Chapter 3

A. HEADWAITERS’ NAMES 298
This and a sawbuck will get you an insult.

B. GUSTATORY GUIDE 298
Where to find what food, when.

C. DINING AROUND THE WORLD 300
For those who don’t rate bids to embassies, but want to
eat foreign.

D. BARE BABES 301
Where to find ’em. Or where to keep away from ’em,
which is harder.

E. LUPO’S LOG BOOK 301
Being some notes to file away where your wife won’t look.

F. THE INNER CIRCLE 302
Extracts from the list of 800.

INDEX 307

WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL

P-s-s-s-t!

Here we go again--Confidential.

We turned New York inside out; but we both live there. We turned
Chicago upside down; but we were both raised there. We descended on
Washington not quite like Stanley invaded Africa, because in our
combined 75 years of newspaper work we had been in the capital hundreds
of times. It intrigued us because we never could understand it. So we
decided brashly to do a Lait-Mortimer operation on it from scratch. Our
principal discovery was that nobody understands Washington--the _city_,
not the nation’s nerve-center.

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.

“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.

So this is the nation’s capital: with its panderers and prostitutes;
gamblers and gunmen; conmen and Congressmen; lawmakers and
law-breakers; fairies and Fair Dealers.

It is a city of moods, even drearier when Congress is away campaigning
or vacationing; yet it turns electric when something big is about to
happen.

It is a city of the wistful little people with adding-machine minds.

Over all, a feeling of fear pervades it. People become conditioned to
talking in whispers. Senators will walk you to the middle of the room,
then mumble, even when what they have to say is inconsequential. The
main indoor sport is conspiracy.

We give you Washington: not the city of statesmen, but the stateless
city.

2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN

We shall begin this catalog of places with Georgetown, by far the
oldest in the city.

Not all who reside in Georgetown are rich, red or queer, nor do all
Washington millionaires, Commies and/or fags dwell in Georgetown.

But if you know anyone who fulfills at least two of the foregoing three
qualifications don’t take odds he doesn’t prance behind Early American
shutters in a reconditioned stable or slave-pen in this unique city
within a city.

Georgetown was a thriving Colonial village when the rest of the
District was swampland. It was included in the District of Columbia
from the time of the original grant, but Georgetown remained an
independent municipality until 1895.

If you like that kind of stuff, Georgetown, which lies in the extreme
NW section of the city, has a charm all its own.

Some people like the smell of dead fish in Provincetown. Others like
to climb up four flights of stairs to ratty garrets in Greenwich
Village. Georgetown is quaint that way, too. Now all this is to be
preserved for posterity forever, through an act of Congress setting up
a commission to keep it looking the way it is under penalty of the law
for modernizing anything in the community without the permission of
some bureaucrat.

Until twenty years ago, Georgetown was just another rundown backwash
in a great city. Most of its residents were Negroes. Most of its real
estate wasn’t even good enough for Southern Negroes, and don’t forget
that a Southern Negro is forced to live almost anywhere. New Dealers
and the bright young braintrusters from Harvard reversed what seems to
be a foreordained rule in every city in the country. In other words,
the whites drove the Negroes out--as many as they could--and took over
for themselves what was practically a blighted area.

This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly flooded with a
horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists, ballet-dancers and
economic planners, there was no place for them to live. They abhorred
the modern service apartments. These people were “intellectual.” The
women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New
Thought. The men, if you could call some of them that, wore their hair
longer than we do, read advanced literature, and talked about the joys
of collectivism, though all of them were so individual they couldn’t
bear to live in skyscrapers.

Most of these people had dough. The others got good government jobs,
became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and wrote for publications
sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide automobiles and other
luxuries for the needier pinks.

Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but in the
early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one of the
fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered” Georgetown and
conceived it as a genteel bohemian community where her sandal-shod
friends could find congenial company. She wouldn’t allow the WPA to
alter anything though sewage comes up from the river. Georgetown is
overrun with rats, which frequently chew up Negro infants.

Ancient wooden houses, much the worse for the wear of centuries, which
could have been bought lot-and-all for $2,500 in the ’20s, skyrocketed
as it became “smart” for society to move to Georgetown. Some properties
are now worth twenty times what they brought twenty years ago, though
terrible odors emanate from a nearby slaughter house.

Following the discovery of Georgetown, the truly gentle Negroes who had
lived there, some for a hundred years or more, were driven out. Few
owned their homes. Into rickety structures which had once housed as
many as ten Negro families--seventy-five people--moved one millionaire
left-wing carpetbagger and his wife. With improvements, naturally.
Equality is okay to talk about. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were
spent on some of these homes, modernizing, beautifying, disinfecting
and furnishing them. Now they have house-and-garden tours for visiting
Kiwanians.

Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown has
a considerable colored population, though it is the only part of
Washington where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty years
ago. Those who remain live in shanties so undesirable that no rich
white fairies can be found who want to turn them into something gay. In
fact, there’s a saying in Georgetown now that you’re not “smart” unless
darkies live next door to you.

The sight-seeing buses point out historic Prospect House, now used
by the government for visiting notables, but they don’t show you the
tumble-down Negro shacks behind it.

One of Georgetown’s most distinguished residents is Dean Acheson.
Emmitt Warring, king of Washington’s gamblers, about whom more will be
found in succeeding chapters, is in business nearby.

Warring is the kingfish of Georgetown. He controls its local police
precinct as well as its local crime. As will be shown, he has direct
affiliations with the national underworld syndicate.

Eleanor Roosevelt gave Georgetown that first big impetus after her son,
Jimmy, who didn’t “got it” in California, moved across the street from
the old Imperial Russian Embassy, in the 3200 block of Q Street. It
looked like good business to build up the area.

Soon the section filled up with all manner of strange people. Many of
these were buddies of the First Lady. We have seen a letter she wrote
to one Ben Grey, in which she pats such types on the head.

One of the queerest sights visible anywhere is the one from a window
on the second floor of Dean Acheson’s quaint home at 2805 P Street. It
faces the 28th Street side over a back yard. The Secretary’s personal
lavatory faces that way. His mind apparently weighted by cosmos-shaking
affairs of state, the secretary forgets to draw down the shade.

It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be seen.
This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows, first-hand
and not confidential.

In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh air
fiends, walk to town every morning.

Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special mission
for the State Department. She is developing a “new type propaganda
campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the movies.

Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest and
largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its
beautiful campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for
preserving the historic buildings of the community from the onward rush
of modernity which swept over the rest of Washington.

But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local
parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around
the law which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at
2 A.M. Despite a murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional
investigation of such enterprises and a flurry of activity by the
United States Attorney, there are still at least 500 of these
unlicensed places, some say more, in the District, a subject which will
be covered in detail hereinafter.

The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin Avenue
where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the hangout of
Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the world over bottles
while Georgetown students roistered around them.

Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every other
section. That is because there are no hotels and few transients.
But what it lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than made up for by
homosexuals of both indeterminate sexes. It seems that nonconformity
in politics is often the handmaiden of the same proclivities in sex.
Among the thousands known in the capital, a goodly proportion live in
the storied ancient dwellings of the area. The fun that goes on in some
is beyond words and was even worse when the staffs of the embassies of
some of the Iron Curtain countries still found it feasible to travel
about in society.

Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair of the
times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a result of
complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing participants in
the unspeakable parties were Administration untouchables or diplomats
sacred from interference.

Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be immune,
makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in--nobody ever
gets pinched there.

3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE

The first question asked by members of the new Seventh Congress, after
taking the oath in the draughty and unfinished Capitol in 1801, was
“where is a saloon with dames?” or the early 19th century equivalent
thereof.

