They patronize the second floor of a place in the 1700 block of H
Street. One night two Congressmen, a couple of army officers, and two
young servicemen were mixing beer and gin there, and kissing each
other. They also swish around the Sand Bar in Thomas Circle.
A favorite meeting-place for keeping appointments is the lobby of the
Franklin Park Hotel. The Riggs Turkish Bath, the only one in town,
under Keith’s Theatre, was closed up because these undesirables took it
over. Its license has since been restored.
Black Washington has its share of deviates, too.
There is free crossing of racial lines among fairies and lesbians. We
have seen aristocratic Southerners, on the bias, hunt down Negro men
for dalliance. We bumped into a gal in show business, who we know is
queer, sitting with two mannish-looking women at the Jewel Box. She
invited us to a party in Black Town, an inter-racial, inter-middle-sex
mélange, with long-haired, made-up Negro and white boys simpering while
females of both races mingled in unmistakable exaltation.
During the summer, groups of colored fairies make up “yachting” parties
and cruise the Potomac on the steamer Robert E. Lee. One Saturday
night, last summer, over 100 cops were dispatched to the docks when the
“Society of Female Impersonators” was to have a midnight sail. They
found 1,700 Negro men, all dressed as women, on the boat, and as many
more trying to get on. A riot was in the making, but the cops busted it
up and kept it quiet when they hauled away two wagon-loads. The ship
finally got off at 2 A.M.
Two weeks later, in another melee on the same boat, a colored man was
fatally shot by a police detective after he jumped into the water.
Another Negro, who pleaded guilty to having started the riot, was fined
$200 for having endangered the lives of 600 persons. Some months later,
Washingtonians were mystified by an ad in a daily paper which read as
follows: “S.S. Mt. Vernon--moonlight cruise--8:30 P.M.--beer--stag or
drag.”
No one knows how many lesbians there are, because the female--or is it
male--of the pervert species is seldom spoken about and is much less
obvious. Psychiatrists and sociologists who have made a study of the
problem in Washington think there are at least twice as many Sapphic
lovers as fairies. A large incidence of lesbianism is concomitant with
the shortage of men, where women work together, live together, play
together, so love together.
Some display themselves, strut around in fairy joints; all queers are
in rapport with all others. You will see them also in some of the late
bottle-clubs, on the make for the same girls the he-wolves are chasing.
The mannish women used to hang out at the Show Boat Bar, H and 13th,
until the management drove them out. Now in David’s Grill, formerly the
Horseshoe, in back of the Mayflower Hotel, they outnumber the pansies
who haunted the place. Many lesbians frequent Kavakos’ Grill, in the SE
section, though this is not any joint so specializing. The club, owned
by Bill Kavakos, a rich Greek who likes to gamble, is near the Navy
Yard. It caters to sailors and slummers.
A breakdown of occupations in one group of 543 perverts who were
arrested showed some interesting sidelights. Among them was only one
actor, but 92 students. There were 58 army personnel and 28 from the
navy. Even the rugged Marines appeared. Among the deviates were one
bartender, one barber and one baker. There were four attorneys, only
two doctors and only one embalmer. This is the record:
Accountant 7
Actor 1
Airport employee 3
Army:
Commissioned 9
Noncommissioned 49
Attorney 4
Baker 1
Barber 1
Bartender 1
Businessman 7
Butcher 1
Cab driver 2
Clerk 48
Diplomat 1
Doctor 2
Embalmer 1
Embassy personnel 1
Government employee 57
Guard 9
Historian 1
Horse breeder 1
Interior decorator 3
Jeweler 1
Laundryman 6
Librarian 3
Marines, U. S. 2
Minister 3
Musician 5
Navy:
Commissioned 1
Noncommissioned 27
Page boy 1
Pharmacist 4
Porter 6
Radio personnel 3
Realtor 2
Reporter 2
Restaurant personnel 27
Salesman 10
Sculptor 2
Servant 10
Service-station operator 2
Skilled laborer 17
Stenographer and secretary 4
Student 92
Teacher and Professor 12
Technician 3
Unemployed 50
Unskilled laborer 31
Writer 2
---
Total 543
With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be
concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more
disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can
be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional
citizens; they are far more intense about their love-life.
