Perspective: The same ideas that have harmed D.C. for more than a century are again rearing their ugly head
Given that D.C. residents have long lacked political rights, and that many Washingtonians have fiercely fought for D.C. statehood, a serious proposal topolitical rights might come as a shock. But it exposes how without full rights, D.C. residents can easily lose the rights they do have. It also echoes the strain of antidemocratic and anti-Black politics from the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras that has haunted D.C. ever since.On Jan.
Both the debt and mismanagement were legitimate problems warranting criticism. But the support for presidential appointees controlling D.C. signaled that these complaints were a smokescreen camouflaging the true motivation for supporters of consolidation — they disdained Black men having the right to vote and wanted to roll it back.By 1871, local Republicans had become too politically divided to oppose the bipartisan consolidationists. The new Republican president, Ulysses S.
In 1874, a joint, bipartisan congressional investigative committee exposed the excessive spending and outright corruption of the Shepherd-led territorial government. But rather than faulting the presidentially appointed officials, conservatives blamed the corruption and spending on the expanded franchise. They had long feared that universal suffrage would lead to social chaos and economic crises. The situation in Washington offered vindication, they believed.
Government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, a longtime D.C. resident and architect of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, put into words the anger antidemocratic rule over the capital city provoked. He warned that if the “autocratic system” remained in place, eventually D.C. would “reissue the Declaration of Independence and set up a government of its own on the same lines as the Colonists did.”Time proved Wiley somewhat correct. The commission government lasted for a century.
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