Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use ItBrandeis, Louis Dembitz
History
Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use It
Brandeis, Louis Dembitz
Banks and banking -- United States; Finance -- United States
The exposure of the bad financial management of the New Haven railroad,
more than any other one thing, led to the exposure and comprehension
of the wasteful methods of big business all over the country and
that exposure of the New Haven was the almost single-handed work of
Mr. Brandeis. He is a person who fights against any odds while it is
necessary to fight and stops fighting as soon as the fight is won. For
a long time very respectable and honest leaders of finance said that
his charges against the New Haven were unsound and inexcusable. He
kept ahead. A year before the actual crash came, however, he ceased
worrying, for he knew the work had been carried far enough to complete
itself. When someone asked him to take part in some little controversy
shortly before the collapse, he replied, “That fight does not need me
any longer. Time and arithmetic will do the rest.”
This grasp of the concrete is combined in Mr. Brandeis with an equally
distinguished grasp of bearing and significance. His imagination is
as notable as his understanding of business. In those accomplishments
which have given him his place in American life, the two sides of his
mind have worked together. The arrangement between the Gas Company
and the City of Boston rests on one of the guiding principles of Mr.
Brandeis’s life, that no contract is good that is not advantageous
to both parties to it. Behind his understanding of the methods of
obtaining insurance and the proper cost of it to the laboring man lay
a philosophy of the vast advantage to the fibre and energy of the
community that would come from devising methods by which the laboring
classes could make themselves comfortable through their whole lives
and thus perhaps making unnecessary elaborate systems of state help.
The most important ideas put forth in the Armstrong Committee Report
on insurance had been previously suggested by Mr. Brandeis, acting
as counsel for the Equitable policy holders. Business and the more
important statesmanship were intimately combined in the management of
the Protocol in New York, which has done so much to improve conditions
in the clothing industry. The welfare of the laborer and his relation
to his employer seems to Mr. Brandeis, as it does to all the most
competent thinkers today, to constitute the most important question we
have to solve, and he won the case, coming up to the Supreme Court of
the United States, from Oregon, establishing the constitutionality of
special protective legislation for women. In the Minimum Wage case,
also from the State of Oregon, which is about to be heard before the
Supreme Court, he takes up what is really a logical sequence of the
limitation of women’s hours in certain industries, since it would be
a futile performance to limit their hours and then allow their wages
to be cut down in consequence. These industrial activities are in
large part an expression of his deep and ever growing sympathy with
the working people and understanding of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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