The Last American Colony

...City of the Powerless" would have seemed more appropriate...

...But the merit of making the District of Columbia a state is really not the overriding concern of Sam Smith's book...

...If Mailer and Breslin were half-joking, Smith is dead serious...

...Last year, under legislation passed by Congress after a conservative Southern House D.C...

...There are the old-line white businessmen who run the city's financial institutions and consider themselves "Washingtonians," and the black government workers who proudly hail from "D.C...

...There are the "uptown" lawyers from the prestigious firms who practice at the Federal courthouse, and the "Fifth Streeters'' who defend the poor in D.C...

...Smith thinks there is a better way: statehood...

...Similarly, the Reverend Douglas Moore is no longer "an affable dashiki militant," as Smith describes him, but a toned-down, tie-wearing city councilman...

...An unabashed advocacy journalist, he invariably takes the side of the powerless against the powerful...

...To long-time residents," Smith writes, "the District's status may appear as sadly inevitable as the summer humidity...

...Richard M. Nixon—who seemed to spend far more time at Key Biscayne, San Clemente and Camp David than at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—is gone now...

...It is an issue familiar to New Yorkers who remember the 51st-state mayoral campaign of Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin in 1968...

...His colleague Marion Barry, formerly of the dashiki-militant school, sounds nowadays more like a fiscal conservative capitalist...

...The view reflected by the original title is the one held by most Americans, however, and it bespeaks their ignorance of the place they generally associate only with politicians, bureaucrats and monuments...

...residents' enthusiasm for their infant democracy...

...Statehood Party-which Smith helped found—if not the statehood idea itself, has emerged as a viable third choice for many disaffected citizens...

...In the August primary, an astonishing 98 candidates ran for 13 City Council seats (17 for one seat in one ward alone)—stark testimony to D.C...

...There are, in fact, two Washingtons—and two classes of D.C...

...almost came out for it in 1972 but backed away at the last minute under pressure from the D.C...

...To disenfranchised residents of the District of Columbia —where many cars sport "D.C...

...True to form, the first such election in a century was almost totally ignored by the national media...

...it lives in distinct neighborhoods of row houses, detached single-family homes and apartments, ranging from poor to plush, from water-damaged to Watergate...

...Electoral politics in D.C...

...There is the national press corps, bathing in a sea of largely unmerited self-importance, and the usually unsung local reporters of the city's two newspapers...

...The city may have gotten a glimpse of what the new home rule means recently when Congress gave double-digit raises to police and teachers, and then left it to the District to raise the funds to pay for them...

...residents...

...Gazette, whose main shortcoming is that it does not appear often enough...

...With a population of 750,000—greater than that of many states—the District, he argues, is entitled to full voting representation in both houses of Congress...

...Smith's pitch for statehood, comprising the final chapter of his book, raises the politically unsettling question of whether city-states should be created across the country...

...He has little use for emerging regional governments, because he thinks they dilute the power of cities...

...The form of home rule granted the city is an improvement, he acknowledges, but far from complete...

...The District's 75 per cent black majority is mostly middle-class...

...The new City Council has powers more akin to a state legislature in some ways, but Congress retains a veto over all actions and can still initiate and pass any legislation it wants for the District...

...It is important to note that the "Other Washington" is not a monolithic black mass, emerging from the vast ghetto only to mug white tourists from Middle America...

...Superior Court...

...City Hall" consists of several buildings generally located downtown but spread over a 10-block area...

...Obviously, that is less so now than before...

...Into this void comes Captive Capital, whose interest in national institutions is confined to how they overshadow and oppress the local citizenry...

...He writes, for example, "The political freedom that Americans take for granted is considered a threat against the state in D.C...

...He recounts the long struggle of local leaders (including himself) to have the old Presidentially appointed city government replaced by an elective one...

...In a city whose voter registration is overwhelmingly Democratic, the D.C...

...If home rule makes Smith's book timely, it also makes some of his comments sound dated...

...Last Colony" bumper stickers...

...Smith also publishes a hometown newspaper, the D.C...

...According to Smith, Senator George McGovern (D.-S.D...

...has tended, it seems, to make system-believers out of such formerly sharp-tongued radicals...

...Smith's book explodes the not-so-subtle racist myth that "nobody lives in Washington...

...This is analogous to the Federal government ordering raises for state workers—at state expense...

...The Federal government, Smith points out, owns more buildings in 46 states and more land in 48 than it does in Washington, so its "presence" is hardly an overwhelming rationale for the District's special status...

...Colonial Life in Modern Washington," the descriptive subtitle, is closer to its core...

...Committee chairman was replaced by a black Detroit congressman, the District was allowed its first elected local government since the 1870s...

...This view seems regressive to me, even if comprehensible in a political context...

...For all its national galleries, there is no city museum...

...Not Smith, however...

...everyone lives in the suburbs...

...Congress, Smith reports, has set the city's fiscal priorities, saddled it with repressive laws permitting pretrial detention and no-knock police raids, and generally witch-hunted rather than watchdogged the few shreds of local autonomy it has allowed District residents...

...Yet Washington is almost devoid of local institutions...

...The city can raise revenue, but Congress retains line-by-line control over how the money is spent...

...The people of Washington, D.C, however, remain...

...He looks at the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, and shows how a voteless population has learned to use both the antipoverty and redevelopment programs, to lobby through civic groups and ad hoc committees for community control of schools and urban renewal...

...Captive Capital is a refreshing breath of cool dry air, showing us the vast majority of Washingtonians who lead lives untouched by the political spotlight...

...Even worse, it is taken for granted by members of the country's power structure in the capital, who live in Georgetown or McLean or Chevy Chase and seldom if ever travel east of Rock Creek Park, the increasingly porous yet still massive racial dividing line that cuts through the District...

...And, not surprisingly, there are few books about the District of Columbia to be found among the countless volumes devoted to "the nation's capital...

...delegate...

...The President can sustain a mayor's veto of Council action, even if the Council overrides the mayoral veto...

...Reviewed by Eugene L. Meyer Reporter, Washington "Post" A few years ago, a major national magazine ran a cover story entitled, "Washington: City of the Powerful...

...Unfortunately, this view is also shared by many who pass through Washington for a time to work, dealing on a national scale with such problems as "the urban crisis" from carpeted high-rise offices, but never venturing into poverty pockets like Shaw and Anacostia...

...The statehood idea has some strong Congressional backers, too, among them Representative Ron Dellums (D.-Calif...

...Since 1971, it has had a single nonvoting House delegate, who likes to call himself "congressman...

...Its author is Sam Smith, like many white Washingtonians an import from elsewhere but, unlike most, fully involved in and dedicated to his adopted city...