The Washington Century: Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital (Paperback)

by Burt Solomon (Author) "Before first light, young Morris Kafitz hitched up the horse and wagon and set out along the lanes of Georgetown..." (more)
Key Phrases: purple veil, honors track, White House, New York, New Orleans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Now a world capital, Washington, D.C., began the 20th century as the "unhurried" capital of a country that had not yet found its place in the world. Solomon, a contributing editor to the National Journal, traces the remarkable evolution of the city through the lives of three insider families whose rise paralleled that of the capital. Washington's foremost industry, government, is represented by the politically potent Boggses, whose patriarch, Hale, began his congressional career in 1941, and whose offspring include journalist Cokie Roberts and influential lobbyist Tommy Boggs. The role of African-Americans in the D.C. establishment is personified by civil rights activist Julius Hobson and his family. The clan of Morris Cafritz, Jewish immigrant turned real estate magnate, and his socialite wife, Gwen, opens the world of Washington's elite social scene. Presidents, politicians, social activists from Stokely Carmichael to Jesse Jackson and other personalities, from J. Edgar Hoover to political columnist Joseph Alsop, move through these pages with dizzying frequency. World events pass by with an equally vertiginous effect, serving as backdrop for the successes and failures of various Boggses, Hobsons and Cafritzes. For the most part, Solomon (Where They Ain't) is generous to his subjects. And though the tale occasionally bogs down in family melodrama, it maintains a generally lively pace. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
As Margaret Leech convincingly demonstrated in her exemplary Reveille in Washington (1941), the Civil War transformed the District of Columbia from "a Southern town, without the picturesqueness, but with the indolence, the disorder and the want of sanitation" into "the axis of the Union." In those four hard years Washington ceased to be "a country town, reserved for the business of government," and became a true city, albeit one, as John F. Kennedy so wittily said nearly a century later, "of Southern efficiency and Northern charm."

It was during Kennedy's lifetime, and during his brief presidency, that Washington was transformed once again: from a sleepy city into a world capital, a place obsessed with influence and power, a place where people would do "anything for money," as Burt Solomon puts it, where "money had become the medium of common exchange, the engine of persuasion, the measure of desire." How this came to pass is Solomon's subject in The Washington Century, a book that by its very nature will be of much interest here, but that satisfies this interest only in the most limited way.

Take note of Solomon's subtitle: "Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital." It echoes the subtitle of what may well be the best book ever written about an American city, J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. It is likely that Solomon has taken Lukas as his (unacknowledged) inspiration and model, so it is scarcely unfair to weigh his book against Lukas's and to judge that it comes up far short. Lukas dug deep below the surface of Boston's complex social and institutional structure; Solomon mostly skims along the top of Washington's. Lukas focused on three unknown families whose stories gained drama from their unfamiliarity; Solomon has chosen three well-known families whose stories long ago lost their drama. Lukas created a strong narrative line, following the three families as they and their city suffered through a wrenching decade of court-ordered school desegregation; Solomon lurches along from chapter to chapter, without ever giving the reader a clear sense of where he, and thus the reader, is going.

It's not that The Washington Century is a bad book -- the stories of the Cafritz, Hobson and Boggs families are interesting, if familiar to most people who are likely to read the book, and Solomon has a fairly clear understanding of how this city changed during the 20th century -- but that it could have been so much better. The transformation of the nation's capital between 1900 and 2000 was dramatic, with reverberations within the city limits, the region, the country and the world. Yet Solomon passes only lightly over significant developments: a mere four paragraphs about the Beltway and astonishingly little about the rise of the suburbs; almost nothing about the battle to build and maintain Metro; a bit more about the separate and unequal conditions of the city's schools; a nod to Marion Barry's prodigious political gifts but almost nothing about his corrupt, destructive mayoralty; a good deal about the rise of the lobbying industry but only a hint of its debasing influence on the city and the country; only a peek, and that almost entirely through the prism provided by Cokie Roberts, about the decline of what once passed for serious Washington journalism and the rise of tinhorn media celebrities and the Gong Shows wherein their reputations are made.

Instead Solomon settles for superficial portraits of his three families and the three men who headed them: Morris Cafritz, the most influential real-estate developer in the District's history and the man who almost singlehandedly created that monster of architectural ugliness and cynical influence-peddling, K Street; Julius Hobson, the passionate, stubborn, obsessive fighter for civil rights who led the boycotts of downtown merchants in the 1960s that broke the old segregationist monopoly; and Hale Boggs, the Democratic congressman from Louisiana who danced along a fine line between the prejudices of his constituents and his own ambitions to be a national, as opposed to merely Southern, Democrat.