The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which
overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of
boxes resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom town on a
rainy day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied. Ever since that
historic moment, anything that matters and much that doesn’t is in that
part of the city known by its postal address as “NW.”

“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It is the
capital of the capital. NW is the works.

When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the capital,
he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four parts. These
he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub “The Hill,” on
which he built the Capitol. He named each section after compounded
cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and SE. The others you can
throw into the garbage-can--NW is the city.

Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington
everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are
piled into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly,
the dirty and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem,
the colored.

Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The crossing
at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison--an insult to
both. Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and environs, plus
a half-million tourists, pass it daily.

Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a mile
away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any night,
Saturday included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and quiet.

Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than those of most
villages. Don’t get us wrong--things do happen after dark. But--those
who do them don’t want them seen.

When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of Washington at
night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the only living
things, he is told what seems the obvious--Washington is a town of
early-to-bedders who do not go in for night life. That is not true.
Washington has hundreds of sneak-ins that remain open all night. Your
hardy reporters almost collapsed before they could complete this
assignment--to visit every place openly or surreptitiously breaking the
law. Almost all are in NW, which should have made it easier.

After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the smalltown
mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or in
pseudo-private “clubs.”

Now let’s get on with NW.

Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-drivers.
Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same fee
regardless of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for each
extra zone the cab enters. The Congressmen, who make all the District’s
laws, talked the Public Utilities Commission into gerrymandering the
zone map in such a way it ended up allowing them and you and us to go
almost anywhere from the Capitol into NW for a minimum fee. No one
wants to go elsewhere, so it’s a fine deal for all but the cab-jockies.

All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from
popular-priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury
hostelries like the Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential
ones in the outskirts, such as the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the
assignation hotels are downtown, smack in the middle of everything,
very snug.

Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th Streets.
They call it the New Willard now, though the new section was built
during Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a century,
VIP’s from all over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe wrote the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its cocktail bar
is a hangout for lonesome government girls and other fancy-free women,
best time after 5 P.M.

The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of the many
holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first” hostess
since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta. The High
Hat Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking spot, much
patronized by the lonesome of either sex because of its informality.
When we asked a cab-driver where we could meet a “friend” he directed
us to the Ambassador. We sat there five minutes, not long enough to
attract a waiter’s eye. But the eyes of two blonde things, young and
not bad-looking, were quicker. One asked us to buy her a drink. We did.

Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the evening
with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They thought we
meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10--“if we had a place
to take them.”

We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all except once
we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1 A.M., and all
the volunteers had already booked themselves. We also saw other stags
talk to girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but with whom they left.

Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock Alley of
the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world statesmen sat
and sized up famed society beauties.

These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns and
cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much can
be done about it, because the muddled situation of District law and
law enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to bounce that
sort of undesirables--if they are so regarded. The cops would refuse to
eject them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-keepers are subject
to the same liability. We saw hookers, or busy beavers that looked
remarkably like them, speak to strangers in the cocktail lounges of the
Statler and Carlton, and we were approached by one in the former place.

The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and the
town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or recession
there are too many rooms. When your authors began their regular trips
to the city in search of material for this book, Washington had not
started to take on its Sino-Korean war dress. We and our money were
welcomed with open arms. We spent lavishly throughout the summer at the
Carlton, a haunt of New Deal and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis
and White House assistant David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.

As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of
businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other
finaglers. They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what
happened in Washington during the years of World War II, some leased
permanent suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to room clerks
and executives. Then reservations at the Carlton for mere confidential
reporters were bitched up. They were unceremoniously moved from room to
room, given second-class accommodations, notified they must get out; so
better spenders could get in--and our bills had been running to $100 a
day.

The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were many
Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had voted against
rent control in the District. But now they were Displaced Persons.

It was no secret that among the permanents who were in danger of being
forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque blondes whose rents
were being paid by high officials, diplomats and senators. The swank
Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels anywhere, has figured
prominently in police court and divorce court news more than once.

Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s managing
director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find other
lodgings, too. There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove were
divorced. Once, when unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony bill,
he convinced the court he no longer had an interest in the hotel,
merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and his former spouse renewed their
sentiments, but figured they’d be happier as friends than as man and
wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the Shoreham.

A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the guests
around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the choice of
Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private apartments are
housed some of the most prominent people in the nation and they haven’t
been moved to enable the management to snag profiteer revenue.

What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was
not always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show town.
There was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved, dignitaries
attended the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed eating spots.

The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The martyred
Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum. President Wilson
was an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit, attending the
same theatre every week on the same night. He used to slip out of the
White House to Keith’s, a block away, where the management held a seat
in the back row, where he tried to be unobserved. Washington had top
vaudeville before the demise of that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind
movie house. The only thing resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol,
where four or five modest acts are sandwiched in between runs of a
picture.

Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once
Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be had
their tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving
Broadway. Washington had minor population but supported many houses.
Its residents were avid show-goers. The National gave up the ghost and
turned into a movie house because of the race problem. Few Washington
theatres permit colored patronage, though Negro theatres allow whites.

The National was restricted against colored attendance in its lease.
A couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity Association,
steamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-brothers” group
resolved not to permit its members to appear in any theatre in
Washington while racial discrimination was enforced. Equity did not
issue the same edict against theatres in the rest of the South, all
of which are so restricted. The operators of the National were bound
by the terms of their lease and could not change their policy. Rather
than risk a long, costly fight, they converted the house into a cinema.
Meanwhile, for two years, the capital of the world’s most literate
nation was barren of all living drama.

Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque, on
9th Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a legit
house. The Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment, because
practically anything is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good. The cagey
operators, not hampered by contractual restrictions, switched. To
accent the fact that they were going all out on this new line of race
tolerance, they booked as their first attraction a show with a mixed
cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Muriel Rahn, who is a
Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the Deep South.

The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by shooting
galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults only,” was
attended by the top layer of Washington New Deal and left-wing weepers
and critics for the Negro press and the _Daily Worker_. The show was
panned by the other reviewers. It closed prematurely, after five
days. Producer Michael Meyerberg said, “We shouldn’t have opened in
Washington.”

After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted, sometimes
dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The whites passed
it up. Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there, subsidized by
highbrow subscribers.

Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s usually a
Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.

During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of New York
companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in some neighborhood
playhouses. Regardless of the success of some individual play,
Washington can be written off as a theatre town.

Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially when
they can get their names in the papers. One of these is Congressman
Klein, of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who represents one of
Gotham’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Klein is trying to get
the government to spend $5,000,000 for a national theatre. Naturally
it is to be named the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of
his constituents need shoes, but F.D.R. needs another monument. His
bill forbids barring any person from appearing in it or attending it
because of race, creed, color, religion or national origin. It would
be conducted by the Secretary of the Interior, who at this writing is
that well-known showman, Oscar L. Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is
a co-founder of the Spanish-American League to Combat Exploitation of
Mexican Workers in the United States, an arty cause, no doubt.

For most of the area’s 1,500,000 permanents and 500,000 transients,
movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the face of TV
competition, remains to be seen. At the present time, attendance runs
100,000 a day. Most film houses in white neighborhoods are restricted
to whites. Negroes have their own. One of the most famous is the
Howard, in the NW colored section, which often augments its shows with
top-flight Negro stage shows. At such times the place is apt to draw
more white customers than black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of
the younger social and diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks.
These people who willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse
to permit them in their own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical
Washington thinking.

The high-class shopping street--the Fifth Avenue--is Connecticut
Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel,
and out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank
apartments.

There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports,
expensive antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar.
Despite the great wealth of the District and the presence of an
international set, all is not pheasant for these merchants. New
York and the magnet of its style-conscious stores is too near. Even
Baltimore gets some of the trade which can’t find enough smart things
at home. But a curious reverse process has been taking place in recent
years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to New York to shop and
to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known institutions have been
reaching out and taking over some of the same places in New York which
Washingtonians travel 225 miles to patronize.

Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A couple of
years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and aristocratic New
York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers. Within a few months, the
Garfinckel octopus reached out and gobbled up one of New York’s oldest
and best-known Fifth Avenue stores, de Pinna.

While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had made a
tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular eatery with fine
food in the NW business section, bought New York’s oldest and most
famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of the last places
left in the country where dining is still a fine art.

Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington eating
places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but most of them
are in NW.

One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, near
the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating place when he
is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants, Harvey’s has been
in business long. It specializes in sea food. The room does a sell-out
business and it’s almost impossible to get a table at the height of the
dining hour. Service by ancient Negro waiters is slow. Best time to
eat is after 9, because most Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is
the standard time. Many start at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some
restaurants close at 8, and a few at 7.

Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust sense
of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-identification
“fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I private’s uniform.
He had them nailed up on posts for miles around Lully’s country place.
When the hick sheriff locked up the restaurateur, who sputtered and
gave Hoover as a reference, J. Edgar said he had never heard of him.

On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from Oscar
of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating his
salad dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the Waldorf
$2,500, but J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.

The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of presidents,
cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was our favorite,
but the Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An officious head
waiter, with a typical Prussian attitude toward customers, lined us up
like prisoners of war, then heaped contemptuous abuse when we dared
question his excellency about the possible chances of being seated
and served. Washingtonians take it. They are used to being kicked
around. Senators or cabinet officers they may be, but at heart most are
grass-rooters overawed by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked
out. We are used to consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good
manners of heartless Manhattan.

When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the streets
should run in three directions, north and south, east and west, and
diagonal. Where the diagonal avenues, which are named after states,
cross the rectangular streets, generally numbered or alphabetically
lettered, there are wide circles or broad squares. One of those is
Lafayette Park, known to all Americans because it is the square in
front of the White House. Here, less than a hundred yards from the
President’s front door, is one of the most sordid spots in the world.
At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson and in
the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees, there is a constant and
continuous soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.

The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police
superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District,
knows about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested
there, charged with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by a
jury. There are few convictions.

Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is Thomas
Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it
were lined with mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of
a newsdealer there, at any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a
horse, buy a deck of junk or get a girl--$10 asking price, $5 if you
put up a struggle.

Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There were the
homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve been razed or
cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate distributions and the
high cost of maintenance. Those that still stand have been turned into
embassies, headquarters of national organizations, and rooming-houses
in between. One triangular corner was torn down to make way for the
Dupont Plaza, a glassy and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists,
flashy girls and 5-percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all
the way out the length of 16th Street, which runs off from the White
House, and Massachusetts Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run
through all NW. They are the “Ambassadors’ Rows.”

Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all are
on one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization
headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary
institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and apartment
hotels.

The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area always had
a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws. Restrictive
covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any racial boundary
lines and some people think that is dandy. They have been in the
driver’s seat since 1933.

You will find colored people living within a half a block of an embassy
or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house. There is no
reason why this should not be so, but the property-owners and the white
residents do not agree. As the process continues, NW grows less swank
and less desirable, while many of its rich residents move into Maryland
suburbs such as Chevy Chase and across the river into Virginia.

The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be considered in
specialized chapters.

4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN

The District’s “red-light” region may be the largest on earth. That is
because almost all of it is such, neither restricted by law, custom nor
local habit to a particular part of town. But, more than any other, NW
is the Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly open than ever was New
York’s infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s 22nd Street.

Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last location a
practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her camp. With
so many more women than men, so many dames lonesome and far from home,
on the eager upbeat for a meal, a drink or even a kind word, you’d
figure mathematically, psychologically and pathologically that this
would be a ghost town for the trollops.

Part of such traffic is always supported by tourists and strays.
Washington has a large and constant visitation of these, but many
other places have more and have virtually expunged street-walkers and
entirely eradicated the sweatshops where such operators do homework.
Yet in Washington they flourish, though they are supposedly verboten,
and the Weary Winnies parade the pavements. It made a couple of graying
Chicago boys homesick for their childhood.

Lorelles--as the Parisians call them--are in the Washington tradition,
claim the capital by long-established squatters’ rights, almost by
right of discovery.

The same stagecoaches which carried the first Congressmen to Washington
150 years ago brought also the first whores. They and their descendants
have been here ever since, an integral, important segment of the
population.

For the first 113 years they were protected by law. Segregation in the
District was expunged by act of Congress in 1913, in the first year of
the presidency of the school-teacher from Princeton.

In the early days of the Republic, whoring flourished as an essential
and honorable trade. Transportation facilities were so primitive,
many Congressmen and officials from backwoods sections had trouble
getting to Washington themselves and would have found it impossible
to transport their women. Trollops became an adjunct to legislation.
Without them, it is doubtful whether a quorum could have been
maintained for transaction of public business, which might not have
been a bad idea sometimes.

The last compound of the trade was in what is now the Federal Triangle,
between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, from 10th to 15th Streets.
The Willard Hotel, the Treasury and the White House are nearby--which
made it convenient for all concerned.

In the Civil War, General Joe Hooker’s division was encamped in
Washington to protect the President. It was bivouacked in what later
became the official restricted district. One story, accounting for
the term “hooker,” now worldwide, ascribes its origin to the habitat
of local prostitutes, who gathered near the camp to pick up soldiers
and remained after the soldiers left. When local blades went out for a
night of hell-raising they said, “Let’s go over to Hooker’s.”

Another version ascribes the origin of the word to the Hook, in
Baltimore, the town’s sailor section, where tarts picked up sea-faring
men.

In the absence of a determination by H. L. Mencken, we will remain
neutral as to the competing claims of the two neighboring cities,
except to say that the residents of either ought to know what they’re
talking about, because there are so many hookers in both.

Leaving out all occasionals in Washington who do it for fun or because
of temporary monetary embarrassment, and counting only pros--those
who have no other form of livelihood, some say there are at least ten
thousand floozies actively in full-time business at this moment. We
were solicited by half that number.

Most of these girls work as loners on the streets or in the cocktail
lounges and bring their earnings back to their pimps. Some function
through call services, via a headquarters phone-number, a cocktail
lounge bartender, or a switchboard operator in a cheap hotel.

Many are tough and predatory. A 20-year old youth was stabbed and
slashed after he turned down a street-corner proposition at Third and
E. He fled when the woman drew a knife, but two colored men caught up
to him and gave him the business.

Until recently, Washington was loaded with whore-houses, was in fact
the last large city where this ancient and storied institution existed.

That’s because it was necessary to take care of the transients and
the male government employes and officials away from their wives. The
war and the post-war housing shortage virtually put the final kibosh
on such dives here as it had done a few years earlier in other towns.
Property became so valuable, landlords could do better by running it
legitimately.

We spoke to a police captain who told us that obstacles were no longer
placed in the way of the vice squad when it came to raiding these
premises; but it is impossible to keep the girls off the streets
and out of the hotel lobbies and cocktail lounges where they had
transferred their business addresses.

Under the law of Washington, as well as all other municipalities,
vice-squad detectives are forbidden to partake personally of forbidden
wares while on raids. If they do, they have no case, for a prosecution
then becomes “entrapment” and they are agents provocateurs.

During a recent raid, an operational plan was drawn up in advance. One
of the cops, the handsomest, made the pick-up, and his confederates
were supposed to crash in five minutes after he entered the room, which
would give both time to disrobe, and that is enough evidence to make a
collar.

