citing new opportunity to exercise their skills as legal crafters in a fluid environment where those skills were desperately needed. Adlai Stevenson, then a young lawyer at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), captured the spirit of hasty improvisation in the legal offices of many agencies when he told his wife that AAA was a "madhouse" (134). For others, it was the challenge of becoming involved in policy or even to influence that policy in line with their own ideological biases and preferences.
The composite profile which Irons constructs is of a small group (who numbered in the hundreds), "predominantly young, city-bred crew with heavy Ivy League representation" (125). He described their mindset as "a veneer of progressive liberalism over a foundation of doctrinal orthodoxy and apolitical professionalism" (10). They were the products of their education, which under the leadership of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court and other legal intellectuals emphasized the role of law and lawyers in reshaping the nation's government system and economy. They were committed as Jerome Frank, the first general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) put it, to "experimentation . . . an imperative necessity" in a period of "economic catastrophe" (123). They were as a group possessed of that overconfidence which is the exclusive sphere of the young, and they were willing to work very hard in the service of the nation and under conditions of severe stress.
FDR himself was a lawyer and a great improviser himself. His closest advisers, the Brains Trust, of the early New Deal, were divided as to how to solve the economic crisis. Prominent in the first two years of the New Deal were insiders such as Raymond Moley and outsiders such as Bernard Baruch, who favored central government planning and a cooperative alliance among government, Big Business and, to a lesser extent, organized labor. Oth...