IX

More important than law school was my growing closeness to Friedrich, who was a reflective person with interesting ideas and serious interests. He had originally looked forward to a career that would bridge Heidelberg and Harvard, much as Harold Laski had linked England and the United States in his transatlantic forays. But when Hitler came to power, Friedrich, who had feared that prospect, decided to become an American citizen. And what better way to become American than to buy a farm? In the depths of the Depression, Vermont farms were cheap. Many had been purchased with Federal Land Bank mortgages at very low interest. I had inherited some money from my grandmother and I put it into a farm Friedrich and I bought jointly. In my last law school years we would go up weekends, staying at a tourist home and spending our time clearing brush and working on the farmhouse itself, a sizable place that had been turned into a granary. And of course we would talk endlessly. Through him I met Gaetano Salvemini, a refugee from Mussolini's Italy, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a fascinating German refugee, and many others. (Friedrich and I were to work later on a project he founded and I directed for retraining refugee lawyers and jurists.) Friedrich encouraged the Busch family and Rudolf Serkin, also refugees from Germany, to relocate in Marlboro, near Brattleboro. We both enjoyed meeting Vermonters, whether gentlemen farmers or herdsmen, county agents or bankers. In The New Belief in the Common Man (1942) Friedrich expressed a faith in the capacity of ordinary Americans for self-government. That faith grew in part out of our experience with the Agricultural Extension Service and with self-reliant, competent dairy farmers in New England; it left out of account the slovenly farmers whose barns we visited, looking for cows to purchase. We were in agreement in our opposition to plebiscites and to proportional representation, were admirers of representative constitutional government, and were aware of virtues in the federal systems of both Australia and the United States.

Friedrich had wide academic interests, having written a book on

Althusius and having immersed himself in Roman law, early European history, and political philosophy. The study of public opinion was something of a side interest for him, but it was already close to my interests in contemporary events and history. I learned from him to do what I still do today, which is to look at the letter columns of a newspaper or journal as a way of getting a sense of opposing views. Later he was to bring Charles Siepmann over from the British Broadcasting Corporation, where he had been director of research, to introduce the study of mass communications for the first time at Harvard.^[6]

Before me, every person who had preceded the Brandeis clerkship by a postgraduate year at Harvard Law School had received a doctorate in law. However, I had offended Dean Roscoe Pound by arranging for Karl Llewellyn to come up from Columbia for a talk billed as "What's Wrong with the Harvard Law School?" and by asking my faculty friend Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (who still suffered, despite his national distinction as a civil libertarian, from not having made law review), to talk in rebuttal. Pound first forbade us the use of a law school classroom but then relented. But he was also feuding with Frankfurter, and the combination of animosities led him to change the rules, so that the doctorate in law could no longer be given to anyone who came to the requisite year immediately after law school. To me it did not matter at all; the doctorate was useful to those planning to teach, especially in the nonelite law schools, or to any hoping for an academic career outside a law school. But since I had at the time no such aspirations, I did not contest the dean's ruling.

I did something else, however, which my friends considered reckless. Frankfurter had formed a strong dislike of Friedrich. He suspected this blond Teuton of being a secret sympathizer of the Nazis, and in addition I think he was jealous of Friedrich's influence over me. The person designated as the Brandeis clerk usually worked with Frankfurter on a thesis. But I intended to work with Friedrich; I held my ground, and Frankfurter, to his credit, said that though he distrusted Friedrich, I could work with him if that was my preference during this post-law school year.