needs which the Jewish people seek are so simple, and their difficulties are so well known, that no one has yet been able to set .an adequate reason for holding a Jewish conference in secret."

Alone through an American Jewish Congress can these needs be served and these difficulties overcome responsibly, openly and effectively. "The Congress is indispensable if the end sought is to be attained." Every Jew, by employing democratic methods and participating directly in the processes whereby are reached decisions which concern his position and destiny, can share in organizing on a nation-wide scale a united front against anti-Semitism, and in defense of the democratic way of life on which his freedom and security depend. Self-discipline, self-defense through democratic organization this is the instrument of freedom for the Jew as Jew as well as for the Jew as man.

Such organization is the modern, as contrasted with the medieval, shtadlanic way of aiming at security and freedom. It is the only way appropriate to any Jew who is also a free citizen of a free country. And those Jews who enjoy the privilege of education and the spiritual advantages of the liberal arts and sciences have a special responsibility for the maintenance and the defense of the democratic principle alike in the Jewish communities and in the non-Jewish world. Noblesse oblige!

In due course the immediate tasks for which the Jews of America had united-some most unwillingly-in the Congress, were accomplished. The peace treaties which officially terminated the First World War became a part of the law of nations, and the Congress, according to agreement, was disbanded. But the situation which had caused the formation of the Congress was not disbanded. Everywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere it was aggravated, and the tasks which the Congress had set itself became each year more urgent than before. '"The forces in the Jewish communities of the United States which had conceived the Congress hence called it together again. But only the representatives of the plain people came. In its second phase the Congress took the form of a confederation of Jewish religious societies, brotherhoods, communities and fraternal orders. To the problems of the Jewish position abroad, its members now found added new problems at home. The Congress movement began to take form as a major step, a final step, in the Americanization of the internal structure of the communities composing American Jewry. As events moved toward the Second World War, the Jew became the surrogate and symbol of the democratic way of life upon which the Nazi sadistocrats concentrated their destructive hatred and brutality. Of all peoples, the Jews were singled out by the deadly foes of democracy for special identification with the principles and program of democracy. And everywhere in the world, under their impulsion, traditional anti-Semitism took on a variety of new forms in new intensities.

Not since 1648 has the Jewish crisis been so profound and the Jewish need so bitter. In its anxiety and despair, the Jewish mind thereupon fled for refuge to all sorts of nostrums and isms to all sorts of locations and occupations. The rich turned even to Fascism; the masses hungered for the bare chance to earn their bread in freedom and eat it in peace. Babel arose in Israel; a tumbling tower of talk of saviors and salvations. One excited person after another raised his voice and constituted himself the Messiah of a special plea. Yiddish captains of journalistic industry were heard shouting in the name of organized labor. Powerful financial magnates and the attorneys of their retinue were heard shouting in the name of philanthropy and religion; those undertook to "unify" philanthropy; to draw the fate of all Jewish institutions, as Jewish, into their own hands by controlling their sources of income. Some of the disinherited young, facing a future of unemployment and destitution, were heard shouting in the name of Communism. "Liberals" were heard urging a flight into assimilation. Rabbis were heard crying a return to the synagogue. Each only intensified the anarchy, the confusion born of fear and fed on anxiety. And so it still is. Because of the multitude of its saviors and the warfare between them, the Jewish cause is being defeated by default. Because no orderly method of free discussion and agreement, when set up, is loyally adhered to, no common decisions are reached. No common action is taken. While through it all, the plain people of the Jewish communities cry for peace and unity, for the unity of counsel and unity of decision of which, as Mr. Brandeis declared more than a quarter of a century ago, alone …

Louis Brandeis had gone to the Supreme Court…after his first statement regarding the Congress movement, and it is a matter of record with what intensity, with what scrupulous concentration, he gave his energies to discharging the duties of his high office. Yet he filled such leisure as he had with an unflagging interest in many causes and movements-of which the democratic Jewish Congress continued to be a significant one-and was to the last generous of his time and counsel, as I have reason to know. His faith in democracy remained ageless and invincible. He was sure beyond all doubt that the surest vindication that any Jew can achieve for himself as man, as citizen, as worker, is his vindication of the democratic principle of his equal right with all men as Jew.

So, during practically a quarter bf a century while the People's Lawyer was serving as the People's Judge, he gave of himself and of his goods freely, without reservation and without afterthought, to the attainment of this ideal -in Palestine as in America. As a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, for the most part alone with Holmes, he stood up against both friends and foes on behalf of that equal liberty of different people wherein he knew the integrity of the national life to reside. I have heard labor leaders vigorously denounce him and financiers grudgingly approve him. But all he was ever concerned about was to render unto each his right. If you knew him at all, you knew that he would render it.