The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (review)

In 1978, the State University of New York Press issued the fifth volume of the Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, ably edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy. "We have finished," the editors announced. Having transcribed and edited more than 3,000 of Brandeis's 14,000 known letters, covering every aspect of his long and eventful career, the editors considered their project completed.

The Brandeis collection lay no claim to comprehensiveness. The editors always described theirs as a "representative sampling" of the justice's immense correspondence; fuller collections soon became available on microfilm. In addition, letters in private collections, including many letters to Felix Frankfurter and large numbers of family letters, remained for many years confidential. Brandeis had coauthored a celebrated article in 1890 on "the right to privacy," and some of his correspondents practiced what he preached.

In 1991, Urofsky and Levy published a supplementary volume to the Brandeis papers entitled "Half Brother, Half Son" based on the newly opened correspondence of Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter. Aresponse, in part, to Bruce Allen Murphy's controversial The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices (1982), the volume sought to illuminate the spirit in which Brandeis and Frankfurter had conducted their extrajudicial activities, by making available to the public Brandeis's side of the correspondence (Frankfurter's letters to Brandeis were apparently destroyed). A footnote to that volume disclosed that "a large collection of letters from Brandeis to members of his immediate family" had been discovered by Brandeis's grandchildren, after the death of their mother, and promised that "a volume containing many of these letters will be published in the future."

Eleven years later, that promise has been fulfilled. The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis presents a side of Louis Brandeis not heretofore available to scholars. Where the public Brandeis often appeared cold, detached, and aloof, here, in the words of the editors, "we see a young man head-over-heels in love, who throughout his long life maintained an unwavering devotion to his wife, a daily interest in the lives and careers of his daughters, and a touching pride in the youthful achievements of his grandchildren" (p. xii). The letters provide old-fashioned advice concerning health, work, and money; occasionally biting comments concerning people and events of the day (President Taft, for example, is once described as "the fat man"); and reports on the books Brandeis was reading and the innumerable men and women with whom he was meeting.

From a Jewish perspective, the family letters are especially interesting, particularly for what they reveal about the Brandeis family's ties to Jewish life. We learn, for example, that the most important holidays on the Brandeis calendar were birthdays and anniversaries, followed by Christmas, which seems to have been regularly celebrated with gifts and, at least for a time, with a tree. In 1900, Brandeis reassured his young daughters, who were away visiting relatives in New York, that "the Christmas tree and Santa Claus are very anxious to see you." Jewish holidays, by contrast, go unmentioned in the letters, save for a single occasion in 1927 when Brandeis sent his daughter Susan his "greeting for the New Year" on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Susan's husband, Jacob H. Gilbert, had by then become deeply involved in Jewish affairs, and Susan herself was active in Hadassah.

Brandeis's other daughter, Elizabeth, intermarried and shared none of her father's Jewish or Zionistic interests. Her husband, Paul Rauschenbush, was the son of the well-known liberal Protestant theologian Walter Rauschenbush. Brandeis, we know, approved of the match, though we learn from these letters that he and his wife did not attend the couple's wedding. When his niece, Amy, married a non-Jewish schoolteacher named McCreary, Brandeis expressed even warmer emotions, describing himself as "very happy." "It seems to me," he wrote in a letter to his brother, "[that] the two are...