Foreign chancelleries long ago learned that homos were of value in
espionage work. The German Roehm, and later Goering, established
divisions of such in the Foreign Office. That was aped by Soviet
Russia, which has a flourishing desk now in Moscow. According to
Congressman Miller, who made a comprehensive study of the subject,
young students are indoctrinated and given a course in homosexuality,
then taught to infiltrate in perverted circles in other countries.
Congressman Miller said:
“These espionage agents have found it rather easy to send their
homosexuals here and contact their kind in sensitive departments of our
Government. Blackmail and many other schemes are used to gather secret
information.
“The homosexual is often a man of considerable intellect and ability.
It is found that the cycle of these individuals’ homosexual desires
follows the cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women.
There may be three or four days in each month that the homosexual’s
instincts break down and drive the individual into abnormal fields of
sexual practice. Under large doses of sedatives during this sensitive
cycle, he may escape such acts.
“The problems of sexual maladjustments are urgent and still far from a
solution. In the Army, several thousand were discharged. When caught in
the act, they were generally discharged without honor, which means loss
of citizenship. Many failed to survive rigors of warfare and intimate
association with men. The majority were unable to conceal their
tendencies and were eventually eliminated with disgrace.
“Never is the bond which unites two friends such that the acquisition
of a new friend by one is regarded angrily by the other; but quite
otherwise is the life among homosexuals. Here jealousy reigns supreme.
Male homosexuals will not share their fairy with anybody.
“The sexual attraction exercised by a male on another may be apparent
in many ways. The homosexual will become excited by the mere presence
of some man in a public place. They often approach that man, though he
is a stranger. A taxi-driver finds fares making indiscreet advances.
The homosexual has no sensation in the presence of the most beautiful
and seductive female. Her amorous advances may be repulsive.”
Until the recent purges in the State Department, there was a gag around
Washington you had to speak with a British accent, wear a homburg hat,
or have a queer quirk if you wanted to get by the guards at the door.
One high State Department official was a notorious homo who preferred
young Negro boys. He was detected in a Pullman car of the Southern
Railroad--on the funeral train to bury Speaker Bankhead, father of
Tallulah--making immoral advances to a porter. The story reached
newspaper offices, but before it could be printed the State Department
sent out an urgent appeal to editors to “kill,” because it might
imperil the war effort. When this official’s misdeeds were placed
before President Roosevelt, it was said he refused to replace him
because they both “wore the same school tie.” After resigning from the
government, this official almost died of exposure when a Negro farm
hand, jealous because of his attention to another, slugged him.
Aware of the seriousness of the problem, the State Department has a
highly hush-hush Homosexual Bureau, manned by trained investigators and
former counter-espionage agents, whose duties are to ferret out pansies
in Foggy Bottom.
But the department cannot free itself of boondoggling tendencies, for
at the same time it retains a personable and intelligent young lady to
prepare a treatise on homosexualism, the purpose being to see if it’s
possible to cure or contain the deviates who remain on the roles. Her
assignment requires her to visit faggot dives, observe the queers in
action and ask them how they got that way.
The following will be denied, but whenever possible the YMCA is vetoing
the use of its facilities, especially the swimming pool, to all State
Department employees, just to be on the safe side.
A man of almost cabinet rank in the Defense Department is also a
pervert, with bivalent tendencies, a two-way performer.
These are no isolated incidents. The government is honeycombed in high
places with people you wouldn’t let in your garbage-wagons.
David K. Eichler, a brilliant 37-year-old Harvard post-graduate who
was a top policy-maker in the State Department as Deputy Secretary
General of the Far Eastern Commission until a couple of months ago,
was arrested by Park Police on the Ellipse, charged with committing an
unspeakable act with a Negro man. He put up $25 “forfeit,” a Washington
variation of bail cash, about which more in another chapter. The next
day, at the hearing, the colored man pleaded guilty, but when Eichler
didn’t appear the judge told the prisoner he might change his plea,
inasmuch as his co-defendant wasn’t there.