There are, of course, many other characters: Gwen Cafritz, Morris's wife, who achieved the dubious distinction of being the "top hostess" of Washington "society"; the Cafritzes' three sons, all of whom struggled in different ways with their parents' private and public legacy; Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Morris's daughter-in-law, the high-octane activist with a penchant for controversy and publicity; Julius Hobson Jr., who shares his late father's inclination toward the public arena and is now a lobbyist for the American Medical Association, on the other side of the fence; Lindy Boggs, widowed in 1972 when her husband's plane disappeared during a flight over Alaska, who took over his seat and served in Congress for nearly two decades; their son Tommy, who as partner in Patton Boggs LLP is one of the most visible and limelight-loving lobbyists in the city; and their daughter Cokie, who translated television renown into lucrative speaking engagements around the country and now writes "feel-good" books that routinely get on the bestseller lists.

Obviously the lives of these people suggest broader patterns in the life of the city, and to some extent Solomon explores these larger ramifications, but the whole enterprise has a tentative, perfunctory air. His portraits of Cafritz, Hobson and Boggs are fairly well-rounded and nuanced, but all three men are safely dead. Reading between the lines, one can sense a measure of disapproval of some of the ways in which younger members of the cast of characters have led their lives and amassed not-inconsiderable wealth, but for the most part Solomon bends far backward in order to be understanding of and generous to them. This, as many another author could testify, is part of the price one pays for interviews, access to documents and cooperation in other forms, but it casts a polite, deferential pall over a story that should be bristling with energy.

Thus, for example, the Boggs family's move from a house in the District to one in Maryland could have provided an opportunity to examine the ways in which the suburbs have changed the city -- its economy, its land-use patterns, its highway system, its culture -- but Solomon makes little more than a nod in that direction. The careers of the Hobsons, senior and junior, as well as that of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, do permit him to look into home rule and local politics, but the District's incredibly complex and often bitter racial dynamics get nothing close to the deep exploration they deserve. By contrast with Lukas, who devotes an entire chapter to the Boston Globe, Solomon has almost nothing to say about The Washington Post and the ways it has exercised its influence in the city's growth and development. There is, as mentioned, a quick look at the city's school system, but primarily because of Julius Hobson's role in a successful 1967 lawsuit charging de facto segregation. There's little about the decline of the public schools, the flight to better suburban schools by whites and blacks alike, or the debilitating effects this decline has had throughout the city -- and there's nothing at all about higher education in the District and its outskirts. The city's subservient relationship with major-league baseball might have inspired other reporters to dig into the vast array of issues raised by professional sports and the cities they hold hostage, but Solomon declines the opportunity, which is all the more surprising since his previous book was a well-received history of the original Baltimore Orioles.

Et cetera. Various readers doubtless will find various things of interest to them in The Washington Century, and many are likely to agree (as I do) with Solomon's rather doleful conclusion that "the rise of permanent Washington" -- lobbyists, journalists, revolving-door special-interest pleaders -- has had a "tawdry" effect on the capital. But appearing as it does in a brief epilogue, that judgment seems almost an afterthought, an attempt to inject some gravitas into what had been, up to then, mostly a string of puffish profiles of powerful people. There's a good story here, but Solomon falls way short of the possibilities it offers.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060937858
• ISBN-13: 978-0060937850
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,733,951 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-written & hard to put down, mostly an "insiders'" book, December 29, 2004

By	Richard E. Hegner (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Washington Century: Three Families and the Shaping of the Nation's Capital (Hardcover)

This book takes an unusual approach to chronicling the 20th century history of Washington, DC, viewing it through the prism of the lives of three prominent families-the Cafritzes, real estate developers and philanthropists; the Boggses, politicians, lobbyists, and reporters; and the Hobsons, civil rights leaders and activists, both outside and inside "the system." Solomon had access to members of all three families, but the portraits are nonetheless critical, showing "warts and all" as well as intra-family disputes in the case of the Cafritz and Hobson families.

To some extent, this is a book written for Washington "insiders." That is, as I read the book, I wondered whether it would appeal to audiences who are less familiar with the District of Columbia and its environs. (I have lived in the Washington metropolitan area for 25 years and worked in D.C. for 12 years.) The Boggs family portrayal (including Hale and Lindy Boggs, both prominent members of the House of Representatives; Cokie and Steve Roberts, both nationally known reporters; and Tommy Boggs, an influential federal-level lobbyist) is apt to be of interest to the "outside the Beltway" audience, but the depictions of the Cafritz and Hobson families, whose sphere of influence has primarily been "inside the Beltway," may be less interesting to audiences less familiar with local history and geography.

Solomon has truly mined an impressive lode of documents and interviews in assembling this book, which has considerable "human interest" appeal. I found the book so captivating and well written that I had difficulty putting it down, and completed it in three days over the Christmas holiday. It is both well-written and compelling. It presents a useful chronicle of a number of developments-including the decline of bipartisan cooperation, the growing importance of money in Washington politics, and the decline of the middle class as a residential group inside the Beltway.