Max Lowenthal (February 26, 1888 – May 18, 1971) was a Washington, DC, political figure in all three branches of the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s, during which time he was closely associated with the rising career of Harry S. Truman; he served under Oscar R. Ewing on an "unofficial policy group" within the Truman administration (1947–1952).
Background
Mordechai Lowenthal was born on February 26, 1888, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1870s, his parents Nathan (Naphtali) Lowenthal and Gertrude (Nahamah) Gitel, both Orthodox Jewish, emigrated from Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, to Minnesota. At a young age, he started using the more "American" name of Max. He had two older siblings, of whom only one survived childhood.
He graduated from North High School in 1905, first in his class. He also attended Talmud Torah, where he learned Hebrew. He received a BA in 1909 from the University of Minnesota and graduated in 1912 from Harvard Law School, where he began a lifelong friendship with Felix Frankfurter.
Career
Many of Lowenthal's accomplishments remain unknown, as some continue to be uncovered through historical research. Lowenthal was notably private and often refused to take credit for his accomplishments.
A memo in Lowenthal's FBI file reveals the following chronology (supplemented): 1907–1909: Reporter at Minneapolis Journal 1912–1913: Law clerk for Judge Julian Mack at $1,800 per annum 1913–1914: Law clerk for Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (AKA Strong & Cadwalader) at $1,800 per annum 1915: Starts own law firm in New York City 1917: Clerk or assistant at U.S. Department of State 1917–1918: Assistant secretary to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's Mediation Commission (Morgenthau Mission, recommended by Felix Frankfurter)) 1918: Informal aid at U.S. Department of War 1918–1919: Assistant chairman for War Labor Policies Board to Felix Frankfurter 1919–1920: Returns to private practice; defends Sidney Hillman and Amalgamated Clothing Workers in "landmark injunction case" 1920–1921: Assistant secretary to Second President's Industrial Congress 1920–1929: Partners in Szold Branwen [sic] law firm and becomes a "very wealthy New York lawyer" in Lowenthal, Szold and Brandwen of 43 Exchange Place, New York City. (FTC commissioner John J. Carson later mistakenly recalled one partner as "Max Bramblin" of "Lowenthal & Bramblin")
Lowenthal knew Walter Weyl (father of Ware Group member Nathaniel Weyl), who recommended Adelaide Hasse as a researcher for the War Labor Policies Board.
Private law practice
Lowenthal ran a private law practice from 1912 to 1932. Cases involved workers rights, defense of right-to-strike legislation and shareholder rights in receivership cases.
In the early 1920s, Lowenthal seems to have had a law office in New York City. While Ann Fagan Ginger does not mention him as a mentor of Carol Weiss King in her biography of King, Ginger does say that King formed a "loose partnership" with radical attorneys, who included Joseph Brodsky, Swinburne Hale, Walter Nelles, and Isaac Shorr as well as a long-term association with Walter Pollak (once partner of Benjamin Cardozo), whom she met through her brother-in-law Carl Stern. Nevertheless, newspaper accounts of King (in the 1950s) mention Lowenthal as not only an associate but her employer. The Saturday Evening Post went even further in 1951 in a long article on Carol Weiss King: Lowenthal is of special interest. A product of Harvard Law, he has been described by a New Deal associate as "self-effacing and ubiquitous." Shuttling between New York and Washington, he has maintained a New York office while holding a variety of Government posts dating back to World War I. On one hand, he has been an assiduous cultivator of high-level friendships, including Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis. On the other, he has been an equally assiduous collector of proteges for whom he has found many Government jobs. Alger Hiss and Lee Pressman benefited by his friendship, and, for a time, did one George Shaw Wheeler, a young lawyer who became so carried away by communism that he denounced his United States citizenship to make a new career bebind the Iron Curtain. Back in 1920, at the time of her admission to the New York bar, Carol also was a Lowenthal protégée, and it was in his office that she served her first and only legal clerkship. Another important protege of Lowenthal's (and his partner Robert Szold) was Benjamin V. Cohen, later known as one of Felix Frankfurter's Hotdogs in the New Deal. Lowenthal and Cohen both knew Judge Julian W. Mack, who was one of Cohen's professor at Harvard (and was uncle of Lowenthal's wife). In October 1920, Cohen first worked for Lowenthal on a bankruptcy case involving E.F. Drew & Company.
In 1923, Lowenthal was general counsel for the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) of 31 Union Square, New York City, launched by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union in 1922, following a 1921 visit to the Soviet Union by union president Sidney Hillman. He was also one of the original directors of the Amalgamated Bank of New York, as advertised in the Liberator magazine. The ad mentions that the bank is owned and operated by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It lists chairman Hyman Blumberg, president R. L. Redheffer, vice president Jacob S. Potofsky, cashier Leroy Peterson, and other directors: Hillman, August Bellanca, Joseph Gold, Fiorello H. La Guardia, Abraham Miller, Joseph Schlossberg, Murray Weinstein, Max Zaritzky, and Peter Monat.
