James Srodes - On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World
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Prizewinning author James Srodes offers a vivid and scintillating portrait of the twelve young men and women who, on the eve of World War I, came together in Washington, D.C.s tony Dupont Circle neighborhood. They were ambitious for personal and social advancement, and what bound them together was a sheer determination to remake America and the rest of the world in their progressive image.
At one residenceknown ironically as The House of Truthlived Felix Frankfuter, a future Supreme Court Justice, and Walter Lippman, later the most important political writer of the twentieth century. Another house served as the base for three siblings: John Foster Dulles, future Secretary of State, Allen Dulles, one of the founders of the CIA, and sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles, one of the most important economists of the age.
Meanwhile, nearby lived young Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who even then were rising political stars, William Bullitt, a charming and unscrupulous writer and future ambassador, and Herbert Hoover, already the most famous American in the world.
The group mixed cocktails, foreign policy, and bedmates as they set out to remake the world. For the next twenty years they pursued increasingly important careers as their private lives become ever more entangled. By the end of this story, on the eve of WWII, the group came together again for a second chance at historythis time the result was the United Nations.
At one residenceknown ironically as The House of Truthlived Felix Frankfuter, a future Supreme Court Justice, and Walter Lippman, later the most important political writer of the twentieth century. Another house served as the base for three siblings: John Foster Dulles, future Secretary of State, Allen Dulles, one of the founders of the CIA, and sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles, one of the most important economists of the age.
Meanwhile, nearby lived young Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who even then were rising political stars, William Bullitt, a charming and unscrupulous writer and future ambassador, and Herbert Hoover, already the most famous American in the world.
The group mixed cocktails, foreign policy, and bedmates as they set out to remake the world. For the next twenty years they pursued increasingly important careers as their private lives become ever more entangled. By the end of this story, on the eve of WWII, the group came together again for a second chance at historythis time the result was the United Nations.
James Srodes: author's other books
Who wrote On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Carol Kelly-Gangi
Eleanor Roosevelt
Willard Sterne Randall
Fiona Young-Brown
Roosevelt Eleanor
Roosevelt Curtis
Cook Blanche Wiesen
Gare Thompson
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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Table of Contents
Guide
Table of Contents
for Cecile
the better angel of my nature
the better angel of my nature
Preface
I ONCE MET A WOMAN IN HER NINETIES who had graduated from a teachers college in Mississippi and had spent the rest of her life educating children in the rural schools of that state. As she talked about the long sweep of history she had witnessed, I asked her what had been her ambition on the day when she graduated from that college and set out on her life. She answered without hesitation, To work for the League of Nations. Noting my surprised expression, she added, Everyone wanted to in those days. It was such a noble idea.
Anyone who reads much history has to be struck by how there are so few really important people involved in any great event. Take any epoch, say, the Hundred Years War, the Age of Enlightenment, or the Great Depression, and it is hard to come up with a list of more than a few scorefewer than a hundred, certainlycharacters who truly can be said to have been important to the outcome. What is so remarkable about our cast of a dozen young characters who assembled in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on the eve of World War I is how important they would remain to the history of the rest of what we call the American Century.
Their story is about a time when a tectonic movement shifted the axis of the entire world. During the first half of the twentieth century, no corner of the globe was immune from the aftershocks as the rush to industrialization produced a series of tremors that toppled monarchies, reduced great capitals to rubble, and condemned millions to famine and violent death while at the same time producing an unimagined prosperity for some and dispossession and resentment for others. This cultural and political upheaval threw off a deadening past and freed millions to aspire to a civil society based on the ideal goal of equality for all under the rule of law. What had been unthinkably idealistic in the early years of the previous century would become an unquestioned standard of what a good society is today.
