The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LV: Splendid Neglect

     The extent to which the satisfaction and wellbeing of the inhabitants of the District was an afterthought from the perspective of the United States Government would seem to be amply demonstrated by the deeply inconsistent manner in which its administration was handled in the years and decades following its creation. The existing settlements of Georgetown and Alexandria arguably fared the best. The former was allowed to maintain its established municipal government for the entire period between the District’s founding and its reorganization in 1871. And while Alexandria comparatively suffered by having Washington City and Georgetown draw away potential commercial traffic in the absence of a state government interested in funding canal or railway connections – both of which improvements Georgetown and Washington eventually gained – local agitation over the issue did eventually bear fruit. After a series of petitions and appeals, the whole of Virginia’s original cession was returned to the state by an Act of Congress in March of 1847. Washington City, by comparison, was made to suffer through a series of administrative alterations over which its residents had essentially no control. Granted, between 1801 and 1874, the city itself was at least possessed of a directly elected legislature, though its exact purpose and powers of fluctuated significantly over time. Initially, with the mayor of the city a direct appointee of the President and Congress maintaining the right to levy taxes upon District residents, the government of Washington City had little else to do but transmit petitions from local residents, administer city services, and conduct tax assessments on behalf of the federal government. Matters improved somewhat in 1812 when the bicameral city council was granted the power to appoint a mayor of its own choosing, and again in 1820 – partly in response to the destruction suffered during the recent conflict with the United Kingdom – when the post was made popularly elected. But this period of local home rule did not last for very long. Not but sixty years later, residents of the District would find themselves less empowered than ever before.

    The Civil War, unsurprisingly, was the catalyst for this unfortunate development. With the secession of Virginia in April of 1861 – an event which the Lincoln Administration had hoped to avoid, and then took steps to avoid repeating in neighboring Maryland – the nation’s capital suddenly found itself sharing a river border with the rebellious Confederacy. The immediate result was a dramatic buildup of both military facilities and personnel as the formerly sleepy capital district was transformed into the headquarters of the Union war effort. Over the course of the next four years, Washington City accordingly become both the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac – a formation which, at its height, consisted of almost fifteen thousand men – and the nexus of a massive series of fortifications, trenchworks, military access roads, and supply depots which combined to make the District one of the most heavily defended locations in the contemporary world. Meanwhile, with the passage of the Compensated Emancipation Act in April of 1862 – the objective of which was the abolition of slavery within the confines of the federal capital – the District also became a magnet for enslaved peoples fleeing captivity from across the river in Confederate Virginia and across the District boundary in Union-controlled Maryland. The resulting influx of domestic refugees, combined with the aforementioned military presence, put tremendous pressure on the capital’s resources and made it abundantly clear the degree to which the region’s civic development had been persistently neglected. Most roads were still unpaved, making it extremely difficult – especially during the rainy summer season – to move the supplies and men necessary to construct and maintain the various fortifications discussed above. Not only that, but the almost complete lack of modern waste management infrastructure very quickly turned certain precincts into the equivalent of open-air cesspools.

    While none of this, fortunately, ended up hampering the Union war effort, it was nevertheless painfully obvious by the end of the 1860s that both the physical and administrative infrastructure of the District of Columbia were badly in need of renovation. Local population numbers alone told a dramatic story, with the pre-war figure of seventy-five thousand – circa 1860 – ballooning to a potentially unmanageable one hundred and thirty thousand by the end of 1870. Not only did this represent a rate of increase of seventy-six percent in ten years, but the accompanying migration of urban dwellers eager to escape the progressively more crowded settlements of Georgetown and Washington City into unincorporated Washington County also led to a rise in the District’s population density. For a time, the prevailing opinion in Congress seemed to be that moving the nation’s capital elsewhere was the only possible solution. The District’s inhabitants, it was true, had weathered the recent war with admirable fortitude, but Washington City had also showed itself to be sorely lacking in many of the basic necessities that most national capitals took for granted. President Ulysses S. Grant, however, refused to even consider the notion, the result of which was the passage of the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871.

