Institute was closed by the F.B.I. some years ago has there been
anything operating on a lavish scale. Now there are some so-called
masseurs who use that classification as a blind, but nothing on the
grand scale.
When F.B.I. men raided the Hopkins Institute, an innocuous-looking
massage parlor in the 2700 block on Connecticut Ave., they uncovered
one of the most sensational call-houses ever in Washington. Not only
was the clientele accommodated at the so-called Institute, but a phone
call could arrange a date on short notice almost anywhere in the
District. The establishment kept a detailed and up-to-date written
record on each patron, fees paid, dates of service, and eccentricities.
Girls there said this list contained entries that could flabbergast
some very prominent persons, in and out of Washington.
The proprietor of the Hopkins Institute was one George Francis
Whitehead, who lived in New York and seldom visited the place. Profits
were sent to him weekly by the “resident manager,” Diane Carter, who
was vice-president in charge of the operation. The Institute was
established originally by someone else and was bought by Whitehead
in 1941. He ran it for several months, then engaged Diane Carter to
manage it at a salary out of earnings. Her principal duties entailed
accepting calls, arranging to send girls to answer the calls, and to
have girls available on the premises.
Whitehead left Washington in 1941, after the girls began to complain
that his presence was hurting business because of his excessive
drinking, untidy habits and uncouth deportment. He did not live up to
the dignity and spirit of an Institute. The girls threatened to strike.
The record system was originated by the first operator and passed on to
Whitehead. In addition to other entries, initials of each girl filling
an assignment and the amount of the fee were noted. For the fees a code
was used, to conceal the fact that some paid more than others. The word
“FITZGERALD” was the key to the code. Each letter stood for a digit,
i.e., F was 1, I was 2, T was 3, etc. Thus the symbol “FD” beside the
name of a customer meant $10; “TD” meant $30, etc. This method was used
also to bamboozle Whitehead, if he checked on his share of the proceeds.
The U.S. Commissioner issued warrants for the arrests of Whitehead,
Diane Carter and 13 girls involved, on charges of violations of the
White Slave Traffic Act. Whitehead was arrested in New York and
extradited. Two indictments were returned against Whitehead, Diane and
nine others. Whitehead pleaded guilty to both and was sentenced to one
to four years on the Act and to eighteen months on conspiracy. But he
was adjudged insane and committed to a mental institution.
Diane Carter pleaded guilty to both indictments and was sentenced to
three to nine months on each, the sentences to run concurrently. Seven
other defendants were found guilty.
The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of the seven,
held the violations were of legislation of the District of Columbia and
not of the White Slave Traffic Act.
But the racket was broken. The place never reopened. The F.B.I. seized
the files and never revealed a name, but hundreds of men still tremble
when they remember the Hopkins Institute. Some still attempt pressure
to try to get their names blacked out. They have no success with the
F.B.I.
5. HOBOES WITH NO HORIZON
The pride of the bum, even when he has abandoned the virile vitality
to hold out his paw as a panhandler, is a terminal twinkle of
consciousness that he is only resting between Election Days, when he is
a man. These derelicts have swung cities and states. But in Washington
even that last link to a reason for being is lost.
No Hinky Dink, no Pendergast caters to him, gives him free beer
and rot-gut or a kip in the flop on the joint. No eager dirty duke
stretches forth to greet the floater and the repeater. He can do
nothing for anyone.
So he is just a shade lower, lousier and grizzlier than the ones at
whom you shudder as you pass them in your own town. Agglomerations of
beachcombers vary little, even with differences of climate. Every city
has its Skid Row. But Washington has three of them. Like everything
else here, they are departmentalized. No alphabetical designations have
yet been allocated to them, but don’t despair.
One is for the general riffraff; the second is for old-timers; the
third is exclusively for sailors.
But first let us tell you about 9th Street--NW, natch--and specifically
where it crosses Pennsylvania Ave.
Stand on one side of the avenue and you are in the shadow of the great
marble structure which houses the forces of law and order. This is the
Department of Justice Building, and the corner we’re standing on is the
entrance to the F.B.I.
