brain trust

1. A group of experts who serve, usually unofficially, as advisers and policy planners, especially in a government.
2. often Brain Trust Such a group associated with the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the development of the New Deal.
3. brains trust Chiefly British. A group of experts gathered to discuss issues informally in public, especially on radio or television.

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A group of experts who serve as unofficial but vital advisers. For example, Each town manager seemed to have his or her own brain trust, which of course changed with every election. This term, closely associated with President Franklin Roosevelt's advisers on domestic and foreign policy in the early 1930s, was first recorded in 1910.

Brains Trust is the informal name for senior government officials who advise the president. A Brains Trust is different from a “kitchen cabinet” of Presidential friends, none of whom hold public office. The original Brains Trust was a group of advisers to New York governor and later President Franklin D. Roosevelt who helped him develop his New Deal program. Members included prominent Columbia University professors such as Adolph A. Berle, Jr., of the law school, Rexford G. Tugwell of the economics department, and Raymond Moley of the department of public law and government. It also included political adviser and speech writer Samuel Rosenman (who first told Roosevelt to recruit the professors) and Frances Perkins, industrial commissioner of New York State when FDR was governor of New York. Roosevelt appointed Perkins to the position of secretary of labor, and she was the first woman to serve in a president's cabinet.

See also Kitchen cabinet; New Deal; New Frontier; Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Sources

• Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt and the Brains Trust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
• Rexford G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1967)

Before his 1932 nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt brought together Raymond Moley, Rexford G. Tugwell, and Adolph A. Berle, Jr. as close advisers. These three continued to aid Roosevelt during his campaign for election. After his inauguration, they became prominent in the councils of the chief executive and received salaried offices in Washington. They and the group of economists, lawyers, and scholars who subsequently joined the administration earned the name "the brain trust," whether or not they were close to the president or truly responsible for any novel programs or policies. Thus, the expression "brain trust" became a symbol for all New Deal experimentation.

Bibliography

Reagan, Patrick D. Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933–1993. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

—Erik McKinley Eriksson/A. E.

A group of intellectuals and planners who act as advisers, especially to a government. The phrase is particularly associated with the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

For other uses, see Brain Trust (disambiguation).

Brain trust began as a term for a group of close advisors to a political candidate or incumbent, prized for their expertise in particular fields. The term is most associated with the group of advisors to Franklin Roosevelt during his presidential administration. More recently the use of the term has expanded to encompass any group of advisers to a decision maker, whether or not in politics.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Roosevelt's "Brains Trust" 2.1 Members 3 See also 4 References 5 Notes

Etymology

The first use of the term brain trust was in 1899 when it appeared in the Marion (Ohio) Daily Star: "Since everything else is tending to trusts, why not a brain trust?" This sense was referring to the era of trust-busting, a popular political slogan and objective of the time that helped spur the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and was later a key policy of President Theodore Roosevelt's administration. The term appears to have not been used again until 1928, when Time magazine ran a headline on a meeting of the American Council on Learned Societies titled "Brain Trust."^[1]

Roosevelt's "Brains Trust"

Franklin Roosevelt speechwriter and legal counsel Samuel Rosenman suggested having an academic team to advise Roosevelt in March 1932. This concept was perhaps based on The Inquiry, a group of academic advisors President Woodrow Wilson formed in 1917 to prepare for the peace negotiations following World War I. In 1932, New York Times writer James Kieran first used the term Brains Trust (shortened to Brain Trust later) when he applied it to the close group of experts that surrounded United States presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt. According to Roosevelt Brain Trust member Raymond Moley, Kieran coined the term, however Rosenman contended that Louis Howe, a close advisor to the President, first used the term but used it derisively in a conversation with Roosevelt. ^[1][2]

The core of the first Roosevelt brain trust consisted of a group of Columbia law professors (Moley, Tugwell, and Berle). These men played a key role in shaping the policies of the First New Deal (1933). 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 core of the second Roosevelt brain trust sprang from men associated with the Harvard law school (Cohen, Corcoran, and Frankfurter). These men played a key role in shaping the policies of the Second New Deal (1935-1936).

Members

• Adolf Berle - original Brain Trust
• Benjamin V. Cohen - 2nd New Deal
• Thomas Gardiner Corcoran - 2nd New Deal
• Felix Frankfurter - 2nd New Deal
• Louis Howe*
• Raymond Moley - original Brain Trust (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 - original Brain Trust
• Hugh S. Johnson
• Napoleon Hill
• F. Palmer Weber
• James Warburg - original Brain Trust^{[citation needed]}

See also

Look up brain trust in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Kitchen Cabinet
• Think tank

References

• Moley, Raymond. (1939). After seven years
• Tugwell, Rexford. (1968). The Brains Trust
• Editorial cartoons
• Rosen, Elliot. (1977). Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust.
• McElvaine, Robert. (1984). The Great Depression: America 1929-1941

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Safire, William "Safire's Political Dictionary" (2008)
2. ^ James Kieran "The 'Cabinet' Mr. Roosevelt Already Has", New York Times, November 20, 1932, p. XX2. Roosevelt himself had recently tossed out the term when speaking to newsmen. Boller, Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press 2004) pg. 237-8 (available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=MpCTZQywq0YC&printsec=frontcover )

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