    Compared to the regime envisioned by the previous Organic Act (1801), the governmental framework that replaced it was both more robust and much simpler. Georgetown, Washington City, and Washington County were all abolished as separate legal entities and combined into a centralized District of Columbia, the administration of which consisted of a governor and a council appointed by the President, an elected legislative assembly, and a board of public works. In light of the infrastructural deficiencies cited above, this latter body in particular was given significant leeway to both propose and carry out whatever projects its members deemed necessary. The result, under the leadership of Republican political operative Alexander Robey Shepherd (1835-1902), was a veritable explosion of city improvements over the course of a relatively brief two-year period. One hundred and fifty-seven miles of paved roads and sidewalks were approved, along with one hundred and twenty-three miles of sewers, thirty-nine miles of gas mains, and thirty miles of water mains. In addition, some sixty thousand trees were planted, a system of horse-drawn streetcars was put in place, and countless streetlights were installed, all at the behest of Robey and his nominal superior, Governor Henry D. Cooke (1825-1881). This breakneck pace of improvements only increased when, in 1873, Shepherd succeeded Cooke as chief executive of the District, in large part because of Shepherd’s canny use of the various responsibilities of his office.

    Under the auspices of the new Organic Act, it seemed, the Governor of the District of Columbia was permitted to issue construction bonds on their own authority, a power which Shepherd further enhanced by submitting the resulting bond issues to the public in the form of referenda. Having risen to authority in the District by way of a decade of service on Washington City’s local council, Shepherd was extremely popular with both middle-class whites and free Blacks, and these bond issues – combined with his tendency to thumb his nose at Congress while pursuing his own agenda – allowed him to reshape the nation’s capital almost singlehandedly and to public acclaim. At length, however, as the cost of Shepherd’s various construction projects continued to mount, popular opinion began to turn. In order to fund his seeming mania for improvements, Shepherd and his allies in the District assembly had raised taxes to such an unprecedented degree that a number of residents had been forced to sell their personal property in order to pay off what they owed. And while streets continued to be paved in precincts across the District, certain areas seemed to be enjoying conspicuously preferential attention. In 1874, a petition was finally circulated requesting that Congress conduct an audit of Shepherd’s administration, the result of which was the discovery that the District was some thirteen million dollars in debt. Shepherd had evidently been spending far more than he was allocated, frequently to the benefit of his political allies and financial backers. In the mold of New York’s William Tweed (1823-1878), he had made himself the political “boss” of the District of Columbia, a cunning bearer of patronage and a font of political corruption. Congress responded – not without reason – by summarily repealing the latest Organic Act and placing the government of the District entirely in the hands of an ad-hoc board of commissioners. Gone was the office of Governor – Shepherd having tarnished it irrevocably – and gone was the elected assembly – its members having cooperated too enthusiastically with Shepherd. But at the very least, the District was no longer an infrastructural backwater.

    This, unfortunately, was perhaps the most that could be said for it. In 1878, Congress made permanent the board of commissioners it had established in 1874. From that point onward into the middle of the 1960s, the District of Columbia would be administered directly by the federal government. The trio of commissioners of which the board was comprised – one Republican, one Democrat, and one member of the United States Army Corps of Engineers – were all appointed by the President and possessed, between them, absolute executive and legislative authority. Local school boards and boards of health were also abolished, and the District police were placed under the command of the commissioners as well. And in consequence of this complete lack of local control, D.C. gradually began to evolve into the most unusual of American cities. The fact that it paid host to all three branches of the federal government would have been more than enough to set it apart as exceptional, of course, but so too did the manner in which its cultural and physical character steadily developed.