The black fairy said, “Never mind, judge. I had a good time.”
Shortly after his arrest, Eichler went on a vacation trip to the South.
After learning about the pinch, security officials instituted a search
for him and summoned him back to Washington. Eichler admitted nothing,
but resigned his $9,000-a-year job. He wasn’t asked to stay.
On the other hand, the Grand Jury voted a no-bill when Eugene
Desvernine, 34, acting officer-in-charge of Caribbean affairs in the
State Department, was arrested for an alleged sex offense against a
13-year-old boy. Desvernine, suspended from the department after his
arrest in East Potomac Park, has been restored to duty.
The original charges against fairies in the State Department listed
only 91, but considerably more than a hundred have been discharged from
it since. More are asked to withdraw. And there are believed to be
hundreds not yet shown up.
Republicans who tried to get a special “pervert squad” formed were
voted down on straight party lines by Democrats, who found themselves
having to protect strange bed-fellows. When you read of a fag being
fired or quitting, don’t think Washington’s homosexual population
is reduced that much. It isn’t. Odds are the discharged degenerate
is shifted up on some other government payroll. At least eight were
transferred from the State Department to Agriculture. Hundreds of
others driven from one department minced into others.
At the end of 1950, State said they were all gone. But on the first
day of 1951, the Washington papers carried this brief item under the
heading: “Two Men Face Sex Charges.”
“Alan A. Wakefield, 26, State Department employe, was released under
$300 bond pending a hearing on a disorderly conduct charge. Vice Squad
detectives arrested him in the men’s room of a downtown hotel.” He was
since convicted of disorderly conduct.
Dr. Kinsey wasn’t appalled by the 6,000 fags in government jobs.
According to his calculations, 56,787 Federal workers are congenital
homosexuals. He includes 21 Congressmen and says 192 others are bad
behavior risks.
We still favor the two-party system.
16. THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS
The district headquarters of the Communist Party--the local setup, not
the Washington nest of the national outfit--is only a block away from
the doorway of the F.B.I., on 9th near F Street. So close is the line
of battle drawn.
This Union Square of the District of Columbia is, appropriately, on
Skid Row. It is the apparatus that recruits government employes. And
sometimes 9th Street is more active and important than 16th Street--the
White House. The District chairman is Roy H. Wood.
This book does not bandy the right or wrong of Communism. It accepts
and proclaims it all wrong. But it will stay within its limitations of
discussing Washington, the city. So it will conduct you mostly through
the muck where crawl the punks in the ranks.
The State Department boys call foreign Reds “Agrarian reformers.” We
call them cobras. The real story of the extent of their infiltration
into the government will never be told. Hundreds of files have been
impounded or destroyed, and their subjects cleared.
The following tale is no exception. It is, rather, the rule. One
night a mysterious informant called on Constantine Brown, brilliant
and patriotic foreign news analyst of the _Washington Star_, with a
photostatic copy of an order from a Deputy Chief of Staff, directing
the Army to destroy the records on several thousand subversives.
Brown hurried to the home of Senator Styles Bridges with the evidence.
By 9 A.M., Bridges had called the Military Affairs Committee together.
An hour later it met and phoned the offices of the Secretary of War
with an ultimatum not to destroy any orders. When the officer who had
issued the order met with the committee, Bridges looked coldly at him
and said, “I can forgive an officer who makes a mistake or loses a
battle, but an officer who betrays the security of his country ought to
be shot.”
Meanwhile, a similar order was given the Navy, but was not caught in
time to head off the destruction of the records. F.D.R. was President
at the time.
We are hopeful these things will come to an end, but do not expect
too much. That is because we know the C.I.A.--Central Intelligence
Agency--is loaded with Commies at the lower level, with some seeping
right up into the upper brackets.
A bright spot, however, is the advancement to the position of ranking
minority member of the House Un-American Activities Committee of Harold
Velde, young ex-F.B.I. agent, now representing Abraham Lincoln’s old
Illinois district in Congress. Velde, at 40, has been a G-man, a county
judge, and is in his second term in the House. His training under
J. Edgar Hoover sets him up as a canny spy-catcher; his hatred of
subversives, left or right, will make him a brake on Commie-coddling.
