The Washington Salon That Saved Liberalism
The presidential election of 1920 seemed like a disaster for liberals. They had broken with their party’s two-term president when he began to abridge civil liberties at home and abroad and he brought home a peace treaty from Paris that they could not accept. Then their internationalist ideals ran headlong into a pro-business Republican who campaigned on an “America First” message. When Warren G. Harding won the White House in a landslide, liberals, once ascendant, found themselves in the political wilderness.
Twelve years passed before Democrats reclaimed the White House—an agonizingly long time for liberals in 2017 who might be looking for historical parallels—but during those 12 years, from 1920 to 1932, liberalism flourished as an opposition movement. Unbound from the obligations of governing, liberals embraced underdog causes – free speech for antiwar radicals, freedom from unlawful searches and seizures during the postwar roundups of radical immigrants, and fair criminal trials for southern blacks – causes that came to define American liberalism for decades. What at first looked like disaster was in fact the beginning of a renaissance.
The roots of this liberal opposition movement began in a dilapidated, Dupont Circle row house known as the House of Truth.
For seven years, a who’s who of politicians, judges, journalists, and artists turned the house into one of Washington’s most vibrant political salons. The lawyer Felix Frankfurter and journalist Walter Lippmann lived in the red brick, three-story house. Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis were regular guests at the carefree dinner parties where they discussed life’s verities, hence the house’s playful name. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who befriended Frankfurter and Holmes and went on to create Mount Rushmore, was a regular too. In this intellectual hothouse, they conceived and launched a magazine, The New Republic, which became the voice of the liberal movement. They wrote New Republic editorials and articles advocating for minimum wage and maximum hour laws and the rights of organized labor and celebrating Holmes’s and Brandeis’s dissents on freedom of speech.
“How or why I can’t recapture,” Frankfurter recalled in his oral history, “but almost everybody who was interesting in Washington sooner or later passed through that house.”
The House of Truth got its start in 1912 when Frankfurter and two other disenchanted Taft administration officials transformed their bachelor pad into the de facto campaign headquarters for former president Theodore Roosevelt. They believed Roosevelt would prosecute more monopolies and promote their pro-labor agenda. With Roosevelt as president again, they hoped to empower organized labor to transform America into an industrial democracy. The house’s owner and visionary, Taft’s commissioner of Indian affairs, Robert G. Valentine, quit the administration to join Roosevelt’s third-party Bull Moose presidential campaign. ...