Brain Trust
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The "Brain Trust" or "Brains Trust" was the name given to a diverse group of economists, professors, and others who served as advisors to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the early period of his tenure. These men played a key role in shaping the policies of the First New Deal. Although they never met together as a group, they each had Roosevelt's ear. Many newspaper editorials and editorial cartoons ridiculed them as impractical idealists.
The term "brains trust" (originally plural, the s was later dropped) was first coined in 1901 and used in a sarcastic sense in reference to the first American general staff of the U.S. President. In 1932, New York Times writer James M. Kiernan revived the term when he applied it to the close group of experts that surrounded presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt. The term has since been applied in general sense to any close group of advisors. [1]
Having an academic team was first suggested in March 1932 by Roosevelt's legal counsel Samuel Rosenman. In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson had assembled The Inquiry, a group of academic advisors he brought to the Versailles Conference.
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[edit] Members
- Adolf Berle
- Benjamin V. Cohen
- Thomas Gardiner Corcoran
- Felix Frankfurter
- Louis Howe
- Raymond Moley (Moley broke with Roosevelt and became a sharp critic of the New Deal from the right)
- Basil O'Connor
- George Peek
- Charles William Taussig
- Rexford Tugwell
- Hugh S. Johnson
[edit] References
[edit] Primary
- Moley, Raymond. (1939). After seven years
- Tugwell, Rexford. (1968). The Brains Trust
- Editorial cartoons
[edit] Secondary
- Rosen, Elliot. (1977). Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Hendrickson, Robert “Word and Phrase Origins” (1997)
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