Saint Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645
~ Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo was a Christian theologian and philosopher from Thagaste, Numidia Cirtensis and the Bishop of Hippo Regius. Wikipedia
Born November 13, 354 AD, Thagaste
Died August 28, 430 AD (age 75 years), Ruins of Hippo (Hippo Regius), Annaba, Algeria
| “I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I’m still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.” |
–Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury was a celebrated American author and screenwriter who worked across genres like fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery. His unique style combined the poetic imagery of Thomas Wolfe with the crispness of Ernest Hemingway. Bradbury’s work explored themes like censorship, racism, technology, and the importance of imagination. He’s considered a significant figure in both American literature and science fiction. (Wikipedia.org)
Born August 22, 1920, Waukegan, IL
Died June 5, 2012 (age 91 years), Los Angeles, CA
Schweitzer in 1955
~ Albert Schweitzer
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was a German polymath from Alsace. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. Wikipedia
Born January 14, 1875, Kaysersberg-Vignoble, France
Died September 4, 1965 (age 90 years), Lambarene, Gabon
YouTube Movies & TV Where’s My Roy Cohn? unearths the origins of a master manipulator’s ascent, revealing how an enigmatic and disturbed man shaped our current political world. This shocking film exposes Cohn’s malign influence and contextualizes him as a modern Machiavelli, tracing his rise to national prominence-first as prosecutor of the Rosenbergs, then as handmaiden to Joseph McCarthy. From director Matt Tyrnauer (Studio 54, Valentino: The Last Emperor) comes this fascinating look at the man who personified the dark arts of 20th-century politics.
Posted in Health and Social Policy
The incredible life and times of the Catholic who served the poor and gave hell to everyone else
by Maureen Tkacik August 6, 2026 (Prospect.org)
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
The process of evaluating canonization for Dorothy Day had its 25th anniversary last year, which might seem inauspicious if it did not require a thorough evaluation of all the books, journals, newspaper stories, diary entries, personal letters, and FBI intelligence memos composed by and about her and her closest associates for all 83 years of her life. Day’s FBI file alone, admittedly duplicative, is 830 pages long. There’s a whole book dedicated to her letters to and from Thomas Merton, who like just about every one of Day’s good friends spent considerable time under intelligence agency surveillance. Her granddaughter wrote a tell-all family memoir detailing her mother’s decision to divorce her gay husband and leave the Church, and the horrific sex abuse cult that emerged from a breakaway faction at a farm owned by the Catholic Worker. And she spent the most thoroughly documented period of her life, between her 1916 arrival in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and her 1927 conversion to Catholicism, in the company of other alcohol-abusing communist writers, nearly all of whom also wrote dishy memoirs detailing their youthful indiscretions, scandals, and flames. Day wrote a roman à clef detailing posing as a nude model and her destructive romance with a womanizing writer. She was arrested for prostitution and received an abortion from a greasy-haired hobo doctor who was famously one of Emma Goldman’s lovers.
There is, in short, just too much tea on this woman, the whole glorious Catholic Worker Movement she founded, and the left-wing icons who traveled around them: John Dos Passos, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and more. Two of Day’s Jewish ex-boyfriends sparred with Ernest Hemingway. Day left the first to become a kind of complicated, mostly platonic muse and drinking companion to Eugene O’Neill; Day could drink him and any other man under the table, at least according to poet Malcolm Cowley, who was at the time married to Day’s best friend, sex-positive late-in-life Catholic convert Peggy Baird Johns. Another poet, W.H. Auden, paid a delinquent fine from the city on Day’s behalf.
You can feel the canonization council wondering, how is there no prestige TV epic on these people? And yet even during those years, Day emerged with her saintliness intact. The night she got arrested for prostitution, for example, she was ministering to a sick woman who happened to be the side chick of her Mr. Big figure, Lionel Moise. She watched a woman experience severe morphine withdrawal and ruminated on the tragedy of sin. She broke it off with Moise soon afterward, though he nearly killed her first. She was 108 pounds when she moved back to New York, where Peggy nursed her back to health and convinced her to buy a small cottage on Staten Island, where her friend Mike Gold bought a place down the road and the journey finally began.
IT WAS MIKE GOLD who first noticed that Dorothy Day had a thing for God, back when he still wrote under his given name, Itzok Granich, and the two started dating after bonding over labor rights and Dostoyevsky and their differing views on the Lower East Side, Day’s adopted neighborhood where Gold had spent his whole impoverished life. Both Gold and Day had downwardly mobile parents: His father had been injured working as a painter, and hers had lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, moving the family to a drab gray apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago. Day still owned nice things and presented like “a well-bred young woman,” but there was something she envied in her immigrant neighbors’ fire escapes, vegetable gardens, and glorious kitchen smells, a fortitude drawn from old-world culture and religion that contrasted with someone like her father—a person whom modern right-wingers would deem a “heritage American”—steeped in Calvinism and regularly gambling away the family’s money.
Day’s grandfathers had fought on opposing sides in the Civil War, and her father’s mom still seethed with resentment about it. No one on either end of her family had any memory of a life before America, a Calvinist experiment whose identity was too inextricably intertwined with the vulgar profit maximization logic to have imbued its natives with anything profound. Catholicism seemed to her a part of this, as she’d thought ever since accidentally barging in as a child on her friend Kathryn’s mother kneeling down in prayer in her ghastly tenement apartment.
Gold assured Day that Catholicism wasn’t everything she fantasized about; after all, Orthodox Judaism was even older than the Church, and the pointless version of it his robotic Hebrew school teacher feebly attempted to indoctrinate him into was wholly devoid of meaning or beauty, in his estimation. But he understood what Day was searching for because he loved Tolstoy too, just as she gravitated toward the “Marxists, the IWWs who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion,” precisely because they were so “eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world they were fighting to obtain for their brothers.” Gold was, she would always say, the only one of Day’s “bohemian friends” who instantly understood and accepted her need to devote more time to God.
Seven years after their brief engagement, Day and Gold became neighbors, using the proceeds of their respective “novels” to buy cottages on the same Staten Island block, where Gold’s mother visited Day with occasional home-cooked kosher meals. Gold’s book had been such a success that he’d adapted his John Brown biography as a play, and Day’s relative lack of success was eclipsed by the fact that she was now Catholic, pregnant, and blissfully happy. And yet Gold hadn’t been entirely wrong about the Church. The congregations were full of second- and third-generation parishioners trained to “cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington, all part of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad. These are attitudes the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian, the Slovak and all races begin to acquire in school. So they change their names, forget their birthplace, their language, and no longer listen to their mothers when they say, ‘when I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily’” and “try to be something which they call ‘an American.’”
Gold was after something different. As the dedication of his 1930 novel Jews Without Money rhapsodized:
O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.
O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live.
O great Beginning!