But the raiders were late. The honest, hardworking cop went through the
motions of undressing. Finally he had to get in bed with the wench; 15,
20, 30 minutes passed, and still no raiding party. He couldn’t stall
her off any more.

By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and void.

The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black
sisters are mentioned in another one.

Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white
street-walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored
ones, it goes up to 99 percent.

Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young; it takes
some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the nerve to
hustle in high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15 and 16
hawking their bodies on the public highways. Many of these children,
who should be home doing their schoolwork, left the hills when they
were 12, after first having been raped by a local lout, usually a
relative.

This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was formally
charged by the arresting officer with “practicing prostitution.”

“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any more.
I know how now.”

The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down. Pretty
fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5. These prices
are low compared with the current tariffs in other large cities, the
reason being the extraordinary amateur competition.

Many of the girls roll their customers, mugg them or use knockout
drops and then go through their pockets. But Washington’s prostitutes
are not so hard-hearted as the street sirens in New York, where it is
commonplace for one to be taken to a hotel-room and wake up doped and
robbed, but never loved.

Many Washington nymphs conscientiously give value received.

In other cities the cops take stern measures against the untrustworthy
whores. It is considered the lowest form of larceny to take advantage
of a man with his pants down. New York police recently sent a young
married woman to the penitentiary for five years for just such an
outrage, but in Washington the appointed judges, many unrealistic
and some downright dishonest, condone and encourage such unethical
practices.

David L. Miller, 43, a resident of the Soldiers’ Home, picked up
Alma Lee Dugent and took her to a 16th Street, NW, room. He said the
33-year-old woman robbed him of $2 in bills and a $30 wrist watch while
he lay asleep. The woman pleaded guilty of petty theft.

“This man is as guilty as the woman,” thundered the judge. He ordered
Miller to pay half of Mrs. Dugent’s $25 fine.

At this writing there are few really big madames operating in
Washington. One of the last big operators was Carmen Beach, deported to
Spain. But Nancy Pressler, who figured prominently in the conviction
of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, international Mafia overlord now in Italy,
when she turned state’s evidence against him in New York, is in
business in the capital.

Though many of the girls work as independent contractors, except for
the inevitable pimp, they are loosely organized for emergency purposes
in the event of arrest, through bail-bond brokers and lawyers who
specialize in underworld cases. The law staff of Charles Ford is
frequently in court defending intercepted prostitutes, who usually get
off with a small fine or a warning.

Many singed doves get their weekly check-ups from a physician in the
1700 block of K Street, who charges them $5 a visit. They learn about
him through their community of interests.

We have studied commercial vice in most large cities. It is as a
rule confined by public tolerance to certain streets or sections.
When we wrote about New York and Chicago we were able to name these
thoroughfares and state exactly what kind of merchandise was for sale
in each. That is not so in Washington, where the city seems to be one
huge red-light range, with tramps falling over themselves trying to
grab unattached men.

We made a contact on the southeast corner of 14th and New York Avenue,
NW, in front of the cigar store, with a young pedestrian who told
us her name was Sue. She came originally from Florida and had been
hustling in Washington for four years. We asked how to get in touch
with her again and she said, “Just call the Astoria Hotel and ask the
operator for Sue.” When we inquired her last name she said she was the
only Sue there. The Astoria is a cheap hotel on 14th Street.

About two weeks later we were walking through the plush lobby of the
new Statler Hotel and saw Sue ensconced in one of the comfortable
armchairs. We stopped to watch. The slender blonde leaned over to a
gent in another chair and asked for a light. In a couple of minutes
they struck up a deal and walked into the elevator together. When she
came down half an hour later we asked her how much she got.

“Ten bucks,” she exclaimed, “and the tight-wad stiffed me out of luck
money.”

When we first came to Washington to work on this book almost everyone
we spoke to, except cops who knew better, said we wouldn’t find any
professional whores, because why should anyone pay when so many
government girls are easy?

We took some of these friends--government officials, members of
Congress, newspapermen and others, on our tours. And this is what we
showed them:

We were solicited by two girls at Jack’s Grill, 3rd and G Sts. Three
broads came up to us at 4th and G NW and asked us if we wanted company.
We also saw girls bracing strange men at the Purity Lunch and Grill,
3rd and G NW, and at Mitchell Grill on the same corner. Mitchell’s is
the hangout for precinct cops who saved its license after charges.

A white prostitute tried to date us at the Mai Fong restaurant, in
Chinatown, and two other girls spoke to us at the China Clipper on 14th.

We could have made pick-ups--$10 asked, $5 bid--at the corner of 14th
and R. We were approached by girls at the Casablanca Tavern, 421 11th
St., NW, and the Covered Wagon, 14th and Rhode Island. The manager
of an all-night diner back of the Statler offered to get us a bed
companion for $15 if we bought a bottle of Seagrams for $8.50--cheap
when you consider it was after hours and he didn’t have a license.

Few if any restaurants and bars employ B-girls. These are women who in
Chicago circulate from table to table and hustle drinks on commission.
They are illegal in the District, though quite common in Maryland, near
the border and in Baltimore.

The femmes fatale who frequent Washington joints usually do so in
free-handed reciprocity. The management steers lonesome men to the gals
who hang around regularly. They, in turn, bring their customers in for
drinks or tell them that’s where they can find them. A saloon which
gets a reputation as the hangout for the best-looking dames finds its
gross up.

When a girl closes a pitch, she usually has a place to take the guy,
if he can’t or won’t bring her to his own room. Most Washington
hotels, including the largest, are very broadminded about this, and if
you don’t make noise they don’t make trouble. But this situation is
changing as the hotels are getting more crowded and more independent.

Few small hotels, even if so inclined, properly police their guests.
Some of the girls take their clients to the New Colonial and the Fox.

A former madame named Jackie is now running a rooming-house at 703 Mt.
Vernon, where some of the girls steer their customers. You can usually
find seven or eight girls hanging around Ivy House Inn, on New York
Avenue.

Among the most active hookers are Kay Saunders and Peggy Proctor, both
29, who were once arrested while entertaining 15 male customers. At
this writing they are still in business on the second floor of a house
in the 2300 block, Lincoln Road, NE.

One of Washington’s most famous characters is a toothless old hag known
only as Diane. She hangs around 14th and Florida. Diane reminds old New
Yorkers of the fabulous Broadway Rose, who used to panhandle in front
of Lindy’s until she was carted to the bug house.

But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a time,
they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed to be that
she liked her work too much to commercialize it.

We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when he was a
school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because she would take
“small change.” Now some of her old customers, matured and prosperous
men of the world, occasionally drive by her corner to stake her to a
hand-out.

All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she refuses
to retire.

We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been discharged
from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky.
The story she told us illustrates how girls are recruited for
prostitution in the District.

Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a girl
high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on
Saturday nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent
them to a room occupied by two men. One, whose name was Grigsby, tried
to sell the girls on coming to Washington. He said he’d put them in a
swell house. The teenagers were afraid of the big city. Grigsby told
them the landlady of the house was in the next room and called her in.
She was a motherly sort. They consented to come with her.

They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie Cooper,
on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an instantaneous
success in the Cooper menage. She was only 17, fresh, buxom and
bucolic. Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed. After she’d been in
the house a few weeks, the madame asked Doris if she’d like to get a
“kick.” She produced a hypodermic needle and gave the child a shot
in the arm. Doris liked the sensation, wanted more. This went on for
several weeks, Doris said, and every day Billie Cooper increased the
frequency of the shots.

One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.

Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”

She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that henceforth Doris
must pay for the shots.

The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a day and,
no matter how much she made, the dope always cost more. She knew no
one else who sold it. She was truly hooked, which was Billie Cooper’s
original purpose, to keep the young girl in her joint and take her
money away from her.