Cross Pennsylvania Avenue and walk into 9th Street, and you are an
intruder in the most publicized Skid Row of the three--they call it the
Bowery here, to distinguish it from the others. As such thoroughfares
go, this is pretty classy-looking. It is wide. All Washington
streets are kept clean, so neither rubbish nor drunks litter the
pavements--anyway not by day. By nightfall, topers rendered hors de
combat on smoke and cheap wine pile up in the doorways.
This part of 9th Street is packed solid with “play lands,” featuring
pin-ball machines, peep show movies and souvenir stands which sell
composition statuettes of the White House and Washington Monument, and
embroidered pillows tastefully lettered with “Love to Mom from the
Nation’s Capital.”
But this human dump lacks romance and legend. No songs are written
about it. There are no grisly tall tales, such as are told about the
Barbary Coast, Basin Street and Chicago, much near the Loop and most of
the old Levee. This is merely a street of convenience, moved up from
around the corner when Pennsylvania Avenue itself was flophouse lane
and Al Jolson and Bill Robinson performed on the sidewalk for pennies.
There’s no law agin’ stripping or peeling in Washington, but it doesn’t
pay off well enough to build a permanent industry around it. The old
Gayety Theatre, which ran pretty high-class traveling burleycue, is
now, probably only temporarily, a legit house. Meanwhile, the burlesque
fans buy their titillation in the cheap movie houses adjoining the
Gayety. Sometimes they amplify their celluloid bills with “living
dolls,” at other times the customers have to get their kicks out of
sex movies advertised “For Adults Only.” An ad before us, of the
Leader Theatre, says, “Burlesque’s brightest stars on screen.” The
day’s program provided snake-charming Zorita in “I Married a Savage”;
body-peeling Ann Corio in “Call of the Jungle”; and Maggie Hart, the
stripper, in “Lure of the Isles,” plus “two more thrills.”
In and in front of cheap saloons, cocktail lounges and lunch rooms, are
tarts, reefer-peddlers and novelty salesmen whose chief stock in trade
is “sanitary rubber goods.” Pistols are on sale at $20. The local law
isn’t tough on gun-toters.
Though Washington’s legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 A.M., this
street, like all in the city, is deserted early. Long before midnight
its habitués have already made sleeping arrangements or are snoring in
the alleys, cheap overnight lodgings or hallways, paralyzed by alky or
cheap domestic red wine.
Crossing 9th Street here, is D Street, known as Pawnbroker’s Row. But
get this--hockshops are against the law.
When you see a shop with a sign reading “Pawnbroker’s Exchange,” don’t
believe it. The window looks like any “Uncle’s” anywhere in the world,
with a profusion of new and used articles ranging from mink coats
to tin watches. But that’s the build-up. These exchanges are only
second-hand stores which buy and sell uncalled for articles pledged in
other jurisdictions, where the three balls of the De Medicis are legal.
The temporarily embarrassed visitor, in need of cash quickly, often
gets rooked in one of these pseudo-hock shops. Take the case of the
stranger who runs short of petty cash until he can wire home. Suppose
he has a $200 watch which he wants to put up for security. Needing only
perhaps $25, that’s all he asks for, figuring when he redeems it in a
few days he will pay only that, plus accrued interest. Yet when he asks
the pawnbroker’s exchange man for $25, he is actually selling the $200
watch for that.
Some of the more legitimate shops get around the law by guaranteeing
to sell the article back to the owner at a specified rate after a
specified number of days. What usually happens to the unsophisticated
is that they have lost their security for a fraction of its value,
because it has already been sold.
Little effort is made to police the Bowery stretches of 9th St. The
armed forces maintain a few MPs, but practically anything goes, short
of mayhem, and even that is not uncommon.
The tomatoes who solicit the young and lonesome men in uniform in
this neighborhood are pretty low. The five bucks they ask, plus three
dollars for a room in a handy flea-bag, should be reported to the
Better Business Bureau, considering the quality of the merchandise and
the strong possibilities of picking up souvenirs of the sort they don’t
display on counters.