At the time, the highest-profile American Catholic was Detroit-based priest Father Coughlin, a conspiracy-minded, increasingly fascist-leaning populist whose syndicated radio show drew 30 million weekly listeners throughout the Depression. Fatefully, Gold’s brother, who was living in the Staten Island place, invited Day to the event that would change her life: the first “hunger march” the Communist Party and unions were holding in Washington on behalf of unemployed workers, who at that point comprised nearly 20 percent of the workforce. The protest attracted 3,000 marchers, most in rusted jalopies out of The Grapes of Wrath, she later recalled. As they began to approach the border of the city, cops barricaded the highway, trapping the marchers in their freezing cold cars for three nights. Day watched with “joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women” as they were finally given permission to march and they streamed out into the streets.
“How our dear Lord must love them, I kept thinking to myself,” she would write later, musing: “Where are all the Catholics?” She stopped at the newly built shrine at Catholic University for Mass and contemplated the fact that years after her baptism, she still didn’t really know any fellow Catholics.
THEN PETER MAURIN—a well-dressed and highly educated crank from a big French farming family in Languedoc who had spent some time in the Christian Brothers—began showing up at Day’s door on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, and often talked at her for hours until he returned to a flophouse, or later, whatever bed was free in one of the holdings in the Catholic Worker’s small portfolio of barely habitable real estate. He proposed she launch a newspaper and call it the Catholic Radical. She found a press that agreed to print 2,500 copies for $57, but she preferred The Catholic Worker, which hurt Maurin’s feelings just enough that he stopped coming to her apartment every day, but not enough to stay away very long or stop submitting the short poems he called “Easy Essays” for publication.
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The newspaper debuted on May Day 1933, the same spring that unemployment hit its all-time high of 25.6 percent, with a front-page story on the suppression and censorship of two investigations into a Mississippi flood control project overseen by the Department of War where the working conditions had been deemed sub-slavery: 120-degree heat, beatings from foremen, ten-cent-an-hour wages docked for egregiously marked-up gruel, men sleeping in airless tents on the mud. Another story detailed the complaints of a garment worker who went from making $35 a week to being unable to find the same work for $8. A column inside excerpted a Paulist priest’s recent speech opining that the Church was “pregnant with promise, but Catholics still-born with prejudice … not so much because we are Catholics as because we are Americans.”
With a bottomless supply of down-and-out volunteers looking to help write or distribute the newspaper, the Catholic Worker office quickly turned into a de facto soup kitchen and boardinghouse, and soon enough they found a larger space in Little Italy that enabled them to feed a thousand souls each day. Almost instantly, it became easy for the newspaper to detail a squadron of supporters to any picket line or protest, and Day was especially emphatic about showing up for causes often derided in the newspapers as “communist.”
In 1935, the Worker began hosting anti-Nazi protests outside the German consulate and the church of a priest known to support Hitler’s agenda, with Maurin carrying a sign that read, “Spiritually we are all Semites.” Catholic antisemitism was overheating at the time, thanks in part to the monstrous radio-fueled popularity of Father Coughlin, whose own newspaper Social Justice employed subway-platform hawkers who’d occasionally get in street fights with the volunteers who sold The Catholic Worker. When Coughlin published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion just months before Kristallnacht, Day teamed up with the Jesuits to publish 100,000 copies of a detailed rebuttal of the legendary antisemitic hoax and demand the Roosevelt administration begin accepting Jewish refugees.
As with so many bastions of the American left, The Catholic Worker’s power and reach peaked in the 1930s, when its circulation approached 200,000 and most of the souls it fed and housed were merely unemployed workers. As World War II approached, the men and women who frequented the breadlines and boardinghouses became less palatable, as did Day’s principled opposition to all war, and the alleged hotbed of “subversion” that was her network of soup kitchens. All this occasioned J. Edgar Hoover’s 1943 FBI inquiry, which wasn’t quite razor-sharp: The Bureau’s trusted informants seem to have believed Day was a recent Russian émigré. But hundreds of churches and Catholic organizations canceled their subscriptions to the Worker over its anti-war absolutism.
Still, the Church itself—and specifically, New York’s often villainous warmongering Cardinal Francis Spellman—protected Dorothy Day, even through her scathing condemnations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment camps, the gravediggers’ strike of 1949, and the McCarthy-era show trials that nuked the careers of so many of her old colleagues and friends. She was constantly on the road preaching the Catholic Worker gospel against napalm, CIA assassination campaigns, segregation, voter suppression, the blockade of Cuba; and for radical love, liberation theology, the dignity of all humans, and Vatican II.
Though it was not so easy to find a physical copy of The Catholic Worker in the 1950s, its sentences could be rare gems. (The designated obituary writer’s account of an alcoholic named Jim Connors who had been sleeping in a coffin-sized chicken coop before he found a bed at the Catholic Worker, from whose roof he subsequently fell to a ghastly death, was one of the more affecting works of literature I’ve consumed in a long time.)
Day lived until Thanksgiving weekend, 1980. On the day she was buried, three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker in El Salvador were abducted, raped, and murdered at the hands of a fascist death squad backed by the United States, their mutilated bodies left to rot on a roadside as a warning to the thoroughly terrorized peasantry. The following year, longtime Catholic Worker staffer Jane Sammon, who had met another murdered El Salvadoran activist just a few months earlier, described the shock and nausea of learning all over again “what the Church in Latin America had known for more than a decade: The Gospel brings death to those who preach it.”
They were not the first martyrs for Day’s radical Catholicism. A 22-year-old Catholic Worker staffer set himself on fire outside the United Nations building in 1965 in solidarity with the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who had done the same to protest the Cardinal Spellman–promoted South Vietnamese government’s persecution and periodic massacring of Buddhists a few years prior. And some followers of Day’s disciple Thomas Merton are convinced that the CIA was behind his bizarre “electrocution” in 1968. But the price of practicing Dorothy Day–style Catholicism would rise considerably in the era of Reagan and John Paul II. President Reagan staunchly backed the openly Hitlerian El Salvadoran junta who ordered the nuns’ assassinations, along with those of Archbishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero, six Jesuit priests, and at least a dozen other members of the Catholic clergy for the sin of “spreading communism.” Pope John Paul II chose to respond to the bloodbath by forcing one of American foreign policy’s fiercest critics in the American government, the Jesuit priest and Democratic congressman from Massachusetts Fr. Robert Drinan, to resign from public office.
As global communism fizzled and the fascist Catholicism of the Francoist project Opus Dei flourished, the radical Catholicism of Day entered a period of near hibernation almost akin to that imposed upon such subversives as Mike Gold, who worked as a janitor in the 1950s as the circulation of his columns dropped to 5,000.