Billie Cooper’s clientele was mostly Chinese. When U. S. narcotics
agents raided her establishment at 5 A.M., gaining entrance with a
ladder borrowed from a fire-house, so two T-men would get into Billie’s
bedroom before she had a chance to flush the narcotics down the drain,
they found several Chinese customers in the place. While the search was
still on, 15 more came to the door and were admitted; of these two were
officials of the Chinese embassy.

In the trial it developed that Billie Cooper, who was sentenced for
violation of the narcotics laws, was charging Doris $7 a deck for
heroin, which she bought at half that price from Chinese peddlers. The
F.B.I. proceeded against Grigsby for white slavery violation and he,
too, was convicted.

Doris swore to us that she was off the stuff now. She said she was
living with a Chinaman who worked in a gambling house in Chinatown.

The glamorous brothels are no more. Not since the notorious Hopkins
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.

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the chief propagandists who exploited this
“blot” on Washington. This particular slum, always photographed, always
on every sight-seeing itinerary, is only a couple of blocks long and is
surrounded on all sides by presentable Negro homes. But this slum is
permitted to remain behind the Capitol only so the lefties will have
something to breast-beat over. It remained there during the Roosevelt
administration, when public housing and public building projects were
reshaping the face of Washington, only because an official who was in
Mrs. Roosevelt’s confidence ordered it undisturbed--for propaganda
purposes.

The headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is in a ramshackle old house near the New Jersey Avenue
slums. These are the specious ones referred to elsewhere, which are
kept untouched and maintained to impress visitors with the shocking
degradation forced on Negroes in view of the Capitol dome.

The N.A.A.C.P. is rich and could locate in one of the prosperous, more
imposing Negro sections. But that would wipe out the psychological
advantage of bringing its visitors through the stage-managed
slave-quarters area.

Under Negro occupancy, some of the best dwellings in Washington, once
residences of ambassadors, cabinet officers and the hated capitalists,
now look like the slums the Fair Dealers decry.

In Washington, a Southern town with a Southern mentality, Negroes are
not popular, are not accepted as brothers except by a nagging and noisy
minority. The Negro is not Jim Crowed in street cars. There is no
law against a Negro’s attending a theatre with whites, eating in the
same restaurant or sleeping in the same hotel. But the law has upheld
proprietors who refuse to serve a Negro, though United States Supreme
Court decisions have gone otherwise elsewhere.

Yet there is considerable intermixture between the races. It is not
uncommon to see white girls with colored men, especially jazz band
musicians, who seem to exert a magnetic appeal for Caucasian women
all over the country. Many Negro madames and pimps employ white girls
for their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles it is
considered chi chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes,
though, because of accepted restrictions against Negroes in the better
spots, these contacts are not evident in the better public gathering
places.

White people frequent colored night spots. Most of the reputed 480
Negro after-hour bottle-clubs cater also to whites, though no white
club admits Negroes except possibly a prominent entertainer or band
leader.

It is not uncommon to find white women living with colored men.
Practically no instance has come up in recent years of white men
consorting with colored women, except temporary pick-ups or in brothels.

A raid on the Logan Hotel, at 13th Street and Rhode Island Avenue,
disclosed a white girl living with a Negro. She was the daughter of a
Texas physician.

Police answered a trouble call at 17th and Q Streets and found a white
girl, employed by the Social Security Administration, visiting with a
colored janitor. He confessed that six other white girls from the same
U. S. agency visited him regularly for intercourse, one each night--and
paid him for it.

Another white girl employed by the Government was arrested at her home
in Alexandria, after having received marijuana from a colored musician
named Brisco. Brisco, well-known in Washington, mailed the marijuana
from New York. According to U.S. Narcotics Agents, two white Washington
girls under 18 admitted smoking marijuana with him and said they had
unnatural sex relations with him--they were afraid of pregnancy.

Due to determined efforts of local reformers, Jim Crow seems to be on
the way out in Washington, as it is everywhere and should be. Until
1949, the city’s six public swimming pools were restricted, to either
whites or Negroes. In 1948, the last year of such rules, the total
number of swimmers was 415,000, of which only 69,000 were Negroes. Two
pools were set aside for colored and four for white. In 1949, when
there were no racial bars, total attendance dropped off to 332,000.
One pool, Anacostia, was shut down for most of the summer after
disturbances started when colored swimmers first attempted to use the
pool. McKinley’s white patrons stopped using it completely.

It was hoped that whites would have learned tolerance by 1950, and
toward the end of the season many of the loudest crack-pots brayed
about the success of the new policy. In the fall of 1950, Eleanor
Roosevelt, in her syndicated column, mumbled about how all friction was
ended and the millennium had arrived. As usual she was wrong. Official
figures released a few days later showed attendance had skidded another
33 percent, down to a total of 220,000, of which--and get this--only
one-third were Negroes. In other words, whites had almost stopped using
the pools; on the other hand, there were barely more Negro patrons than
when the pools were restricted. Agitation was heard from tax-payers to
shut the pools, now run at a heavy loss to the city.

Only in public schools does legal Jim Crowism hold out. Recently a
performance of a tableau representing the Sesquicentennial of the
founding of the city was banned from the stage of a high school
auditorium because it had a mixed cast. The school board said:
“Congress makes the law and we enforce it.” There is a technical
question about whether a colored member of the board may visit white
schools, and vice versa.

Adopting tactics employed by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People elsewhere, Washington Negroes and
whites who are trying to break down racial restrictions often picket
restaurants and other facilities which refuse to serve Negroes, and
sometimes stage sitdown strikes within them. After such an experiment
in the John R. Thompson chain, the demonstrators for racial equality
were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced by a judge who at
this writing has not been overruled.

But the lot of Negroes is enviable compared to that of their brethren
elsewhere. We called Chicago’s Bronzeville Black Paradise. But that was
before we saw Washington’s Negro Heaven.

The life of the Washington Negro is made pleasant by the force of many
circumstances. The odds are he is employed by the government, which
has raised salaries. If he doesn’t work for the government, he serves
government workers. He shares in the highest per capita earnings, yet
the cost of living in Washington is not so high as in New York and many
other large cities. All streets, in white sections or colored, are
broad and tree-lined.

No Negro is ever fired from a government job if it can possibly be
helped. When necessary to cut down a staff, the whites go first,
reversing the process of private business.

If they can’t do their work, whites are hired to do it over for
them. An instance, typical of thousands, occurred in the Bureau of
the Census, where five Negro women were so inefficient that their
department head requested permission to discharge them. His immediate
superior almost had a stroke.

“If Eleanor hears about this,” he gasped, “there’ll be hell to pay.”

Eleanor no longer lives in the White House. But she is still a potent
force in Washington, where her kitchen cabinet continues to rule the
nation that President Truman thinks he rules.

The upshot of the matter was that the section head was told to keep the
five colored women and to hire five white girls to do the work over for
them, on the night shift.

The same sort of favoritism is shown Negro job-holders and applicants
throughout the whole governmental set-up in the District. When a white
man wants to become a cop he takes a stiff civil service test and is
subject to a searching investigation. Most of the Negroes who have been
getting on the force recently did it on political pull.

Kid-glove handling of Negroes is the rule in every phase of Washington
life, in addition to favoritism in appointments to the public payroll.

Apparently no effort is made by the police and other public authorities
to enforce the liquor laws in the dark sections. The local Alcoholic
Beverage Control code provides that no one may be served while
standing. Bar customers must be seated on stools, and even then may be
served only beer and wines. Hard liquor may be consumed only at tables.
This is strictly enforced in resorts catering to whites. But almost
all colored saloons sell liquor openly over the bar, where drinkers
stand--as long as they can stand. Few attempts are made to restrict
gambling or policy-slip sales in the colored sections.

