TESTING GROUND
Washington, DC has no voting representation in Congress. Yet Congress legally oversees our government, finances, and laws. Members of Congress can tell us what to do, or what not to do, in order to score political points with their constituents at home. This situation has fueled years of calls to make DC a state, where our citizens will have the same rights as those in every other state and won’t be subject to the whims of national legislators. But until then we are a colony of the United States.
When a congressman or president decides to test out an idea, say abolishing slavery or imposing urban renewal, DC is a handy place to do it. DC’s residents can’t vote that official out of office if we don’t like the idea. That’s why DC became known as a “laboratory for federal experiments.”
DIRECT NULLIFICATIONS
The idea extends to actions by national legislators that are not so much experiments but rather are direct nullifications of the will of the people here. For example, in 1998 the city setup a free needle exchange program as a proven method of reducing the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases. Then Congress passed a law banning the use of federal funds for needle exchanges on the grounds that availability of safe needles would promote drug use. The legislation did not stop localities from using their own funds for the purpose. Except in DC, where the city could not use its own funds for this purpose. (The restriction was overturned in 2007.)
Without a voting representative in Congress, Washingtonians have no one with the ability to trade votes. Trading votes on legislation, building coalitions, and influencing other legislators is how the American national legislature operates. And this applies to much more than local issues. Today more than 700,000 people are without a voice when the country’s lawmakers decide to go to war or rewrite its rules.
How did this happen? The founders thought that because Washingtonians lived within walking distance of the national government, they would have easy access to those law makers when necessary. But that proved not to be the case over time as government became more and more complex.
These resources are intended to offer insight into how the system has worked, and how it has been perceived by Washingtonians.
White Men’s Roads thru Black Men’s Homes: Reflecting on DC’s Freeway Fight (Video)
On November 18, 2020, the DC History Center presented activist Samuel Jordan and journalist Martin Austermuhle in conversation about how civic activism defeated the plan for federal highways through DC.
View the video here
Recommended Reading
“The City under the Hill,” by Steven J. Diner, Washington History 8-1 (1996)
This closely argued discussion of the relationship between Washington, D.C., and Congress summarizes why it has been marked by dysfunction, partisanship, and racism from the outset. He describes the history of congressional neglect and intervention, of Congress members’ meddling in “local matters that mirrored national political issues,” and the sheer inefficiency of the arrangement.
“Mapping Metro, 1955-1968: Urban, Suburban, and Metropolitan Alternatives,” by Zachary M. Schrag, Washington History, 13-1 (summer 2001).
“Mapping Metro” looks at why DC’s Metro system goes where it does, and where it doesn’t, also describes the battle between Congress (wanting to build freeways) and local interests (preferring public transportation). Schrag went on to publish the authoritative The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), which shows the federal government hand in the subway’s development.
“Reconstruction Politics in Washington: ‘An Experimental Garden for Radical Plants,’” by Thomas R. Johnson, Records of the Columbia Historical Society 50 (1980)
Johnson’s essay explains how DC lost its rights to self-governance in 1874, emphasizing the corruption of Alexander R. “Boss” Shepherd and how the white public wrongly blamed the loss on Black Washingtonians. Johnson describes the brief flowering of Radical Republican reforms to make DC an equitable city free of Jim Crow segregation.
The Federal Social Dollar in Its Own Back Yard by Sar A. Levitan (Washington: Bureau of National Affairs, 1973)
An overview of how federal funding is, and is not, applied to the District of Columbia. Among the topics covered are urban renewal and housing. Available in the Kiplinger Research Library at the DC History Center.
Captive Capital: Colonial Life in Modern Washington, by Sam Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), especially chapter 9
Journalist and activist Sam Smith’s now-classic history of the city’s political struggles, a book-length call for statehood, details federal intercessions in local life. Please note: Captive Capital is out of print, but is available at area libraries and via the online used book market.
Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C., by Howard Gillette Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
In his landmark study of how the federal government used Washington as a laboratory for urban policy, Gillette shows how those policies failed the city and the nation. As he notes in the preface, “federal oversight of Washington in practice proved uneven at best and at times disastrous. To some degree, such failures were the product of incompetence or indifference. . . . [but] what happened in Washington, D.C., was what the nation wanted.” In other words, he argues, the nation’s racism allowed the keepers of Washington to prioritize beauty over the needs of the city’s disadvantaged and social justice in general.
Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017), by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove
The history of Washington receives the attention it deserves, from the story of its native peoples to just shy of today, with race and democracy front and center. University of Maryland historian Alfred A. Moss, Jr., called Chocolate City “the definitive history of Washington, D.C.”
Housing Washington: Two Centuries of Residential Development and Planning in the National Capital Area, edited by Richard Longstreth (Chicago: Center for American Places, 2010)
A look at housing projects “conceived as new models locally and, often, nationally.”
On DC’s needle exchange program
https://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2007/12/congress-lifts-washington-dc-syringe-funding-ban
On Eleanor Holmes Norton’s battle in Congress to allow local kids to sled on Capitol Hill
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/winter-storm-blizzard-jonas/426624/
From our Collections
Once the Kiplinger Research Library reopens, researchers will have access to these collections and items related to the events of 1968.
Click the links for more details from our catalog.
URBAN RENEWAL
Plater T. Gedney real estate records collection MS 0808
Garnet W. Jex “Southwest Redevelopment” slide collection SP 0020
Feiss “Southwest Redevelopment” slide collection SP 0011
Experiment in planning : citizen-government teamwork in planning for the renewal of Adams-Morgan. P 1080
FEDERAL HIGHWAY PROJECTS
Organize to defend your community from white man’s roads through black men’s homes. M 0004
Roberts Owen Three Sisters Bridge Litigation papers MS 0793
Washington’s Three-Sisters Bridge and inner loop freeway systems controversies / prepared by the Committee of 100 on the Federal City. P 1891
POLICING
Thomas L. Lalley Pilot District Project files MS 0885
Robert Shellow Pilot District Project files MS 0907
BATTLING JIM CROW
Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws MS 0404
Harry S. Wender Papers MS 0379
BUILD YOUR LIBRARY
Check out these local bookstores: Mahogany Books, Loyalty Bookstores, Sankofa, Wisdom Book Center, Harambee Books, Second Story Books, Politics and Prose
Funding for Context for Today was provided from from the Office of the Secretary of the District of Columbia, and HumanitiesDC and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of NEH.