Transcriber’s Note
Italics are enclosed in _underscores_, boldface in =equals signs=.
[Illustration: Washington Northwest]
[Illustration: District of Columbia and Vicinity]
WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL
_Previously Published_
_by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer_
NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL
CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL
_by Jack Lait_
HELP WANTED (_a play_)
THE BIG HOUSE
BROADWAY MELODY
BEAST OF THE CITY
PUT ON THE SPOT
GANGSTER GIRL
BEEF, IRON AND WINE (_short stories_)
GUS THE BUS
OUR WILL ROGERS
WILL ROGERS’ WIT AND WISDOM
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL WRITING
_by Lee Mortimer_
NEW YORK BEHIND THE SCENES
_WASHINGTON
Confidential_
_BY JACK LAIT_
AND
_LEE MORTIMER_
CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1951, BY CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.
_Second Printing, February 1951_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_American Book--Knickerbocker Press, Inc., New York_
_The Confidential Contents_
Introduction: WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL ix
Part One--THE PLACES (Confidential!)
1. DISTRICT OF CONFUSION 1
Washington’s whys and wherefores, guaranteed to mystify,
amaze and amuse.
2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN 8
No relation to the wrestler, only sometimes he makes
more sense than the rich big domes and fancy queers
who reside in this made-to-order Greenwich Village.
3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE 12
North West is the only section of Washington which
counts. On the other hand, what is there in it you won’t
find in Denver, Detroit or Dubuque, except the White
House?
4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN 21
Where the hustlers hustle.
5. HOBOS WITH NO HORIZONS 30
They can’t vote the bums in Washington’s flophouses,
otherwise these skidrows are like your home-town
Bowery, except there are three.
6. GREEN PASTURES 34
Here the poor, downtrodden colored folk are not equal,
they’re superior. And there are more of them. This is a
Negro Heaven.
7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE 46
Where the blackest crimes are hatched.
8. CHINATOWN CHIPPIES 56
Washington’s Chinatown offers inducements other than
Chop Suey and Chow Mein.
9. THE OVERFLOW 62
A. The Free State--where anything goes for a price.
B. The Policy of the Old Dominion is policy.
10. UNCLE SAM: LANDLORD 70
The government owns 40% of the land. Read this and
find out what happens on it.
Part Two--THE PEOPLE (Confidential!)
11. THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DAME 74
You can say that again about those in Washington.
12. G-GIRLS 77
They come in two grades:
A. Government Gals--they’re many and not so glamorous.
B. Glamour Gals--they’re few and not so glamorous.
13. COMPANY GALS 83
Being a dissertation on a specialty known only to Washington
and how one finds same.
14. FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES 86
The capital was made for lupos. An elucidation on how
one goes about being one.
15. GARDEN OF PANSIES 90
The hand-on-hip set wins the battle of Washington.
16. THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS 99
Agrarian reformers--that’s what the bright State Department
lads call them, in other countries. We call those in
Washington traitors.
17. KICKING THE GONG AROUND 107
When we speak of hopheads, we don’t mean Congressmen.
18. THE YOUNG IN HEART 118
Until we read this book we liked children. In Washington
the little dears are devils.
19. BOOZE AND BOTTLES 123
Washingtonians imbibe three times as much as you.
Where they get it, how and why, with pointers on what
to do with your hollow leg.
20. CAFE AU CORN 131
That’s Washington’s Cafe Society.
21. CALL ME MADAME 134
With apologies to Irv Berlin. Being the story of the Social
Climbers who climbed in when SOCIETY climbed out.
22. STRIPED PANTS 144
Elsewhere men who wear ’em bury the dead; in Washington
most who wear them are dead but not buried.
That’s the sad tale of what happened to the once oh, so
gay diplomatic corps.
23. LOBBYIST’S LICENSE--THE RIGHT TO PETITION 155
The population consists of so many five percenters,
lobbyists, fixers, lawyers, press agents and men from
Missouri, you’d think everyone was taking advantage of the
Constitutional guarantee.
24. RACKETS BY REMOTE CONTROL 171
Washington’s underworld is operated by local overseers
for absentee landlords. This is how the system works.
25. WHO’S WHO IN MOBOCRACY 177
The Blue Book of the silk-lined aristocracy who own the
works.
26. THE TERROR FROM TENNESSEE 194
Estes in Plunderland.
27. LUCKY NUMBERS 206
After all, politics is a gamble, so why shouldn’t the
citizens do it too?