Almost 500 Negro after-hour clubs are running, most of them not even
bothering to get club charters. Thousands of Negro flats are operated
as blind pigs, where liquor, mostly gin, is sold openly to all comers
at all hours. None has a license, naturally.

Occasionally hokum raids are made and sometimes the defendants are
fined $25. Next day they are in business as usual. Honest policemen
are afraid to make too many pinches in Negro neighborhoods for fear
the pinkos will list them as “nigger-haters” and send their names up
above--maybe even to the White House. One cop whose name we will not
mention told us that one night after he pulled in a colored after-hour
spot, word came directly from the White House to the 13th precinct
station, in which the arrest had been made, to lay off. F.D.R. was
President then.

Despite the maudlin tears of reformers about the horrible conditions
existing in Washington’s “Negro Ghetto,” there are probably more new
Cadillac convertibles being driven from its doors than from any others.
Sleek, new, expensive convertibles of the flashier brands have become
the sine qua non of Negro policy-peddlers and reefer-pushers here,
as well as in all other major American cities. Respectable people are
returning to the old-fashioned closed models for fear their bankers
will wonder what they’ve been up to.

Yet, despite the flashy visible prosperity of Washington’s Negroes, a
disproportionate number are on public relief. Many draw dole and social
security checks under one name while gainfully employed at one or two
jobs under other names. This racket, invented for the residents of New
York’s Harlem and Little Puerto Rico, has been brought to its full
flower in Washington.

The humanitarians and the New Dealers, worrying about colored votes in
the northern states, help to put butterfat in the colored man’s milk
in the capital. If the colored man works it right, he can get a relief
check the first day he lands in Washington.

This story wasn’t published, but the federal agents who made the pinch
and compiled the record had carried it on their chests so long, they
ached to unburden it where it wouldn’t come back and bite them. When
they broke in on a Negro whom they suspected of selling narcotics,
he indignantly asserted, “You can’t arrest me. I am a friend of Mrs.
Roosevelt.”

To prove it, he brought out a couple of letters from the First Lady,
one of which was addressed “Dear Jim,” or “Joe,” stating she was sorry
to hear that his relief check had not arrived on time, and she would
see that he was not pushed around in the future--he shouldn’t worry.
The boys arrested him and got a conviction.

Mrs. Roosevelt, while in the White House and out, sincerely sought to
improve the position of Negroes everywhere. But sometimes her efforts
went to such extremes she hurt the cause. Once she made a reservation
for a small banquet party of sixty at the swank Hay-Adams House, across
the street from the White House. When the managers discovered it was to
be an interracial affair they cancelled it. On September 14, 1950, Mrs.
Roosevelt tried to register three Negroes in her party into the Willard
Hotel. She was staying elsewhere, with friends. The Willard refused.

White property-owners tremble at the financial danger that would result
should Negroes crash white residential areas.

But entry is made through a tactic known as “block-busting,” developed
by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and
utilized by it and by white real estate agents out to make a buck.

Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro woman
on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied with
dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men
that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as
follows:

When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they thought
ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for a
bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was
worth $25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to
sell out. There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man
could be found after a searching survey by private detectives.

After the block-buster--in her own name--made the purchase, she and her
large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the
neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The
far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then
they resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started
another Negro island in the city.

When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another base
and repeated the process.

You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted
by “For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise
overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.

In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct
sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare.
In Washington, where they live side by side all over, use the same
street cars and buses, patronize the same stores and constantly brush
shoulders on the streets, there is friction which sometimes flares
high and hot. Some of their leaders advise Negroes to be assertive,
aggressive, to demonstrate their equality. They pick fights and needle
Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make complaints, because when
they get into court the federally appointed Yankee judge, whose robe
was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights” President, in many instances
finds for the Negro and castigates the white complainants, especially
policemen.

Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously fight
to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:

Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic National
Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on Executive
Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a
patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central
Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous
Mafia, which controls all crime and corruption in the United States.
Before a Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the
defender of the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury,
former Chicago police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed
him in an alley after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an
effort to put the full inside story of the underworld on the record.

Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s Harlem, who
usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is supported in every
election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose policy-slip and
murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s district. He
is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been frequently cited
by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating pro-Russian
proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank Long
Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven
$6,000 limousine.

William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first
Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of
Appeals. In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee
on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie
was cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations.
He was, however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by
President Truman.

Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and
social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor
and the black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word
“nigger” than do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not
found among whites--resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent
comer from the Southern plantations.

7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE

There is a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal
cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel
prize or is selected the rookie of the year.

We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring
facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable
names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted
centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s
Ebenezer evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.

That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by
people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or
Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the
identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then
is that the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on
the Caucasian population.

The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people and
then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them.
That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding
of vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.

Fancy if you can what this chapter could not tell were we to suppress
racial references.

Of every four felonies and other breaches of the law in the grades
where a defendant has the right of trial by jury more than three are
committed by Negroes. That is not confidential, but official. Arrests
for Part One felonies--the more serious--in 1949 were as follows:

Colored males, 7,715.
Colored females, 1,085.
Total colored, 8,800.
White male, 2,396.
White female, 309.
Total white, 2,705.

Here is a breakdown on some:

Murder, colored 40; white 8.
Manslaughter, colored 6; white 1.
Rape, colored 140; white 23.
Aggravated assault, colored 2,651; white 381.
Burglary, colored 2,322; white 640.

Negrophiles and impractical activists for brotherhood of all God’s
children campaign to force newspapers to omit racial identification of
the lawless and hide it with white lies. That is the foggy, unrealistic
policy of visionaries, sparked by the cold, hard practicality of Reds.

Arrests for Part Two felonies (less serious) and important misdemeanors
showed an even higher incidence of Negro crime.

Estimating the Negro population at 50 percent, this means half the
people commit 85 percent of all the crimes. As will be shown in a later
chapter, a large quota of the white crimes can be charged to transients.

The data on crimes by whites are incontrovertible. Those by Negroes
in Washington, as well as in all other northern cities, do not give
the full picture. Most police officers prefer not to arrest blacks,
especially if there is no white complainant. They have nothing to gain
by such a pinch; they merely invite an uproar for “persecuting the
gentle Negro.”

Many colored law breakers are never arrested; many who are are not
booked, the officers often preferring to mete out summary punishment
on the back stairs, which they know is a better deterrent than the
inevitable discharge or suspended sentence by a timid, “seen” or
left-wing judge.

If you doubt that, the following is from the record of a Congressional
hearing and there are plenty of other stories like it:

Private Hamilton was assigned with Detective Sergeant Clyde Rouse for
midnight cruising. They observed a stolen car parked on Q Street NW,
with two occupants.

Rouse and Hamilton walked up to the car. Rouse went to the left and
Hamilton to the right. Rouse recognized the driver as Charles W. Scott,
colored, 24, of 476 O Street NW, wanted for questioning in connection
with stolen auto hold-ups.

Rouse opened the door and tried to seize Scott, but only succeeded in
shoving the gear shift lever out of gear. Rouse was on his knees on
the front seat, practically on top of the other occupant of the car, a
woman, who proved to be Marian Holston, 20, colored, of 16 Q Street NW,
who had been picked up by Scott.

Rouse made a desperate effort to reach the key to cut off the motor but
the woman fought him, kicking, scratching, and biting. The Negro driver
of the stolen car shoved the gear lever in and with the accelerator
down to the floor board, rocketed the car into high speed. Hamilton,
his head and shoulders through the window, holding on to the wheel,
attempted to steer. It was impossible for either officer to jump or
let go. The stolen car finally collided with a barricade, ran over the
sidewalk.