Interspersed between the shooting galleries, theatres and hamburger
hideaways are the usual bargain men’s clothing stores, army and navy
outfitters, etc. One of the clothing stores, visible from the windows
of the Department of Justice, was built by money inherited from a
gangster who isn’t around to enjoy it, due to a sit-down strike in an
electric chair.
This street is a little too fast, flighty and noisy for the old-time
bums and stiffs. It is for younger men. The perennials, who know every
flop-house and smoke-joint in the country, and travel from town to
town with the seasons and the harvests, prefer the Skid Row at 3rd and
G Streets, NW and vicinity, around the corner from Chinatown. Come to
think of it, Skid Rows all over the continent are around the corner
from Chinatown.
We call this Mission Row, because it’s where the mission stiffs hang
out. These are the hoboes, bums and tramps who get their morning’s
coffee and their night’s sleep on the benches of a gospel shop nearby
on H Street, in return for listening to a “Come to the Lord” sermon.
Mission Row is the best-looking Skid Row in the country. The streets
are broad, with grass and trees, and most of the set-back buildings are
reconverted residences with stoops and a surviving air of charm. We
have been assured it is refreshing to wake up in the gutter here with a
smoke hangover.
You find no brassy newcomers in these quarters. Young tramps abhor
missions. They prefer 9th Street, with its zip and excitement. The
mission stiff, almost an extinct species, is on in years and no
longer troubled by dames. His animal needs are taken care of by a
bowl of soup and as much red-eye as he can drink. If only one of the
two is available, the former can be dispensed with. Some of these
mission-moochers are junkies. But dope, like everything else, is
suffering from inflation, and the wherewithal is forbidding.
The Greek colony, large for the size of the town, runs into this
Bowery. Many Hellenes are gamblers. Hecht’s Hotel, at 6th and G, where
girls take their men, was owned by a Greek arrested last month in New
York on narcotics charges. The Hellenic Social Club, next door, is a
gambling house.
There’s one Skid Row no visitors and few Washingtonians ever see.
That’s Sailors’ Row. Unlike the other two, which are in NW, this is
in SE--8th Street, down near the Navy Yard. After Chicago we thought
nothing could make us blink. But some of the dives on 8th Street made
it. At the northern approach of this stretch of howling hell are a
couple of Filipino joints where bus-boys, house-boys and valets pick up
white whores. Eighth Street runs into Sailors’ Row proper, a line of
groggeries and lunch-rooms that hit bottom.
The undermanned Washington cops can do little to keep it orderly.
The Navy’s shore patrol takes over most of the policing. We saw Navy
paddy-wagons in front of Guy’s, the Ship’s Cafe and the Penguin. But
the SP’s seldom make a pinch unless there are fights. We visited four
or five of the bars--not alone, because hereabouts, even in the shadow
of the Capitol’s dome, outsiders who travel in parties of less than
four are crazy.
We saw hustlers working in the Band Box, the Ship’s Cafe, Guy’s and
the Penguin. These were the frowsiest broads we have ever seen,
dilapidated, toothless, drunk, swinging the shabby badge of their
shoddy trade, long-looped handbags.
The worst and the cheapest were in the Ship’s Cafe, where two
girls--call them that in charity--offered themselves to us at $3. The
going price in the other places was $5. They circulated along the
bar and from booth to booth and from table to table. They do not work
in these saloons as B girls or house prostitutes. They use them as
points of contact with their trade, apparently with connivance of the
management for the business they bring in. In these Sailors’ Row joints
we saw many amateurs, typical sailor-crazy bobby-soxers, servant girls
and Victory girls. These may ask for money but can be talked out of it.
There are many cheap hotels and rooming-houses close by. But the dark
streets or alleys are free and busy.
6. GREEN PASTURES
Agonized oratory through the decades has been banging against the walls
of the Capitol, demanding that Washingtonians be given the precious
privilege of the vote. It is as futile as spitting against the wind.
And we will tell you why there will be no vote--Confidential.
If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman
affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr.
Jones is a Negro.
We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish--there are more
Negroes than whites in Washington. We will prove it by incontrovertible
figures.
There is an amazing underground proclivity in all big cities, south,
north and everywhere, to fake the facts on Negro population. For some
distorted reason, both races conspire in this foolish flummery.