NEARLY A CENTURY after his heyday, even Mike Gold is in the throes of a resurrection. It turns out the villain of Jews Without Money, who sets in action the protagonist’s slide into destitution when he scams his father out of his ownership stake in a small zipper factory, is a hard-line Zionist, whose ideology is cast as an extension of the same virulent racism that leads him to return to the tenements to sell fractional investments in a segregated housing development in the New Jersey suburbs. Gold later edited New Masses when it published a 1935 prophetic takedown of “Jewish Hitler” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the bloodthirsty Zionist fascism that currently terrorizes the Middle East; and he was an early advocate of a “binational Arab-Jewish” one-state solution in Palestine championed by the beloved new mayor of New York, who appears to have cribbed his political identity from Fiorello La Guardia, the “one-man melting pot” who led the city when Gold and Day were at the pinnacle of their political powers.
Day’s own return to relevance was championed by no less than the deeply reactionary Pope Benedict, in one of his last speeches before the mysterious resignation that unleashed the Vatican’s first Jesuit pontiff, the irrepressible Pope Francis, who inspired this deeply lapsed Catholic to belatedly have her own sons baptized in a small, historically Black Catholic church about a mile down the road from the basilica where Day tearfully prayed for the answer that became the Catholic Worker Movement. I only began attending weekly Mass there, however, during the early weeks of Pope Leo XIV, which coincided with the breathtaking evil unleashed by the second term of Donald Trump, whose institutional death squads staffed by Palantir hackers and anarcho-capitalist legal theorists waged dirty war on every remaining American organization designed to promote the public interest: hospitals and schools, infectious disease trackers and air traffic controllers, weather balloons and disaster responders, IRS auditors and taxation watchdogs.
Day came of age in an America that lacked most of those things, that used the awesome powers of its federal government to break strikes and massacre Bonus Marchers and execute Sacco and Vanzetti and colonize Cuba for the slaveholder class and employ the goons who’d beaten and tortured her during her first stint in prison for protesting World War I. She achieved national fame during the governance of progressive men like FDR and La Guardia, but she harbored no illusions that a state founded to promote capitalist greed or an ideology developed in service of said greed’s eradication could nurture the radical, indefatigable love she sought to spread through humankind.
She famously inspired the conversion of one Catholic Worker subway hawker when she returned to the office after Mass in a huff that the organist had started pounding out “The Star-Spangled Banner” immediately following Communion; as the whole congregation obediently stood, Day herself, much to the awe of her disciple, had knelt back down and prayed for a laity that would rebel against that warmongering song. In 1975, The Catholic Worker published a column suggesting that on the occasion of the American bicentennial, readers should “repent” for their nation’s murderous subjugations and genocides of Native and Black Americans, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the “plundering of our resources to build up the monstrous stockpiles of diabolic weapons,” “lies and plots and murders of the FBI and CIA,” and finally of “our own indifference to the starving millions of the world.” Day was the last Catholic who would have been surprised by that same state’s facilitation of the liquidation of Gaza and the quarter-century campaign to lay waste to the Middle East, its harrowing crackdowns on anti-genocide protesters and its systematic imprisonment and torture of vast swaths of brown-skinned Americans for the crime of standing in the Home Depot parking lot.
In a decade of unprecedented populist state reform, Dorothy Day cast her lot with the Catholic Church—of all things!—purely on the basis of a kind of spiritual hunch that for all the Vatican’s hypocrisy and duplicity, the revolutionary philosophy it was designed to sustain still meant something in the hearts of its believers, and that those believers would change the world if they heeded the call.
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This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. More by Maureen Tkacik
It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to the quantum foam.
The best shorthand we have for it is soul.
“One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) lamented in her diary. But writing directly about the soul, and with tremendous insight, is precisely what she does in a wonderful essay about the essays of Montaigne — his epochal “attempt to communicate a soul,” a “miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul” — included in her classic Common Reader (public library).
Virginia Woolf
Contemplating the soul — that most private part of us — as “so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public,” she writes:
Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he decreed to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it. Woolf writes:
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)
Observing that the souls we most wish to resemble “are always the supplest” — for “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living” — Woolf arrives at what it takes to be fully oneself:
Complement with E.E. Cummings on the courage to be yourself, Tracy K. Smith’s short, splendid poem “The Everlasting Self,” and the poetic science of how we went from cells to souls, then revisit Woolf on self-knowledge, the remedy for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the consolations of growing older, and her epiphany about the meaning of creativity.
Be Inspired Oct 7, 2025 In 1977, a famous sci-fi author attended a conference in Metz, France. What he said that day shocked everyone in the audience — he spoke about reality,. After that conference, his life took a strange turn…
Philip Kindred Dick was an American science fiction short story writer and novelist. He wrote 45 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines. Wikipedia
Born December 16, 1928, Chicago, IL
Died March 2, 1982 (age 53 years), Santa Ana, CA
(Contributed by Steve Hines)
Posted in Politics
Thomas Paine’s lifelong battle for freedom
by Thor Benson July 27, 2026 (Prospect.org)
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
When Americans discuss the Founders, there’s always a cloud of shame hanging overhead. One might like many things about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but it’s impossible to forget that these men participated in the horrific system of human bondage. A few of the Founders, though, stand out for opposing it outright.
Thomas Paine was one such figure. Paine—an author and political philosopher—was born in Thetford, England. His friend Benjamin Franklin helped him get established in Philadelphia upon his arrival to the colonies in 1774. There, he wrote the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and swept early America. The pamphlet became the defining argument for America’s independence—for many Americans, both the first and the most persuasive argument for severing allegiance to the British king, or to any king.
In many ways, Paine was a fiercer supporter of democracy than many of the more celebrated Founding Fathers, whose mistrust of the “common people” led them to put limits on voting rights and popular representation in the halls of government. Those were limits that Paine also opposed outright.
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today.
“I think most people know him largely because of his pamphlet Common Sense, which came out in 1776 and had an impact on galvanizing Americans in favor of independence from Britain,” William Hogeland, an author and historian who focuses on the founding era, told The American Prospect. “It was dramatic because he attacked the idea of the British Constitution and said, basically, they have no constitution. Where is this constitution? Because it wasn’t written down. He attacked the idea that the Crown was part of a constitutional, balanced government.”
Paine portrayed the king as a “royal brute,” Hogeland says. This was seen as somewhat extreme at the time, because even colonists who favored independence weren’t that critical of the king. For that reason, Common Sense helped lay the groundwork for the Declaration of Independence, which also excoriated King George at length.
“The pamphlet sells extremely well, whether it’s in Charleston or Boston. Maybe … the idea is not completely alien. It’s more that he finds a way to make the case, and the case looks pretty appealing in his hands,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Prospect. “It’s less than six months before the Declaration of Independence becomes the actualization of what he’s proposed in his little pamphlet.”
Paine became quite influential in early America. He also seems to have had a personality that was sometimes difficult for people to accept. He knew what he believed and was not willing to waver from those beliefs. To read about him is to envision a passionate, stubborn man who might have had a hard time keeping friends.
