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CHAPTER 1
DINNER AT THE HOUSE OF TRUTH
1911–1916
"It was Justice Holmes who gave the place the name, The House of Truth. It was to tease us because we were all so certain we were right. He also said we were the brightest minds and the fastest talkers in Washington. And we were."
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
IT NEVER OCCURRED TO THE young men and women at the House of Truth, as they sat arguing around a late night dinner table strewn with empty wine bottles and smoldering ashtrays, that they were the inheritors of a long tradition in American politics.
They would have laughed. They knew better. For although they all had been born in the last years of the nineteenth century, the early weeks of 1916 now found them placed very firmly in a new age. They considered themselves a generation of crusaders in a new cause — Progressivism. They came from diverse family backgrounds, but education at elite universities gave them a sense of superior judgment that entitled them — no, required them — to speak their new truths to an older age. They were unique, they thought.
In reality, these young Progressives were the advance guard of the next phase in the evolution of America into the society we have today. As they disputed and tested each other in that shabby boarding house in Washington, D.C., all of them dreamed of achieving great things. But none of them could foresee just what important lives they all would come to live or how far their legacy would reach into our own times. They hoped to create a new world. We are the inheritors of that dream as surely as they were the heirs of a tradition that began with America's founding.
America always has been in a state of tension between ideals and interests. From the first debate after the War for Independence about what kind of national government we wanted, Americans divided between those who wanted to push for a more expansive vision and those who wanted to consolidate and to conserve what had been achieved.
This tension remains constant. But the issues that dominate any moment are in perpetual flux. A party formed around an idea will, with success, become a party of interests and will grow staid and unresponsive to the next wave of change. Then another group urging idealistic goals will coalesce into a new force, and the political cycle will begin again. Traditional parties must evolve and adopt these new ideas, or they die out and vanish.
Driving all this is something in the genetic code of Americans that makes them want to reform and improve their own lives and the world around them. This irresistible urge — shared both by native-born citizens and newly arrived immigrants — lies at the heart of that other unique national trait, a boundless optimism, a conviction that the future must be better than the present.
So the Democrat-Republicans who battled the early Federalists morphed into the Democrats, who fractured in the 1840s to produce the Whig insurgents. Then the Whigs themselves splintered into heated disagreement over slavery, immigrants, and the new lands on the frontier. Out of that breakup emerged the new party of ideals known as the Republican Party.
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, both Republicans and Democrats had come to represent interests and not ideals. The land-hungry farmers and fervent abolitionists of the GOP (Abraham Lincoln's Grand Old Party) had been replaced by the Civil War's victors. Bankers and railroad builders vied with owners of factories that made mass-produced goods to squeeze more wealth out of the land. The Democrats presided over a coalition of corrupt Northern big city bosses who herded huge blocs of immigrant claimants and disaffected Southerners who were trying to climb back out of the economic wreckage of their lost rebellion.
Once again, the forces of change pushed their way into the political arena. The new movement became known as Progressivism. It took its name from theorists such as William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana, each of whom had pioneered new ways of organizing "progressive" education reforms and cultural improvement. To the vexation of the leaders of both the Republicans and Democrats, groups of Progressive advocates began to appear within their own ranks.
The Progressives were at root a hybrid of various reformist movements that had come and gone before. Campaigns for improved wages and fair labor standards, for the abolition of slavery, for a prohibition of alcohol, and for increased rights for women all had existed well before the Civil War. Indeed, there always would be as many varieties of Progressivism as there were Progressives devoted to one cause above all others. But this loose conglomeration of causes gained a unifying theme as the nineteenth century came to an end.
What united these loose strands that had existed without much impact was the revolutionary concept that a strong and active government was needed to intercede for the individual citizen as a referee and advocate in the increasingly exploitative relationships people had with big corporations and big city governments, which had agendas that too often ignored the public good.
The immediate target of the Progressives was to reform city governments, and it was here that the movement met its first successes. But the longer-term goal was a national government that imposed a nationwide standard of fairness and equality into all corners of American life. This was a novel idea that overturned the traditional notion that government's prime responsibility was to foster conditions for the benefit of the major corporations and banks and otherwise stand out of the way of prosperity.
The Progressive theorists argued that America was changing. Through their teaching and writing, they pointed to the tidal wave of industrialization and urban sprawl they saw as both the great promise and even greater threat to the nation's contract of equality of opportunity for its citizens. With so many of those citizens being swept into a mass society of cities and factories, it also was clear that a more activist national government was the third force that could protect the citizen and also harness the irresistible power of those masses for to build a better nation.
