those who have come to Washington from afar. A little squad of aged men,
who have a wolfish scent for tourists, act as its own particular
Reception Committee. These old men, between their cards and the sporting
extras of the evening papers, condescend to act as guides to the huge
building. We shall spare you the details of a trip through it with them.
It is enough to say that they are, in the spirit at least, sight-seeing
car lecturers grown into another generation. Their quarrels with the
Capitol police are endless. On one memorable occasion, a captain of that
really efficient police-force had decided to mark the famous whispering
stone in the old Hall of Representatives with a bit of paint. You can
read about that whispering stone in any of the tourist-guides which the
train-boy sells you on your way to Washington. Suffice it now to say
that when you have found this phonetic marvel and have stood upon it
your whisper will be heard distinctly in a certain far corner of the
gallery of the room. It is an acoustic freak of which the schoolboys out
in Racine can tell you better than I. And it is one of the prized assets
of the Capitol guides. The police captain forgot that when he set out to
mark it.
It came back to him the evening of that day, however, when the building
had been cleared. He chanced to cross the old hall and, looking for his
marker, found three of the guides upon their knees carefully restoring
it to absolute uniformity with its neighbors. And the captain nearly
lost his job. He had sought to interfere with prerogative, and
prerogative is a particularly sacred thing at the Federal capital--as we
shall see in a little while.
* * * * *
Late in a pleasant afternoon all Washington seems to walk in F street.
The little girls come out of the matinees, the bigger girls drift out
from the tea-rooms, there is a swirl of motor vehicles--gasoline and
electric--but the tourist knows not of all this. The gay flammeries of
Pennsylvania avenue hold him fascinated. Souvenir shops rivet him to
their counters. Post-cards--grave, humorous, abominable--urge themselves
upon him. But if all these fail--they have post-cards nowadays of the
high schools in each of the little Arizona towns--here upon a counter
are the little statuettes of pre-digested currency.
Mr. Lincoln in $10,000 of greenbacks. And yet that money today could not
buy one drop of gasoline, let alone an imported touring automobile, for
once it has passed through the government's macerating machine it is
only fit for the sculptor. Three thousand dollars go into a Benjamin
Harrison hat, fifteen thousand into a model of the Washington Monument
that looks as if it were about to melt beneath a summer sun. Twenty
thousand doll--stay, there is a limit to credulity. And you refuse to
buy without a signed certificate from the Treasury Department as to
these valuations.
Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to be blindly
credulous--these folk who feel their way to Washington. It was not so
very many spring-times ago that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath
to the effect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. That rumor
slipped around the town with amazing rapidity--Washington is hardly more
than a gossipy, rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand
folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No two of them
could agree as to the direction in which the shaft would tumble and they
all made a long and cautious line that completely encircled it--at a
safe distance. After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yet no
one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of the day's program.
* * * * *
There is another side of Washington not so funny and tourists, even of
the most sedate sort, who stop at the large hotels and who ride about in
dignified motor-cars, do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings.
For in no other city of the land is the social code more sharply
defined--and regulated. There are many cities in the country and we are
telling of them in this book, who draw deep breaths upon exclusiveness.
But in none of these save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt
themselves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old houses of
Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery down at Charleston may draw
themselves apart, but they do it silently and unostentatiously. In the
very nature of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the
question.
[Illustration: The stately dome of our lovely Capitol]
For here at our Federal capital we have a strange mixture of real
democracy and false aristocracy as well as real--if there be any such
thing as real aristocracy. The fact that almost every person in the town
works, more or less directly, for Uncle Sam makes for the democracy. And
that self-same fact seems to fairly establish the aristocracy--you can
frankly call much of it snobbishness--of the place. To understand the
whys and wherefores of this paradox one would need, himself, to be an
employé of the government, of large or small degree. They are many and
they are complicated. But an illustration or two will suffice to show
what we mean:
A rule, which no one nowadays seems very desirous of fathering, but
nevertheless a rule of long standing, states that when a department
chief enters an elevator in any of the department buildings it must
carry him without other stops to his floor. The other passengers in the
car must wait the time and the will of the chief, no matter how
urgent may be their errands or how short the time at their command. A
gradual increase of this silly rule has made it include many assistants,
sub-chiefs and assistants to sub-chiefs. Only the elevator man knows the
rank at which a government employé becomes entitled to this peculiar
privilege. But he does know, and woe be to that little stenographer who
enters the Department of X---- at just three minutes of nine in the
morning, with the expectation of being at her desk with that promptness
which the Federal government demands of the folk in its service. The
second assistant to a second assistant of a sub-chief of a sub-division
may have entered. The little stenographer's desk is upon the third
floor; the gentleman whose official title spelled out reaches almost
across a sheet of note paper is upon the seventh. There are folk within
the crowded elevator-car for the fourth and fifth and sixth floors as
well. But they have neither title nor rank and the car shoots to the
seventh floor for the benefit of the Mr. Assistant Somebody. If there is
another Assistant Somebody there to ride down to the ground floor--and
there frequently is--you can imagine the consternation of the clerks.