The Amalgamated relationship seems to have started when Lowenthal defended Hillman in 1920 in a labor dispute in Rochester, New York. As late as 1929, Lowenthal still had a close relationship with the Amalgamated Bank, as after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 he recommended that the bank sell its securities for cash; throughout the Great Depression, the bank held its assets in cash or cash-equivalents. "It was the advice of Max Lowenthal that helped more than anything else to keep our banks open during the Hoover banking collapse," Hillman later noted. Advising Lowenthal in this period was Benjamin V. Cohen.
Government service
During his early days in politics, Lowenthal served as advisor to several United States senators. In 1929, he served as pro bono secretary on U.S. President Herbert Hoover's National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (later called the Wickersham Commission) to investigate gang-related crimes and Prohibition enforcement through July 1930, when he resigned. He assisted Ferdinand Pecora with Senate committee hearings investigating the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The hearings launched a major reform of the American financial system.Moyers, Bill.: Pecora Part II?, "Bill Moyers Journal", Retrieved April 25, 2009. Around 1930, "another job that I was given in connection with the charge that in the Government that men were taking positions in the Government who had private investments," connected (unclearly recounted later by Lowenthal) to his Harvard Law School friend, U.S. Solicitor General Charles Hughes, Jr. (1929–1930), son of 11th Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Sr. In 1933–1934, he consulted for the U.S. Senate Banking and Currency Committee. "I can't remember that I had worked for any congressional committee before that, but this I would not want to affirm categorically."
Railroad reorganization
In 1933, Lowenthal began advocating railroad reform by republishing his original Harvard Law Review argument The Railroad Reorganization Act in book form along with a second book, The Investor Pays (1933) (Felix Frankfurter attributed much of the work on The Investor Pays to Benjamin V. Cohen.) Abuses he cited included: control of receivership and of reorganization by owners prior to acknowledgement of insolvency, inadequate administration of properties prior to reorganization, inadequate regulatory supervision, and conflicts of interest. While making the rounds "as agents of the President" with Tommy Corcoran (one of Felix Frankfurter's "Happy Hotdogs"), Lowenthal told any and all that nothing would happen "without the help of railway labor." On July 5, 1935 Federal Coordinator Joseph Bartlett Eastman wrote to Senator Wheeler (committee chair), with Lowenthal as committee counsel, to recommend 18 railroads (including Van Sweringen Lines, Pennsylvania Railroad, Wabash Railway, and Delaware & Hudson Company) plus financiers (J.P. Morgan & Company, and Kuhn, Loeb & Company) for investigation, as reported in the New York Times and Railway Age. Only in December 1936 did Lowenthal manage to obtain enough subpoenaed documentation to begin actual investigation, according to Railway Age. By 1939, the Senate had introduced a "Lowenthal Bi|ll" to create a special "Railroad Reorganization Court" for bankrupt railroads and downsizing of capitalization and reduction of fixed charges. In April 1939, ICC commissioner Walter M. W. Splawn and committee counsel Lowenthal testified. Lowenthal explained changes in the new Reorganization Act of 1939 (passed and signed into law on April 3, 1939). Its special court would make for "sounder reorganizations" thanks to judges trained in railroads.
Truman
In 1935, Lowenthal met Harry S. Truman, after Truman joined a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, investigating railroads and holding companies, which resulted in U.S. Senate Resolution 71 on February 4, 1935. Senator Robert F. Wagner had to withdraw from the subcommittee, and Senator Burton K. Wheeler filled his place with Truman. Senators on that subcommittee included: Wheeler (chair), Truman, Alben Barkley, Victor Donahey, Wallace White, and Henrik Shipstead. Heading the legal counselors for that subcommittee was Telford Taylor, assisted by Lowenthal and Sidney J. Kaplan, who later headed the Claims Division in the Solicitor General's office of the U.S. Department of Justice during World War II, George Rosier, Lucien Hilmer, and John Davis. According to close Truman's Appointments Secretary Matthew J. Connelly, "Lowenthal served as counsel for Senator Truman during the hearings on the setting up of the Civil Aeronautics Board." According to daughter Margaret Truman, Truman relied on Lowenthal to keep up pressure on the Missouri Pacific Railroad and Alleghany Corporation over the "Alleghany-Missouri Pacific matter."
Lowenthal later recollected, "Until we went into World War II, I may have been doing some work for the Interstate Commerce Committee. I was for a number of years, in that category which was referred to as dollar-a-year men, but, when we went into the war, I had a talk with Senator Wheeler and suggested that probably I ought to be available on some wartime work, and Chairman Wheeler thought that was right." Thus, Lowenthal did not serve with Truman on the so-called "Truman Committee" (1941-1944) (formally, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, 1941-1948, from 1948 the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations or "PSI," and current the "United States Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations"). "I attended one or two hearings out of interest, but I was completing work for the Interstate Commerce Committee at that time and then I was involved in some work in the war effort which was pretty absorbing -- it was day and night work," he later recalled.