Scan barcode
cfc's review
4.0
It's kind of embarrassing and a shame that I didn't read Captive Capital until I had already lived in DC for 20 years. I would have seen a lot of what has transpired since much differently.
By the time I moved here Sam was a minor legend among long-time DC activists. He had been an editor of one of the city's independent weeklies for about a decade. In 1995 he had started one of the nation's earliest independent news blogs -- Progressive Review (see link below).
This is a history of DC largely written for activists by a local son who spent the late 60s and early 70s reporting on local politics.
This, therefore, is a captive-vating story of how DC's status as an abused colony (its budget still has to be approved by a paternalistic Congress) evolved from the 1800s up to the 1970s.
Although the city gained "self-government in 1812 with an elected council, and a council-elected mayor in 1820, it was largely controlled by appointed positions in the school boards, development authorities and the like until the 1960s. Through early and modern struggles, things have changed, but it's still a sort of colony: After all, this year -- 2020 -- is the first time that either body of Congress (the House, of course) passed a resolution in favor of Statehood.
No matter how long we've lived here, most of us who come to DC from outside -- even those who have lived 20 years in the District itself -- are blind to its status and history. That's mostly on us. But its engendered by a pervasive culture of deracination, gentification, development and distraction.
The constant cycling of people in and out is fueled by an imperial economy that has only accelerated further since 2000, even if its growth has been much greater in the Manassas Corridor and Maryland suburbs. The massive increase in the number of lobbyists, consultants, war profiteers and other contractors, interns, "development" experts and careerists who work at the World Bank while living in downtown condos for just a couple of years -- just like they might work out of the Intercontinental in some backwater country for a couple of years before decamping) -- has made it a much different city than it was even when I arrived in 1999. The shame of it is that Sam hasn't written a sequel, but that would have been a Promethean challenge, given the growth and complexity of the subject.
There are various anecdotes here that could by themselves have taken up a full chapter.
Back in 1849, for example, Congressman Lincoln introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the district. It was compromised a year later to exclude trading but not slavery itself. Since Alexandria had just been retroceded to Virginia, I wonder: was it one of the earliest instances of business lobbying for exclusive control under the guise of progress?
I learned a lot of the history throughout the book, but most fascinating are account of the 60's and 70s -- when Smith draws from his experience reporting on civil rights struggles for self-governance and the shape-shifting nature its power structures.
Underneath the progress made is a more complicated story. E.g. the tension fights between militant radicals like the Free DC Movement (led by Mario Barry) and more established Civil Rights leaders. As he saw it, the Movement was responsible for "bringing the issue of self-determination further in Congress than it had been in a hundred years." (LBJ recognized the local government in 1967 and in 1968 the city's school board became an elected body). Outsiders who saw the news about Barry getting caught on tape smoking crack (by the FBI) many years later were confounded when voters put him back in office, but we didn't know that he had come out of SNCC and spent many years organizing before becoming one of the first civil rights leaders to be the chief executive of a major American city. (But that happened five years after the book was published, so...).
The person whose story I found most fascinating in Captive Capital was that of the irascible and uncompromising activist, Julius Hobson. Hobson drove change through an unrelenting combination of direct action and legal strategy. He did a one-man lie-in in the Washington hospital (and a resulting jail term) -- which ultimately ended segregation in the city's hospitals. He staged a sit-in at the Benjamin Franklin School (1964) that led to the desegregation of private business schools in the city. He filed lawsuits that left him bankrupt but broke teacher segregation and differential distribution of books and supplies. He was involved in peace, police and transportaion issues, and filed a major suit in 1969 accusing the federal government of bias against blacks, women and Mexican-Americans.
"With such a record, one might have expected Julius Hobson to emerge as a national civil rights leader. His record of achievement was as impressive as the best of them and if he had wished to he could have driften into the more comfortable world of semi-acceptance enjoyed by James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins and even Martin Luther King ... but Hobson eschewed power and he refused acceptability. He was equally frank about his Marxist philosophy and his atheism. He had an innate distrust of leadership, black or white, and he spoke disparagingly of the new leadership in the city government as "pasteurized negroes." "
I know too little to say, but was wondering if Hobson's atheism and "disagreeable" personality have contributed to the seemingly censorious omission of his role in the civil rights movement. A movement that was in large part led by religious figures and community organizers.
"[W]hile Julius Hobson was a man as important to Washington in his way as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were to the nation, he differed markedly from other charismatic figures in that he never developed a mass following. One local activist who worked closely with Julius for a number of years said, "He's a prophet; but he can't organize shit."
Perhaps Hobson's contributions have been downplayed since Captive Capital was published because it later (1981) came out that he had been an FBI informant (before 1965). (read his Wiki profile for the details).
But who's to judge?
