An Urban's Rural View

It's 10 a.m. on a mid-May day and the temperature in Washington, D.C., is already pushing 80. Beware, this premature summer heat warns: Sticky, muggy, dispiriting months lie ahead in the nation's capital.

In the days before air conditioning, much of Washington decamped every summer to cooler climes. These days Congress takes only August off. Hard as it is to shed a tear for an institution with an approval rating only a hair above single digits (http://tiny.cc/…), you have to pity our Congressmen sweating through the summer in their suits and ties.

When the decision was made in 1790 to locate the capital along what historian John Steele Gordon calls "the muddy and fever-ridden banks of the Potomac," Congress was in session in New York. If those early legislators had based their decision on summer weather, the capital might well have stayed there. Measured by "apparent temperature" (http://tiny.cc/…), New York had, over a 30-year period, half as many oppressively hot and humid days as Washington.

So how did we end up with Washington as capital, then? The story is oft told but worth telling again. As Gordon narrates it in his short, instructive book "Hamilton's Blessing" (http://tiny.cc/…), it involved a compromise on a matter of principle, something today's Congressmen often seem incapable of.

Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, was trying to establish the ability of the new federal government to borrow when necessary. As part of that effort, he wanted the federal government to assume the debts the states had run up during the Revolutionary War.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were suspicious of the effort philosophically and especially suspicious as Virginians. Virginia had little debt to be assumed; Hamilton's assumption scheme looked to them like a bailout of more profligate states. But Jefferson and Madison also "wanted the capital located in the rural South, away from what they regarded as the commerce and corruption of the cities."

And so the three went to dinner, where a deal was made. Votes would be switched in support of Hamilton's proposal; the capital would be located on those fever-ridden, muddy banks adjoining Virginia and Maryland. "To ensure Pennsylvania's cooperation, the temporary capital was to be moved to Philadelphia for ten years."

We live with the consequences of that deal, a central government bigger and more powerful than Jefferson and Madison wanted -- but headquartered on their state's border, sharing its stifling summers. Every day the Congress is not in session, some small-government advocates say, the republic is safer. The legislature of this Hamiltonian government cannot take many summer days off.

Thankfully, my wife and I can. We're driving off to Oregon, escaping the beltway swelter, embracing temperatures in the 60s and cool coastal breezes. More blog posts soon from there, and maybe en route, as well.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(CZ)

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