This is not the place to discuss the tidal shifts and adjustments of that time. Instead I have focused on the lives of a dozen individuals who were born in the late nineteenth century, who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth, and whose roles in that ultimate quest influence our lives today. Each of my twelve personalities was prominent in their own right; each has been the subject of at least one biography, and in several cases, whole shelves of books have been devoted to some of the others. Additionally, they all were outsiders. Even Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, despite their aristocratic lineages, were viewed by their social equals and others in their wide circle of family as being slightly exotic. Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, and Herbert Hoover stood apart from the American mainstream by virtue of their religious faiths. The three Dulles siblings, John Foster, Allen, and Eleanor, spent their youths shuttling between privilege and privation. Phillip Kerr and Eustace Percy were born into the tiny enclave of the British Catholic nobility but spent their lives in radical politics.
What binds them together is how, at an unusually young age, all of them became acquainted and how they came and went in and out of each others lives during the twenty-year period between the two world wars. Even when they were separated by careers, private lives, and changing fortunes, they remained unified by common commitment to that ultimate quest that so engaged other young people of their age. So they are not just a group of friends who banded together, they are a metaphor for a generation who had to overcome the restraints of being born in one era and living their lives in the turmoil of another even as they struggled to create a better future.
The name they gave themselves was Progressives, a word that has a different meaning today. Just as todays Tea Party partisans have little in common with the revolutionaries who dumped tea in Boston harbor in 1773, our cast of characters would have been astonished at the political objectives of those who call themselves Progressives today. The enlarged role of the national government in determining social standards, for example, would have discomfited them. For that matter, many of the labels and descriptive terms in this story have changed during the more than a hundred years between their time and ours. While the two major political parties were called Democrat and Republican, they represented vastly different coalitions of interests then and in many ways were more fluid groupings; there were Progressive wings of both parties then, for example.
There were as many kinds of Progressivism as there were Progressives themselves. One reason that Progressivism never achieved the cohesiveness it needed to survive as a lasting political force lay in the single-issue zealotry of some of its adherents. For example, in his fine history of the Prohibition movement, historian Daniel Okrent shows how discord over whether or not the campaigns ultimate goal was to extend voting rights to women proved to be the crusades undoing. The movement also attracted eugenicists who believed that selective birth policies could solve many social issues; for a time there was a vogue for enforced sterilization of individuals judged to be genetically unfit to participate in the societys gene pool. Unlike Socialist dogma, most Progressives were as chary of big government as they were of an overweening corporatist state; bigness to the minds of most was suspect. Progressive advocacy ranged from those who retreated to rural communes based on Christian doctrines to those who proclaimed new economic theories from Marxism to Fascism with all of the ideological gradations in between.
WHILE THE LARGER MASS of people still could be thrilled at the sound of the drum and the sight of a flag, Progressives saw war as a bacillus that infected all of a societys tissues. The lives lost robbed families of their hold on prosperity; the materials consumed in munitions and engines of war were better and more profitably used to improve domestic infrastructure, better housing and sanitation. The increasing prospect of a major war between alliances of great powers spreading into a global conflict threatened the very existence of civilization.
Like other Great Awakenings of the past, the Progressive search for peace drew support from individuals who did not always share in the movements broader agenda of government reform and social uplift. But perhaps no one captured the heart of Progressive peace seekers more than the bellicose hero of the Spanish-American War, President Theodore Roosevelt. It was to his banner that our cast of characters first rallied. However, as his age and intemperate judgment took its toll, the young Progressive shiftedwarily at firstto the ranks of that other American Messiah of Peace, Woodrow Wilson.
Our story is about the period of profound disappointment that came after Wilsons ill-starred crusade to create a permanent world peace, which was rejected by the American people. We will follow the public careers and private lives of our youthful Progressivesthe Dupont Circle setas they mature and refine their ambitions. We will see how their search for some mechanism to win peace in a world bent on war will send them seeking another leader, and how, as warily as before, they will coalesce around Franklin Roosevelt for yet another effort. In so doing, these once-young idealists will end up giving us the world we inhabit today.
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