My Amazon Review of Brad Snyder's "The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism"

The Birth of the Administrative State

University of Wisconsin Law School professor Brad Snyder has written a very long book (824 pages in the print edition) on the origins of American liberalism. He tells his story through the collection of people who lived in and/or visited a house located at 1727 19^th Street in the DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington D.C. between 1912 -1919 and he then follows them through the early 1930’s.  Here we meet such liberal icons Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann (in his early life) and the sculptor Gertzon Borglum (think Mount Rushmore).

All of them were upset with the more conservative strain of the Taft Administration as compared to Teddy Roosevelt’s and all of them want to move  away from the laissez faire philosophy of the 19^th century and to move towards a regulated economy run by disinterested experts. Their attitudes were in response to the emergence of an industrial society that was a far cry from the Jeffersonian vision of a democracy based on yeoman farmers. Simply put they wanted to use Hamiltonian means to achieve liberal ends.

It is all so remarkable to read that the Washington D.C. of those days was a very small town and many of the residents and visitors had ready access to the leading figures of government from the president on down. And boy did they use that access, especially during the Wilson Administration. We see Frankfurter running the War Labor Board, Borglum investigating fraud in aviation procurement and Lippmann writing what was to become Wilson’s Fourteen Points and become part of the U.S. negotiation team at Versailles.

Snyder shows how Brandeis and Frankfurter influenced Holmes to become a leading civil libertarian on the Court as they applaud his pro-regulatory views. The book spends far too much time on the liberal cause celeb of the 1920s, the Sacco-Vanzetti case.  To be sure in a strict legal sense they were victims of a miscarriage of justice but as Snyder tells us in an endnote, modern scholarship suggests that Sacco was guilty. He should have been more honest in noting that upfront.

Snyder also shows us how Frankfurter sent his best students to be law clerks for the Supreme Court. One notable success was Dean Acheson Truman’s Secretary of State who clerked for Brandeis. Two others mentioned did not turn out as well. Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran clerked for Holmes was an architect of the New Deal, but later be became one of Washington’s great “fixers.” Many followed in that tradition by going to Washington to do good and ended up doing well. The other clerk he sent to Holmes was Alger Hiss, the notorious Soviet Spy.

What I liked about the denizens of 1727 19^th Street was that unlike too many of today’s progressives, they really believed in free speech and that Frankfurter and Brandeis were full-throated supporters of the Zionist project. Although Snyder carefully notes Lippmann’s move to the Right, he hardly spends time on how later in life Frankfurter became one of the leading conservatives on the Supreme Court. He stayed true to his belief that courts should give great deference to elected legislatures. Finally Snyder doesn’t deal with the dark side of the administrative state where nameless and faceless bureaucrats, many with heavy political agendas, dictate practically every nook and cranny of American life.

Nevertheless for readers who slog through the book, they will get a real sense of ferment of ideas that made liberalism a major force in our society.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1FN340T5FBJXM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv