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Young Roosevelt and young Frankfurter met again in Wartime Washington, Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Frankfurter as a legal jack-of-all-trades who wound up as assistant and right-hand man to Secretary of War Newton Baker. Both were members of the War Labor Policies Board, set up to straighten out the employment conditions of the overworked Government agencies and industries with Government contracts. Before returning to Harvard, Frankfurter thoroughly enjoyed himself as one of the brighter apostles of Wilson's "New Freedom." With a group of cronies he lived, entertained and talked in a house on 19th Street. This establishment, which humorous old Oliver Wendell Holmes called The House of Truth, was the precursor of the "little Red House on R Street" which several of Mr. Frankfurter's protégés, including Ben Cohen and Tom Corcoran, made famous.
The Boys. Felix Frankfurter's notes recommending young lawyers—over a scrawled "FF"—fluttered into Washington long before the New Deal (Corcoran, for instance, was a gift to Hoover's RFC). The fact that 125 "happy hot dogs" are in Washington today spurred General Hugh Johnson to call Professor Frankfurter "the most influential single individual in the U. S."
Childless Felix Frankfurter is pleased when the hot dogs call him "Poppa." Some of their doings please Poppa completely. He is proud of the share Hot Dogs Cohen & Corcoran had in drafting the Public Utility Holding Company Act and the Securities Exchange Act, both expressions of the Brandeis-Frankfurter economic crusade against bigness and irresponsibility. But NRA left Mr. Frankfurter cold and suspicious. And though he did not publicly attack the Court Plan, he wrote an indignant letter of repudiation when an article in a British magazine gave out that Protégés Cohen & Corcoran had helped originate it.
Like Lawyers Holmes, Cardozo and Brandeis, Lawyer Frankfurter is a firm believer in judicial self-limitation. The most relevant qualifications for a Supreme Court appointee, he once wrote, "are his breadth of vision, his imagination, his capacity for disinterested judgment, his power to discover and suppress his prejudices."
Fighter & Fight. "Don't call me judge," Felix Frankfurter implored newsmen who stormed his Cambridge home after the appointment, "I'm not confirmed yet." Ten years ago, getting Fighter Frankfurter, defender of Tom Mooney and of Sacco & Vanzetti, by the Senate would have meant a sizable fight. Last week Tom Mooney walked out of jail, and it seemed that Felix Frankfurter would step as easily into the Supreme Court. Felix Frankfurter had become so relatively inoffensive that last September the arch-conservative legal profession, Gallup-polled, gave him five times as many votes for the Court as any other candidate. As a Senate subcommittee got busy to consider whether Felix Frankfurter should be called Associate Justice, busy Professor Frankfurter declined an invitation to appear in person, deputized his friend Dean Acheson to represent him.