28. IT’S A CRIME 213
Murder and mayhem, rape and robbery are pastimes in
Washington. Jail? Don’t be naïve.
29. THE LAW 220
The poor, underpaid coppers, who try to enforce it.
30. HOW TO STAY OUT OF JAIL 229
Hire the right lawyer and bondsman. This will name him.
31. THE BOSSES 234
They’re responsible for the works working. Maybe that’s
why they don’t.
32. THE MONARCHS OF THE METROPOLIS 240
The “Honorable” members of Congress.
33. WIRETAPPERS, SNOOPS AND SPIES 245
The only thing they can’t tap is sign language.
Part Three--THE ESCAPE (Confidential!)
34. THE TUESDAY TO THURSDAY SET 254
Where shall we go? Anywhere, but most head north to
New York, Philly and Atlantic City.
35. BALTIMORE CONFIDENTIAL 258
Baltimore is less than an hour away, but what a difference!
You’ll find things here they never heard of even
in Chicago.
Part Four--THE LOWDOWN (Confidential!)
36. INSIDE STUFF 276
What they don’t teach you in school.
37. TIPS ON THE TOWNS 281
Advice for the visitor with much that’s unknown to the
natives.
38. CONFIDENTIAL GUIDE TO WASHINGTON AND BALTIMORE 292
Where to find what, when, including much you should
never want, but if you do--
Part Five--THE APPENDIX (Confidential!)
A. HEADWAITERS’ NAMES 298
This and a sawbuck will get you an insult.
B. GUSTATORY GUIDE 298
Where to find what food, when.
C. DINING AROUND THE WORLD 300
For those who don’t rate bids to embassies, but want to
eat foreign.
D. BARE BABES 301
Where to find ’em. Or where to keep away from ’em,
which is harder.
E. LUPO’S LOG BOOK 301
Being some notes to file away where your wife won’t look.
F. THE INNER CIRCLE 302
Extracts from the list of 800.
INDEX 307
WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL
P-s-s-s-t!
Here we go again--Confidential.
We turned New York inside out; but we both live there. We turned
Chicago upside down; but we were both raised there. We descended on
Washington not quite like Stanley invaded Africa, because in our
combined 75 years of newspaper work we had been in the capital hundreds
of times. It intrigued us because we never could understand it. So we
decided brashly to do a Lait-Mortimer operation on it from scratch. Our
principal discovery was that nobody understands Washington--the _city_,
not the nation’s nerve-center.
By the time we went through it--its avenues, its alleys, its
cat-houses, its dumps, its mansions, its hotels, its police stations,
its jails, its courts, its clubs, its closets, and its catacombs, we
knew more about it than anyone who lives in it, and finished the job
which stymied Lincoln Steffens 40 years ago; for that classic muckraker
who turned up the shame of the cities recoiled in bafflement when he
attempted to “do” Washington.
It was our toughest task of digging, but we turned up plenty. We think
we have X-rayed the dizziest--and this will amaze you, as it did us,
the dirtiest--community in America.
We are not reformers. We are reporters. As such we will take you with
us through a metropolitan area of 1,500,000, living in what should be
a utopia, but which is a cesspool of drunkenness, debauchery, whoring,
homosexuality, municipal corruption and public apathy, protected crime
under criminal protection, hoodlumism, racketeering, pandering and
plundering, among anomalous situations found nowhere else on earth.
Washington is a made-to-order architectural paradise with the political
status of an Indian reservation, inhabited by 800,000 economic
parasites; no industries but one, government, and the tradesmen and
servants and loafers and scum that feed on the highest average per
capita income in the world, where exist the soundest security, the
mightiest power, and the most superlative rates of crime, vice and
juvenile delinquency anywhere. And this in a seat of intelligence, the
cross-section of the whole United States, where women far outnumber men.
It leads the country in the percentage of the native-born. There are
no peasants, factory-workers or slums as they are known in every other
city of magnitude.
The paternal form of local administration in this disenfranchised and
politically castrated community should eliminate ward and district
bosses, vote-buyers, grafters and gangsters, all of whom elsewhere
thrive primarily on controlling votes. Yet in this magnificent planned
city of majestic proportions, the official heart of the richest and
greatest and freest land in the history of mankind, we found corruption
and perversion, organized and individual, that dazed a pair of hardened
characters who considered themselves shock-proof after their groundwork
for the books that debunked New York and deloused Chicago.
