"...of which the chief partisan was Maryland's John W. Smith, an affable septuagenarian Democrat who along with George Turner and a number of Westerners would in due time form the core of the "Grand Synod" of Senate elders who steered the body for close to a decade after the death of John Kern left the Democratic caucus without a singular force at its center and instead governed largely - and successfully - by committee. This enormous level of influence for Smith was nowhere to be seen in 1917, however. A former member of the "Committee of the District of Columbia" which made important governance decisions for the "Federal City," Smith had been a good-government reformer as Governor of Maryland credited with dramatically reforming the state for the better, and had brought that zeal to the capital's administration for the six months before its evacuation. As such, it was a matter of emotional importance to him to return Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency back to D.C., going so far as to sponsor a photographic expose of its remains in The Nation out of his own pocket and mentioning the matter every time he was interviewed anywhere in Philadelphia.
The institutional forces arrayed against Smith were formidable, however. Most of Washington had been leveled in 1913 or destroyed by retreating Confederates, including the Hay-era expanded White House, the baroque Smithsonian Castle, and most importantly the United States Capitol, of which only parts of the Senate chamber remained. The Washington Monument had, miraculously, survived, standing as a solemn pillar of white in the middle of all that carnage, which many took to be an almost providential sign, but beyond that, little remained. Neighborhoods were gone, Georgetown had been the site of one of the worst slaughters of civilians of the war, and the place felt haunted and tainted in person that Baltimore or York, Pennsylvania, did not.
The arguments in favor of returning the government to Washington were strong: that a federal district was a Constitutional provision, that it was named after the first President and held symbolic importance, and that the United States would not relinquish its capital in retreat due to the Confederates when they had just won the war. Indeed, on that last matter, anticipation by President Hughes, then-Secretary of State Root and incoming Secretary of State Lodge that the government would return to Washington had been a major factor in the decision to extend Maryland's borders south to the Rappahannock in the Treaty of Mount Vernon. Smith had a compelling case to make as the debate on the matter ratcheted up in the summer of 1917, and he had formidable cross-partisan allies.
What defeated the push was that many of his allies didn't feel as strongly about it as he did, and that his chief enemies were not only extremely passionate about not returning to Washington D.C. but also three of the most powerful Liberals in Congress: Philander Knox, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and thus an effective veto on any spending provisions out of the House of which he did not approve; Thomas Butler, the House Majority Leader who was always lurking as a threat to Mann's flimsy Speakership; and most importantly Boies Penrose, the Senate Majority Leader. All three of these men were Pennsylvanians, and Penrose in particular was the epitome of the Episcopalian Old Philadelphian aristocracy and the effective boss of the powerful Pennsylvania Liberal Party as well as the leader of the Liberal Party's ascendant conservative faction reinvigorated by the departure of Hughes and the hard shift to the right that Root's Cabinet represented, characterized in particular by Treasury Secretary Mellon, a Pittsburgh native personally close to Knox and a longtime political patron of all three of the Keystone State conservatives.
Further challenging Smith's dogged campaign was that most Liberals and Democrats from west of the Appalachians didn't particularly care where the capital was sited, and indeed Norris was at the head of his own push, alongside with Senators Hodges and Hitchcock, to move the capital to St. Louis or Chicago, an endeavor supported wholeheartedly by Illinois' influential senior Senator, Richard Yates. The "New Republic" ethos that had arisen in the wake of the war and was coined in Hughes' farewell address suggested that America could start anew in all manner of ways, that a return to Washington represented the old country of the 19th century that had not expanded coast to coast and that a capital in the heartland could better represent this new country.
The arguments in favor of this fell on deaf ears as the summer advanced. Mann, a Chicagoan, declared his support for a "permanent placement of the Federal District in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia" and that "the national capitol should shift from the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Schuylkill." Had Mann come out in support of the Chicago move, it probably could have carried the day; as it was, he feared Butler more than the cared about his home city. Political inertia towards Philadelphia was starting to consolidate; the federal government was already there, after all, so what was the harm in keeping it there? Behind the scenes, Penrose cajoled and threatened Liberals into starting to form a phalanx around the position despite its relatively minor importance in the grand and immediate scheme; a decision didn't have to be made this soon after the war, did it?
