Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
Capital City’ in the hopeful years of the mid-1870s, after the military defeat of the slave-holding South, in which he spelled out what the Southernness of Washington meant before the Civil War’s outcome:
Sandwiched between two of the oldest slave states, each of which was a nursery and a hot-bed of slavery … pervaded by manners, morals, politics, and religion peculiar to a slave-holding community, the inhabitants of the National Capital were from first to last, frantically and fanatically sectional. It was southern in all its sympathies and national only in name. Until the war, it neither tolerated freedom of speech nor of the press.9
Slaves made up a fifth of Washington’s population in 1800, and the Capitol Building was partly constructed by slave labour.10 By 1860, Blacks made up 18 per cent of the city, most of them freed.11 Washington, until recently, was never a major port of immigration, and immigrant communities left less impact on the capital than on many other settler-state cities. There were a few, though: The German Schützenfest became the city’s second festive event, after the Fourth of July, and the Societá Culturale Italiana donated a statue of Garibaldi to Congress.12
The Natives had been killed or expelled, and in 1853 the major figure of Native ethnic cleansing in the first century of the United States, the military hero and president Andrew Jackson, was honoured by the nation’s first equestrian statue.* But the African American issue soon returned, after the Emancipation decade following the Civil War. From about 1880 until the New Deal, the situation of African Americans steadily deteriorated, politically and legally. Washingtonians were somewhat less badly off than people of colour in other Southern cities: there were no lynchings in Washington, streetcars and public libraries stayed open to all races and in the entertainment district of U Street Northwest, where Duke Ellington once lived, there was an inter-racial ‘contact zone’. But much racial apartheid descended upon the city, upon its neighbourhoods – although not as strictly as according to the South African Group Areas Act – its schools, its restaurants, its theatres and cinemas and its employment structure. President Woodrow Wilson – who would soon be selling slogans like ‘national self-determination’ and ‘a world safe for democracy’ – reintroduced the racial segregation of federal office facilities for the few African Americans still allowed there.13
To the White rulers of the state and the capital, Negro Washington was largely a ‘secret city’, having no part in the city’s official layout and monumentality. It did develop a centre of its own though, outside the city centre, of course, in the Northwest quadrant around Howard University – put up in 1867 by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Howard Theatre and the jazz and entertainment district around U Street. In 1900 African Americans constituted a third of the population of Washington, a larger share than in any other big US city. Since 1957, until recently, they have made up the majority, which, together with legal desegregation of neighbourhoods and schools, started a massive White flight to the suburbs and about four decades of financial plight and drastic social deterioration of the remaining city.
Architecturally, Washington has maintained a sober, modern – in the Jeffersonian sense – style, keeping neoclassicism for important buildings with a public role, like the Supreme Court or the US Chamber of Commerce, abstaining from modernist iconography and keeping skyscrapers at bay through height-control laws.
Over time, an extensive iconographic programme has been deployed. Most imposing are the monuments to the two most famous presidents of the two established parties of the nation – so established that you publicly register your membership in one or the other – Abraham Lincoln of the Republicans and Thomas Jefferson of the Democrats. While more stylish, to Euro-American taste at least, the large quasi-religious monuments to these political leaders have hardly any contemporary near equivalent outside Pyongyang. A huge marble Lincoln has since 1922 been sitting in a Greek temple across the Reflecting Pool at the western end of the memorial Mall, while a bronze Jefferson of triple human height has stood since 1943 in a Roman pantheon across the Tidal Basin south of the Mall, at the end of a not-quite-straight axis from the White House via the Washington Monument. The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were the self-celebration of ‘the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean’, in Lewis Mumford’s comment on the first memorial.14 The Roosevelt Memorial of 1997 is very different, a pedagogical historical landscape about the issues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four presidential periods.* Currently, a Frank Gehry (biographical landscape) design for an Eisenhower homage is on hold, because of opposition (from his descendants and conservatives) to its perceived insufficient solemnity.
A contemporary visitor to Washington is struck by something which probably would have surprised both Washington and Jefferson: the military character of the city. Across the Potomac is the world’s largest military building, the Pentagon, started in 1941, and a military-cum-national cemetery, Arlington Cemetery, with its iconic Iwo Jima Marine Corps War Memorial of victory in the Pacific. In the centre of the public city is the imposing building of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and in the Southeast until recently a Navy Yard and the headquarters of the US Navy, now with their ‘adult entertainment’ environs redeveloped. On the Mall are three memorials to the veterans of the Vietnam War, one to those of the Korean War and, since 2004, a grandiose monumental layout to the ‘Victory on Land, Victory at Sea, Victory in the Air’ in all the theatres of World War II. Only in Moscow is there anything similar.† More specific to Washington is a 2007 Goddess of Freedom hailing the ‘Victims of Communism’, organized by an anti-Communist activist of Ukrainian background, Dobriansky, and financed by Jesse Helms, Grover Norquist and others of the US far right.15
The secessions of Canada, New Zealand and Australia were rather like a young adult leaving home than a divorce. Canadians let Queen Victoria choose their capital in 1857. In a five-city race, including two major Québec cities, Québec City and Montréal, and two Ontario cities, Toronto and Kingston, Ottawa emerged as the winner. It was centrally located in the Canada of that time, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and two other rivers and at the border of Anglo-Protestant and Francophone/Irish-Catholic Canada; it was no plausible rival to the commercial centres of Toronto and Montréal. But it had little population weight, and the ratifying Parliament vote was narrow, sixty-four to fifty-nine.16
The ‘dominion’ status of the White settlements of the British Empire was ambiguous. They were territorial units in which ethnic/national balances and power blocs mattered, but their state sovereignty evolved gradually, finally inscribed as the legislative independence of the Dominions in the Statute of Westminster in 1931. In 1929 it was the British Privy Council which finally settled a contentious issue in Canadian politics: are women persons? The Supreme Court of Canada had said ‘no’, but the supreme imperial court graciously declared ‘yes’.*
The new capital rapidly got a towering Parliament building on Barrack Hill, built in neo-Gothic style and out of local sandstone, soon turning from its original beige colour to a sombre dark grey. Unlike Washington and Canberra, the city grew without any grand plan. In 1884 a leading politician of the time, Wilfrid Laurier, wrote: ‘Ottawa is not a handsome city and does not appear destined to become one either’. About a decade later Laurier became prime minister, and as such he established an Ottawa Improvement Commission, with a view to making Ottawa the ‘Washington of the North’.17
Twentieth-century planning has focused largely on bringing out the natural beauty of the city on hills by the rivers. But towards the end of the century, it also developed a new political awareness, giving rise to a distinctive spatial layout and monumentality quite different from that of the imperial capital south of the border. Ottawa did not become a Federal District, but in 1958 the National Capital Act gave special planning powers to a National Capital Commission. One of its results was the Confederation Boulevard, a route, based on existing streets, connecting in a central loop Parliament Hill, the governor-general’s residence and, across the river, the Québec city of Hull – renamed Gatineau in 2000 after an amalgamation – manifesting the confederate unity of multi-national Canada. A noteworthy outgrowth of Westminster parliamentary courtesy is that Ottawa has an official residence for the leader of the opposition, for which the National Capital Commission is responsible.18
Ottawa