We spent many months in Washington. We made contacts in our own
surefire way, which opened up sources not usually available to the
reporters there, who regard affairs of their town as chickenfeed, and
who dream of becoming syndicated columnists who can pontificate on
Congress, the Cabinet and the White House.
We know plenty about those, too. But we will stick to the Lowdown on
the Big Town, which has become our trademark.
We will not even attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim to
make Washington a better place to live in. We don’t give a damn what
kind of a place it is to live in, except that the kind of place we
found furnished us with that sole commodity in which we deal--copy.
Everything interested us, but we will limit this to what we think will
interest you. This is no guide-book. This is no preachment and no
appeal, not even a lesson. As we said in the introduction to _Chicago
Confidential_, “We have nothing to sell except books.” And we sold
plenty of them and are still selling them.
This will be the stripped-down story of a queen who turned into a
street-walker.
That’s why we were born--to tell you what you couldn’t find out without
us--Confidential!
PART ONE
THE PLACES
(_Confidential!_)
1. DISTRICT OF CONFUSION
The Nation’s Capital is a bastard born of a compromise and nurtured on
a lottery.
The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution
and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that
government in a stinking, steaming swamp. This was a peace offering to
recalcitrant Southerners, who were that way then just as they are now.
The first funds to build and improve that city were raised by selling
real estate by lottery. With such ancestry, it is no wonder today that
“numbers” make one of the biggest businesses in Washington. The policy
racket far exceeds bookmaking, the Number 1 source of gambling revenue
in all others parts of the country.
Before the plane which brings the arriving traveler to Washington lands
at the National Airport, on the Virginia side, it swoops gracefully
over the city in a salute. The tall, needle-like Washington Monument
and the familiar dome of the Capitol arise through a sea of green, to
dominate the landscape.
They and the other public structures, which alone form the skyline in
a city where buildings over 110 feet high are banned by law, are the
symbols of Washington. It is an old-fashioned, tree-shaded Southern
town, delightful and gracious, taken over by a gigantic governmental
apparatus which, though founded on Colonial Virginia’s tradition
of personal freedom, has mushroomed into the world’s greatest
bureaucracy, humpbacked and bow-legged under tons of laws and endless
regulations.
The spacious avenues, the tree-shaded lawns, the green which one sees
wherever he looks, is a symbol too--that Washington is dominated by the
rural mind.
It is the only capital of any world power where there is no variety
of humanity. London, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, these are
great commercial centers where national government is incidental.
Washington is inhabited by residents of every state in the union and
representatives of every country on the globe, yet it is as backwater
and provincial as any small inland one-plant town.
This most uncosmopolitan capital is overshadowed by that giant of
metropolises, New York, only minutes away by air, and by Baltimore,
with its wide open and blatant vice much nearer. The foreign trade
commissioners, the visiting bankers, and all the important public
personages go to Manhattan, where the United Nations is cutting into
Washington’s diplomatic monopoly. The lowlier links lam the 36 miles to
Baltimore to cut up.
Not that Washington has no vice and venery. It has more of it than the
escape havens. But, as in all ingrown towns, the “respectables” must go
away from home to prance and play. It is the story of the deacon from
Dubuque all over again, and what happens to him in the Big Burg. Only
here the deacon is a Congressman, or--
As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft, cheap
gambling, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get, thrown on a
large screen, a peep show of this stately concentration camp of cold
monuments and hot mammas where there are four women for every three
men. Murkier than the “smoke-filled room” so often used as a cliché to
typify a corral of politicos, it is a vast bedroom with a jumbo bottle
of bourbon beside the bed.
And yet its manners and morals are those of the barnyard and the
railroad-junction town rather than the romantic intrigue of the salon
and the scented boudoir.
Washington has a kind of glamor all its own. It is not the kind one
finds in New York, or Paris, or even Atlantic City. The Washington
feeling comes from being close to great events and to the memory of
great people. It is, to a certain extent, similar to the public appeal
of Hollywood’s famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, the place where the movie
stars are interred. Forest Lawn there is a must for tourists. There is
no sacred peace about this graveyard. Trippers photograph its ornate
tombs and profane its dead. The tombs were purposely designed by hams
who craved publicity even in death.
Washington does remind one of a well-kept cemetery. Its gleaming public
buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums. It is the
nation’s Forest Lawn, where is sunk its priceless heritage, killed by
countless generations of getters and gimme-ers.
Washington is a reflection of Los Angeles--a Los Angeles without palm
trees. Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set.
