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.