Louis Brandeis - Personal Life and Marriage

Personal Life and Marriage

Brandeis became engaged to Alice Goldmark, of New York, in 1890. He was then thirty-four years of age and had previously found little time for courtship. Alice was the daughter of a physician, the brother of the composer Karl Goldmark, who had emigrated to America from Austria after the collapse of the Revolution of 1848. They were married on March 23, 1891, at the home of her parents in New York City in a civil ceremony. The newlywed couple moved into a modest home in Boston's Beacon Hill district and had two daughters, Susan, born in 1893 and Elizabeth, 1896.

Alice supported her husband's resolve to devote most of his time to public causes. The Brandeis family "lived well but without extravagance." With the continuing success of his law practice, they later purchased a vacation cottage in Dedham where they would spend many of their weekends and summer vacations. Unexpectedly, his wife's health soon became frail, so in addition to his professional duties he found it necessary to manage the family's domestic affairs.

They shunned the more luxurious ways of their class, holding few formal dinner parties and avoiding the luxury hotels when they traveled. Brandeis would never fit the stereotype of the wealthy man. Although he belonged to a polo club, he never played polo. He owned no yacht, just a canoe that he would paddle by himself on the fast-flowing river that adjoined his cottage in Dedham. He wrote to his brother of his brief trips to Dedham: "Dedham is a spring of eternal youth for me. I feel newly made and ready to deny the existence of these gray hairs."