The Federal District Relocation Act of 1917 was passed in late September, upon return from summer recess, with almost all Liberals in support and slightly more Democrats opposed than in favor. Norris, like many, voted largely out of distaste for the autocratic maneuvering by Penrose, Knox and Butler to secure their goal - Knox had gone so far as to publicly announce he would block all budget acts formulated in the House until the act was not just voted on but passed - and in later years acknowledged that on the merits, keeping the capital in Philadelphia was likely the right move. The Hearst years had after all kickstarted a dramatic rise in the growth of influence and sophistication in the federal government, and the war had supercharged that; the Democratic restoration of the 1920s brought with it a considerable compounding of this administrative, progressive revolution, and Philadelphia as a major city made considerably more sense logistically than a reconstructed capital with all the infrastructure from 1913-17 already placed there. It was also persuasive, Norris noted, that Washington had been chosen as capital in the first place only as a compromise between North and South in the early 19th century; the New Republic had in the war years taken as its ideological north star not Thomas Jefferson but rather Benjamin Franklin, and Philadelphia symbolically represented more of what was important to the post-GAW America than Washington did.
Still, the efforts of Penrose to bully his precious Act over the line was one of those subtle ironies of politics - a decision that was more or less correct, but done in such an unappealing and unscrupulous way as to damage its chief advocate. That Penrose was an Old Philadelphian baron tied deeply to the city's arch-Liberal establishment made the whole affair seem to have been done for the benefit of his machine, and the Roosevelt network of Journal papers went so far as to denounce the "corrupt bargain of 1917" and in an editorial penned by Roosevelt personally sarcastically asked how Liberal papers would have covered the Act had, say, Tammany Hall worked to bring the national capital to Manhattan. There was little doubt amongst a great many Democrats that the way the choice was handled helped cement public perceptions over the next year of the Root-era Liberals as shady, uncaring stooges of big business who cared little for the opinion of the public or even dissenting voices within their own party, and that the Federal District Relocation Act was one factor in the massive bloodshed Liberals faced at the polls in 1918.
What was done was done, however. The Federal District was heretofore defined by legislation as a long, skinny square kilometer (indeed, the "Square Kilometer" has become a metonym in Philadelphia for the federal government in general and the District specifically) running along the Schuylkill River just northwest of Center City, defined by boundaries at Girard Avenue on the north, Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street on the east, and Race Street on the south, with the river to the west hemming it in. An executive residence would be expanded upon at the Lemon Hill House where Hughes and now Root had resided (Hughes had taken up residence there in late 1914 after living in a rented townhome near Independence Hall previously), while a grand parkway lined with federal offices and buildings, including the Supreme Court chambers, would be extended from Logan Square at its bottom corner to Fairmount Hill, where a new capital building would be built over the next several years. Unsurprisingly, firms with connections to Penrose and Knox were chosen in late 1918, just before the midterm elections and to great controversy, to be responsible for much of this construction work.
Smith's odyssey to rebuild Washington as the national capital may have been dead, but his advocacy and the push itself endeared him to Marylanders and also many Democrats who had voted against "the corrupt bargain," and built a great deal of support for his backup plan after the old federal district was reworked into "Columbia County," Maryland - the National War Memorial, which established a section of the old National Mall and the site of the White House and Capitol Hill as a protected battlefield managed by the National Park Service, with tens of thousands of graves placed there in concentric circles around the Washington Monument, and the Smithsonian Castle rebuilt into the National Museum of the Great American War, a complex dedicated and expanded over the next decades to commemorate America's deadliest and most substantial peer conflict. The chief sponsor of the National War Memorial Act in the House? George Norris."
- The Gentle Knight: The Life and Ideals of George W. Norris