His predecessor on the committee was California’s new Senator Nixon,
who nailed Alger Hiss, and in Congress, Senator Dirksen, who beat Scott
Lucas. The Senate’s own Red probing committee is also good news.
Your authors delved into how the rank-and-file protectors and
comforters of Communists in Washington got that way. We know about the
over-educated Harvard prodigies, recommended to key spots by Felix
Frankfurter, but how does a $3,000-a-year file clerk in State, or
Defense, meet Reds in the first place? By what means is he wooed and
won to betray his country? Jim Walters of the _Times-Herald_ exposed a
lot. Here is more:
Red spies came here as soon as Lenin and Trotsky pulled their
successful November coup in 1917. But not until the late Roosevelt
handed diplomatic recognition to the enemies of civilization in 1933,
did a sizeable apparatus begin to build openly in Washington. In the
early years of the New Deal it became fashionable to be “liberal,” to
love all radicals, including revolutionaries.
The government was overloaded with Reds, pinks, fellow-travelers,
social planners, do-gooders, proletarians, boondogglers and Socialists.
The federal establishment is still up to its neck in conspirators and
collaborationists, despite a few publicized firings.
Let’s take the case of this humble clerk who is seduced by Reds.
Seduced is just that. We covered the modus operandi used by the Pervert
Sections of foreign chancelleries in the previous chapter. But not
all government employes are homos or susceptible. The normal must be
romanced with natural methods. Sex-starved government gals are enticed
by smooth, suave, good-looking men. Meek male clerks, in soporific jobs
at standardized sustenance-pay, are awakened with a sudden whiff of the
esoteric when fast-working, trained good-lookers make a play for them.
These happenings are not cribbed from E. Phillips Oppenheim novels.
They are planned that way and they come off.
Wealthy left-wingers with mansions in Georgetown cooperate avidly.
Humble government employes are invited to exotic, erotic parties. This
sudden entrance into a world of wealth, taste, refinement, liquor and
libido is irresistible to hoi polloi.
Smart Red undercover agents try to get a hold of some kind on their
victims, something insidious. Soviet agents press a systematic campaign
to bring women employes of the State Department under their control by
enticing them into acts of adultery and abnormality. Parties are staged
in rich surroundings with pornographic exhibitions, unlimited liquor
and every form of dope--and a hidden, talking moving picture camera
recording it all.
As many as 65 or 70 attend these aphrodisiac get-togethers, where many
wear rich Oriental costumes and Arabian Nights music completes the
intoxication of all the senses. Not only potential friends are thus
won and hooked, but dangerous foes are silenced. One gossip writer, a
feared crusader, has within the last couple of years become a virtual
transmission belt for the Communist line. He was called into a secret
projection room and shown a devastating film of his behavior at a
drunken, depraved orgy. We have seen “stills” from it.
This use of sex as a means of recruiting is a basic tactic. It has
been developed to such an extent by the Reds, they now seek to
convert children thereby. Herbert J. Benjamin, long a key figure in
the Communist Party in the United States, was arrested recently by
vice squad men for selling lewd pictures and literature to Washington
children, and convicted of violation of the D.C. code.
Benjamin, a former secretary of the International Workers Order, long
a contributor to party magazines and periodicals, was mentioned in a
memo by Earl Browder, November 27, 1939, as an alternate to the tenth
convention of a national Communist Party committee. Later he was the
organization’s national press director and was in charge of the St.
Louis office of a Communist political association. He and his wife
lived in the Trenton Terrace apartments, on Mississippi Ave., SE, where
other tenants were Rob Hall, Washington correspondent for the _Daily
Worker_, and Joseph Forer, a veteran attorney for Reds. Benjamin’s wife
was manager of the apartment house.
The pinks are still working strenuously to grab off and bring up new
followers from the incubator stage. As these lines were written,
three names listed by the District Board of Education as speakers for
its in-service-training program were found to be also in the House
Committee on Un-American Activities’ files as left-wingers--Dr. Paul B.
