He is perhaps best known for his 1919 work on the Industrial Workers of the World, entitled The IWW: a Study of American Syndicalism.
[4] He earned his Master of Arts at the University of California in 1912, and completed his doctorate in political science at Columbia University in 1917 under supervision of Henry Rogers Seager.
Brissenden was married to Margaret Geer and the father of three sons.
In 1920, he documented labor disputes between miners in Butte and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.
He pointed out the prosecutions failure to actually identify the 15,000 alleged deserters, challenged the legality of the evidence seized in raids based on void warrants, and argued that prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence that IWW members had directly obstructed the war, but convicted them on the basis of their association with the IWW.