| Irving Brant | |
| Birth Name: | Irving Newton Brant |
| Birth Date: | 17 January 1885 |
| Birth Place: | Walker, Iowa, U.S. |
| Education: | University of Iowa (BA) |
| Occupation: | Biographer, journalist, historian |
Irving Newton Brant (January 17, 1885 September 18, 1976) was an American biographer, journalist, and historian.
Brant was born on January 17, 1885, in Walker, Iowa, the son of David Brant, the editor of the local newspaper, and Ruth Hurd Brant. After attending local schools, he earned a BA in 1909 at the University of Iowa. In 1918 Brant became a reporter St. Louis Star-Times. He left the Star-Times in 1923, to write poetry, plays and children's novels. In 1930, Brant returned to the newspaper as an editorial writer.
Brant wrote about conservation of natural resources for magazines and in 1930 was one of the first members of Rosalie Edge's Emergency Conservation Committee. Brant advised Roosevelt and Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, on conservation issues, such as the protection of migratory ducks against the demands of farmers.[1] In the late 1930s, Brant performed survey work that established the boundaries of the new Olympic National Park.
In 1936, Brant wrote Storm over the Constitution, defense of the constitutionality of the New Deal, which was challenged repeatedly in the U.S. Supreme Court. Brant's work reportedly encouraged Roosevelt in 1937 to send a bill to the U.S. Congress to enlarge the membership of the Supreme Court and overcome the conservative majority. The so-called court packing plan lost in Congress after a bitter fight.
Brant's study of the Supreme Court led him to examine the legacy of president James Madison, who was largely ignored by historians at the time. When he first started writing the biography, he operated under the assumption that Jefferson overshadowed Madison's political contributions, especially influenced by the writings of the historian Henry Adams and his history of the United States. "I began writing the life of Madison without the slightest suspicion that the prevailing estimates of him were incorrect."[2] While he had first focused on the then acknowledged contributions of Madison as architect of the Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights, he came to believe that Madison was equal in importance to Thomas Jefferson in creating the United States. "Not in the remotest fashion did I suspect that in their political symbiosis, Jefferson might owe as much to Madison as Madison to Jefferson". Brant wanted to rehabilitate Madison's reputation as a theorist of constitutional issues; to demonstrate Madison's mastery of practical politics; and to refute the states rights interpretation, which denied that the Founding Fathers considered the new country to be a single nation rather than a loose confederation of sovereign independent countries.[3]
The first volume of the Madison biography was published in 1941, the sixth and final volume in 1961
Brant died on September 18, 1976.