It has a feel of unreality. This is a designed city, the only important
one in America, and its streets are so straight, its architecture is so
conforming, and its sidewalks are so neat and clean, it might have been
set up in _papier-mâché_ only today.
And it’s a dead heat which--Washington or Los Angeles--has more yahoos
from more dull places. New York gets its share, but its tourists
include many from fairly alive communities; the plowboys hail from
New England or other points not very far away. But the barbarians
who inundate Washington and Los Angeles would be conspicuous if they
visited Little Rock. Heaven knows where they come from. Their clothes,
make-ups, manners and expressions are of the cow-pasture.
We were sitting in the Senators’ Reception Room in the Capitol, waiting
for one solon to come off the floor. This rococo room is open to the
public. While we sat there, we idly contemplated the sight-seers
who gaped at the mid-Victorian gold and mosaic with which it is
embellished. One coatless yokel, with two dirty-nosed youngsters in tow
and a dreary wife toting a wailing babe bringing up the rear, figured
we knew something because we were wearing ties and sitting down.
“What room is this?” he humbly asked.
“This is the President’s private office,” we replied. “No visitors
allowed.”
You should have seen them scram!
The number of transients who enter and leave Washington annually is in
excess of 45 million. Most of them are peasants who shudder when they
ride in an elevator and gape at an escalator. The sessions of Congress
find them in the galleries of the noisy House and the sedate Senate.
The men are negligee with firemen’s suspenders, the women often suckle
babes at their breasts while some Demosthenes below debates a bill
vital to the world.
But the residents of the Washington area are, on the whole, remarkably
well-dressed--not only the natives in Washington but the government
employes drawn from every corner of the map. It is surprising how
quickly they shed their corn-fed looks and begin to look like
Easterners and try to act like them.
One wonders where the hoards of ill-dressed, low-mannered visitors eat
and sleep.
Tourists may wander coatless through the White House and in the
legislative office buildings, but all of the better restaurants and
hotels require men to wear coats and ties at all times. This, of
course, is universal in New York, but in Chicago, horny-handed, wilted
hoi polloi are seen in lobbies of such swell hotels as the Ambassador
and Drake in shirt-sleeves.
Washingtonians are completely white-collar. Its private business
is merchandising. The service trades, such as feeding and sleeping
visitors, form its chief non-governmental activity. Before the New Deal
put a premium on alphabet soup, federal employes got miserly wages.
Washington was a poor city. Now some secretaries make as much as $8,000
a year and Senators’ assistants drag down $10,000. We talked to one
babe, some kind of an expert in the Treasury, who draws $15,000 a year
on a fee basis. In her spare time she checks hats in a joint which
sells liquor after hours.
The average family income in Washington is the highest in any big city
in the land, despite its disproportionate Negro population. Colored
folk work for Uncle Sam at salaries equal to whites’, in many cases get
preferential treatment, and others draw liberal relief checks. Another
reason for high family income is that in so many families husband and
wife work for the government, and many who are grounded there also
hold outside jobs, after hours. This practice is permitted in many
departments. Even members of the Metropolitan Police are allowed to
accept outside employment after their eight-hour day. Many drive taxies
or are chauffeurs.
The per capita income in Washington is $1820, compared with the
national average of $1330. Even rich New York is second to Washington
with $1758.
Washingtonians file more income-tax returns per capita than do any
other Americans. More than two-thirds of the homes in the District
are worth more than $12,000. The city has the highest retail sales per
capita on earth. Government employes are paid regularly by a boss who
never goes broke--though that isn’t the fault of the politicians.
Added wealth streams constantly into the city, from the cornucopias of
lobbyists with no-limit expense accounts, tourists and representatives
of foreign governments who let loose a few francs, shillings or lire
before tapping our tills.
Here we have a city which, if mental cripples who believe in planned
economies were correct, should be a happy place, free of crime and
vice. Washington is rich and almost everyone in it is insured against
want for life. Yet it has that apex rate of crime. The waterfront of
Marseilles, the alleys of Singapore’s Chinatown, the sailor’s deadfalls
of Port Said have nothing on it. Washington makes even Chicago look
good. And that’s been going on since Abigail Adams hung the family wash
in the backyard of the then unfinished White House--and shuddered lest
the President’s drawers be stolen.
In the early years of the Republic, grifters and grafters, highwaymen
and conmen, pimps and prostitutes flocked into the city. Instead of
being a community where women greatly outnumbered men, as they do
today, early Washington contained almost entirely males. The first
Congressmen and early office-holders were easy pickings for the fancy
girls and their fancy men, who arrived a jump ahead of the lobbyists.
