By Gary Topping–
I was as appalled as most other Americans at the sight of the assault on our nation’s capitol on January 6, 2021. Not only is it a sort of secular temple of our democracy, but I have personal recollections of the place as I visited it during the year I spent in Washington (1959-60) as a student at the U.S. Navy School of Music. I was a star-struck seventeen-year-old, and although I was a recent graduate of a pretty good high school, as I look back on it now, I wish I had known more to help me appreciate the experience more fully.
One of the things I did not understand was that Washington is a southern city built on a tract of land called the District of Columbia donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia. It exists as a result of a compromise between Representative James Madison of Virginia and Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. In order to get Congress to pass his economic plan of banking, finance and capitalism, Hamilton offered to designate a southern site for the national’s capital. A very conspicuous feature of the city when I lived there was a large population of African-Americans, especially since Anacostia, the district where the Naval Station was located, was a black neighborhood.
Those were the days of the segregated South, yet I do not recall any indications of segregation: no separate rest rooms or drinking fountains, and the buses that we rode to and from the city were completely integrated. The 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka had integrated the schools, but of course I was neither a parent nor a student, so I would not have seen that. My suspicion, now that I have studied a little American history, is that I was witnessing the same kind of racial hypocrisy that came out in the Compromise of 1850, which abolished the slave trade—though not slavery itself—in the nation’s capital so that foreign visitors would not witness the very undemocratic practice of human beings being bought and sold in the capital city of the country supposedly based on the principle that all men are created equal.
A lot of history has passed by since 1959-60, and I’m afraid that some of it has made me a good deal less patriotic than I was at that time. But I remember being absolutely awestruck walking into the capitol rotunda and looking up at that gloriously colorful dome. I climbed up every single stair to the top of the Washington Monument and peered out the windows in the pyramid at the top. I was there when the cherry trees blossomed in the spring and walked through them along the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial, though I’m not sure at the time that I even knew Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. I did witness his handiwork, though, at the National Archives, where I stared at the actual Declaration and the Constitution in their hermetic display cases filled with inert gas to slow their deterioration. And I spent the better part of several Saturdays wandering through the Smithsonian Institution, that magnificent national museum of which, despite my youthful energy, I never saw more than a part.
The great service bands—Army, Navy and Marine—took turns on weekends offering free concerts at the Watergate (not yet tainted with its Nixonian infamy) on a barge tethered to the bank of the Potomac. We sat on the soft grass and marveled at the musical virtuosity we were hearing. Sometimes we took a cruise boat up the Potomac to the Marshall Hall Amusement Park (we found it was a good place to pick up girls), but in my historical ignorance I never stayed on the same boat farther up the river to Mount Vernon. So I missed visiting George Washington’s plantation.
I missed a lot, in other words. I’ve never been back, and I know the city has changed greatly since that time. If I were to return, it would be as a much more knowledgeable visitor as I would return to some of the old haunts and visit others I didn’t know about. But I saw a lot, too, and it made a big impression that I have treasured throughout my subsequent life. It was not a bad way to begin my transition from adolescence to adulthood.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles
