Louis
Brandeis, the son of Jewish parents, was
born in Louisville, Kentucky in 13th November, 1856. He was educated
in Louisville and Dresden in Germany before graduating from Harvard
University in 1877. He worked as a lawyer in Boston
where he illustrated a strong sympathy for the trade
union movement and women's rights.
This included him working without fees to fight for causes he believed
in such as the minimum wage and anti-trust
legislation.
Brandeis advised President Woodrow Wilson
on policy and influenced his New Freedom economic doctrine. Brandies
also published two important books during this period, Other
People's Money (1914) and Business
- A Profession (1914). A supporter of trade union rights,
Brandeis argued in these two books that the retailer should make sure
that " the goods which he sold were manufactured under conditions
which were fair to the workers - fair as to wages, hours of work,
and sanitary conditions." He went on to claim that if the business
community considered moral issues when producing and selling goods
then 'big business' will then mean "business big not in bulk
or power but great in service and grand in manner. Big business will
then mean professionalized business, as distinguished from the occupation
of petty trafficking or more moneymaking."
In 1916 Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme
Court and this decision was attacked by business interests and
anti-Semites. One of the justices, James
McReynolds, hostility towards Jews
was so strong he always refused to sit next to Brandeis during meetings.
Over the next few years Brandeis was a strong advocate of individual
rights and freedom of speech. This included his opposition to the
Espionage Act passed during the First
World War.
Brandeis was often aligned with his friend, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, in his decisions on the Supreme
Court. Brandies favoured government intervention to control the
economy and therefore defended most of the New
Deal legislation that was introduced by Franklin
D. Roosevelt during his period as president. However, Brandeis
did argue that the National Recovery Administration
(NRA) was unconstitutional. Louis Brandeis, who retired in February,
1939, died in Washington on 5th October,
1941.
(1)
Louis Brandeis, Business - A Profession (1914)
The
next generation must witness a continuing and every increasing contest
between those who have and those who have not. The industrial world
is in a state of ferment. The ferment is in the main peaceful, and,
to a silent; but there is felt today very widely the inconsistency
in this condition of political democracy and industrial absolutism.
The people are beginning to doubt whether in the long run democracy
and absolutism can coexist in the same community; beginning to doubt
whether there is a justification for the great inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, for the rapid creation of fortunes, more mysterious
than the deeds of Aladdin's lamp. The people have begun; and they
show evidences on all sides of a tendency to act.
Many workingmen, otherwise uneducated, talk about the relation of
employer and employee far more intelligently than most of the best-educated
men in the community. The labor question involves for them the whole
of life; and they most, in the course of a comparatively short time,
realize the power which lies in them. Often their leaders are men
of signal ability, men who can hold their own in discussion or in
action with the ablest and best-educated men in the community.
(2) Louis
Brandeis wrote about a Boston company
called Filnes in his book, Business - A Profession (1914)
The Filnes recognized that
the function of retail distribution should be undertaken as a social
service, equal in dignity and responsibility to the function of production;
and that it should be studied with equal intensity in order that the
service may be performed with high efficiency, with great economy,
and with nothing more than a fair profit to the retailer. They recognized
that to serve their own customers properly the relations of the retailer
to the producer must be fairly and scientifically adjusted; and, among
other things, that it was the concern of the retailers to know whether
the goods which he sold were manufactured under conditions which were
fair to the workers - fair as to wages, hours of work, and sanitary
conditions.
The Filnes are of course exceptional men; but there are in America
today many with like perception and like spirit. The paths broken
by such pioneers will become the peopled highways. Their exceptional
methods will become accepted methods. Then the term "big business"
will lose its sinister meaning, and will take on a new significance.
"Big business" will then mean business big not in bulk or
power but great in service and grand in manner. "Big business"
will then mean professionalized business, as distinguished from the
occupation of petty trafficking or more moneymaking. And as the profession
of business develops, the great industrial and social problems expressed
in the present social unrest will one by one find solution.
(3) William
Douglas, ruling against the United States Steel Corporation
in 1948.
We have here the
problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into
our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness shows how size
can become a menace - both industrial and social. It can be an industrial
menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative
competitors. It can be a social menace - because of its control of
prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage
on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds
of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether
we have prosperity or depression - an economy of abundance or scarcity.
Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis,
size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over
our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can
be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act
is that it should not
exist. For all power tends to develop into a government
in itself. Power that controls the economy
should be in the hands of elected representatives
of the people, not in the hands of an industrial
oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized.
It should be scattered into many hands
so that the fortunes of the people will not be
dependent on the whim or caprice, the political
prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed
men. The fact that they are not vicious
men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant.
That is the philosophy and the command
of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory
of hostility to the concentration in private hands
of power so great that only a government of
the people should have it.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