Lonesome men whiled their time at cards and dice, and ever since then
Washington has been a gamblers’ garden.
Foreigners and many American political philosophers say one great fault
of our American system is our form of municipal government. They point
out the astounding crime, legal laxity and municipal deviltry in this
country where we elect our local governments directly and give them
great power, whereas most foreign countries are ruled from above, with
cities and provinces allowed minimum authority.
Well, Washington is ruled from above. It has no votes, no county
chairmen, no campaign funds to be raised, no favors to be returned. It
is policed by a constabulary appointed directly by the United States
government and paid from the public treasury of the United States.
Its judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the
Senate, and all but municipal court judges serve for life. Its District
Attorney is chosen by the President, as are its city commissioners,
and through them all public District officials.
There is no chance for a neighborhood gang boss to establish himself
through floaters and colonized flotsam. Yet there are neighborhood
bosses. There is influence. Judges and police are bought. Washington
has the blackest record of any city in the country on the F.B.I. ledger
of reported crimes. Black is the color of its crime, too, as will be
shown. The proportion of Negro crime to white is almost eight to one.
Another reason for Washington’s defiance of the law which is made in
Washington is that, except for ogling tourists, everyone who comes
comes to get. To get jobs, contracts, favors, pardons, commissions, and
sometimes social preferment. This acquisitive horde is not interested
in the city. Toward local public affairs there is lethargy of mind,
spirit and body, nothing conducive to enterprise or local pride.
This potpourri of human beings on the make remained within bounds until
the first World War. There was room for all. As every schoolboy knows,
the original grant of land from the states of Maryland and Virginia for
the national capital was a square, ten miles wide. This proved too big
and the Virginia part was receded more than a hundred years ago. The
remaining area, all in Maryland, was ample for the needs of the city
until overnight, in 1917, it changed from a country town to a madhouse
in which all the residents are inmates. There was some respite during
the 1920’s, but since the coming of the New Deal, Washington burst its
pants and overflowed back into Virginia and across into Maryland.
As with other large cities, the 1950 census returns found the rate
of growth of Washington suburbs far outstripping the parent. At this
writing there are about 800,000 people in the city limits and 750,000
in the satellite suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. The percentage of
Negroes is higher than it is in Mississippi.
Seniority rules in the Congress, which permit one-party Southern
Senators and Representatives to control more than their share
of committees, account for continuance of its Dixie slant. So
Washingtonians talk like Southerners. Even the Oregonians and
down-Easters fall into the liquid drawl after a few years in the
capital. With the dulcet Dixie dialect comes the Southern attitude
toward the Negro. Fiery FEPCers from New York, after a couple of
years’ indoctrination, wink in private over the “tolerance” they sell
in public. As Negroes move in the whites flee out.
As residents of Virginia and Maryland, these automatically gain
the votes they surrendered or never had. Though still employed in
Washington, they lose all interest in its municipal affairs. They live,
vote, pay taxes, send their children to school and join churches beyond
the borders.
And, as the Negro immigrates and propagates, Washington’s chance of
ever getting the vote dwindles. Even Northern congressmen, with huge
Negro voting constituencies at home, won’t burn their hands with
such legislation. They declare for the principles of home rule, sign
petitions to withdraw bottled-up home-rule bills from committees, then
secretly withdraw their names.
As these pages unfold you will get a picture of how more than 1,500,000
people live. Few would stand for some of Washington’s nauseating
conditions in their own towns. Yet they take them here complacently.
Congressmen, the lords of the city, shrug at what would throw them out
of office if the good burghers in Beloit or Boonetown suspected--and
cared.
Washington has a heritage of “everybody’s business is nobody’s
business.” But the stimulation which sparks its evils is different,
though the result is the same.
Of old, Congress didn’t worry about local crime because all the people
could do about it was write letters to the papers. But now, since crime
is nationally syndicated, some legislators actively protect Washington
crime, because it means more funds back in their bailiwicks from the
branches of the swelling Syndicate of silk-lined racketeers who are
allied with Washington’s criminals.
So this is the nation’s capital: with its panderers and prostitutes;
gamblers and gunmen; conmen and Congressmen; lawmakers and
law-breakers; fairies and Fair Dealers.
It is a city of moods, even drearier when Congress is away campaigning
or vacationing; yet it turns electric when something big is about to
happen.