Progressive Review:
https://samsmithessays.blogspot.com/2018/09/sam-smiths-biography.html
By the time I moved here Sam was a minor legend among long-time DC activists. He had been an editor of one of the city's independent weeklies for about a decade. In 1995 he had started one of the nation's earliest independent news blogs -- Progressive Review (see link below).
This is a history of DC largely written for activists by a local son who spent the late 60s and early 70s reporting on local politics.
This, therefore, is a captive-vating story of how DC's status as an abused colony (its budget still has to be approved by a paternalistic Congress) evolved from the 1800s up to the 1970s.
Although the city gained "self-government in 1812 with an elected council, and a council-elected mayor in 1820, it was largely controlled by appointed positions in the school boards, development authorities and the like until the 1960s. Through early and modern struggles, things have changed, but it's still a sort of colony: After all, this year -- 2020 -- is the first time that either body of Congress (the House, of course) passed a resolution in favor of Statehood.
No matter how long we've lived here, most of us who come to DC from outside -- even those who have lived 20 years in the District itself -- are blind to its status and history. That's mostly on us. But its engendered by a pervasive culture of deracination, gentification, development and distraction.
The constant cycling of people in and out is fueled by an imperial economy that has only accelerated further since 2000, even if its growth has been much greater in the Manassas Corridor and Maryland suburbs. The massive increase in the number of lobbyists, consultants, war profiteers and other contractors, interns, "development" experts and careerists who work at the World Bank while living in downtown condos for just a couple of years -- just like they might work out of the Intercontinental in some backwater country for a couple of years before decamping) -- has made it a much different city than it was even when I arrived in 1999. The shame of it is that Sam hasn't written a sequel, but that would have been a Promethean challenge, given the growth and complexity of the subject.
There are various anecdotes here that could by themselves have taken up a full chapter.
Back in 1849, for example, Congressman Lincoln introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the district. It was compromised a year later to exclude trading but not slavery itself. Since Alexandria had just been retroceded to Virginia, I wonder: was it one of the earliest instances of business lobbying for exclusive control under the guise of progress?
I learned a lot of the history throughout the book, but most fascinating are account of the 60's and 70s -- when Smith draws from his experience reporting on civil rights struggles for self-governance and the shape-shifting nature its power structures.
Underneath the progress made is a more complicated story. E.g. the tension fights between militant radicals like the Free DC Movement (led by Mario Barry) and more established Civil Rights leaders. As he saw it, the Movement was responsible for "bringing the issue of self-determination further in Congress than it had been in a hundred years." (LBJ recognized the local government in 1967 and in 1968 the city's school board became an elected body). Outsiders who saw the news about Barry getting caught on tape smoking crack (by the FBI) many years later were confounded when voters put him back in office, but we didn't know that he had come out of SNCC and spent many years organizing before becoming one of the first civil rights leaders to be the chief executive of a major American city. (But that happened five years after the book was published, so...).
The person whose story I found most fascinating in Captive Capital was that of the irascible and uncompromising activist, Julius Hobson. Hobson drove change through an unrelenting combination of direct action and legal strategy. He did a one-man lie-in in the Washington hospital (and a resulting jail term) -- which ultimately ended segregation in the city's hospitals. He staged a sit-in at the Benjamin Franklin School (1964) that led to the desegregation of private business schools in the city. He filed lawsuits that left him bankrupt but broke teacher segregation and differential distribution of books and supplies. He was involved in peace, police and transportaion issues, and filed a major suit in 1969 accusing the federal government of bias against blacks, women and Mexican-Americans.
"With such a record, one might have expected Julius Hobson to emerge as a national civil rights leader. His record of achievement was as impressive as the best of them and if he had wished to he could have driften into the more comfortable world of semi-acceptance enjoyed by James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins and even Martin Luther King ... but Hobson eschewed power and he refused acceptability. He was equally frank about his Marxist philosophy and his atheism. He had an innate distrust of leadership, black or white, and he spoke disparagingly of the new leadership in the city government as "pasteurized negroes." "
I know too little to say, but was wondering if Hobson's atheism and "disagreeable" personality have contributed to the seemingly censorious omission of his role in the civil rights movement. A movement that was in large part led by religious figures and community organizers.
"[W]hile Julius Hobson was a man as important to Washington in his way as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were to the nation, he differed markedly from other charismatic figures in that he never developed a mass following. One local activist who worked closely with Julius for a number of years said, "He's a prophet; but he can't organize shit."
Perhaps Hobson's contributions have been downplayed since Captive Capital was published because it later (1981) came out that he had been an FBI informant (before 1965). (read his Wiki profile for the details).
But who's to judge?
Progressive Review:
https://samsmithessays.blogspot.com/2018/09/sam-smiths-biography.html
More...