Howard Lee McBain

Columbia, not always because of its own wish as an institution, has provided a good part of the outstanding personnel of the so-styled “Brain Trust.” It was in fact the visit of a group of younger Columbia instructors to the Democratic candidate of 1932 [Franklin D. Roosevelt] at his Hyde Park summer residence, which gave occasion, quite accidentally, for the invention of that descriptive term. The visitors emerged from the council-chamber as the newspaper correspondents were filing in. The presidential candidate was requested to name his visitors; he told who they were. One of the New York newspaper men remarked, reflectively and quite on the spur of the moment: “The Brains Trust.” He did not even use the expression in his own published correspondence; but his journalistic colleagues at Hyde Park caught it up at once, broadcasted it in their own dispatches, and made it instantly an essential part of the political vernacular.

But not all the “Brain-trusters” were Columbia men, and by no means all Columbia instructors could have qualified under the popular interpretation of the title. Howard Lee McBain, who occupied at the University a highly responsible position in the teaching of Public Law, was destined later to train his own guns on some of the “New-Deal” innovations. His colleagues, in their tributes to his memory, recalled not only “the brilliance of his intellect, his quick wit and his mastery of English style,” but added that “his dominating mental traits were exactness and superb common sense”; that “froth and ‘bunk’ were to him anathema,” and that “for speculative political theory he had no love.” Except for McBain’s distinguished career as academic instructor, administrator, and counsel of New York City on public policies, that description of him by his friends might in these days seem to picture a man of old-fashioned notions, discarded in the conceptions of our up-to-date political pioneers. But Professor McBain, even in the New-Era acceptation of the term, was no crusted conservative. As far back as 1928, he described the day’s social and political situation as one of “money-grabbing anarchy.” He rebuked the dominant party for its lack of specific program, and predicted that the day of chaotic democracy on both hemispheres was “about over.” Only a year ago, he declared his judgment that the United States Constitution as it now stands is inadequate to meet “the requirements of governmental action that will be pressed heavily upon it in the next ten or twenty years.” But he stressed the words “as it now stands,” and did not hesitate to couple his prediction with a remark that the New Deal and the N. R. A. had given us a “sorry sample of confused and haphazarded governmental control.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1937 Century Association Yearbook