Abstract

A City Without a Main Street

This article describes the conditions in the District of Columbia. The District was to be a capital city and nothing else, at once the tool and the jewel of the ambitious new United States. Life and growth in the District were to be in predestined grooves. Inevitably, the people of the District became a people without roots. They could not plant themselves deeper than the topsoil. Washington has been denied the most priceless of human values, most priceless because with it all other values may be realized and without it all others may be lost. It has been denied the value that exists in the right to dig in and build a roof-tree. Government-created, government-developed, it has repelled the constructive, independence seeking type of man and has been a magnet to the opposite type.