The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism

In 1912, a group of ambitious young men, including Felix Frankfurter and Walter Lippmann, became disillusioned by the sluggish pace of change in the Taft Administration. They threw informal dinner parties at a Dupont Circle row house owned by Robert G. Valentine that they self-mockingly referred to as the “House of Truth.” The house became the city’s foremost political salon. Brad Snyder draws on the Valentine family papers at MHS to weave together the stories of these fascinating, combative, and sometimes contradictory figures, and looks at how ideas shifted from progressivism into what today we refer to as liberalism.