Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (review)

Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis. By Carl Abbott (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 252 pp. $39.95 cloth $19.95 paper

Washington, D.C., does not fit into any of the conventional narratives of American urban history. Neither industrial metropolis nor decentered postmodern sprawl, the nation's capital city defies easy synthesis. Abbott starts from the illuminating premise that Washington is a city that all Americans think that they know, but few understand. This provocative book does much to complicate our ideas about the city, arguing for its paradoxical modernity and its underexamined similarities to the cities of the modern sunbelt. Abbott proposes that Washington's history is an ideal laboratory for unraveling American ideas about cities, regions, and the nation at century's end.

Washington's evolution from Tidewater town to international city, Abbott demonstrates, has followed a different trajectory from conventional accounts of urbanization in the United States. Regionalism, and attempts to negotiate regional tensions, have driven the city's singular history; Abbot places Washington at the heart of "the construction and interaction of American regions and networks" (5). This alertness to the intermixing of regional identities and cultures leads Abbott to his most original insights about the city's varying, yet persistent southern-ness. James' 1907 description of Washington as a city where "the North ceases to insist, [and] the South may begin to presume" captures the imperfect balance that the nation's capital has long maintained (91). ¹ For the late twentieth century, Abbott locates Washington in the larger emergence of sunbelt America, convincingly arguing that it holds much in common with Los Angeles and other modern cities of the South and Southwest.

This extended essay offers a number of vivid snapshots, from the city's late eighteenth-century, politically-driven founding to "Washington at 2000." However, the individual pieces never come together to form a coherent narrative. Abbott's prolific powers of suggestion maintain interest, but in the end, he only sketches the outlines of his argument. Political Terrain confronts many of the obstacles facing works of synthesis but does not fully succeed in overcoming them. Abbott builds on the extensive secondary literature on Washington's history while also attempting to engage a number of far-flung literatures. This interdisciplinary work speaks partially to debates in political science, gender and labor history, geography, and urban sociology. Further, Abbott makes extensive use of literary evidence, ranging from Henry Adams' Democracy (London, 1882) to Tom Clancy's Patriot Games (New York, 1987). So many different types of evidence and so many debates are brought together that the book's argument, at times, loses focus.

Political Terrain's claim that Washington is "the closest the nation has to common ground" (131) comes across in this intriguing book not in the form of an insistent patriotism, but with a sense of the fragility and, at times, emptiness of that common ground. Born in a regional no-man's land, built amid enduring regional and sectional conflicts, the nation's capital has often stood not as a vibrant common ground but as a space apart.

David Quigley
Boston College

Note

1. Henry James, The American Scene (London, 1907).

...