With Rouse still fighting to gain control, and Hamilton still
struggling, the car, without headlights and at a terrific speed
collided with a tractor trailer truck. The stolen auto was completely
demolished.

Private Hamilton was killed.

Scott had a record which showed he had been committed eight times as a
juvenile delinquent on charges of larceny, and in 1943 was sentenced to
from two to five years for auto stealing. Thereafter he was involved in
six charges of robbery.

But the U.S. Attorney’s office refused to prosecute the Negroes and the
police were advised that if they insisted on going through with charges
before a judge, the DA’s office would nolle prosse the case, because
they did not believe “a conviction could be obtained” against colored
people who had so unfortunately become involved in the killing of a
policeman. But when a policeman kills a Negro in the line of duty, the
politically chosen District Attorney is frequently highpressured by the
N.A.A.C.P. into bringing murder charges.

We have pointed to the misguided tendency to minimize the size and
extent of the Negro population. If more than half of Washington’s
population is not black, the per capita crime rate is even more
appalling.

Like white crime, Negro crime is organized and syndicated. This does
not mean every rapist, hold-up man and car-thief takes orders from
above. But it means that when he gets in trouble he does seek certain
directed sources for bail-bonds, lawyers and fixers.

Policy-sellers, bookmakers’ runners, reefer peddlers and junk salesmen
are employed by an organization which protects them also.

The process, as it works here, will be described in detail in the
chapters devoted to crime and law enforcement, as it is part of the
general picture of organized evil.

In Washington, as in other cities, Negro crime on the consumer and
go-between levels is operated and controlled by Negroes. They report
to, kick back to, and make their fixes at upper levels with, white
criminals. The topmost control rests in the hands of the international
Syndicate, the Mafia, the Unione Siciliano. The Washington Negro
crime-ring has more autonomy than usual, because there are few
Sicilians and even fewer interested in crude crime. The national
Syndicate prefers not to show its bloody hands openly in the capital,
but lurks in the background--in New York, principally.

The most powerful Washington Negro is the aforementioned Puddin’ Head
Jones. Jim Yellow Roberts is the boss of dope and reefers. He makes his
buys in wholesale lots in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, direct
from the importers. While temporarily embarrassed by a jail sentence,
Roberts continued to run the Negro dope trade.

“Whitey” Simpkins is king of the Black Belt’s numbers racket. Johnny W.
Carter, who owns the Club Bali, a black-and-tan resort, is one of the
gamblers’ chiefs. Their payoff is a percentage which eventually reaches
the Syndicate through channels which will be set forth in detail in the
chapter devoted to dope and gambling in Washington.

One of Washington’s most important Negro underworld figures is Lamarr
(Polly) Brown who has been implicated in every form of illegality from
operating after-hour clubs to the sale of narcotics. Odessa Madre,
known as the “Queen of the Fences,” is just what her honorific implies.

Following the white pattern, the largest, gayest and most colorful
Negro section is also laid out in NW. This part of town abounds with
colored flats where a white man may take a white or colored woman.
These holes sell gin without licenses, provide bedroom accommodations
for those who want them, and girls for those who don’t have them.

Many Negro cab-drivers pimp for white girls, first getting acquainted
with them when they pick them up as passengers. They set them up in
apartments, most of which are in NW, and sell their services to white
or colored men. These cabbies also handle reefers and after-hour liquor.

If you rode with us in Washington, through the NW colored section,
these are some of the things we could have shown you:

First, we parked our car at the corner of 10th and B Sts., in front of
the Lincoln Barbeque. We waited five minutes, a colored man came out of
the restaurant and took our order for bootleg liquor. It happened after
two, when the bars were closed. His prices were moderate, no more than
50 cents to a dollar above the established tariff. But the stuff was
moonshine and cut.

Let’s go to 1919 14th Street NW. This house was formerly the Star Dust
Club, an after-hour drinking and gambling place. Now it’s a shoeshine
parlor. It’s owned by William J. “Foots” Edwards, a notorious Negro
gambler. If you want a game, you can find stud in the basement.

The dark corner of 5th and K looks quiet and serene. The colored
damsels who parade past here singly and by twos are not. Stop your car
at the corner and they will come over and solicit you. Business all
night. If you’re a Negro you’ll know where to take them. If you are a
white man they’ll go along in your car to an alley or steer you to a
buggy rooming-house. Another corner frequented by dusky hustlers in
search of white trade is 9th and Rhode Island.

At about this time, we’ll run through the 7th Street district, which
is the Broadway of the NW Negro section, with the chief shops,
restaurants, night clubs and theatres. You can make pick-ups anywhere
around 7th, Georgia and Florida Avenues, but these streets are brightly
lighted, so most white men who want to change their luck play the
darker streets. And there it is not unusual to see white girls brace
black men.

In addition to sex on sale at the corner of 7th and Florida, you can
buy reefers or policy slips.

On the corner of 7th and T are three hot spots--the Off Beat Club, for
musicians, the Club Harlem, and the Seventh and T Club. We saw them
serve drinks after hours and cater to fairies of all shades, female
white thrill-chasers and Negro reefer addicts.

Washington, like Chicago, is a city of alleys in every block of
residential property and many business squares, bisected by the rear
passages. As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark,
narrow lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of
crap shooting and soliciting.

In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in
shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred
to--not many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known
is an alley oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived
there it would be fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the
aristocratic Washington Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. But
it is inhabited by some of the lowest members of the Negro race in
Washington--and that means low.

Temperance Court is between 12th and 13th, T and U Streets, near the
13th precinct station. More dope peddlers and ginmill operators are
annually arrested in this block than on any other street of comparable
size anywhere in the world. You can buy anything you want there--girls,
bootleg whiskey, cocaine and marijuana, stolen property, guns and
knives, articles of perversion and sadism. Anything but a virgin past
the age of puberty.

A notorious dope peddler operated there until recently and may still be
there when this comes out. He is John Frye. He has so many children,
some sleep on the roof, four on a bed, and there is always a new baby
in the carriage. Narcotics agents said he hid junk in the baby’s
diaper. A competitor in the same block was Wilbur Kenny, known to the
cokies merely as “Y.”

Another byway in the NW Negro section, which is unpublicized in the
slick magazines, is Goat Alley, off 7th Street, near M. This is
terribly tough, with reefer peddlers, two-dollar wenches, a mugging
a minute and murders common. Close by the Negro sections of crime
and perversion is Ledroit Park, once surrounded by the mansions of
aristocracy. This is back of Griffith Stadium, which, like Comiskey
Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, is engulfed in a sable sea.
Baseball lovers must travel through miles of dangerous streets to the
stadium.

Nearby is Freedman’s Hospital, the world’s leading institution of its
kind for colored people, one of the outstanding institutions in the
world. Its internes are Howard University medical graduates, and among
these are great doctors. They get plenty of practice. The worst Negro
assault cases go to Freedman’s. On Friday and Saturday nights the
floors of its emergency wards look like slaughterhouses. Knifings are
frequent; shootings run second. Even on weekdays the place teems with
police interviewing victims.

Garfield Hospital, also near a large Negro community, is the second in
assault cases.

One of the largest Negro islands in NE has as its center Central
Avenue--same name as Los Angeles’ Harlem, though purely coincidental.

Gamblers in the NE section get action above the colored poolroom at 507
8th Street and E.

SW’s colored section is one of the largest in Washington and perhaps
the oldest. It begins within a thrown stone’s distance of the Capitol
and runs through to the Army War College. If you’ve read about this
neighborhood in some pinkish publication before seeing it for yourself
you will be looking for something awful. But you will drive through
miles of wide avenues with deep lawns. They’re littered with rubbish
and junk, of course. This homey residential section is reminiscent of
God-fearing, law-abiding middle-class sections in typical Southern
towns.