“We gather from reading about him that he was very intense in his personality, but also he had a friendly, casual quality,” Hogeland says. “I think a lot of people see Paine as just like a very adroit propagandist for new ideas because he was such a good writer. But I disagree. I think he did have original ideas. In fact, you can sort of tell [that] from the degree to which a lot of the other Founders kind of recoil from his thinking.”
Both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton—future Federalists with a disinclination to popular democracy—regarded Paine as extreme. Adams famously wrote his pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, in response to Paine’s ideas. He wrote in favor of independence but was not comfortable with the hyper-democratic government Paine was proposing.
The country was still years away from the writing and adoption of the Constitution when these pamphlets were being released, but they did set a foundation for what would eventually go into that document.
“There’s no way Paine knew that he was setting up the mechanism for a constitution,” Rosenfeld says. “But I think in times of disorder and dismay, sometimes a text can articulate clearly the discontent people are feeling. A very similar thing happens at the start of the French Revolution, when What Is the Third Estate?, Abbé Sieyès’s little pamphlet, similarly gives an agenda to people who would go on to be revolutionaries.”
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today. He didn’t want anything like the Senate or the Electoral College, which might act as bulwarks against popular majorities and the will of the people. He wanted judges to be elected by the public. He didn’t want a solo executive but rather something of a committee. While many of the Founders feared what might happen if you gave the people too much power, Paine (like Franklin) did not.
“He really doesn’t come from the aristocratic worlds of people like Hamilton or Madison,” Rosenfeld says. “He’s kind of anti-elitist.”
During the Revolutionary War, Paine was a volunteer for the Continental Army, and he ended up writing The American Crisis about what he was observing. He famously wrote the line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine was essentially cheerleading the war effort and trying to convince his fellow patriots to keep fighting, and that, as difficult as the struggle appeared, it would all be worth it in the end. The American Crisis also found a wide, appreciative, and strategically important readership.
Once the war had concluded, despite his successes and his fame, Paine was broke. He ended up having to argue for compensation from individual states and the newly forming American government. He was eventually awarded $3,000 from Congress for his contributions to the American Revolution.
“He did get some money in the end from Congress, but he wasn’t making it here,” Hogeland says. “He felt he had to leave. And so then he becomes kind of a citizen of the world type.”
Paine was also becoming something of an inventor at this point, pitching an innovative bridge concept to investors and governmental officials, but to no avail. In April of 1787, he decided to take his ideas elsewhere. He returned to Britain, but he failed to raise the investment needed to fully realize his project. He eventually left for France, arriving just as the French Revolution was commencing. Once again, a revolutionary was surrounded by other revolutionaries.
“He goes on to play a pivotal role in the French Revolution,” Rosenfeld says. “He becomes perhaps the first international revolutionary, in that sense.”
In 1791, Paine authored Rights of Man, one of the most influential defenses and manifestos of the Revolution published at that time. Again, he put pen to his democratic impulses and his rejection of monarchy. Again, Paine synthesized ideas that were circulating at the time. On both sides of the Atlantic, he had a preternatural ability to put those ideas into words that resonated with the people. In Britain, Rights of Man sold some 100,000 copies in three months of publication.
“He ends up in France as a hero of the French Revolution, and they wanted him partly because he was a hero of the American Revolution,” Hogeland says. “Paine spoke across France and was even made a member of the revolutionary government.”
As anyone familiar with the French Revolution would suspect, that was not the safest place to be. Paine ended up facing condemnation for opposing the execution of the king: It was wrong, he insisted, and a mistake to turn the king into a martyr. Eventually, like many of his fellow revolutionists, he was arrested and spent ten months in prison. He almost ended up being executed by Robespierre and his lieutenants, but narrowly escaped that fate.
“He barely missed being guillotined himself in France,” Hogeland says. “Because he had such an idiosyncratic personality and such an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world and politics, he was often at odds with allies as well as with enemies.”
The American government didn’t do much of anything to assist Paine in his time of need in France. The U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, did not seem interested in securing Paine’s release from prison or helping him escape the guillotine. Later, after Paine had been released, James Monroe became the minister to France and came to his aid.
With America badly divided over the French Revolution, and the administration of John Adams resolutely set against it and its Jeffersonian allies in the States, Paine didn’t return to the United States until 1802—one year after Jefferson assumed the presidency.
“He thought, ‘Oh, now our guys are in. Now the more democratic people are in,’” Hogeland said. “But he had been writing all this stuff that was so controversial, especially The Age of Reason, which was very anti–organized religion. It became so controversial that even the Jeffersonians thought he was too hot to handle.”
He certainly didn’t return a hero. He still had those who celebrated his work and appreciated his contributions to the country’s independence, but he was now seen as a polarizing figure. Many hated him for his criticisms of organized religion.
New York had granted Paine some land in New Rochelle for his contributions to the American Revolution, so Paine decided to settle there. He continued to write and was a supporter of the Jefferson administration, but his relevance had severely dwindled. Paine died at the age of 72 in 1809. “Very few people came to his funeral, and nobody who was still around from the glory days of 1776 showed up,” Hogeland says.
His reputation, for better and worse, outlived him. Theodore Roosevelt famously called him “a filthy little atheist,” though Paine was in fact a deist. As the 20th century proceeded, however, Paine became a hero to liberals and the left, who found him to be both the most democratic and the most modern of the Founding Fathers.
“His ideas don’t seem that radical to us now, because they’ve become, in a way, our common sense,” Rosenfeld says. “His style and his ideas have become so ordinary to us that it’s hard to actually see that he was advocating for things that were rather radical in their moment, whether it was about race or religion or economics or political rights.”
Today, most of us understand the limits that the Founders placed on the democratic and egalitarian sentiments in our foundational documents. Hogeland pointed out, though, that “in 1776, the anti-democratic, elitist impulse wasn’t the only American impulse. There were radically democratic and populist ideas in play too, and Paine was maybe their most articulate and thoughtful spokesperson.”
You won’t find many statues of Thomas Paine in town squares or abutting county courthouses around the country. It was his ideas, however, that both made this country possible and tilted it, over time, toward the genuine popular democracy we still struggle to create.
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This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
Thor Benson is an independent journalist who has contributed to The American Prospect, Wired, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He’s currently based in Chicago. More by Thor Benson
Posted in Politics
If Frederick Douglass, a former slave who saw the dream of emancipation drown in Jim Crow, didn’t give up on this country, then we have no excuse.
by Ryan Cooper July 28, 2026 (Prospect.org)
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
America is suffering a crisis of faith. The president, rapidly losing control of his faculties, is leading a coterie of degenerate cronies, literal malefactors of great wealth, who are destroying whole wings of the White House when they’re not gorging themselves on the public treasury with corrupt contracts and giveaways.
