Larz Anderson House

This guide to Larz Anderson House in Washington, D.C. opens in 1783, when George Washington nearly resigned from the new Society of the Cincinnati over a small gold eagle medal that critics like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson denounced as a step toward American nobility. It follows the compromise that kept the society alive and the eagle's place in the collection that fills this fifty-room mansion, which Larz and Isabel Anderson built for diplomats and later gave to that same society. Listen for how the rooms built for entertaining still frame that founding-era argument.