Felix Frankfurter - First World War

First World War

Frankfurter's work in Washington had impressed the faculty at Harvard Law School, and a donation from the financier Jacob Schiff created a position for him there. He taught mainly administrative law and occasionally criminal law. With fellow professor James M. Landis he advocated judicial restraint in dealing with government misdeeds, including greater freedom for administrative agencies from judicial oversight. He also served as counsel for the National Consumers League arguing for Progressive causes such as minimum wage and restricted work hours. He was involved in the early years of The New Republic when it was founded by Herbert Croly.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917 Frankfurter took a special leave from Harvard to serve as special assistant to the Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. He was appointed Judge Advocate General, supervising military courts-martial for the War Department. In September 1917, he was appointed counsel to a commission established by President Wilson to resolve major strikes threatening war production, the President's Mediation Committee. Among the disturbances he investigated were the 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco, where he argued strongly that the radical leader Thomas Mooney had been framed and required a new trial. He also examined the copper industry in Arizona, where industry bosses solved industrial relations problems by having more than 1,000 strikers forcibly deported to New Mexico. Overall, Frankfurter's work gave him an opportunity to learn firsthand about labor politics and extremism, including anarchism, communism and revolutionary socialism. He came to sympathize with labor issues, arguing that "unsatisfactory, remediable social conditions, if unattended, give rise to radical movements far transcending the original impulse." His activities led the public to view him as a radical lawyer and supporter of radical principles, and he was accused by former President Theodore Roosevelt of being "engaged in excusing men precisely like the Bolsheviki in Russia."