Many Americans, particularly in elite circles, seem stunned and bewildered. The worst people in the country are in power, again, and laying waste to everything. Every week, Trump does something an order of magnitude worse than Watergate, and it’s a two-day story at most. It’s hard to muster the energy to care about so many scandals.
I frankly share the stunned feeling, sometimes. Is a nation stupid enough to elect Donald Trump twice worth saving? Maybe the American people deserve to get what they voted for, good and hard.
At those times, I think about Frederick Douglass. There was someone who had a mountain of reasons to give up entirely on the United States. Instead, he poured out a lifetime of grueling effort to end slavery and secure civil rights for African Americans. He lived long enough to see slavery ended, but also to see the resurgence of white supremacy that violently destroyed the brief Reconstruction experiment with multiracial democracy in the South. Yet even with so much of his life’s work in ruins, he never gave up on America or freedom. So how can we?
DOUGLASS’S LIFE STORY SEEMS designed to embody all the contradictions and possibilities of 19th-century America. Born not just a slave, but a mixed-race slave likely fathered by one of his enslavers or one of his enslaver’s sons, he was the product of arguably the single most appalling feature of antebellum slavery: the widespread habit among male Southern slave owners of raping their female slaves and then enslaving their own resulting children.
He successfully escaped bondage from eastern Maryland in 1838, at age 20. After a few years working odd jobs, he was discovered by the abolitionist movement. The discovery of Douglass’s immense oratorical talent was instantly appealing to abolitionist organizers for obvious reasons. He would prove that a Black person can succeed at the highest level, even if he were a result of the dreaded race-mixing, without any formal education, inherited wealth, or powerful family connections. Nobody has ever come closer to the impossible idea of lifting himself by his own bootstraps.
Abolitionists like Douglass toured the northern United States tirelessly, speaking at thousands of abolitionist rallies. This was a dangerous business even in New England, and he was repeatedly the victim of discrimination, heckling, threats, and assaults. One particularly violent brawl left him with a permanently disfigured right hand.
Eventually, he wrote an autobiography, which became an instant classic, and went on extensive international tours. By the mid-1850s, he was a world-famous speaker, writer, journalist, newspaper editor, and all-around celebrity. He ended up being the most-photographed American of the 19th century, and certainly the most important civil rights activist in the world.
In a sense, he was the 19th century’s version of an influencer—except instead of producing short-form video optimized to catch the attention of “masses” of individuals scrolling on their phones, Douglass brought the show to the actual masses, day after day, for decades. Through years of practice, he honed his routine and technique to a mirror finish; a reliable crowd-pleaser was his bitterly sarcastic “Slaveholder’s Sermon,” in which he parodied the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Southern Christianity.
“Oh, consider the wonderful goodness of God! Look at your hard, horny hands, your strong muscular frames, and see how mercifully he has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill!” Douglass had the pastor say to his slaves. “While to your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers, he has given brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working” (emphasis in original).
From a modern standpoint, it is almost unbelievable that Douglass could get huge crowds of people, most of whom did not have even a high school education, to pay rapt attention to flowery, hours-long speeches, often full of learned citations and elaborate arguments. But they kept coming back for more. There may be something to the idea that television and cellphones have ruined the national attention span; professor friends of mine relate that if they assign any Douglass speech, it must be heavily abridged or students simply will not read it.
DOUGLASS’S FIRST MENTOR was William Lloyd Garrison, one of the classic American-style utopian idealists, disgusted by the grubby realities of politics. Garrisonians hated political parties, lambasted the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, advocated pure “moral suasion,” and, as so often with political radicals, were highly prone to sectarian infighting.
After a few years, Douglass came to understand that such a naïve, hyper-moralistic approach—Garrison argued that government itself was essentially always wrong—could never abolish slavery. Abolitionists would have to descend into the political muck and get dirty grappling for power.
Navigating the pitfalls of politics without losing sight of one’s moral principles is always the most difficult part of radicalism, and Douglass managed it with rare dexterity. After having briefly fled the country for fear of prosecution over his involvement with John Brown, Douglass debated the British abolitionist George Thompson in 1860 about whether the Constitution was pro- or anti-slavery. Douglass made the latter case, and while the argument was sophisticated and clever, it was also a little tendentious.
He argued, for instance, that the infamous three-fifths clause was a “downright disability” because it “deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation … Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of ‘two-fifths’ of political power to free over slave States.” Mathematically correct, but something of an evasion of how the clause gave extra political power to slave owners in proportion to how many people they owned, and quite obviously done to enlist reverence for the Constitution and the cult of the Founding Fathers on behalf of abolition.
If the argument was something of a cynical expedient in 1860, it became an open-and-shut case when the Radical Republicans added the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. That’s one way to win a debate about constitutional law.
Though he never quite reached the heights of national power, Douglass was not some bit player amid the enormous tumult of the Civil War. When fighting began, Black men were not allowed in the United States military, which Douglass attacked as unjust and counterproductive. “This is no time to fight only with your white hand, and allow your black hand to remain tied,” he argued.
When this ban was removed, thanks partly to his own influence, Douglass became a tireless military recruiter, and two of his own sons enlisted. He quickly stopped, however, when it became clear that Black troops were being abused, paid much less, denied promotions, and, worst of all, denied prisoner-of-war protections, making it more likely for them to be murdered by racist Confederate forces after capture.
Douglass met with President Lincoln in the White House and argued once more that this racist treatment was immoral and holding back the war effort. Lincoln took the complaints seriously, some rules were removed, and Douglass returned to recruiting, though the personal military position he thought was coming never arrived.
Historians have argued that the Civil War was a fairly close-run thing in 1864. Union losses were appalling during the Overland Campaign, as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant went on a sustained, grueling offensive to force the Confederacy into submission and end the war quickly. The resulting carnage and repeated setbacks were extremely unpopular, and Lincoln assumed that unless the tide turned quickly, he was going to lose the election that November. He even met with Douglass to plan a possible effort to covertly free the remaining slaves in the South, should the election be lost.
But by this time, there were roughly 200,000 Black men in the United States military, about 10 percent of the total. Without this influx of new recruits, many of whom fought and died in the bloodiest battles of 1864, Grant’s harrying of Lee might have dragged on a critical few months, leading Lincoln to lose the election to would-be Confederate appeaser George B. McClellan. In short, it is entirely possible that without Douglass’s actions to enable and then bolster Black enlistment, the Confederacy would have won its independence.
When African Americans from around the country consecrated a statue of Lincoln in 1876 (known as the Emancipation Statue, it can still be seen in Washington, D.C., today), Douglass delivered a famous oration to practically the entire national political establishment, from President Grant to the Supreme Court to congressional leaders. (As biographer David W. Blight notes, no Black person would do this again until Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.)