And yet it is part of the system under which they have to work when they
work for that most democratic of employers--Uncle Samuel.
The secretary of an important department who entered the cabinet with
the present administration stayed very late at his office one evening,
but found the elevator man awaiting him when he stepped out into the
hallway of the deserted building. It was only a short flight of stairs
to the street, and the secretary--it was Mr. Bryan--asked the man why he
had not gone home.
"My orders are to stay here, sir, until the secretary has gone home for
the night," was the reply.
It is hardly necessary to say that right there was one order in the
State department that was immediately revoked, while some twenty
thousand clerks and stenographers who form the working staff of official
Washington sent up little prayers of thanksgiving. These clerks and
stenographers make up the every-day fiber of the town life. They go to
work in the morning at nine--for a half-hour before that time you can
see human streams of them pouring toward the larger departments--and
they quit at half past four. The closing hour used to be five, but the
clerks decided that they would have a shorter lunch-time and so they
moved their afternoon session thirty minutes ahead. Half an hour is a
short lunch-time and so official Washington carries its lunch to its
desk, more or less cleverly disguised. The owners of popular priced
downtown restaurants have long since given up in utter disgust.
But official Washington does not care. Official Washington ends its day
at half-past four and official Washington is such a power that matinées,
afternoon lectures and concerts of any popular sort are rarely planned
to begin before that hour. And on the hot summer afternoons of the
Federal capital the wisdom of such early closing is hardly to be
doubted. On such afternoons, matinée or concert, a cup of tea or a walk
along the shop windows of F street are all forgotten. For beyond the
heat of the city, within easy reach by its really wonderful
transportation system, are playgrounds of infinite variety and joy. True
it is that the really fine parts of Rock Creek Park are rather rigidly
held for those folk who can afford to ride in motor cars, but there is
the river, innumerable picnic-grounds in every direction, fine bathing
at Chesapeake beach, not far distant--and the canal.
Of all these the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal is by far the most
distinctive. And how the Washington folk do love that old waterway! What
fun they do have out of it with their motor boats and their canoes. If
that old water-highway, almost losing its path in the stretches of
thick wood and undergrowth, had been created as a plaything for the
capital city, it could hardly have been better devised. The motor boats
and the canoes set forth from Georgetown--on holidays and Sundays in
great droves. They go all the way up to Great Falls--and even
beyond--working their passage through the old locks, exchanging repartee
with the lock-tenders, loafing under the shadows of the trees, drinking
in the indolence of the summer days.
* * * * *
But Shafer's Lock or Cabin John's Bridge is not the Chevy Chase Club and
official Washington knows that. It reads in the daily papers of that
other life, of the folk who wear white flannels and dawdle around great
porches all day long; hears rumors brought, Lord knows how, from the
gossipy Metropolitan Club; almost touches shoulders with its smart
breakfasts and lunches and dinners when it comes in and out of the
confectioners' and the big hotels. But it is none the less apart,
hopelessly and irrevocably apart. Uncle Sam may take the office folk of
his capital and give them the assurance of a livelihood through long
years, but that is all. He gives them no chance to step out of the
comfortable rut into which they have been placed. The good positions,
the positions that mean rank and title and entrance to the hallowed
places, rarely come through promotions. They are the gifts of fortune,
gifts even to strange folk from Cleveland or Madison or Stockton. They
are not the reward of faithful service at an unknown desk.
And so official Washington, as we have seen here, is quite helpless. The
other official Washington--the official Washington of the society
columns--little cares. It is not above noticing the twenty thousand, but
it is mere notice and nothing more. And as for interest or graciousness
or kind-heartedness--they are quite out of the question. Washington is
being rebuilt, in both its physical and its social structure. The
architects of its social structure are not less capable than those folk
who are working out marvels in steel and marble. These first see the
Washington of tomorrow, modeled closely after the structures of European
capitals. Already our newly created class of American idle rich is
establishing its _habitat_ along the lovely streets of our handsomest
town. That is a beginning. In some of the departments they have begun to
serve tea at four of an afternoon--just as they do on the terrace of the
House of Commons. That is another beginning. We are starting.
The structure of European capitals is largely built upon class
distinctions. Washington is being builded close to its models.
For ourselves, we prefer the touch of Europe as the architects work them
in steel and in marble. A man who has been to Washington and who has not
returned within the decade will be astonished to see the change already
worked in its appearance. From the moment he steps across the threshold
of the fine new station--itself a revelation after the old-time railroad
terminals of the town--he will see transformation. Washington is still
in growth. They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon
their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the
modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be
modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital
for the entire world to follow.
