On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World

An inside and sometime scandalous portrait of the twelve young men and women who shaped the early progressive movement.

It never occurred to the young men and women at the House of Truth, as they sat arguing around a late night dinner table strewn with empty wine bottles and smoldering ashtrays, that they were the inheritors of a long tradition in American politics.

They would have laughed. They knew better. For although they all had been born in the last years of the nineteenth century, the early weeks of 1916 now found them placed very firmly in a new age. They considered themselves a generation of crusaders in a new cause-Progressivism. They came from diverse family backgrounds, but education at elite universities gave them a. sense of superior judgment that entitled them-no, required them-to speak their new truths to an older age. They were unique, they thought.

In reality, these young Progressives were the advance guard of the next phase in the evolution of America into the society we have today. As they disputed and tested each other in that shabby boarding house in Washington, D.C., all of them dreamed of achieving lives they all would come to live.