There, Douglass delivered a considered political verdict on Lincoln’s legacy. He stated forthrightly that Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” and that African Americans “are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” Still, “we were able to take a comprehensive view … and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position … we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
Douglass pointed out that even Lincoln’s prejudice was a necessary precondition for his political success. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Few have delivered a better summary of how to ride the edge of the politically possible.
DOUGLASS’S MOST MARKED CHARACTERISTIC was his astounding capacity for empathy. Brilliant minds are not uncommon. Much rarer is the genius with a sound moral sense—one which persists even when that person has suffered terrible injustice. Someone with Douglass’s background would have had every right to cultivate a bilious resentment against white people. But a repeated theme in his anti-slavery work was how the institution gravely harmed everyone, regardless of race.
This extended even to his unknown father. “Cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so,” Douglass wrote in his first autobiography. “Unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.”
No doubt this was partly rhetorical—by demonstrating insight into the human motivations even of his own brutal enslaver, Douglass demonstrated his own humanity, and his superior virtue to boot—but it was also true.
Douglass maintained this largeness of spirit throughout his life. He was one of a handful of men—and the only Black person of any gender—at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the first women’s rights conference in American history. There he argued strongly for women’s suffrage against more moderate factions who worried it would discredit the group, and he helped carry the day. He continued to advocate for women’s rights his whole life, even as many white feminists, embittered by the fact that Black men had gotten the vote first, and drawn into the vortex of racism that gradually consumed the post–Civil War North, welcomed segregation and Jim Crow.
“Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote,” Douglass said in an 1888 speech at an International Council of Women conference. “They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote.”
In 1867, as a xenophobic anti-Chinese panic built up, Douglass argued powerfully that the United States is a “composite nation,” and Chinese immigrants should be welcomed and granted all the benefits of citizenship. “There are such things in the world as human rights,” he said. Later, he strenuously opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Douglass was, of course, far from perfect. He was vain, egotistical, proud, touchy (particularly about racial slights), and treated his first wife quite poorly. He ended up, somewhat by accident, as the patriarch of an enormous family and coterie of hangers-on, and was forced to keep an arduous touring schedule long into his old age to make ends meet. He took over the Freedman’s Savings Bank just a few months before it collapsed, perhaps unwittingly persuading Black depositors to open accounts that were almost immediately wiped out.
Such flaws were hardly surprising in a man of his time and background. On the contrary, it is surprising that they weren’t much worse. A man who endured such a traumatic upbringing and then found his way into so much privilege could be expected to develop a severe case of megalomania, if not substance abuse. That he did not is certainly partly the result of his own noble character, but I think also because Douglass had a great moral crusade for which to fight. Struggle against injustice can give one’s life a powerful sense of purpose.
That same purpose exists today, as white supremacists once more have the upper hand. Pete Hegseth is resegregating the military, and the Republican Party is rebuilding a new Jim Crow, enabled by the Supreme Court. Just as in Douglass’s day, the voting rights of Black people in the South are being stolen by force and fraud.
In 1878, as Reconstruction was being destroyed, Douglass gave a speech remembering what the Civil War was about. “Though freedom of speech and of the ballot have for the present fallen before the shot-guns of the South, and, the party of slavery is now in the ascendant, we need bate no jot of heart or hope,” he said. “The heart of the nation is still sound and strong, and as in the past, so in the future, patriotic millions, with able captains to lead them, will stand as a wall of fire around the Republic, and in the end see Liberty, Equality, and Justice triumphant.”
Douglass made such a political prophecy come true in his own time, and we can do the same again.
I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work.
The Prospect doesn’t answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us.
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If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you’ll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.
David Dayen
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This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs. More by Ryan Cooper
Posted in Law and Justice
Louis Brandeis believed that facts could change lives and break excessive power where it accumulated.
by David Dayen July 30, 2026 (Prospect.org)
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
“Iam no theorist,” Louis Brandeis stated bluntly in the Hastings, Nebraska, Daily Republican on February 3, 1912. “I have had a large experience and I know what I am talking about.”
It’s rare to unearth a quote that gives you the full measure of a man, especially someone as varied in his interests as Brandeis. His biographer, historian Melvin Urofsky, segments his life into four careers: attorney, Progressive reformer, Zionist (out of nowhere as he approached the age of 60), and Supreme Court justice. He practically invented the concept of pro bono legal work; he revolutionized operations in the insurance, railroad, utility, and textile industries; he was a leading critic of Gilded Age monopoly trusts and the financial machinery behind them; he inspired and substantially wrote Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” economic agenda; and his landmark dissents on free speech and the right to privacy eventually became the prevailing standard in American law. But throughout all of this, Brandeis relied upon what he could see—often barely, as he had such vision trouble that fellow students had to read to him at Harvard Law so he could keep up with the workload—with his own two eyes.
Brandeis’s upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky, where his family traded grain, gave him insight into how honest businesses and farmers could achieve economic freedom. The family business was liquidated before the Panic of 1873 sent the country into a deep recession, seeding his distrust of financial engineering. His early career as a corporate lawyer taught him how well-meaning regulation could be defeated with armies of loophole hunters. He often won reforms by learning more about corporate titans’ businesses than even they knew. And his major contribution to America’s courtrooms, the Brandeis brief, was nothing more than a recitation of facts as a basis for applying law. “He called the Brandeis brief ‘what any fool knows,’” said Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University law professor and author of Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet.
The radical component of Brandeis’s Progressive Era fulminations was his attack on big business.
A statue on the campus of the university outside Boston that bears his name includes a quote Brandeis delivered in a dissent in Jay Burns Baking Co. v. Bryan (1924), a case about regulation of standard bread weights in Nebraska that feels trivial for such a definitive proclamation: “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.” The line before that in the dissent is even more on point: “Knowledge is essential to understanding, and understanding should precede judging.”
The knowledge in that instance, which Brandeis laboriously chronicled with legislative testimony, World War I Food Administration reports, and excerpts from the trade publication Bakers Weekly, involved the schemes for “short-weighting” bread loaves by a few ounces to overcharge unsuspecting customers, the numerous ways state and federal regulators had sought to outlaw such villainy, and why scrupulous bread makers suffered no appreciable cost from the rules, and indeed were relieved of the chore of “constantly watching the juggling of weight by their competitors” rather than producing quality products at a fair price.
Brandeis was as concerned with the realities of breadmaking as he was with any realities, but this recounting had a point: to admonish the Court for substituting their own judgment about the burdens of regulations over that of officials elected by the people. This offended him as “an exercise of the powers of a super-legislature—not the performance of the constitutional function of judicial review.”
Sound familiar?
AMERICA AT ITS BIRTH REBELLED at the centralized nature of the British Empire and embraced—at least rhetorically—a new form of political organization, where artisans and farmers and small merchants could exercise self-governance, take charge of their own lives, and reach their full potential. Brandeis, with his faith in democracy and trust in the people, was an heir to this tradition and to one Founder’s vision in particular. “I see him as the Jewish Jefferson,” said Rosen, who somewhat amazingly studied under one of Brandeis’s last law clerks, David Riesman.
Even Brandeis’s Zionism, a surprise given that he was never a practicing Jew, was more about building a model society than religiously inspired. He imagined a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a small-unit, agrarian collection of kibbutzim, removed from the social discord that industrialization had brought to Gilded Age America. In his naïveté, he declared that the economic benefits of this organization would bring the two peoples together. “I don’t think he would be very happy with Israel now,” Urofsky told me.
As a young attorney in Boston, Brandeis merged his Jeffersonianism with relentless practicality. He was hired to resolve a shoe manufacturer’s labor dispute: He ended up restructuring the regional shoe business so workers received more consistent pay. When the Boston Consolidated Gas Co. formed a monopoly, Brandeis proposed a “sliding scale” plan where the company’s dividend could only increase if it lowered prices for customers. He proved that railroads could save $1 million a day through scientific management—reorganizing their repair shops, more efficiently laying track—which regulators used as justification for lowering rates. When insurance policyholders hired Brandeis to protect them from the abuses of term life companies, which funneled 40 cents out of every dollar in premiums to executive salaries, agent commissions, and shareholder dividends, he came up with having savings banks sell the product, which drove commercial insurance prices down through competition.
“A lot of reformers complained about things,” Urofsky explained. “But once Brandeis identified a problem he came up with a solution.”
In working out these compromises, Brandeis referred to himself as “counsel to the situation.” In exchange, he asked for no money, which burnished his reputation as The People’s Lawyer. He could work pro bono because his law firm was extraordinarily lucrative; his partner’s family owned a successful paper mill and became the firm’s first client. Attending to the needs of the public was kind of Brandeis’s hobby. “I don’t want money or property most,” he said once to an interviewer. “I want to be free.”
This experience also gave him understanding of how even careful compromises could falter. “He thought that as an attorney … he could work out contractual relations that were mutually satisfying across the gulf of power,” said Gerald Berk, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon and another Brandeis biographer. “And then he realized, ‘Wait a minute. These guys will abuse this power.’”
This understanding sparked Brandeis’s antipathy toward any unchecked ability to impose conditions over man. “He is somebody who was extraordinarily consistent about his skepticism of concentrated power, regardless of whether it was coming from the commercial sector or from government,” said Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Indeed, in his crackdown on fraudulent life insurance, a reform he considered the crowning accomplishment of his life, he countered with a private bank option, not a public option.
This would prove uncomfortable to liberals when the Democratic hero voted to strike down a few New Deal programs on the Supreme Court. But big government wasn’t really a feature of pre–New Deal America; the radical component of Brandeis’s Progressive Era fulminations was his attack on big business.
IN “A CURSE OF BIGNESS” and a series of articles in Harper’s that were collected into the book Other People’s Money—and How the Bankers Use It, Brandeis wrote his briefs against corporate power. He considered consolidated trusts too big to manage; it was impossible for their leaders to track so many divisions. They were inherently corrupting, with their boards populated with the same self-interested insiders (he termed them “interlocking directorates”). They suppressed innovation and rejected internal improvements, making them inefficient by temperament and design, the precise opposite of the beliefs held by Robert Bork, the right-wing legal scholar who reversed much of Brandeis’s theories about competition policy in the 1970s.
The trusts were constructed and controlled by financiers with no experience in the trusts’ particular businesses, but much expertise in controlling capital to advantage themselves. Brandeis warned of a financial oligarchy that never took on risk, instead using borrowed cash to build lucrative empires that threatened the nation’s stability. Despite its thunderous reputation, Other People’s Money is mostly laden with dense regurgitations of valuations, shares of stock, and bank deposits. Yet the vigor of his pursuit suggested that Brandeis found the financiers behind monopoly even more distasteful than the monopolies themselves.
But financial control isn’t Brandeis’s primary complaint about bigness. He believed that those robbed of the ability to start their own business or purchase what they please were harmed as citizens, too. “Brandeis stands for the idea that economic independence is a fundamental condition for democratic freedom,” said Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School. There’s no record of him uttering the famous line attributed to him—that we can have a democratic society or concentration of wealth, but not both—yet he would agree with its essence.
He did say another line that speaks to his belief in how facts can change the world: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
The confrontation that elevated Brandeis as a national icon concerned the New Haven Railroad, which was in the process of rolling up all the rail lines in New England, using a fake subsidiary to purchase the stock of the last holdout, the Boston & Maine. J.P. Morgan was the New Haven’s financial patron, and thanks to its 8 percent stock dividend, practically every businessman in Boston was its champion. But Brandeis, who paid his own firm $25,000 so he could freely work on the matter, pored over the New Haven’s books and found significant financial strain that he said threatened the company’s operations and its dividend.
This outraged the city’s financial elite, who were all heavily invested in the New Haven. They claimed Brandeis was misinformed and driven by anti-bigness monomania. But though the Massachusetts legislature approved the merger in 1909, math was on Brandeis’s side. The New Haven was indeed in terrible financial shape. As stock transfers made middlemen millions, the railroad deteriorated, with a series of deadly crashes attributed to deficient maintenance. The company’s books were riddled with phony accounting. In time, the feds broke up the New Haven, the dividend was eliminated, and railway president Charles Sanger Mellen was ousted. It’s now part of Amtrak.
The 1912 election was described in Matt Stoller’s Goliath as a crossroads for how the nation would wrest democracy back from the frightening business dominance that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. President William Howard Taft, running for re-election, wanted to use existing tools of trust-busting, which were limited by the courts; former President Theodore Roosevelt, who broke from his handpicked successor and founded the Bull Moose Party, believed monopolies were inevitable but could be regulated into becoming benign.
Brandeis backed Woodrow Wilson, someone he had never spoken to until after Wilson clinched the Democratic nomination. After Brandeis wrote one congratulatory letter, Wilson summoned him to his summer cottage in Sea Girt, New Jersey, and they hammered out an entire economic platform over a three-hour working lunch. The program was Jeffersonian where Roosevelt’s was Hamiltonian, regulating not companies but competition by outlawing unfair methods like forced sales, contractual restraints, or price discrimination. It fit Brandeis’s small-government approach, and he thought it would free citizens to pursue their talents. “They believed good people should be given the opportunity to succeed, and if it was opposed by large corporations, that block should be taken away,” Urofsky said.
The country gave their votes to Wilson. While considered too controversial for the cabinet, Brandeis stage-managed a legislative burst that included the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the constitutional amendment allowing an income tax, and two anti-monopoly laws, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act. The former secured prohibitions on unfair practices while allowing the government to challenge mergers that “substantially lessen competition,” rather than just ones that create a monopoly. The FTC could study markets to identify new tactics and prevent consolidation before it formed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the public figure who most closely took on Brandeis’s role as counsel to the situation before entering public office, drew on his approach to government when devising the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “The whole point of the CFPB was not new substantive rules, a new rule declaring overdrafts illegal, but instead to change the structure so there was countervailing power to the financial predators,” she said.
