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Poster Commentary
"Most of the things worth doing in the world were declared impossible before they were done."Louis Brandeis
Poster design:R.O. Blechman
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by Erica Brown

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) was an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court for more than 20 years—the first Jew to be appointed to that position. Committed to social justice, he was called the People’s Lawyer because he was a passionate advocate of workers’ rights and fought hard against corporate monopolies and corruption. Justice Brandeis also did ground-breaking work on privacy and helped create the Federal Reserve System.

An influential liberal arts college, Brandeis University, was named after him. Founded in 1948 in Waltham, Massachusetts, nine years after his death, Brandeis is a nonsectarian institution that, in its infancy, provided higher education to many Jews who, due to quotas on Jews, were locked out of Ivy League institutions.

Justice Brandeis questioned many conventional beliefs and practices in his work. When he wrote, “Most of the things worth doing in the world were declared impossible,” he was speaking from a place of intimate knowledge. Obstacles did not frighten him. He knew that only those who can see the invisible can do the impossible.

This may explain his remarkable commitment to Zionism later in his life, despite not being particularly religious. He never lived to see the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, but Justice Brandeis was deeply committed to a Jewish homeland to alleviate the scourge of anti-Semitism, which raged through Europe during his lifetime.

 

Author
Louis Brandeis
1856–1941
Lived in Washington, DC, and Massachusetts
U.S. Supreme Court justice

Louis Brandeis’s story is a Jewish mother’s dream come true. He grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and was accepted to Harvard Law School without a college degree, becoming one of the school’s most outstanding students. He became a successful private-practice lawyer while doing pro bono work to fight monopolies and protect the underdog. He then served as legal counsel to President Woodrow Wilson, who nominated him for the Supreme Court—the first Jew ever nominated. After being approved despite anti-Jewish sentiment, he served 22 years on the Court as a staunch defender of civil liberties. He married a Jewish woman, actively supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and had a university named after him.

Brandeis lived at a juncture in US history when wealth generated by 19th-century industrial growth became a tool of excessive social and political power. In 1914 he wrote a treatise called Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It. “We can have democracy in this country,” he said, “or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

His most outstanding legal works include a counsel’s brief he wrote that defended minimum-wage, maximum-hour legislation for women laborers in Oregon; a Supreme Court opinion advocating the right of privacy in the face of the “dirty business” of wiretapping (Olmstead v. United States); and a Supreme Court opinion defending free speech against an overly broad application of “clear and present danger” (Whitney v. California).

 

Artist
R.O. Blechman
New York
Illustrator
Animator

Brooklyn-born R. O. Blechman’s career was launched when he was 23, with the publication of The Juggler of Our Lady. It was a graphic novel before the term existed. He went on to become a freelance illustrator for such publications as Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire and Glamour.

As an author/illustrator, he has penned nearly a dozen books, several of which were selected for the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Fifty Books of the Year.

Blechman’s art has graced 14 covers for the New Yorker, 39 for Story magazine and six for The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.

In 1975 he founded an animation studio, The Ink Tank, which operated for 27 years. The studio produced an hour-long Christmas program for the Public Broadcasting System, Simple Gifts, and an Emmy-winning film version of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. The Stravinsky film was performed to a live orchestra at The Museum of Modern Art in 2003, and subsequently by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lyons Opera and the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra.

Blechman has had one-man shows at Galerie Delpire in Paris, the Graham Gallery in New York and the Galerie Bartsch & Chariau in Munich. In 2003, The Museum of Modern Art had a retrospective of his studio films.

He was elected to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1999 and given The Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Cartoonists Society in 2011.

 

Quote
"Most of the things worth doing in the world were declared impossible before they were done."Louis Brandeis

There were no reliable statistics on garment industry wages, but one thing was clear - the industry was marked by extreme seasonality, which caused great irregularity of employment.  

Brandeis found himself back to his old theme, that year-round regular employment was much more important than high hourly wages.  He found himself practically alone in believing that garment industry employment could be spread evenly over the year.  

"I, for one, have been wholly unable to accept the idea that whatever is, is inevitable, even under the capitalistic theory and system.  I know in certain industries, with which I have come in contact, which are capitalistic in their nature, and where irregularity has been considered inevitable, it has yielded...

I only feel convinced of two propositions: that much which seems impossible is possible... and that most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared to be impossible before they were done; and necessity has proven itself the mother of invention."