Census figures are off the beam. They always lag in summing up
minority races. Most of the migrant census-takers assume that they
should help to make the picture as light as possible. If a Negro is
not unmistakably black, he is encouraged, if he does not think of it
himself, to be listed as a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a West Indian, a
South American, Filipino, Indian, Mexican or even Eskimo; the blood of
all these is sprinkled through many generations of admixture.
There is no way of calculating how many light-skinned citizens can and
do “pass.” Some Negroes sleep in shifts in crowded premises, so that a
count in the regular course would register about one-third of the true
total. Many are house servants and these do not go into the tally where
they are employed, nor are they home during the hours when enumerators
call.
More Negroes than whites are police characters, as will be
demonstrated. And as a rule members of the race are wary and suspicious
of questioners from “the law.” Many census-takers deliberately duck
more than superficial duties in predominantly dark districts, because
they are confused and afraid after getting hostile receptions and
responses.
But in Washington there is one indisputable check.
The District of Columbia has a single Jim Crow law, segregating Negroes
and whites--in schools. When pupils are enrolled they must reveal their
true race. There can be no tampering with these statistics.
And in the winter of 1950–51 there were registered the following in all
public schools through all grades from elementary to teachers’ college:
Negroes, 47,807; whites, 46,080.
Broken down, these figures are even more definitive. There are more
Negroes than is evidenced by the bare totals. Negroes, because of their
economic outlook, do not keep their children in school as long as do
whites. That is sharply proven by the enrollment in the senior high
schools:
Negroes, 4,787; whites, 7,176.
But there are 10,146 colored children in junior high schools compared
to 9,270 whites.
The attendance at parochial and private schools is minor. Washington
has the largest per capita Negro Catholic population in the United
States.
Even an excess of 10 per cent of whites in the grand total and allowing
for unmarried government workers would still indicate a Negro majority
over all, because of the earlier departure from school of Negro
children, as shown above.
This reveals a startling metamorphosis in a ten-year period. In 1940
the school record showed 66,000 whites and 36,000 Negroes. Thus there
has since been a decline of 20,000 white children and a rise of 12,000
Negro children. The over-all decline is due to removal of white
families to suburbs.
Negroes lived in Washington before the first President chose the
rolling land along the Potomac to bear his name. Slavery was legal in
the capital until the emancipation. The population of Washington about
doubled between 1860 and 1870. Much of this influx represented slaves
who escaped from plantations and got through the Union lines during the
Civil War. But the big swell came when thousands of ex-slaves, free
and foot-loose for the first time in their lives, left the destroyed
and deserted Dixie farms and headed for Washington, which was not only
near Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas, but which exercised a
fascination for them because they felt safer near their savior and
their demigod, Abraham Lincoln.
Until the middle 70’s, Washingtonians of all colors had home rule,
elected their own officials under a territorial form of government
similar to that now practiced in Alaska and Hawaii, where mayors,
legislators, judges and other lower-level officials are elected. They
sent a delegate to Congress.
Long before LaGuardia, Marcantonio, Ed Flynn and Ed Kelly found the
formula of organizing Negroes into blocs which could be voted en masse
to perpetuate control of left-wing and criminal political groups, that
was old stuff in D.C., where it was invented by one “Boss” Shepherd
in Washington, the first large city in the country where Negroes were
allowed to vote, and where there were enough of them to throw any
weight as citizens.
Washington had been a sewer of iniquity during the Civil War; when
Shepherd took over control it turned infinitely worse. The stench
asphyxiated the members of Congress, who were exposed to it so
intimately, and they exercised a forgotten constitutional prerogative,
“to exclusively govern the District.” The polling booths made swell
bonfires.
As will be seen, however, under the unique voteless system, the Negroes
now exercise far more power, and Puddin’ Head Jones is by common
consent the “mayor” of Washington’s Black Belt. As we progress you will
be let in on how that could come about.
