by union president Sidney Hillman. He was also one of the original directors of the Amalgamated Bank of New York, as advertised in the Liberator magazine. The ad mentions that the bank is owned and operated by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It lists chairman Hyman Blumberg, president R. L. Redheffer, vice president Jacob S. Potofsky, cashier Leroy Peterson, and other directors: Hillman, August Bellanca, Joseph Gold, Fiorello H. La Guardia, Abraham Miller, Joseph Schlossberg, Murray Weinstein, Max Zaritzky, and Peter Monat. The Amalgamated relationship seems to have started when Lowenthal defended Hillman in 1920 in a labor dispute in Rochester, New York. As late as 1929, Lowenthal still had a close relationship with the Amalgamated Bank, as after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 he recommended that the bank sell its securities for cash; throughout the Great Depression, the bank held its assets in cash or cash-equivalents. "It was the advice of Max Lowenthal that helped more than anything else to keep our banks open during the Hoover banking collapse," Hillman later noted. Advising Lowenthal in this period was Benjamin V. Cohen. Government service During his early days in politics, Lowenthal served as advisor to several United States senators. In 1929, he served as pro bono secretary on U.S. President Herbert Hoover's National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (later called the Wickersham Commission) to investigate gang-related crimes and Prohibition enforcement through July 1930, when he resigned. He assisted Ferdinand Pecora with Senate committee hearings investigating the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The hearings launched a major reform of the American financial system. Around 1930, "another job that I was given in connection with the charge that in the Government that men were taking positions in the Government who had private investments," connected (unclearly recounted later by Lowenthal) to his Harvard Law School friend, U.S. Solicitor General Charles Hughes, Jr. (1929–1930), son of 11th Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Sr. In 1933–1934, he consulted for the U.S. Senate Banking and Currency Committee. "I can't remember that I had worked for any congressional committee before that, but this I would not want to affirm categorically." Railroad reorganization In 1933, Lowenthal began advocating railroad reform by republishing his original Harvard Law Review argument The Railroad Reorganization Act in book form along with a second book, The Investor Pays (1933) (Felix Frankfurter attributed much of the work on The Investor