The historian James Srodes begins his delightful book On Dupont Circle with a discussion of the young residents of The House of Truth. The group is also the subject of a history, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism written by Brad Snyder. The boarding house stood at 1727 19th Street and was so named by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a way of playfully teasing its young progressive residents. A 2012 Washington Post review of Srodes’ book discusses the history of the home in great depth and touches on some of the historical figures who stayed there.

The boarding house became the residence of an all-star cast of young movers and shakers at around the time AEI’s current home was being constructed. We discussed that building in an earlier post. The roads forming spokes emanating from Dupont Circle were newly paved and the house’s proximity to the White House and the State, War, and Navy Department offices (now the Old Executive Office Building) made it an ideal location for the young Progressives. Franklin Roosevelt, then undersecretary of the Navy, lived around the corner and was a frequent visitor. Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou—both accomplished engineers—dined there often. Walter Lippman, the founder of the New Republic, resided there first as a bachelor and then with his wife, as did Justice Felix Frankfurter, who met his wife there. On Louis Brandeis’s first trip to Washington, Frankfurter brought him to dinner at the house. Frankfurter noted later, “almost everybody who was interesting in Washington sooner or later passed through the house” during the Taft and Wilson administrations. 

One of the less political residents was the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who drew on the dining room’s tablecloth a model for a sculpture in the Black Hills that would eventually become Mt. Rushmore. We can’t directly compare the dining room spaces at the House of Truth and AEI. However, it is possible to see the passion for intellectual debate and new ideas of those early residents of the House of Truth living on today in the work and research of AEI’s scholars, albeit with a different political orientation. 

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