Our Capital on the Potomac!

Our book today brings back sweet, sweet memories. It’s Our Capital on the Potomac, a wonderful 1924 history of Washington, D.C by Helen Nicolay, who was an energetic researcher and something of Beltway aristocrat, being the daughter of President Lincoln’s beloved secretary John Nicolay.

She was a wonderful hostess, an inevitable fixture in the town’s best private libraries, a champion ruminator in archives. She liked to eat; she loved to laugh; she was welcome at the doorsteps of diplomats, lawmakers, and a string of presidents for over half a century. The stories accumulated in Our Capital on the Potomac were as much the product of a lifetime’s good talking as of a lifetime’s quiet reading.

The book starts, refreshingly enough, not with the Founding Fathers but with the American Indian inhabitants of the region. The narrative moves through the Revolution, gives us a vivid account of the planning and designing of the new capital city by Pierre L’Enfant, watches as the city expands along those plans and fills with life, and all along the way pauses at regular intervals to attest to something that visitors to the place almost always feel: “A traveler might come to wonder or to criticize,” Helen tells us, “but if he lingered to partake of the city’s bread and salt, he forgot all except the beauty of its setting and the hospitality of his friends.”

Those two themes – the beauty of its setting and the hospitality of friends – dominate this book and give it life. Our author has done a great deal of work researching the city’s history (and she’s witty about it, too, remarking for instance that “the most effective use William Henry Harrison made of the Executive Mansion was to die in it”), but her real subject is the city’s soul.

And at the climax of her story, she’s elbowed off-stage by an even better raconteur than she is, by the whirling, laughing center of the world, by the actual embodiment of the peculiar shot and charge of the nation’s capital. It happens in all such stories of the city, with all the lines of its history warping to funnel all the energy straight to the gravitational center. The book delights and delights and delights for a century and a half … and then, as soon as President McKinley tragically dies in office, bottle-rocket anecdotes start firing off on every page:

One diplomat’s career was entirely ruined so long as Roosevelt remained President, because of a dinner-table remark that Holland was the ideal billet for a man below the rank of ambassador. Mr. Roosevelt asked why, expecting some profound reason, and was told, “Because it takes such a short time to get to the opera or a dinner in Paris or Berlin.” “Think of it!” he exploded, mentioning the matter years later to a friend. The offender found himself firmly retrograded, until at the end of Roosevelt’s term he was “gnashing his teeth in Persia” and begging to be sent back to civilization.

Or this one:

Next morning he ran gaily downstairs to the eight-o’clock breakfast with the children which which his day invariably began, stopping on the way, as a telephone bell rang, to pick up the receiver. As he listened, [his visiting sister] saw a broad smile overspread his face and he answered the piping voice at the other end:

“No, I am not Archie. I am Archie’s father. All right. I will tell him. I won’t forget,” and rang off, laughing. “How the creatures order you about!” he quoted from “Alice in Wonderland,” and sketched for his sister’s benefit the disgust of the small boy at the other end of the line when he found he was talking to the President of the United States and not to his chum.

But Helen, as susceptible to the syrupy sentimentality that tends to afflict everybody who stays in the capital for any length of time as anybody else, periodically looks away from Theodore Roosevelt to the city’s past. She tells us about how President Taft turns the first spadeful of earth on the Lincoln Memorial (and then years later helps to take part in the finished monument’s dedication), and she rises to the occasion of describing the odd feeling of quiet exaltation that overcomes visitors to the spot:

As one mounts the many steps leading to the memorial, something happens. Perhaps it is the effort of ascent; perhaps it is the ever closer view of the big fluted columns toward which one climbers. Things of the outer world seem to grown less important as one nears the top. But even so, the mind is scarcely prepared for the quiet and the sense of awe that prevail within as one faces the great seated figure with its head bent forward and its hands resting on the arms of its chair, one fist clenched, the fingers of the other hand relaxed but by no means nerveless. For an instant, perhaps the knees and square-toed boots of the statue seem a little too much in evidence, but only for a moment. After that they merely stand for the homely qualities of speech and idiom that people forgot after they had been with Lincoln for a brief time.

But she also looks forward in her story, bringing it to a wonderful conclusion by narrating the much-belated official funeral of Pierre L’Enfant:

Looking over the plain that was field and woodland when he knew it, and is now filled with houses and parks, we trace the outlines of his plan, see rising over it the Capitol dome, faintly luminous like a great pearl in the afternoon light, and, turning, follow the same lines upon his tomb, where his old map of the city has been engraved, for epitaph and memorial.

But the plan is engraved deeper still in our hearts.

I’ll admit, I love books about DC (and I’ll less readily admit to having lived there, once upon a time), and I revisit the best of them regularly. This is one of the best of them.