Cornely, Freedmen’s Hospital medical director; Dr. Alice V. Keliher,
of New York University; and Dr. Dora B. Smith, of the University of
Minnesota. Superintendent of Schools Corning said, “The names were
identical with names in the House Un-American Committee records.” Since
then Red and Socialist-slanted text books have been found to be in use
in Washington’s schools.
Until two years ago, there was considerable radical financial
interest in radio station WQQW. The stock has since been placed in a
voting-trust with a good American as trustee. For years this station
refused to sign off with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The Dupont Theatre specializes in interracial and foreign films, most
of them slanted left. Danny Weitzman, owner of the building, was active
in the Wallace presidential campaign.
The Reds and bleeding hearts play up their “love” for Negroes at every
opportunity. This often pays off big dividends because so many colored
people are employed in government offices. A few Negroes are dumb
enough to be misled by the Reds’ baloney about the brotherhood of man.
But to their eternal glory, the great mass of Negroes are among the
most patriotic citizens in the country. A few malcontents, who have
been taken in by the crocodile tears of the Eleanor Roosevelt brand of
reformer, occasionally indirectly render aid and comfort to the enemy.
To show how much they love the Negro, the white Communist brethren
hold their District powwows at Shilo Baptist Church, a Negro house of
worship in the NW section.
It is a Communist strategy to line Negroes into the party through white
gals who, to show their complete compliance and condition of servitude,
are urged to give themselves to colored men. Into this specialized
service they seem to wade with more than token application.
Mrs. Louise Branston Berman, millionaire radical who declines to
state if she’s a Communist on grounds of self-incrimination, spends
much of her time in Washington. She uses her great wealth to help
the enrollment of left-wing recruits through social contacts. Louts
who never dined above a cafeteria before are invited to sumptuous
banquets in her homes in various parts of the country. Visiting Negro
dignitaries who can’t get accommodations in hotels are her house
guests. Mrs. Branston will learn for the first time here that when she
put up the Negro singer, Paul Robeson, government agents had “bugs”
in every room of her house from the parlor to the boudoir--she ought
to hear the recordings. We did. They’re neither intellectual nor
musical--but they are illuminating.
A principal Communist apparatus and recruiting ground for new Reds on
the lower levels was the late but unlamented UNRRA.
The organization was rotten with traitors during the time Mayor
LaGuardia was its director. Either he didn’t know what was going on,
because he attended meetings only a few times, or he didn’t care.
When UNRRA was disbanded, its Red membership was moved almost en
masse to the payroll of the United Nations secretariat. Many are now
stationed in New York, where they are sabotaging U.N. work as far as
they can. Others are attached to U.N. field offices in Washington.
If anyone doubts it was the policy of UNRRA to aid Communism and
that this had the approval of the present administration, which is
bent on fighting Communism, let him read the following excerpts from
a memo which we filched from the UNRRA files. It is an inter-office
communication, written in 1947, and addressed to Col. Katzin, a South
African, then an important UNRRA man and now top aide to Trygve Lie.
It follows: (The italics are ours.)
“It should be made clear that _the administration, in pushing for
distribution to Communist areas_ and in requesting Edgerton to report
on such distribution, has in mind _actual shipments into Communist
areas_ and not merely movements out of Shanghai with the expressed
intention of making such shipments.”
Another paragraph reads, “In reference to Shanghai 6404, it is
interesting to note the U.K. position that _the program should be cut
proportionately if the (Chinese) Nationalist government does not meet
its obligations for Communist area distribution_.”
In other words, we strengthened the Chinese Reds so they could kill our
boys three years later.
Another batch of Communists and Communist-lovers came into the U.N.
through its International Child Fund. This department is loaded
with ex-State Department employes fired on suspicion of subversive
activities.
That is a common habit. If all the homos, spies and other undesirables
fired for cause were traced, hundreds would be found snugly ensconced
in other bureaus, ostensibly screened, actually given screens of
protection and falsification by the radicals in high places.
We are not indicting Eleanor Roosevelt or Supreme Court Justice
Frankfurter as Communists. Yet it is impossible to study the set-up of
the District of Columbia white collar Communist underground without
finding tie-lines from them to members of this group.