The King of Silver Spring

by Richard Jaeggi

Nowadays, E. Brooke Lee is only a middle school in Silver Spring, but for the better part of the last century, the man himself bestrode Montgomery County like a colossus. In the period between the wars, the Colonel was the political boss of Montgomery County and the undisputed king of Silver Spring. He laid the political infrastructure that made suburban Montgomery possible, and formed a deeply intertwined system of public politics and private land development that lasts to this day.

His life story reads like a character in a John Dos Passos novel. Edward Brooke Lee was born to the politically prominent family of Lees and Blairs that both owned and shaped south Montgomery County since the 19th century. His father was Blair Lee, a progressive Democrat and the first popularly elected Senator from Maryland.

Together with his friend, Frank Hewitt, E. Brooke Lee organized Company K of the Maryland National GuardÕs 115th Infantry. In 1916 Company K, under the command of Captain Lee, marched out of the Silver Spring armory to go fight Pancho Villa down by the Rio Grande. A year later, they were shipped off to France to fight in the war to end all wars.

Major Lee returned from Europe a highly decorated war hero. (It was later that The Colonel became a colonel.) In 1919, he was elected State Comptroller, a position he held for four years as a prot?g? of the newly elected Governor Albert Ritchie. At that time, the control of the Montgomery County Democratic Party was split between the "good government" reformers and the up-county agrarian landholders. E. Brooke Lee helped forge a pragmatic alliance called the United Democratic Club of Montgomery County that eventually shifted the balance of power to suburban Montgomery without unduly alienating the Rockville status quo.

The pinnacle of his political career was in the years 1927 through 1930, when he served as the Speaker of the House of Delegates in a close personal alliance with Governor Ritchie. For the next thirty years, The Colonel commanded his Democratic machine and by extension, Montgomery County, with the same penchant for discipline and loyalty that served him so well in the trenches of France.

Despite his familyÕs deep roots in Maryland politics, public office was only a derivative interest for E. Brooke Lee. Unlike his idealistic father, Edward Brooke was an eminently practical man with a passion for building wealth. Clausewitz said that politics was an extension of war by other means; for The Colonel, politics was an extension of business by other means.

The federal bureaucracy had expanded considerably during the First World War, and the young Lee recognized that there was a pent-up demand for single family housing. The Lee family owned huge tracts of land as part of their ancestral Silver Spring estate just over the District line. This property was already connected to Washington by a commuter trolley. But land alone was not enough; housing subdivisions needed sewage, water, and electricity to make them habitable, and schools and parks to make them desirable.

The problem was that this infrastructure was fantastically expensive and well beyond the means of the early developers such as Lee, whose wealth consisted primarily in land. Only public entities had the capacity to invest this kind of capital in infrastructure, but the powerful north Montgomery agrarian interests were unwilling to subsidize suburban development in the south with their property taxes.

From his dual vantage as both Comptroller of Maryland and president of the North Washington Realty Company, Lee saw the solution: public bond issues. The state could build infrastructure today by issuing bonds that would be paid back by future generations. The agrarian interests didnÕt care so long as their taxes didnÕt go up. Under the current patronage system, this had the bonus effect of allowing politicians like Lee to award loyal supporters with large construction contracts to build roads, schools, and pipelines using money borrowed by the public. Patronage was the glue that held the machine together.

The only catch to this "buy now, pay later" form of publicly subsidized development was that it depended on an ever-expanding tax base. As long as people poured into the suburbs and became tax-paying Montgomery property owners, the state and county could continue to issue new bonds to build more infrastructure, so that new subdivisions could be built to pull in still more taxpayers, etc.

This self-expanding cycle worked like a charm throughout the 1920s. The county population grew by half again, and E. Brooke Lee grew richer. It was not until the onset of the Depression that the whole cycle fell in upon itself like a latter-day "dotbomb," and Lee very nearly went bankrupt. But that is another story.

E. Brooke Lee also realized early on that publicly financed infrastructure alone was not sufficient for the orderly development of Montgomery County. The other key to expanding suburban development (and, not incidentally, the key to increasing the value of select property) was public planning. Wealth was created along the arteries of roads, water, and sewer lines that extended northward into MontgomeryÑwhoever controlled the extension of these arteries controlled the wealth.

In 1922 he was instrumental in granting the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission planning authority for the extension of streets, water, and sewer lines. In 1927 Lee co-founded the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a bi-county agency empowered by the State of Maryland to acquire land for public purposes, control zoning and development, issue bonds and levy taxes. Both of these agencies were effectively controlled by the state government and, by extension, the Lee machine, well into the 1950s.

Colonel Lee ruled Montgomery County in the '20s and '30s with an autocratic discipline that is incomprehensible today. Back in 1920, what was good for the Colonel really did seem good for the homeowner. The Montgomery Civic Federation was wholly supportive of the ColonelÕs efforts to bring home bond money and sound planning through the MNCPPC. Zoning laws protected property values; parks and schools increased them. More stores meant fewer trips to the District and wider roads meant you got there faster. Nobody was really worried about the loss of rural spaces, highway congestion, or homogenized retail. sIt was only later, in the 1940s, that the Civic Federation and the League of Women Voters took on the Lee machine over the issue of Home Rule.

But that, too, is another story.