The Washington Century: Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital

by Solomon, Burt

• ISBN13: 9780066213729
• ISBN10: 006621372X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-20
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In this epic work of history, the story of the American capital is told through the lives of three families who each symbolize a different aspect of the city and nation it represents.

Author Biography

Burt Solomon is a contributing editor for National Journal, where he has covered the White House and many other aspects of Washington life. In 1991 he won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. He is also the author of the acclaimed Where They Ain't, a history of baseball in the 1890s. He lives with his wife and children inside the Beltway

Table of Contents

One THEODORE ROOSEVELT TO HOOVER	1	(24)
Two ROOSEVELT	25	(36)
Three TRUMAN	61	(26)
Four EISENHOWER	87	(30)
Five KENNEDY	117	(28)
Six JOHNSON	145	(52)
Seven NIXON	197	(54)
Eight FORD	251	(22)
Nine CARTER	273	(24)
Ten REAGAN	297	(32)
Eleven BUSH	329	(26)
Twelve CLINTON	355	(40)
Epilogue	395	(8)
Notes	403	(72)
Acknowledgments	475	(4)
Index	479

Excerpts

The Washington Century
Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital

Chapter One

Theodore Roosevelt to Hoover

Before first light, young Morris Kafitz hitched up the horse andwagon and set out along the lanes of Georgetown. The gas lampswere still lit, and the reflections flickered off the cobblestones. As herode south along Twenty-seventh Street, beneath a canopy of trees,the clopping echoed between the facing rows of houses.

Morris was accustomed to the early hour. He had a sturdy buildand a strong and stolid face, with dark hair and somber blue eyes thatkept their own counsel. As the eldest of the three sons, he woke eachmorning at four thirty and made his way across the sleepy, shufflingcity ofWashington, in the District of Columbia, to buy fresh produceat the Center Market and sometimes to shop for fish down at thewharf. Only after hauling these provisions back to his father's grocerystore, at Twenty-seventh and O Streets, in the city's northwesternquadrant, would he rush the three and a half blocks to the CorcoranSchool, with its redbrick Romanesque tower.

Soon his schooling would end, after the 1901–2 school year,once he had finished the seventh grade at age fourteen. What Morriswanted for himself in this land of liberty was not found in books.

Surely there was no shame in living in unfashionable Georgetown, even in its shabbier eastern end. This was paradise comparedto Lithuania. His family had fled the pogroms when he was elevenand by 1898 had wound up in Washington, where some cousins hadsettled. The seven of them, Nussen, Anna, and the five children,lived first in a shack twenty-some blocks north of the Capitol building,and then in an alleyway a dozen blocks closer.

Pierre L'Enfant's grandiose design for the nation's capital, withits broad avenues and elongated blocks, had created a web of alleys,out of sight, where freed slaves lived after the Civil War. The Kafitzeswere among the few white residents on Glick Alley, a dirty, overcrowdedlane that stretched from S Street NW to Rhode Island Avenue,between Sixth and Seventh Streets. They occupied a two-story,four-room tin-roofed brick house, all of fourteen feet wide, dark anddamp, without a basement. A spigot and a privy stood in the back.

Nussen was known as Nelson or Nathan in his new country. Hewas a small dapper man with a round fragile face and a trimmedbeard. He had a sparkle -- into his eighties he would chase his secondwife around a table -- and a sense of humor and no desire to speak orwrite in English. He opened a grocery on Glick Alley, in one of theground-floor rooms. This was the most common business for thecity's immigrant Jews, because it required little money or know-how.

Within a year the Kafitzes had left the alley and moved to Georgetown.They could afford to live away from the grocery, though the rowhouse at 2706 N Street was even narrower than the house on GlickAlley and also lacked indoor plumbing, a hardship for the children onwinter nights. Most of their neighbors were colored -- teamsters, servants,a porter, a deliveryman, a dressmaker, a day laborer, a washerwoman,an ash man, a laborer for the federal Bureau of Printing andEngraving. Georgetown was a quilt of black and white, of the poorand the poorer.

Forty-nine years older than the city of Washington, Georgetownhad been named not for that George (though he had slept there manya night, a half-day's ride from Mount Vernon) but rather for Britain'sKing George II, whose governor of the Virginia colony had dispatchedthat George as a young colonel out to Ohio, an excursion thattouched off the French and Indian War. The village, near the head of the navigable Potomac River, had originally been a thriving port forMaryland tobacco and then a point of departure for trade with theOhio River Valley. Even after the capital was founded, in 1800, thehandsome brick town houses and bustling streets of Georgetownoutshined the drab and sparsely settled city next door, as a residencefor foreign diplomats and the more adventurous members of Congress.Georgetown had ceased being a separate municipality withinD.C. in 1871, and its social standing had withered. A port once a forestof masts had become an industrial suburb for a city lacking muchindustry of its own. The riverbank now harbored iron foundries, limekilns, a sheet metal works, a bottling company, a coal yard, an electricpowerhouse, and -- worst of all, to the residents -- an animal renderingplant, with its reek of decay. Only people who had few choiceslived nearby.

Morris rode ahead toward M Street. On his left, past a prim Baptistchurch, an open field gave way to the ravine, dense with trees,that cradled Rock Creek. He turned left onto M Street, still knownto many as Bridge Street for the iron-laced bridge that crossed thecreek. He trotted above the mouth of the wide, rushing stream andinto what had been properly known until recently as WashingtonCity. Two quick turns put him on Pennsylvania Avenue, as broad aboulevard as any in the capital.

The scattered buildings stood low in the lightening sky. It wasquiet here, and spacious. The paving of asphalt and coal tar climbedsteadily before him, a godsend for the ever-more-popular safety bicycles.His horse sidestepped the slots for the streetcars. Morris likedto race the electrified streetcars, though once while doing so he hadspilled a wagonful of groceries -- oranges and everything -- all overthe road.

Washington was an unhurried city of barely a quarter-million inhabitants,ranked fifteenth in the nation, just behind Milwaukee ...

The Washington Century
Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital. Copyright © by Burt Solomon. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Washington Century: Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital by Burt Solomon
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