About this item
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.
About the Author
Brad Snyder is the author of the forthcoming book, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, Feb. 1, 2017) . The book tells the story of a Dupont Circle political salon where future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and up-and-coming journalist Walter Lippmann lived and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the sculptor Gutzon Borglum (Mount Rushmore) were regular guests. A University of Wisconsin law professor, Snyder teaches constitutional law, constitutional history, civil procedure, and sports law. He has published articles on constitutional history in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Law & History Review, UC-Davis Law Review, and Boston College Law Review. Prior to teaching law, he worked as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP and wrote two critically acclaimed books about baseball: A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports and Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball.