It fell to a new generation of students of these theorists to attempt to put the tenets of Progressivism to work through government policies. By the first decade of the twentieth century, a steady stream of university-trained, fiercely ambitious intellectuals began to seek careers that took them out of the academic world and into the public arena. They became missionaries who carried a new evangelism of social engineering into crowded tenements and dismal factories. For the more determined, two avenues that offered the quickest access to the power of reform were the law and advocacy journalism, and indeed, one could try both. While New York City was an obvious magnet for these young Progressives as a place to exchange ideas and publish their thoughts, increasingly, the most ambitious were drawn to the hitherto somnolent backwater seat of the national government in Washington, D.C.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of these young strivers found their way to Washington and by chance found themselves clustered in a neighborhood that was both newly fashionable and handy to those government offices where they would try their hands at reforming America into the best of all possible nations. The neighborhood was identified with a small round park dedicated to an obscure Civil War admiral — Dupont Circle.
A convenient starting point for our story begins on a Sunday afternoon in January 1916 when journalist Walter Lippmann wrote a note from New York City to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the assistant secretary of the Navy in Washington:
Dear Mr. Roosevelt, I shall be in Washington Wednesday and Thursday and I would like to see you if it is possible for a little talk while I am there. I have to spend the afternoons at the Capitol. So if you could make it in the morning or, preferably, if you could lunch with me either day that would be fine. I shall be staying at 1727 19 Street. Could you drop me a line there about this? Sincerely, Walter Lippmann.
The note marks the start of a cautious shift by Lippmann from his role as a confidential adviser for the first real hero of the Progressive movement, Republican ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, to backing the re-election campaign of the then incumbent, Democrat Woodrow Wilson. It also confirms the start of a lifelong and often contentious relationship between the thirty-four-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, a rising star in American politics, and Lippmann, who already at twenty-seven was a nationally recognized author on political philosophy and one of the founding editors of the most powerful voice of the Progressive movement, The New Republic. Intriguingly, this also is the first reference to the boarding house, which served as Lippmann's base for the two years he was in Washington, a nondescript row house on a tree-shaded side street just two blocks east of busy Connecticut Avenue — jocularly known to its inhabitants and many visitors as The House of Truth.
The House of Truth came into being in 1911, when Robert Grosvenor Valentine, the Taft administration's Commissioner of Indian Affairs, rented it and turned it into an informally run bachelor's boarding house. Valentine was a wealthy Harvard graduate and MIT professor in the new discipline of industrial engineering.
If one occupation symbolized the Progressive image, it was the engineer. He was the fact-driven, unassailably honest inventor whose constructions — whether a bridge, a new machine, or a social reform — were both more efficient and at the same time more moral than what had come before. If industrialization was inevitable, the engineer would make it a force for good. As Harvard historian John M. Jordan has observed, "Engineers appeared as heroes in over one hundred silent movies and in novels that sold roughly five million copies between 1897 and 1920." Technocrats like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, who created new technologies and then turned them into commercial successes, were living proof of American intellectual and (equally important) moral superiority.
So Valentine had little trouble recruiting congenial companionship from among the growing number of Harvard alumni who were beginning their careers in the federal government. The narrow three-story house featured a large living room-dining room space on the ground floor that served as a commons area; tall French windows on the front could open in the evening to catch the breeze. The furnishings there and in the six upstairs bedrooms were secondhand and a bit rump-sprung, but that added to a raffish, slightly bohemian atmosphere that made it highly attractive to the young people who were drawn there.
Another important attraction of the house was its location in the newly fashionable neighborhood of embassies and important residences that orbited the Dupont Circle intersection of the grand boulevards of Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As late as the 1880s, the area had been a marshy wasteland and dumping ground at the outer limits of the city. But by 1900, the boundaries of the District of Columbia had been greatly expanded northwards in response to a building boom.
The circle with its small park was less than a mile northwest of the White House and the baroque office building that housed the State, Navy, and War Departments, so government workers and high officials alike enjoyed an easy commute. Radiating out from the circle, newly paved streets crossed a recently opened bridge on P Street across Rock Creek Park to link with Georgetown; another bridge for trolleys extended Connecticut Avenue northwards and spanned the Rock Creek to reach out to the faraway farm hamlet of Chevy Chase. If one had business in downtown Washington, Dupont Circle was where one wanted to live.
The neighborhood had undergone change almost from the start of its development twenty years earlier. First, huge beaux arts mansions had been built by the wealthy and powerful. But plainer row houses then filled in what had been empty lots on either side of the major spokes off the circle. Many of the older, more ornate structures had changed hands by 1916 and now housed important embassies including those of Great Britain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and China. But the House of Truth was in a compact enclave of row houses and small apartments that had originally served a community of affluent African American families of mid-level government employees.
Valentine was a generous host when it came to entertaining, so the House of Truth quickly became a social magnet for the influx of young men and women who had come to Washington for exciting careers. Two early visitors who became residents were a young lawyer from New York named Felix Frankfurter and a British nobleman, Lord Eustace Percy, who was the private secretary to the British ambassador. Percy later recalled,
That household had a touch of du Maurier's Quartier Latin, with law and the erratic politics of the then infant New Republic taking the place of art as the focus of its endless talk and even more endless flow of casual guests. The range of our talk and our entertainment was 'extensive and peculiar'; but we hardly took ourselves or our symposia seriously enough to deserve the mocking nickname of the "House of Truth," which some humorist conferred upon us.
The "humorist," of course, was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who lived nearby. Despite his age (he was seventy-five), Holmes quickly had established himself as the paterfamilias of the younger men, and he relished ruling over the dinner table debates as both referee and devil's advocate.
Most of the bachelors of the House of Truth were very young, in their twenties. They favored the new soft–collar shirts and slightly shabby suits common to the graduate students they had recently been. Their drink of choice was the newly popular daiquiri cocktail, and they pursued debutantes of suffragette convictions with the intensity of their arguments and their taste for dancing to gramophone records of that new syncopated rage known as "jass." The food served was indifferent but was available at all hours — a good thing because the fierce debates around the dinner table often lasted all night, and arguing was hungry work.
The house on Nineteenth Street was just one of several important addresses in the Dupont Circle neighborhood that were homes to prominent political names in the Progressive roster. These houses served as both debating arenas and recruiting centers for what New York socialite Mabel Dodge had dubbed as the young "movers and shakers" of the movement.
Nearby at 1323 Eighteenth Street was a vastly different place that was the focus for what might be called the Old Guard Progressives. The huge art-filled mansion of former secretary of state John Watson Foster was a base for older reformers who had come to power in the previous century, but it also drew young place-seekers from the wealthier families of the Eastern Establishment. Its lure for young visitors was enhanced by the fact that by 1915, one of Foster's sons-in-law, Robert Lansing, had just been made secretary of state for Woodrow Wilson. Lansing and his wife lived there as well.
Champagne, not cocktails, was the drink of choice for the guests in white ties and tailcoats who gathered amidst the collection of Russian and Spanish art collected during Foster's tours as U.S. ambassador. During the day, young diplomats wore the same high starched collars of their elders, and when their day jobs did not require the cutaway coat and striped trousers of officialdom, their suits were cut more formally and were newer than those of their friends at the House of Truth.
Lansing, a Democrat, and Foster, a Republican, were the two most prominent activists in what was called the arbitration movement in international affairs. For more than twenty-five years, they had participated in more negotiations to settle international disputes than anyone. The common wisdom that prevailed was that conflicts between nations could be reduced to legal issues and adjudicated peacefully if only the contending parties would concede to the judgments of impartial arbitrators. Arbitration had drawn the support of determined peace activists such as Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who funded a prize to reward those who sought to end war. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie had donated the funds to establish a World Court in The Hague, Netherlands, as a permanent forum for international law adjudication.
The quest for peace was hardly new. After the carnage of the American Civil War, the nature of war itself had morphed from distant conflicts between professional armies to a general melee that resulted in horrifying civilian destruction without resolving the causes of the wars themselves. Whatever other issues might engage Progressive reformers, all agreed that the quest for peace was paramount. The new genre of warfare — exaggerated by new armaments of staggering firepower — threatened civilization itself. No one felt safe. So Prussia could conquer France with ease; Russia could attack the tottering Ottoman Empire and in turn be sent into near-revolution by its defeat at the hands of the upstart Japanese navy. However emotionally satisfying America's triumph over the Spanish in 1898 might have been, it nevertheless added to the growing instability of the globe.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "On Dupont Circle"
by .
Copyright © 2012 James Srodes.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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