RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Committee City The arrangement to site the capital in the South was the nation’s first great backroom deal By Fergus M. Bordewich

Posted By Ruth King on December 14th, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-committee-city-1449873244

In the spring of 1790, as the members of the First Congress, meeting in New York City, discarded one proposed location after another, it seemed almost certain that the nation’s permanent capital would end up somewhere in Pennsylvania. Few expected it to wind up sandwiched between the slave states of Maryland and Virginia—except President George Washington and his leading acolyte in Congress, James Madison. How the capital got there is just one of the many stories that Tom Lewis recounts in “Washington: A History of Our National City,” an engagingly written, panoramic chronicle of the nation’s capital, from its unlikely founding to the era of the city’s notorious crack-smoking mayor Marion Barry.

Madison, brilliantly playing a weak political hand, derailed the overconfident Pennsylvanians and their allies and concluded the first great back-room deal in American political history. Over dinner at Thomas Jefferson’s rented house on Maiden Lane, he agreed to provide enough (grudging) Southern votes to ensure the passage of Alexander Hamilton’s ambitious financial plans, in return for the Treasury secretary’s agreement not to block the establishment of the federal city on the Potomac River.

Founding a city was one thing. Making it livable was another. Workmen, many of them enslaved, barely managed to complete enough of the Capitol and the president’s mansion for the government to move there 1800. For decades to come, Washington would lack even the most basic infrastructure. Sewage pooled in the stagnant canal that followed the course of what would later become the National Mall. Marauding pigs and dogs prowled the unpaved streets that were unlit at night and that, when it rained, turned into morasses. Houses remained few and far between, commerce modest, and cultural life almost nonexistent.

Such shortcomings aside, the capital had a pleasantly intimate, small-town feel. In one of his many well-chosen anecdotes, Mr. Lewis notes that, after Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, the new president made his way back on foot from the Capitol to the inn where he was temporarily staying and dined simply with his fellow boarders. Similarly, “when the horses were running, Congress regularly adjourned to the racecourse north of the city. Not even discussion of the Louisiana Purchase in November 1803 could keep members from the turf.”

Mr. Lewis leads us into the capital’s drawing rooms, corridors of power and (less frequently) squalid slums. We encounter all manner of Washingtonians: the city’s irascible planner, the French-American engineer Peter Charles L’Enfant; the loquacious early chronicler of social life Margaret Bayard Smith; Beverly Snow, an African-American whose Epicurean Eating House was one of the city’s most popular restaurants in the 1830s; William Corcoran, the pro-Southern millionaire whose art collection became the Corcoran Gallery; the flamboyant hostess and Confederate spy Rose Greenhow; Oliver O. Howard, the one-armed Civil War general who founded eponymous Howard University and defended it tenaciously against assault from racist politicians; high-handed “Boss” Alexander Shepherd, who dominated the city’s post-Civil War government, bullying and muscling it into Gilded Age modernity; Walter Washington, who piloted the city out of the shadow of Jim Crow and became, in 1967, its first black mayor.

Mr. Lewis’s account of the city’s always significant African-American population is sympathetic and thorough. Although Washington grew into a major regional slave market—cavalcades of shackled slaves were often seen from the Capitol, trudging toward local slave pens—the capital simultaneously became, in the antebellum era, a magnet for free men and women, who soon made up a majority of its black population. Slaves were commonly allowed to hire themselves out, paying their masters a fixed sum and keeping the rest for themselves. Many worked in boarding houses, taverns and the Navy Yard, which, says Mr. Lewis, “gave blacks, enslaved and free, frequent opportunities to meet in ways that ordinarily weren’t possible on isolated farms and plantations.” Over time, free blacks founded schools, small businesses and self-help organizations, gradually forming the core of the city’s black middle class.

After the Civil War, during the decades in which the Republican Party dominated the federal government, many ambitious blacks found jobs in the racially integrated civil service, where they flourished. That era came to an abrupt halt during the administration of Southern-born Woodrow Wilson. Blacks who were not fired outright from government jobs were dispatched to isolated offices or hidden from sight behind partitions. Says Mr. Lewis: “The effect of the Wilson administration’s policies on Washington’s nearly 100,000 blacks was devastating.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the seedy capital was physically transformed into a city fit for the nation’s new imperial aspirations. Monumental public buildings replaced slums and filled vacant land to form the cityscape that Americans know today. So dramatic was the rebuilding that in 1912 a writer for Scribner’s Magazine could exclaim: “He who visits Washington now after ten years finds so great a transformation that he is fain to take his bearings anew from the ancient landmarks.”

More than a few ill-conceived projects were narrowly avoided: the addition of two giant Beaux Arts wings to the White House; the removal of the president’s mansion altogether to a hill overlooking the outskirts of the city; a huge new railway station plopped in the middle of the Mall. Finally, in the early days of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency—thanks largely to the architect Frederick Law Olmsted and decisive political support from Sen. James McMillan, chairman of the Senate’s District of Columbia Committee—L’Enfant’s long-neglected plan once again became the guiding inspiration for the capital’s continuing development.

World War II transformed what had remained a city of slow-paced informality, where ordinary citizens were free to stroll on the South Lawn of the White House and motorists sometimes stopped under its north portico during rainstorms to put their tops up. Now “temporary” government office and housing blocks—some would survive into the 1970s—popped up everywhere, including the middle of the National Mall. Despite lingering discrimination, large numbers of blacks and women, and the handicapped as well, found work in war-related facilities. “On any given day,” Mr. Lewis writes, “Washingtonians might encounter an armless telephone operator, a one-armed teletype operator, a chauffeur without legs, or a blind mechanic.”

After World War II, many black Americans in particular, who for the first time had enjoyed good jobs with commensurate salaries, resented being pushed once again to the margins of society, setting the stage for the multiple struggles for civil rights and personal respect that were soon to come. Those conflicts would not be free of violence—swaths of downtown Washington burned during 1968 riots—but they would eventually lead to black control of the city’s government.

Mr. Lewis races a bit too quickly over Washington’s recent history following the spectacular fall of Marion Barry—from three-term mayor to felon and, for six months in 1991-92, federal prisoner. (He was re-elected mayor in 1994 and later served on the city council, little heeded, until his death in November 2014.) Although still beset by typical big-city problems, including entrenched poverty and troubled schools, the city, over the past decade, has seen economic growth, a construction boom, a flowering of cultural life and an influx of young people who have brought new energy to once moribund neighborhoods.

“The city has survived for more than two centuries as an outward and visible sign not only of our vices and failings, but also of our virtues and ideals,” Mr. Lewis writes. “Through it all, Washington has remained the mirror of America.”

—Mr. Bordewich is the author of “Washington: The Making of the American Capital.”

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