Raymond Moley

Who was Raymond Moley?

Raymond Charles Moley was a leading New Dealer who became its bitter opponent before the end of the Great Depression.

The son of Felix James and Agnes Fairchild Moley, he was educated at Baldwin-Wallace College and Oberlin College and received his PhD from Columbia University in 1918. He taught in several schools in Ohio until 1914. In 1916 he was appointed instructor and assistant professor of politics at Western Reserve University and from 1919 was director of the Cleveland Foundation. In 1918–19 he was also director of Americanization work under the Ohio State Council of Defense. He joined the Barnard College faculty in 1923, then became a professor of law at Columbia University from 1928–1954, where he was a specialist on the criminal justice system.

Moley supported then-New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt, and it was Moley who recruited fellow Columbia professors to form the original "Brain Trust" to advise Roosevelt during his presidential campaign of 1932. Despite ridicule from editorial and political cartoonists, the "Brain Trust" went to Washington and became powerful figures in Roosevelt's New Deal, with Moley writing important speeches for the president.