Felix Frankfurter - Postwar

Postwar

As the war drew to a close, Frankfurter was among the nearly one hundred intellectuals who signed a statement of principles for the formation of the League of Free Nations Associations, which aimed to increase American participation in international affairs.

Frankfurter was encouraged by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to become more involved in Zionism. With Brandeis he lobbied President Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration, a British government statement supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1918, he participated in the founding conference of the American Jewish Congress in Philadelphia creating a national democratic organization of Jewish leaders from all over the US. In 1919, Frankfurter served as a Zionist delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1919, Frankfurter married Marion Denman, the daughter of a Congregational minister and a Smith College graduate. They married after a long and difficult courtship, and against the wishes of his mother, who was disturbed by the prospect of her son marrying outside the Jewish faith. Frankfurter himself was a non-practicing Jew, and regarded religion as "an accident of birth". Frankfurter was a dominating husband and Denman suffered from frail health, which resulted in frequent mental breakdowns. The couple had no children.

Frankfurter's activities continued to attract attention for their alleged radicalism. In November 1919, he chaired a meeting in support of American recognition of the newly created Soviet Union. In 1920, Frankfurter helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union. Following the arrest of suspected communist radicals in 1919 and 1920 during the Palmer raids, Frankfurter, together with other prominent lawyers including Zechariah Chafee, signed an ACLU report which condemned the "utterly illegal acts committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws" including entrapment, police brutality, prolonged incommunicado detention, and violations of due process in court. Frankfurter and Chafee also submitted briefs to a habeas corpus application to the Massachusetts Federal District Court. Judge George Anderson ordered the discharge of twenty aliens, and his denunciation of the raids effectively ended them.

In 1921, Frankfurter was given a chair at Harvard Law School, and continued progressive work on behalf of socialists and oppressed and religious minorities. When A. Lawrence Lowell, the President of Harvard University, proposed to limit the enrollment of Jewish students, Frankfurter worked with others to defeat the plan.

In the late 1920s, he came to public attention when he supported calls for a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists who had been sentenced to death on robbery and murder charges. Frankfurter wrote an influential article for the Atlantic Monthly and subsequently a book, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. He critiqued the prosecution's case and the judge's handling of the trial and asserted that the convictions were the result of anti-immigrant prejudice and enduring anti-radical hysteria of the Red Scare of 1919–20. His actions further isolated him from his Harvard colleagues and from Boston society.