The New Freedom was not wholly successful. Despite efforts to decentralize the new central bank, the same lords of finance would come to dominate it. Brandeis disliked the selections for FTC commissioners. And Wilson’s attention drifted amid the Great War and his failing health. It took the Great Depression for the country’s political elite to recognize Brandeis’s warnings. Franklin Roosevelt would eventually institute plans like the separation of commercial and investment banking and the Securities Exchange Act to outlaw stock fraud, which appeared plucked directly from Other People’s Money. (Brandeis reissued the book after the 1929 crash.)
The New Deal, then, delivered on the promise of the New Freedom, and its structure of regulated competition sustained America’s unprecedented shared prosperity in the decades following World War II.
SUCH WAS HIS IMPACT as a private citizen that Brandeis’s Supreme Court career can be addressed as almost an afterthought. The 1916 nomination fight itself, which occasioned a horror among the business class that is today reserved for Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, was among its most interesting elements. A cartoon from the era showed “Privilege,” “Wall Street,” and “Monopoly” writhing in pain while Brandeis strolls along. At one point, a petition of 55 prominent Boston Brahmins opposing the nomination was circulated, whereupon a lawyer in Brandeis’s office fashioned a chart of all their overlapping financial connections. It was supposed to run in The New Republic, then a house organ for Brandeis allies. “The editor killed it. The owner’s friends and business connections were being called out,” Rosen explained.
Brandeis sat from 1916 to 1939 on a Lochner-lite Court, repeatedly outvoted by conservatives until FDR appointees joined him during his final years on the bench. Yet he believed in the power of dissent to illuminate reason in the minds of men. And he used his familiar blend of facts, animated by America’s principles of individual liberty, to establish a legacy that would eventually convince a nation.
In Whitney v. California (1927), the Court supported punishment for a woman who organized the state’s Communist Labor Party, alleged to be a violent criminal syndicate. Brandeis concurred on technical grounds, but used the case to argue for free speech as a cornerstone of democracy. “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties,” he wrote. “They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
People must be allowed to hear all sides of the debate, because that is how ideas develop and the national character builds, Brandeis believed. Anything less is arbitrary coercion that breeds repression and hate. “I think Brandeis had very well-developed ideas about citizenship,” said Tim Wu, the former Biden administration competition policy czar who borrowed Brandeis’s title The Curse of Bigness for one of his own books. “The U.S. was meant to be a republic of citizens and not a republic of observers or passive followers.”
The greater assault on liberty came from new technology. Brandeis found Prohibition unworkable precisely because of the police powers it would take to enforce it. A Seattle policeman named Roy Olmstead ran a bootlegging operation, and federal agents got the evidence needed to indict him by tapping the phone wires outside his office and listening in on his conversations. They never actually entered Olmstead’s premises, ruled Taft, promoted to chief justice after his failed re-election, and therefore there was no Fourth Amendment violation.
The broader point Brandeis made was that Americans had the constitutional right to be left alone.
In his dissent, “Brandeis insists on preserving the same amount of privacy in the age of wires as the age of the horse and buggy,” Rosen said. He wanted government kept at the electronic water’s edge, the same way it’s kept outside the home. He also wanted to incorporate in the dissent a new technology he thought would be truly privacy-depriving in 1928: television. But untutored in its operation, he mistakenly believed that those on-screen could see and hear those watching at home. In this, Rosen quipped, he anticipated Zoom.
The broader point Brandeis made in Olmstead was that Americans had the constitutional right to be left alone. If you were compelled to give up your thoughts and beliefs, your freedom to think would be extinguished, the greatest crime of tyrants. “He really believes in the individual conscience and the capacity and ability of people to engage in moral reflection, and that we should support laws and structures to encourage that capacity,” Teachout said. “There is a force in our internal thought processes that actually shapes the world.”
The right to privacy was affirmed by the Warren Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, as was Brandeis’s conception of free speech that should only be abridged to avert serious injury. At a time when constitutional protections—like the right to make private medical decisions with your doctor—are being knocked down by the Roberts Court, Brandeis’s dissents demonstrate to Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson that there is power in building an argument with care and precision, utilizing the facts that surround, that can meaningfully oppose. One day, the nation might just agree with you.
WE ARE TODAY LIVING in the world Brandeis feared. The rule by the one percent, the fusion of big government and big business, the domination of public knowledge by Big Tech and AI platforms, the surveillance economy—the fever dreams of the past are now present, and worse than had been imagined. “Government itself has been weaponized on behalf of the wealthiest,” Sen. Warren told me. “And that means democracy as a tool is under threat in a way that Brandeis didn’t have to confront.”
When a new strain of anti-monopolists who rebelled against the laissez-faire attitudes of the past 40 years sought to give themselves a name, they chose the New Brandeis movement. While I may have been the first to publish that nickname, it was not my invention. But in reviewing Brandeis’s life and work, it fits. Anti-monopolists follow in the American traditions of skepticism toward concentrated power and a desire for human freedom. And like Brandeis, they believe that personal self-governance is necessary for political self-governance.
“He always said that the most important thing a person can be in a democracy was a citizen,” Urofsky said. “As a citizen you not only reap rewards of democracy but have a responsibility to it.”
The epitome of a citizen in Brandeis’s preferred democracy may be his own great-grandson, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. He leads the Interfaith Alliance, founded to countervail the power of the religious right and Christian nationalism, and more recently supporting faith leaders who are working to shield their neighbors from ICE. “We are saying religion can be the handmaiden to authoritarianism but also its worst enemy,” he told me.
This work has associations with Raushenbush’s other great-grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, a leader of the Social Gospel anti-poverty movement of the late 19th century. Brandeis’s daughter Elizabeth married Rauschenbusch’s son Paul in 1925, and the two became leading economists at the University of Wisconsin who authored the first state unemployment compensation law in the nation. Brandeis would successfully lobby FDR for an unemployment insurance component to the Social Security Act of 1935. The late philosopher Richard Rorty was Paul Raushenbush’s cousin.
“This is the vibe,” Raushenbush said.
He talked about Brandeis’s austere summer home on Cape Cod, still owned by the family today, where the mattresses were made of horsehair and a TV had to be rented to watch the political conventions. And he talked about Brandeis’s commitment to serving the people, armed with the facts and common wisdom. He related it to Walter Rauschenbusch, at his church in the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, wondering how the Gospel can uplift a congregation in penury, and his grandparents, in their office in Madison, wondering how someone copes with no job prospects, and how government can help.
“There’s a theme here that is relevant to our lives,” he said. “How am I going to use my skills to impact and love my neighbor?”
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David Dayen
Executive Editor
This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen
