I suggest before you finally go you come down here and let us have a talk.” Enclosing a copy of a note to Lord Eustace Percy: “Meyer Bloomfield is an old friend of many of us, a very understanding person and one who ought to perform to profit the great service of interpretation. I hope you will enable him to see the things he ought to see and meet the men he should meet – Thomas, Zimmern, Tom Jones, etc. – for he has it in him to make understanding wiser and more durable…”   

          Some twenty years before he was appointed a Justice of the United States Supreme Court by President Franklin Roosevelt, 36 year-old Felix Frankfurter left a teaching position at Harvard Law School during World War I to take on several low-profile but important Washington positions – as Judge Advocate General, supervising military courts-martial for the War Department, and as Labor Department counsel to a presidential commission to resolve major strikes that threatened war production. In both these roles, Frankfurter was embraced by high British officials dedicated to building an Anglo-American “special relationship”. As a political progressive, he also maintained old friendships with Bostonian Jewish social reformers like Meyer Bloomfield, leading advocate of a once-novel idea – providing vocational guidance and training to public school students, particularly those with socio-economic disadvantages. When Bloomfield, a friend of Frankfurter’s for a decade, was commissioned by the Saturday Evening Post to visit England to write a series of articles on British industrial-labor relations at the close of the War, he naturally asked Frankfurter to open doors for him at Whitehall. Frankfurter happily complied in this hurried exchange of messages between the two men. The result – as Bloomfield noted in a book he published the following year (“The New Labour Movement in Great Britain; Management and Men”) – was a warm reception he received in London from Frankfurter friends Lord Eustace Percy, then at the British Foreign Office; historian Alfred Zimmern of the Political Intelligence Department (who later coined the term “welfare state”); and British Trade Union official Thomas Jones.