Socialism's Superhero: "[Do] Bernie Sanders and AOC have large Soviet-style portraits of Felix Frankfurter hanging on the walls of their Washington offices alongside those of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara..."?

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: AMERICAN THOUGHT

HIS OFFICIAL resume identifies Felix Frankfurter as an exceptional Harvard Law School student, a distinguished Harvard Law professor, an advisor to three presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt), and as a justice of the Supreme Court. All of that is true. However, it does not reveal that throughout his life, quite possibly as far back as his teenage years, Frankfurter believed in socialism, was an active member of socialist associations, and helped develop the foundation for a socialist government in the U.S.

Frankfurter greatly admired the socialist labor movement in Great Britain that arose during and after World War I. He became a member of the Fabian Society, a powerful socialist organization in England. In the 1920s, the American far-left were members of the Progressive Party then headed by Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette, who was a socialist. Frankfurter was an active member of the Progressive Party and endorsed its far-left platform.

In 1894, when Frankfurter was 12, he and his family emigrated from the Leopoldstadt ghetto in Vienna, Austria, to the poverty-stricken Lower East Side of Manhattan. Surrounded by destitution, Frankfurter nevertheless excelled academically. In his teen years, he often attended the tuition-free Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, listening to lectures on union issues, socialism, and communism.

From his youngest thinking years, Frankfurter learned to distrust commerce, preferring the pristine environment of academia. In that respect, his thinking mirrored that of many Progressive Era leftists, as his biographer Michael E. Parrish explains in Felix Frankfurter and His Times: The Reform Years: "[Frankfurter] placed his faith in the good sense, the educability, and the benevolence of the country's old elite, represented by [Oliver Wendell] Holmes, Henry Stimson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The gentry and the new intellectuals, he believed, would moderate the excesses of American capitalism, discipline the vulgar business classes, uplift the poor, and usher in the benign future of expanded social welfare and security. He believed, finally, in the desirability of democratic change tempered by an elite; in this respect he remained throughout his life a typical tum-of-the-century progressive."

Frankfurter was an elitist who believed academic refinement could produce a class of experts who, in the complex world of the Industrial Age, could define the "common good," direct individuals to...