Books

Washington Burning
By Les Standiford, Crown Publishers, 2008, 316 pp.

The cover of Les Standiford's Washington Burning displays a lengthy subtitle/explanation of the title that would make an academician proud: "How a Frenchman's Vision for Our Nation's Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army."

There, now. With a popular history writer's flair, Standiford has thus encapsulated his book's contents and allayed our anxieties that what we have taken on to read might be a gloom-and-doom account like the Weather Channel's It Could Happen Tomorrow series.

Instead, Washington Burning gives a compelling picture of the people and political maneuvering behind the unique project of building a city of government for a unique political experiment.

The star of the initial stages was Frenchman Pierre Charles L'Enfant, and for several chapters, his biography prevails, revealing his enthusiasm for the concept, his brilliant design and his artistic temperament.

That temperament did not sit well with the committee George Washington appointed to oversee the implementation of the plan. One of L'Enfant's more startling actions was to pull down, rather peremptorily, the walls of a home under construction which infringed upon his plan.

Other local landowners with connections to the committee protested his plan at every other step during L'Enfant's short tenure as project director. His successor had little luck in curbing local interest either, proving that, notwithstanding L'Enfant's temperament, the committee was at least 50 percent of the problem.

Congress' decree that the city be built, despite its failure to fund it, convinces us that Congressional bungling is nothing new.

In addition to cataloguing the parallels between bureaucracy then and bureaucracy now, the book includes tidbits about the competition to select the design for the city and its main buildings, including whose designs were snubbed.

And, of course, the government's inadequate military preparation for the British invasion highlights how hindsight beats foresight.

Standiford's inclusion of numerous letters and excerpts of letters written by the founding fathers to one another concerning the problems of building the city provides real insight into the manners and personalities of the day.

It also reminds one of the snail's pace of communication under which the project was undertaken. Instructions languished on the road while the recipient forged onward in ignorance. In spite of the politeness of the language, one can feel the frustration of the great men who pushed the project forward.

But the letters did not lapse into vitriol and no Senate investigations were held — which probably explains why there was a city to burn when the British attacked.

Or perhaps the Fates exacted a fee in recognition of the fact that L'Enfant never considered that his fees had been paid in full. He died impoverished and bitter.

Judith H. McKibbin is a retired instructor of English at Jacksonville State University.