House of Truth

In 1912, a group of ambitious young men, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and future journalistic giant Walter Lippmann, became disillusioned by the sluggish progress of change in the Taft Administration. The individuals started to band together informally, joined initially by their enthusiasm for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. They self-mockingly called the 19th Street row house in which they congregated the "House of Truth," playing off the lively dinner discussions with frequent guest (and neighbor) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about life's verities. Lippmann and Frankfurter were house-mates, and their frequent guests included not merely Holmes but Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Herbert Croly - founder of the New Republic - and the sculptor (and sometime Klansman) Gutzon Borglum, later the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument. Weaving together the stories and trajectories of these varied, fascinating, combative, and sometimes contradictory figures, Brad Snyder shows how their thinking about government and policy shifted from a firm belief in progressivism - the belief that the government should protect its workers and regulate monopolies - into what we call liberalism - the belief that government can improve citizens' lives without abridging their civil liberties and, eventually, civil rights. Holmes replaced Roosevelt in their affections and aspirations. His famous dissents from 1919 onward showed how the Due Process clause could protect not just business but equality under the law, revealing how a generally conservative and reactionary Supreme Court might embrace, even initiate, political and social reform. Across the years, from 1912 until the start of the New Deal in 1933, the remarkable group of individuals associated with the House of Truth debated the future of America. They fought over Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence; the dangers of Communism; the role the United States should play the world after World War One; and thought dynamically about things like about minimum wage, child-welfare laws, banking insurance, and Social Security, notions they not only envisioned but worked to enact. American liberalism has no single source, but one was without question a row house in Dupont Circle and the lives that intertwined there at a crucial moment in the country's history.

Brad Snyder teaches law at the University of Wisconsin and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University.

Book I: Felix Goes to Washington
Chapter 1: The People Collector
Chapter 2: A Man Named Valentine
Chapter 3: The Call of the Moose
Chapter 4: Mephistopheles
Book II: Lippmann and the New Republic
Chapter 5: The Buddha
Chapter 6: The Soldier's Faith
Chapter 7: Temperamentally Unfit
Chapter 8: Death of a Pioneer
Chapter 9: Valentine Would Have Been Proud
Book III: The Real American Artist
Chapter 10: The First Wonder of the World
Chapter 11: The One-Man War
Chapter 12: A Better Way to Win the War
Chapter 13: The Inquiry
Chapter 14: The Spy for Zionism
Chapter 15: Its Soul Goes Marching On
Book IV: The Making of a "Liberal" Justice
Chapter 16: Fighting Faiths
Chapter 17: Touched With Fire
Chapter 18: Protestant of Nordic Stock
Chapter 19: Pictures in Their Heads
Chapter 20: Different Roads in the 1924 Campaign
Chapter 21: Eloquence May Set Fire to Reason
Chapter 22: A Ku Klux Klan Matter
Chapter 23: A National Cause Célèbre
Chapter 24: This World Cares More For Red Than Black
Chapter 25: I Want The Name Calvin Coolidge on that Monument
Chapter 26: The Happy Warrior
Chapter 27: Death Plucks My Ear
Chapter 28: The Boy Scout
Chapter 29: The Meeting of Two "Liberals"
Conclusion