In 1912, a group of young and ambitious bureaucrats and thought-leaders, disillusioned by the progress of change in the Taft Administration, transformed the house they shared into the capital's foremost political salon. Self-mockingly referred to as the "House of Truth," the row house was the residence of the young Felix Frankfurter and the aspiring journalist Walter Lippmann, and their guests included Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, and sculptor Gutzon Borglum (later the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument).

Weaving together the stories and intellectual trajectories of these figures Brad Snyder shows how the progress of their thinking about government and policy, shifted from a firm belief in progressivism--the belief that the government should protect its workers and regulate monopolies--into what we call liberalism, the belief that government can improve citizens' lives through legislation while still being prevented from abridging their civil liberties and eventually civil rights. This fascinating historical and biographical narrative reimagines and recreates the birth of the minimum wage, child-welfare laws, banking insurance, Social Security, and other programs that we now take for granted. In essence, the origins of the New Deal and American Liberalism can be traced to a row house in Dupont Circle.