Portraits of Harvard Figures

Among the troubles which rose up to plague President Wilson's second administration was the nation-wide outbreak of labor disputes in the closing months of the World War. To aid in the settlement of one of these disputes, the strike of the California lumberjacks, Wilson sent to the coast the chairman of his War Labor Policies Board, the thirty-six-year-old, Austrian-born Felix Frankfurter. Arriving in San Francisco before the strike leaders, Frankfurter accepted an invitation to dinner on his first evening in the city, returned to his hotel at eleven o'clock. In the lobby his associates met him to tell him that the lumberjacks had arrived and were waiting for him with some impatience. Frankfurter started for the elevator. "You can't go up like that," the others objected. The lumberjacks, they warned him, were in a hostile mood, suspicious of the government's efforts at mediation. Frankfurter's appearance in any such capitalist regalia as a dinner jacket would ruin all prospect of settlement. "Nonsense," Frankfurter replied and went to meet the strikers. While his associates looked on apprehensively, he held the conference, gradually succeeded in breaking down the antagonism of the strikers. When the meeting broke up substantial progress had been made.

The next morning, Frankfurter, attired in a business suit, met some of the strikers in the elevator. The leader, a burly, red-headed Irishman, surveyed the diminutive mediator, grunted, "You don't look so nice as you did last night." The strikers, it turned out, had felt honored that the government's agent should put on a dinner jacket to deal with them.

Felix Frankfurter's capacity for dealing with men is the tool which has enabled him to exert the extraordinary influence with which he is rightly credited. Take, for example, his influence on the development of public law in the United States. His work has been done, not through the medium of his own books, which are few and of secondary importance, but through his stimulation of other men. Scarcely an important book has been published in recent years dealing with public law in which the author does not acknowledge his debt to Professor Frankfurter for suggesting the work and for continued assistance and encouragement in its execution. Likewise, countless articles appearing in legal magazines emanate indirectly from his fertile mind. One journal is said not to have appeared for years without at least one article for which the idea was furnished by him.

Gifted with an unusual ability for making friends and with one of the keenest minds in the country, Frankfurter is the idol of literally thousands of men who pass through the portals of the Harvard Law School. His ideas are notoriously liberal, his stimulating quality as a teacher in a small group unrivalled. He knows an extraordinary number of his students by their first names and in turn is known as "Felix" to his group of ardent disciples. With many of his former students he keeps in touch after graduation by means of a voluminous correspondence and due to his wide connections and reputation, he annually places many men in positions with private firms or with the government.

Frankfurter's much-touted but withal mysterious influence with the Roosevelt Administration has been of the same indirect sort as his influence on the law. While other professors have snatched eagerly at the opportunity to occupy prominent posts in the government. Frankfurter has consistently resisted efforts to drag him into the limelight. If rumor be true, he turned down the Attorney-Generalship. In any case he was offered and declined the post of Solicitor General and several other legal offices connected with the new administrative agencies in Washington, positions whose incumbents regularly take the spotlight from cabinet members.

Through these hectic times Frankfurter has preferred to remain the most powerful member of the "Invisible Brain Trust." Hosts of the younger appointees to legal and administrative positions in the new government agencies owe their appointments to suggestions from Frankfurter. It is through them that his own idees have cropped up so frequently in dispatches from the capital. Many of them belong to the Frankfurter coterie studied under him at the Law School and still keep in regular touch with him. The one piece of work to which Frankfurter's hand was directly applied is the highly controversial Securities Law. But even in that he was content to sketch