By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Snyder, Brad. The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 811 pp. Cloth, $34.95.
The house in question in the book’s title was located at 1727 Nineteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. It belonged to Robert G. Valentine and served as a political salon from 1911 to 1919, a brief period, to be sure, but with consequences for the nation. Valentine shared the house with Felix Frankfurter and Winfred T. Denison. Oliver Wendell Holmes lived nearby at 1720 Eye Street and became a frequent visitor.
The house served as a meeting place where Frankfurter, Louis D. Brandeis, and Henry L. Simpson, and others could develop their ideas with respect to progressive and Zionist objectives.
The occupants of the House of Truth were liberals, not in the nineteenth-century sense of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom, but in the twentieth-century sense, with its emphasis on regulation and on government run by experts rather than by bureaucrats. Addressing the issues of the day, in common they believed that government could force big business to recognize the rights of organized labor and could protect industrial workers from long hours, inhumane conditions, and unconscionably low pay. The institution of a progressive tax code was another objective.
Frankfurter arrived in Washington in 1911, choosing to reside in the nation’s capital over New York City because “it was not driven by money, but by power and ideas.” President Howard Taft had named Henry Simpson secretary of war, and Simpson got Frankfurter a job in the law offices of the Bureau of Insular Affairs.
Valentine had secured a job as commissioner of Indian Affairs, and in that capacity issued a one-page order banning teachers in the government-sponsored Indian schools from wearing religious insignia and garb. The order was aimed primarily at the 60 Catholic priests and nuns still teaching in the Indian schools after the government had taken them over.
The House of Truth in early 1912 was the place to be for supporters of Theodore Roosevelt’s bid for a third presidential term. The House survived Bull Moose’s defeat and continued to function as a liberal salon under the leadership of Frankfurter, Denison, and Valentine.
Liberals lost much of their power during the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, but nevertheless spent the 1920s and 1930s fighting for and against judicial nominees, and relied on the courts to advance their political and legal agenda. As an outlet for their ideas, Valentine in the company of Frankfurter, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann, with financial support from J.P. Morgan, launched The New Republic. Frankfurter left the House in June 1914 to teach at the Harvard Law School, but in the following years he wrote many signed and unsigned articles for The New Republic.
Walter Lippmann was important for the early success of the magazine, but his friendship with Frankfurter did not last. Lippmann had studied at Harvard, where he had founded the Harvard Socialist Club and could number among his friends William James and George Santayana. He became a syndicated newspaper columnist, with 126 newspapers carrying his “Today and Tomorrow” briefings.
By 1933 Lippmann had left the fold and became one of the New Deal’s foremost critics, differing substantially with Frankfurter, particularly on policy with respect to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Upon his election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered Frankfurter the position of solicitor general, hoping eventually to name him to the Supreme Court. Roosevelt thought it would be easier to get him appointed from that position than as a Jewish professor from Harvard. Frankfurter declined. As a law professor he was able to send dozens of his former students and protégées, notably Dean Acheson, into positions throughout the administration.
In Brad Snyder’s judgment, “His influence on the FDR Administration, the New Deal, and the future of federal regulation was incalculable.”
Joseph P. Kennedy, then director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, charged that Felix Frankfurter was running the Roosevelt administration. Hugh S. Jackson claimed that Frankfurter had his “boys” insinuated into obscure but key positions in every vital department of the U.S. government.
In 1916 Louis D. Brandeis was appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson. He was the first Jew to be named to the Supreme Court and by all accounts distinguished himself both as a diplomat and as a jurist. Frankfurter did not join the Supreme Court until 1939.
Not to be neglected is the contribution of the House of Truth to the American landscape. Gutzon Borgulm, a Belgian sculptor who sought the support of the salon, revealed his intention to celebrate heroes of the Confederacy by a carving into Stone Mountain, Ga., the horseback images of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.
Influential members of the House redirected his energies, and he became the sculptor of the four presidential images, of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roose-
velt, and Lincoln, that we now know as the National Memorial at Mount Rushmore.
With reason, Brad Snyder, in a conclusion to his volume, can say, “The people associated with the House made two major contributions to American liberalism. First, Holmes and Brandeis showed liberals how the Court could come to the aid of political and racial minorities by protecting free speech, voting rights, and fair criminal trials. . . . Second, Frankfurter and his friends created an influential liberal network, one that longed survived the breakup of the House in 1919.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress