When Holmes emerged as a consistent judicial defender of economic reform and of free speech, he became a hero to progressives and civil libertarians--to people like Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly. Holmes did not share the politics of these people, but he did not think it was his business as a judge to have a politics, and he did nothing to discourage their admiration. It suited his conception of heroic disinterestedness to serve as their Abbott--privately denouncing the stupidity of the views he strove, often boldly and alone, to defend.