“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.