7
THE CITY OF THE SEVEN HILLS
You can compare Richmond with Rome if you will, with an allusion upon
the side to her seven hills; but, if you have even a remote desire for
originality, you will not. Rather compare the old southern capital with
a bit of rare lace or a stout bit of mahogany. Of the two we would
prefer the mahogany, for Richmond is substantial, rather than
diaphanous. And like some of the fine old tables in the dining-rooms of
her great houses she has taken some hard knocks and in the long run come
out of them rather well. She is scarred, but still beautiful. And she
wears her scars, visible and invisible, both bravely and well.
But if a man come down from the North with any idea of the histories of
that war, which is now fifty years old and almost ready to be forgotten,
too sharply in his memory, and so imagines that he is to see a Richmond
of 1865, with grass growing in the streets, ruins everywhere, mules and
negroes in the streets, he is doomed to an awakening. There are still
plenty of mules and negroes in the streets and probably will be until
the end of time, but the Richmond of today boasts miles and miles of as
fine modern smooth pavements as his motor car might ever wish to find.
And as for ruins, bless you, Richmond has begun to tear down some of the
buildings which she built after the war so as to get building-sites for
her newest skyscrapers.
Do not forget that there is a new spirit abroad in the South--and
Virginia, in many ways the most poetic and dramatic of all our states,
has not lagged in it. There are Boards of Trade at Roanoke and Lynchburg
that are not averse to sounding the praises of those lively
manufacturing towns of the up-country, and as for Norfolk--let any
Norfolk man get hold of you and in two hours he will have almost
convinced you that his town is going to be the greatest seaport along
the North Atlantic--and that within two decades, sir. But this chapter
is not written of Roanoke or Lynchburg or Norfolk. This is Richmond's
chapter and in it to be writ the fact that the capital of Virginia has
not lagged in enterprise or progress behind any of the other cities of
the state. In the transformation she has sacrificed few of her
landmarks, none of that delightful personality that makes itself
apparent to those who tarry for a little time within her gates. That
makes it all the better.
It is the spirit of the new South that is not only bringing such
wonderful towns as Birmingham, to make a single instance, to the front,
but is working the transformation of such staunch old settlements as
Memphis or Atlanta--or Richmond. Not that Richmond is willing to forget
the past. There is something about the Virginia spirit that seems
incapable of death. There is something about the Virginian's loyalty to
his native state, his blindness to her imperfections, almost every one
of them the result of decades of civic poverty, that cannot escape the
most calloused commercial soul that ever walked out of North or South.
And there is something about this bringing up of spirit and of loyalty
with the spirit of the new America that makes a combination well-nigh
irresistible.
Here, then, is the new South. The generation that liked to discuss the
detail of Pickett's charge and the horrors of those days in the
Wilderness is gone. The new generations are rather bored with such
detail. The new generations are not less spirited, not less loyal than
the old. But they are new. That, of itself, almost explains the
difference. Now see it in a little closer light.
Volumes have been written of the loyalty of the old South. Richmond
herself today presents more volumes, although unwritten, of that
loyalty. You can read it in her streets, in her fine old square houses,
in that stately building atop of Schokoe hill, which generations have
known as the Capitol and which was for a little time the seat of
government of a new nation. Within that Capitol stands a statue. It is
the marble effigy of a great Virginian, who was, himself, the first head
of a new government. The guide-books call it the Houdini statue of
Washington, and keen critics have long since asserted that it is not
only the finest statue in the United States but one of the most notable
art works of the world. It was known as such in France at the time of
the Civil War. And hardly had that very dark page in our history been
turned before the Louvre made overtures to Virginia for the purchase of
the Houdini statue. The matter of price was not definitely fixed.
France, in the spendthrift glories of the Second Empire, was willing to
pay high for a new toy for her great gallery.
Poor Virginia! She was hard pressed those days for the necessities of
life, to say nothing of its ordinary comforts. Her pockets were empty.
She was bankrupt. Her mouth must have watered a bit at thought of those
hundreds of thousands of French francs. But she stood firm, and if you
know Virginia at all, you will say "of course she stood firm." A
Southern gentleman would almost repudiate his financial obligations
before he would sell one of the choice possessions of his families.
There are great plantation houses still standing in the Old Dominion,
which were spared the torch of war by the mercy of God, and whose walls
hold aloft the handiwork of the finest painters of England, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; rare portraits of the masters and
mistresses of those old houses. In them, too, are furniture and silver
whose real value is hardly to be computed, not even by the screw of a
dealer in antiques. The folk in these old houses may be poor--if they
come of the oldest Virginia stock they very likely are. They stand
bravely, though, to the traditions of their hospitality, even though
they wonder if the bacon is going to last and if it is safe for the
brood to kill another chicken. But they would close their kitchen and
live on berries and on herbs before they would part with even the
humblest piece of silver or of furniture; while if a dealer should come
down from Washington or New York and make an offer, no matter how
generous, for one of the paintings, he would probably be put off the
place.