    On the one hand, because the city served as the directly-governed seat of power of a nation which had long regarded the “great powers” of Europe with a mix of jealousy and disdain – and because one of its trio of administrators was always a professional engineer – Washington spent the next several decades on the cutting edge of urban planning and infrastructural development. In 1888, for example, it was one of the first cities in the nation to switch from using horse-drawn to electric streetcars. Beginning in that same decade and continuing into the 1890s, numerous public structures were also constructed, including the National Museum (now the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building), the new headquarters of the Agriculture Department (elevated to cabinet level in 1889), and a veritable host of public schools, hospitals, and public markets. And beginning in 1901, the core of the district containing the headquarters of the various organs of the federal government was completely remodeled into the urban park now known as the National Mall. A product of the Progressive “City Beautiful” movement, this monumental plan was intended to both elevate Washington D.C. into a world city on par with the likes of Paris, London, and Rome while at the same time providing local residents with clean air, greenery, and suitably inspiring surroundings. The construction of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 served as the effective capstone of this project, creating, as it did, a continuous landscaped span between itself and the United States Capitol, with the Washington Monument in between.

    On the other hand, however, at the same time that successive Congresses and appointed commissioners were willing to spend money and attention on making the District of Columbia into the kind of showpiece modern city that the rest of the world was supposed to envy, urban residents often found their day-to-day needs largely sidelined or ignored. The redevelopment plan that gave birth to the National Mall, for example, also resulted in the removal of the various slum neighborhoods that had grown up around the Capitol over the course of the 19^th century. Evidently, while the authorities in control of the federal district at that time had a burning desire to make the environs thereof visually more spectacular and more conducive to pedestrian traffic, they had no particular interest in alleviating the woes of its most economically precarious inhabitants. Indeed, it was not until the 1930s that public housing became a priority in D.C., in the meantime leaving thousands of residents to find whatever shelter they could absent any kind of political recourse. Likewise, Washington’s status as one of the only cities in the 20^th-century American South wherein Jim Crow laws were not in effect and Black individuals and families were able to own property created its own set of problems which the federal government and its board of commissioners showed no particular interest in solving. This was made perhaps most evident during the events of the so-called “Red Summer” of 1919.

    In July of that year, soldiers and sailors of the United States Armed Forces who were in the process of being decommissioned in the aftermath of WWI responded to the rumored arrest of a Black man for the rape of a white women by spending the four days between the 19^th and the 24^th terrorizing Black residents and laying siege to Black neighborhoods. When police declined to intervene, members of the Black community then opted to defend themselves and began purchasing weapons and ammunition, the result of which was a period of urban chaos leading to as many as forty deaths, significant property destruction, and an NAACP remonstrance that fell on deaf ears at the Wilson White House. As with the many poor urban residents displaced during the construction of the National Mall and the various other public buildings cited above – many of whom, to be sure, were also members of the Black community – the victims of the 1919 Washington Race Riot had no means by which to make their voices heard or to punish those responsible for the brutal treatment they had been made to suffer. The District of Columbia may have existed outside the legal framework of Jim Crow, but the complete lack of a popularly accountable territorial or municipal government meant that Black residents were still unable to assert any control over the manner in which the laws they were required to obey were either drafted or administered. And the fact that D.C. was at the same time also host to any number of politicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers native to regions of the United States wherein Black property ownership was either extremely rare or practically forbidden doubtless made this lack of control all the more tense and terrifying for Black residents. In many cases, their families had called Washington home since slavery was abolished there in 1862. In spite of their resulting generational claim to it, however, the District of Columbia did not exist to serve their needs. Indeed, it’s practical purpose seemed to be to do anything and everything but provide for the basic necessities of its permanent inhabitants.