Despite the high enrollment of Negro children in public schools where
they enjoy facilities for education equal to white children, Negroes
continue to have an illiteracy far above the full population. In 1942,
illiteracy in the District was only 1 percent for all races, whereas
the Negro group showed 4 percent. Weighing these figures against the
proportions of population in 1942 would seem to indicate that the
Negroes were about 15 times as illiterate as whites.
Much later figures are available, however. Only 4 percent of
Washington’s white youths who took the Army’s mental tests in 1950
failed, but nearly 29 percent of the prospective colored recruits were
turned back.
New York’s Harlem is self-contained. Though Chicago’s Bronzeville has
gone over its borders and set up tributary colonies in other sections
of the city, it is still the center of Negro life there and contains
most of its colored population.
But Washington’s Black Belt is no belt at all. It is sprawled all over,
infiltrating every mile and almost every block in sections which for
150 years were lily white.
In New York, when you refer to Harlem, everyone knows what part of town
you’re talking about. Similarly, Bronzeville and Central Avenue have
definite meanings in Chicago and Los Angeles. In Washington, you have
no way of indicating Darktown, because the Negro section has no generic
name and it isn’t a section. It is all of Washington.
What is occurring in Washington is happening on a lesser scale in large
northern population centers, except probably Manhattan, where Harlem
is geographically restrained by Columbia University and Central Park,
though Puerto Ricans are generously overflowing its borders on both
sides.
In Chicago, instead of being bound in black ghettos, Negroes have
preempted many sections, including former residences of millionaires.
They live along wide and vernal boulevards in once splendid apartments
and luxurious private homes with greeneries, and in palaces of packers
and pioneer pirates.
This process is being repeated in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit
and especially Philadelphia.
The South, with its restrictive practices against Negroes and its
underpayment of them, is gradually being denuded of its cheap labor,
which is drawn North.
The recent census showed the population of most metropolitan cities
remained stable. But their suburbs, beyond city limits, increased in
many from 50 to 100 percent or more. This growth of Suburbia was made
by whites who left as Negroes came. That kept city populations in
status quo.
The words used to paint the picture in Chicago may be repeated in
Washington, but with emphasis and re-emphasis. Here they took mile
after mile of fine old dwellings on wide, tree-lined streets. And they
also overran the slums. But Washington, despite the anguished yelps of
the do-gooders, long was and now is practically slum-free.
Some rookery regions are on F St. and New Jersey Ave. near the Union
Station and Capitol. But there are poor whites living in hovels equally
depressed. On the other hand, 95 per cent of the Negroes live in
lodgings as good as and better than most white residents’. Negroes have
taken over most of the desirable blocks near the government offices and
downtown.
We have before us an article on “The Negro in Washington,” in a recent
issue of _Holiday_ magazine, a slick-paper, 50-cent pleader for
leftist causes, published, curiously enough, by the staid, rich and
conservative house of Curtis, owners of the _Saturday Evening Post_.
This effusion is illustrated with four pages purporting to show the
Negro’s treatment in Democracy’s capital, which the editors call a
“democratic contradiction.” There are photographs of Negro children
at play in cluttered backyards which are called typical of the city’s
overcrowded Negro slums. Another picture shows a Negro woman in an
alley dwelling; another is captioned, “Capitol Dome presents a contrast
of obvious irony to the Negro slums which it overshadows. Overcrowding,
dirt and disease are all prevalent.”
Your authors traveled up and down 1,000 miles of streets and
boulevards, 404 of alleys, not once but a dozen times. They saw the
slums illustrated in _Holiday_ magazine, but they saw few others,
because there are few others. At the most, 20,000, of a total of
400,000 Negroes, live in these “slums,” which, even at their worst, are
turreted castles compared to the degraded dwellings in which Negroes
and myriad whites are forced to live in New York.
_Holiday_ did not print one picture showing the thousands of fine homes
and small apartment buildings in which most of Washington’s Negroes
live.
Cup your ear and we’ll let you into a little secret about these
“slums.” Whether you read _Holiday_ or not, you’ve seen the pictures,
because they are the ones which are always used by Reds and Pinks
to point up to the world how gruesomely America treats its dark
step-children. The reason you’ve seen these pictures--always with the
Capitol dome in the background--is that there are no others available.