It is a city of the wistful little people with adding-machine minds.
Over all, a feeling of fear pervades it. People become conditioned to
talking in whispers. Senators will walk you to the middle of the room,
then mumble, even when what they have to say is inconsequential. The
main indoor sport is conspiracy.
We give you Washington: not the city of statesmen, but the stateless
city.
2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN
We shall begin this catalog of places with Georgetown, by far the
oldest in the city.
Not all who reside in Georgetown are rich, red or queer, nor do all
Washington millionaires, Commies and/or fags dwell in Georgetown.
But if you know anyone who fulfills at least two of the foregoing three
qualifications don’t take odds he doesn’t prance behind Early American
shutters in a reconditioned stable or slave-pen in this unique city
within a city.
Georgetown was a thriving Colonial village when the rest of the
District was swampland. It was included in the District of Columbia
from the time of the original grant, but Georgetown remained an
independent municipality until 1895.
If you like that kind of stuff, Georgetown, which lies in the extreme
NW section of the city, has a charm all its own.
Some people like the smell of dead fish in Provincetown. Others like
to climb up four flights of stairs to ratty garrets in Greenwich
Village. Georgetown is quaint that way, too. Now all this is to be
preserved for posterity forever, through an act of Congress setting up
a commission to keep it looking the way it is under penalty of the law
for modernizing anything in the community without the permission of
some bureaucrat.
Until twenty years ago, Georgetown was just another rundown backwash
in a great city. Most of its residents were Negroes. Most of its real
estate wasn’t even good enough for Southern Negroes, and don’t forget
that a Southern Negro is forced to live almost anywhere. New Dealers
and the bright young braintrusters from Harvard reversed what seems to
be a foreordained rule in every city in the country. In other words,
the whites drove the Negroes out--as many as they could--and took over
for themselves what was practically a blighted area.
This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly flooded with a
horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists, ballet-dancers and
economic planners, there was no place for them to live. They abhorred
the modern service apartments. These people were “intellectual.” The
women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New
Thought. The men, if you could call some of them that, wore their hair
longer than we do, read advanced literature, and talked about the joys
of collectivism, though all of them were so individual they couldn’t
bear to live in skyscrapers.
Most of these people had dough. The others got good government jobs,
became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and wrote for publications
sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide automobiles and other
luxuries for the needier pinks.
Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but in the
early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one of the
fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered” Georgetown and
conceived it as a genteel bohemian community where her sandal-shod
friends could find congenial company. She wouldn’t allow the WPA to
alter anything though sewage comes up from the river. Georgetown is
overrun with rats, which frequently chew up Negro infants.
Ancient wooden houses, much the worse for the wear of centuries, which
could have been bought lot-and-all for $2,500 in the ’20s, skyrocketed
as it became “smart” for society to move to Georgetown. Some properties
are now worth twenty times what they brought twenty years ago, though
terrible odors emanate from a nearby slaughter house.
Following the discovery of Georgetown, the truly gentle Negroes who had
lived there, some for a hundred years or more, were driven out. Few
owned their homes. Into rickety structures which had once housed as
many as ten Negro families--seventy-five people--moved one millionaire
left-wing carpetbagger and his wife. With improvements, naturally.
Equality is okay to talk about. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were
spent on some of these homes, modernizing, beautifying, disinfecting
and furnishing them. Now they have house-and-garden tours for visiting
Kiwanians.
Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown has
a considerable colored population, though it is the only part of
Washington where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty years
ago. Those who remain live in shanties so undesirable that no rich
white fairies can be found who want to turn them into something gay. In
fact, there’s a saying in Georgetown now that you’re not “smart” unless
darkies live next door to you.
The sight-seeing buses point out historic Prospect House, now used
by the government for visiting notables, but they don’t show you the
tumble-down Negro shacks behind it.
One of Georgetown’s most distinguished residents is Dean Acheson.
Emmitt Warring, king of Washington’s gamblers, about whom more will be
found in succeeding chapters, is in business nearby.
Warring is the kingfish of Georgetown. He controls its local police
precinct as well as its local crime. As will be shown, he has direct
affiliations with the national underworld syndicate.
Eleanor Roosevelt gave Georgetown that first big impetus after her son,
Jimmy, who didn’t “got it” in California, moved across the street from
the old Imperial Russian Embassy, in the 3200 block of Q Street. It
looked like good business to build up the area.