Family means much to these Virginians. If you do not believe this go to
Richmond, stop in one of its fine houses and make your host take you to
one of the dances for which the city is famed. Almost any dance will do
and from the beginning you will be charmed. The minor appointments will
approach perfection, and you will find the men and women of the city
worthy of its best traditions. Some places may disappoint in their
well-advertised charm but the girls of Richmond never disappoint. Here
is one of them. She gets you in a quiet corner of the place, meets a
friend over there, and a conversation somewhat after this fashion gets
under way:
"Miss Rhett, allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. Blinkins, of New
York."
You bow low and ask Miss Rhett if by any chance she is related to the
Rhetts of Charleston.
"Only distantly. My people are all Virginians. The Charleston Rhetts are
quite another branch. My grandfather's brother married a Miss Morris,
from Savannah and the Charleston Rhetts all come from them. If my papa
were only here he would explain."
You say that you understand and murmur something about having met a
Richard Henry Rhett at the old Colonial town of Williamsburgh a few
years ago when you were down for the Jamestown exposition.
"He was a Petersburgh Rhett," the young lady explains, "son of a cousin
of my father. He married Miss Virginia Tredegar last year."
You remember hearing of a Miss Virginia Tredegar of Roanoke, and you
slip out that fact. But this is Miss Virginia Tredegar of Weldon and a
cousin of Miss Virginia Tredegar of Roanoke. Miss Virginia Tredegar of
Weldon--now Mrs. Richard Henry Rhett, of course, is a delightful girl.
The young lady who has you in the corner assures you that--and she,
herself, is not lacking in charms. Mrs. Rhett was a sponsor for the
state for several years, and you vaguely wonder just what that may mean
as you have visions of large floats lumbering along in street parades,
with really lovely girls in white standing upon them. And you also have
visions of the Miss Virginia Tredegar, of Weldon, sitting in the other
days upon the door-steps of an old red and white Colonial house, which
faces a hot little open square, visions of her accomplishments and her
beauty; of her ability to ride the roughest horse in the county, to
dance seven hours without seeming fatigue, of the jealous beaux who come
flocking to her feet. You find yourself idly speaking of these visions
to your companion. She laughs.
"I've just the right girl for you," she says, "and she is here in this
ball-room. She is all these things--and some more; the rightest,
smartest girl in all our state--Miss Virginia Bauregard, daughter of Mr.
Calhoun Bauregard, of Belle Manor in King and Queen county."
Apparently they are all named Virginia in Richmond, seemingly
three-quarters of these girls who live in the nicer parts of the town
are thus to bespeak through their lives the affectionate loyalty of
their parents to the Old Dominion.
All these folk come quite easily to the transformation that has come
over the South within the decade, since she ceased to grieve over a past
that could never be brought back and overcome. The young boys and the
young girls turn readily from fine horses to fine motor cars, the coming
of imported customs causes few shocks, it is even rumored that the
newest of the new dances have invaded the sober drawing-rooms of the
place. But the New South is kind to Richmond. She does not seek to
eliminate the Old South. And so the old customs and the old traditions
run side by side with the new. And even the old families seem to soften
and many times to welcome the new.
* * * * *
If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go out to Hollywood
cemetery, which is perhaps the greatest of all its landmarks. It is easy
of access, very beautiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate
fashion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just outside of
Boston. But where man has fallen short at Hollywood, Nature has more
than done her part. She rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond
might place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she swept the
finest of all Virginia rivers--the James--by those hills. Man did the
rest. It was man who created the roadways and who placed the monuments.
And not the least interesting of these is the strange tomb of President
James Monroe, an imposing bronze structure, in these days reminding one
of an enlarged bird-cage. It is interesting perhaps because nearby there
is another grave--the grave of still another man who came to the highest
office of the American people. The second grave is marked by a small
headstone, scarcely large enough to accommodate its two words: "John
Tyler."
But more interesting than these older monuments is the group that stands
alone, at the far corner of the cemetery and atop of one of those
little hillocks close beside the river. The head of that family is
buried beneath his effigy. It is the grave of Jefferson Davis, who
stands facing the city, as if he still dreamed of the days that might
have been but never were. And close beside is the grave of his little
girl, "The Daughter of Confederacy." When she died, only a few years
since, the South felt that the last of the living links that tied it
with the days when men fought and died for the Lost Cause had been
severed. It was then that it set to work to build the new out of the
old.