    The events of the 1930s and 1940s once again served to drive this point home. In keeping with the administrative framework established in 1878, Congress was responsible throughout these two decades for raising and allocating funding to provide for the District’s various day-to-day needs. And in practice, this responsibility fell to a pair of congressional committees, both of which were often staffed by legislators either uninterested in or hostile to the wellbeing of Washington residents. At times, the result was merely the continuation of a policy of official neglect. Speaking in the late 1930s as a member of the District Subcommittee on Appropriations, Mississippi Representative Ross Collins (1880-1968) effectively summed up this attitude when he moved to cut healthcare and education spending by claiming it was in his best interests to do so. “My constituents [,]” he said, “wouldn't stand for spending money on n-----s.” Worse yet, though, were the committee members who sought to use their power over the District to advance their own destructive agendas. The most notorious among this latter group was self-proclaimed white supremacist Theodore Bilbo (1877-1947), Senator from Mississippi and chair, between 1945 and 1947, of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia.

    Even in the 1940s, Bilbo was seen as something of an extremist whose stated desire to deport Black Americans to Africa made him a source of controversy and embarrassment within an increasingly progressive, New Deal-oriented Democratic Party. In an attempt to limit his power, his co-partisans in the Senate accordingly sought to exile him, circa 1944, to what they considered to be the least influential committee in the whole of the upper house. That being, of course, the aforementioned Committee on the District of Columbia. Undaunted – and in fact of the opinion that he’d been given a great opportunity – Bilbo proceeded to use his newfound authority to deny Washington any funds which might possibly have been used to alleviate the suffering of the city’s urban poor, proposed that thousands of Black residents be driven out of low-income neighborhoods and into the surrounding countryside, and once more called for a campaign of African deportation. And while, thankfully, none of Bilbo’s more outlandish propositions ever came to pass, his leadership of the aforementioned committee nevertheless did great harm to the District and its inhabitants at a time when more attention and more funding was badly needed, not less.

    The effects of the Great Migration – between 1910 and 1930, the movement of about six million Black Americans from Southern states to Northern states in pursuit of higher wages and freedom from Jim Crow laws – along with the further expansion of the District’s population as a result of the military and bureaucratic buildup surrounding WWII, led to overcrowding and resource scarcity within a relatively short period of time. And between the beginning of the 1930s and the middle of the 1940s, the robust urban infrastructure for which the city had arguably become famous in the period following the Civil War began to break down, a trend in no small part accelerated by the racist administrative policies of men like Collins and Bilbo. By 1943, as construction concluded in nearby Arlington, Virginia on the massively expensive War Department headquarters soon to be known the world over as the Pentagon – at a contemporary cost of some eighty-three million dollars – it had become common for residents of Washington to wait in long lines for food, shopping, and even public transportation. Evidently, while Congress had access to sufficient resources to simultaneously fund the greatest war effort in American history and construct the world’s largest office building, it was simply too much to ask to ensure a decent quality of life in the nation’s capital. Or rather, it was simply too much to ask to keep the wrong kind of people from wielding authority over the District and its inhabitants.

    By the late 1950s, the situation had been alleviated somewhat. Executive orders issued by the Truman Administration at the end of the previous decade combined with a series of Supreme Court decisions handed down in 1954 – Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education to be specific – to fully desegregate the United States Armed Forces, federal workplaces, and all of the District’s public schools. This development, along with the growth of the federal bureaucracy and the nation’s defense industry as a result of WWII and the Cold War, led to an even greater influx of Black Americans into the city of Washington proper as jobs became more plentiful and access to basic services was increasingly unrestricted. Circa 1957, with the growth of interstate highways having facilitated a simultaneous white migration into the post-war suburbs that surrounded the District in neighboring Maryland and Virginia, Washington became the nation’s first major city with a majority Black population. But while life in D.C. at the dawn of the 1960s certainly represented an improvement compared to the decades of neglect and stagnation that had followed the turn of the 20^th century, it still remained one of the only precincts in the continental United States that lacked both a locally accountable government of its own and any manner of input into the affairs of the nation at large. This would only change, at least in part, with the final meeting of the 86^th Congress at the beginning of 1960.