Soon the section filled up with all manner of strange people. Many of
these were buddies of the First Lady. We have seen a letter she wrote
to one Ben Grey, in which she pats such types on the head.
One of the queerest sights visible anywhere is the one from a window
on the second floor of Dean Acheson’s quaint home at 2805 P Street. It
faces the 28th Street side over a back yard. The Secretary’s personal
lavatory faces that way. His mind apparently weighted by cosmos-shaking
affairs of state, the secretary forgets to draw down the shade.
It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be seen.
This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows, first-hand
and not confidential.
In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh air
fiends, walk to town every morning.
Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special mission
for the State Department. She is developing a “new type propaganda
campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the movies.
Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest and
largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its
beautiful campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for
preserving the historic buildings of the community from the onward rush
of modernity which swept over the rest of Washington.
But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local
parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around
the law which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at
2 A.M. Despite a murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional
investigation of such enterprises and a flurry of activity by the
United States Attorney, there are still at least 500 of these
unlicensed places, some say more, in the District, a subject which will
be covered in detail hereinafter.
The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin Avenue
where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the hangout of
Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the world over bottles
while Georgetown students roistered around them.
Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every other
section. That is because there are no hotels and few transients.
But what it lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than made up for by
homosexuals of both indeterminate sexes. It seems that nonconformity
in politics is often the handmaiden of the same proclivities in sex.
Among the thousands known in the capital, a goodly proportion live in
the storied ancient dwellings of the area. The fun that goes on in some
is beyond words and was even worse when the staffs of the embassies of
some of the Iron Curtain countries still found it feasible to travel
about in society.
Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair of the
times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a result of
complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing participants in
the unspeakable parties were Administration untouchables or diplomats
sacred from interference.
Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be immune,
makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in--nobody ever
gets pinched there.
3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE
The first question asked by members of the new Seventh Congress, after
taking the oath in the draughty and unfinished Capitol in 1801, was
“where is a saloon with dames?” or the early 19th century equivalent
thereof.
The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which
overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of
boxes resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom town on a
rainy day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied. Ever since that
historic moment, anything that matters and much that doesn’t is in that
part of the city known by its postal address as “NW.”
“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It is the
capital of the capital. NW is the works.
When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the capital,
he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four parts. These
he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub “The Hill,” on
which he built the Capitol. He named each section after compounded
cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and SE. The others you can
throw into the garbage-can--NW is the city.
Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington
everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are
piled into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly,
the dirty and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem,
the colored.
Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The crossing
at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison--an insult to
both. Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and environs, plus
a half-million tourists, pass it daily.
Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a mile
away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any night,
Saturday included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and quiet.
Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than those of most
villages. Don’t get us wrong--things do happen after dark. But--those
who do them don’t want them seen.
When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of Washington at
night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the only living
things, he is told what seems the obvious--Washington is a town of
early-to-bedders who do not go in for night life. That is not true.
Washington has hundreds of sneak-ins that remain open all night. Your
hardy reporters almost collapsed before they could complete this
assignment--to visit every place openly or surreptitiously breaking the
law. Almost all are in NW, which should have made it easier.
After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the smalltown
mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or in
pseudo-private “clubs.”
Now let’s get on with NW.
Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-drivers.
Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same fee
regardless of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for each
extra zone the cab enters. The Congressmen, who make all the District’s
laws, talked the Public Utilities Commission into gerrymandering the
zone map in such a way it ended up allowing them and you and us to go
almost anywhere from the Capitol into NW for a minimum fee. No one
wants to go elsewhere, so it’s a fine deal for all but the cab-jockies.
All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from
popular-priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury
hostelries like the Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential
ones in the outskirts, such as the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the
assignation hotels are downtown, smack in the middle of everything,
very snug.
Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th Streets.
They call it the New Willard now, though the new section was built
during Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a century,
VIP’s from all over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe wrote the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its cocktail bar
is a hangout for lonesome government girls and other fancy-free women,
best time after 5 P.M.
The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of the many
holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first” hostess
since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta. The High
Hat Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking spot, much
patronized by the lonesome of either sex because of its informality.
When we asked a cab-driver where we could meet a “friend” he directed
us to the Ambassador. We sat there five minutes, not long enough to
attract a waiter’s eye. But the eyes of two blonde things, young and
not bad-looking, were quicker. One asked us to buy her a drink. We did.
Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the evening
with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They thought we
meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10--“if we had a place
to take them.”
We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all except once
we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1 A.M., and all
the volunteers had already booked themselves. We also saw other stags
talk to girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but with whom they left.
Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock Alley of
the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world statesmen sat
and sized up famed society beauties.
These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns and
cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much can
be done about it, because the muddled situation of District law and
law enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to bounce that
sort of undesirables--if they are so regarded. The cops would refuse to
eject them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-keepers are subject
to the same liability. We saw hookers, or busy beavers that looked
remarkably like them, speak to strangers in the cocktail lounges of the
Statler and Carlton, and we were approached by one in the former place.
The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and the
town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or recession
there are too many rooms. When your authors began their regular trips
to the city in search of material for this book, Washington had not
started to take on its Sino-Korean war dress. We and our money were
welcomed with open arms. We spent lavishly throughout the summer at the
Carlton, a haunt of New Deal and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis
and White House assistant David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.
As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of
businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other
finaglers. They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what
happened in Washington during the years of World War II, some leased
permanent suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to room clerks
and executives. Then reservations at the Carlton for mere confidential
reporters were bitched up. They were unceremoniously moved from room to
room, given second-class accommodations, notified they must get out; so
better spenders could get in--and our bills had been running to $100 a
day.
The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were many
Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had voted against
rent control in the District. But now they were Displaced Persons.
It was no secret that among the permanents who were in danger of being
forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque blondes whose rents
were being paid by high officials, diplomats and senators. The swank
Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels anywhere, has figured
prominently in police court and divorce court news more than once.
Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s managing
director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find other
lodgings, too. There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove were
divorced. Once, when unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony bill,
he convinced the court he no longer had an interest in the hotel,
merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and his former spouse renewed their
sentiments, but figured they’d be happier as friends than as man and
wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the Shoreham.
A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the guests
around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the choice of
Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private apartments are
housed some of the most prominent people in the nation and they haven’t
been moved to enable the management to snag profiteer revenue.
What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was
not always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show town.
There was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved, dignitaries
attended the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed eating spots.
The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The martyred
Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum. President Wilson
was an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit, attending the
same theatre every week on the same night. He used to slip out of the
White House to Keith’s, a block away, where the management held a seat
in the back row, where he tried to be unobserved. Washington had top
vaudeville before the demise of that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind
movie house. The only thing resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol,
where four or five modest acts are sandwiched in between runs of a
picture.
Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once
Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be had
their tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving
Broadway. Washington had minor population but supported many houses.
Its residents were avid show-goers. The National gave up the ghost and
turned into a movie house because of the race problem. Few Washington
theatres permit colored patronage, though Negro theatres allow whites.
The National was restricted against colored attendance in its lease.
A couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity Association,
steamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-brothers” group
resolved not to permit its members to appear in any theatre in
Washington while racial discrimination was enforced. Equity did not
issue the same edict against theatres in the rest of the South, all
of which are so restricted. The operators of the National were bound
by the terms of their lease and could not change their policy. Rather
than risk a long, costly fight, they converted the house into a cinema.
Meanwhile, for two years, the capital of the world’s most literate
nation was barren of all living drama.
Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque, on
9th Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a legit
house. The Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment, because
practically anything is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good. The cagey
operators, not hampered by contractual restrictions, switched. To
accent the fact that they were going all out on this new line of race
tolerance, they booked as their first attraction a show with a mixed
cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Muriel Rahn, who is a
Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the Deep South.
The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by shooting
galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults only,” was
attended by the top layer of Washington New Deal and left-wing weepers
and critics for the Negro press and the _Daily Worker_. The show was
panned by the other reviewers. It closed prematurely, after five
days. Producer Michael Meyerberg said, “We shouldn’t have opened in
Washington.”
After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted, sometimes
dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The whites passed
it up. Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there, subsidized by
highbrow subscribers.
Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s usually a
Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.
During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of New York
companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in some neighborhood
playhouses. Regardless of the success of some individual play,
Washington can be written off as a theatre town.
Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially when
they can get their names in the papers. One of these is Congressman
Klein, of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who represents one of
Gotham’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Klein is trying to get
the government to spend $5,000,000 for a national theatre. Naturally
it is to be named the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of
his constituents need shoes, but F.D.R. needs another monument. His
bill forbids barring any person from appearing in it or attending it
because of race, creed, color, religion or national origin. It would
be conducted by the Secretary of the Interior, who at this writing is
that well-known showman, Oscar L. Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is
a co-founder of the Spanish-American League to Combat Exploitation of
Mexican Workers in the United States, an arty cause, no doubt.