But what goes on inside these cozy habitations is not sleepy. The
streets, so quiet by day, take on a sinister aspect at night. This
whole section is known as Bloodfield. It’s worth a white man’s or
woman’s life to walk there unaccompanied. Even respectable Negroes are
not safe.

Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing,
prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find
his luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming.
But white women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct
by the men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent
the intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police.

The main shopping and drinking boulevards of the SW Negro section are
4th and 7th Streets. Around here the Negroes moved into and drove out
what there was of a Jewish ghetto. The street where Al Jolson lived as
a child and where his father practiced as a cantor is now all Negro.

The SW dope peddlers and whores make their hangout on 6½th Street. The
chief madames are “Mamma Liz” and “Big Tit” Flossie.

We have indicated that many white women--especially government
workers--are receptive to sexual attentions of Negro men. But the
comparative ease with which a black man can get a white girl, even a
so-called respectable one, does not seem to deter colored men from
committing rape on women of their own race and whites.

As these lines were being written, all Washington was shocked and
alerted when a 22-year-old South American girl, visiting with a
diplomatic family, was stalked, attacked and ravished in a park near
Arlington Cemetery by a Negro, who, Tarzan-like, leaped from a clump of
trees entirely naked.

The popular form of Negro attack is mugging, a process in which the
assailant comes up behind a man or woman and throws his arm around the
victim’s throat, closing it sharply with the elbow out, and jabbing a
knee into the small of the back.

But in Washington colored people call it “yoking,” derivation of the
word unknown. It includes all forms of street assault. One process
consists of sneaking up behind a lone passer-by, usually one who
apparently has been drinking, and tapping him on the shoulder. As he
turns around, he is hit square on the jaw with a stiff arm, then kicked
in the groin when he falls. Most victims are robbed. But many young and
exuberant Negroes get up yoking parties just for the joy and excitement.

Three young colored boxers, aged 14, 16, and 17, terrorized Washington
a few months ago, committing at least 19 yoke robberies, netting more
than $2,000. The 17-year-old was a semifinalist in the 160-pound class
in last year’s Golden Gloves tournament. The youngest boxed at a boys’
club. The 16-year-old was a quarter finalist in the 135-pound class.
These activities are said to breed good citizens.

The three bet among themselves which would land the first punch on the
victim and whether it would be a knockout.

Police arrest hundreds of Negro yokers every year, most of them in
their teens. Thousands of yokings go unsolved. The yokers are usually
highly organized into juvenile gangs which fight also with home-made
pistols, sawed-off shotguns and switchblade knives.

Many of these young Negro gangs terrorize students, white and black, in
public schools, offering to sell them “protection” and punishing them
when they don’t pay up.

Startled public officials first heard about these gangs some months
ago after incidents at Banneker High. An 18-year-old colored boy was
held for the grand jury on a charge of robbing a 15-year-old Banneker
schoolboy of a wrist watch on the school playground. He threatened to
whip the younger boy if he talked. School officials were awakened to
the fact that all the schools in the city had this problem. According
to the assistant superintendent of schools G. C. Wilkenson, “the gangs
are made up of boys who aren’t in school and who aren’t working--mostly
from 16 to 21 years old.”

Officials try to minimize the situation, but there is a wave of terror
in every public elementary and high school. Young Negro gangsters lurk
about the schools, sell reefers, molest girls, and commit mayhem on
children who won’t pony up. Boys and girls thus forced to pay tribute
are told to steal from their parents or do a little shoplifting if they
have no other means of procuring the extortion money. Youngsters are
put on heroin and morphine by the youthful gangsters, and soon enter a
life of serious crime.

Other yokers use a tactic borrowed from the dacoits, a murderous
religious gang of India, throwing a cord over the victim’s head from
behind and garroting him.

Some of these colored juvenile mobs have been in existence for 15 or 20
years. When boys and girls outgrow them and become adult criminals on
their own, they are replaced by new children on the way up. Among the
older and better-organized kid mobs are the Fastest Runners, the Forty
Thieves, the Purple Cross Gang and the Protective Association.

The Fastest Runners is composed of younger boys who fight with
switch-blade knives. When they grow up they graduate into adult gangs.
All these organizations have female auxiliaries, membership in which
requires the young colored girls to solicit on the streets and turn the
proceeds over to the boys. Girls as young as 11 participate and at 12
are “debs,” with full standing.

Among offenses which are practically Negro monopolies in Washington are
the following:

_Numbers and policy slips._ Almost all numbers sellers, even in white
neighborhoods and in government office buildings, are colored men and
women. In other cities Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and Mexicans
get in on this activity, but there are no sizeable groups of such in
Washington. The modus operandi of numbers selling will be described in
the chapter on gambling.

_Sale of reefers._ Almost all marijuana retailers are colored, which
also is unique to Washington.

_Theft and conversion of government checks at the lower level._ The
men, because so many are janitors and elevator boys, have entree to
apartment buildings and tenement houses and access to mail-boxes. These
thieves strike at the middle or at the end of the month, when checks
are sent out by the Treasury for G.I. remunerations, Social Security
benefits, pensions, army subsistence and similar regular allotments.
Those who do the manual stealing seldom attempt to cash the checks,
which are turned over to fences, often white, including storekeepers
and sometimes bankers.

Another Negro industry is _the sale of bootleg booze_. The rings
operate in many fashions. On some streets you find peddlers who sidle
up beside you, or come up to your car when you stop for traffic lights.
Many shoeshine “parlors” are moonshine dispensaries. Groceries and
poolrooms also sell, usually gin, but sometimes what is supposed to be
bourbon--corn for the Southern taste. The gin is mixed with cider to
dilute the taste of raw kerosene and the combination has a wallop.

That good old Negro money-raising institution, known as “the rent
party” elsewhere, has a specific, generic name in Washington, where
it’s called a “chitlin party.” Chitlins, hogs’ innards, are a delicacy
in some blacker parts of the South and are used here as a decoy
to attract guests to the homey brawls which are a regular part of
Blacktown’s social life. In New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville
the paying guest at a rent party gets nothing in exchange for his
contribution except the right to bring his woman, drink his gin, and
get into the fracas.

We met a white fellow who has run Washington’s chitlin industry up into
a million-dollar-a-year class. He gets the stuff from the butchers for
nothing. They’re almost willing to pay him to cart it away. Then he
packages it in 10-gallon jars which he sells for $2.50, or two bits a
gallon. That means the capital’s Negroes consume 4,000,000 gallons a
year.

These chapters were, of course, not in print when a young man known as
“The Sniper” was, for a few days, the most famous person in Washington.
If he were around now, our critics might have said we incited him. The
Sniper--a young white man--was a congenital Negro-hater. He boiled up
into an insane rage every time he saw a sable woman or man. He hid in
various sections and hit bullseyes from roofs, behind trees and through
open windows.

Before he was caught there was a wave of terror. For days Negroes
remained indoors. Crime sagged, because even the worst elements were
afraid to leave their homes.

Police Lieutenant Barrett, now Major and Superintendent of the
Metropolitan Force, got him after he had killed a half-dozen men and
wounded scores.

While the Sniper was in jail on suspicion, he met a drug addict, one
Richard Harlowe, and confided in him where he had hidden his gun, in
Baltimore. Barrett recovered it and came back to find his bird had
escaped. He was recaptured in Georgetown. Barrett’s fame helped him to
become the chief. His friends say it had nothing to do with the fact
that he was related to Major Edward Kelley, a previous chief.

8. CHINATOWN CHIPPIES

Sam Wong, an owner of the China Clipper, Quonsett Inn, the Dragon and
other popular restaurants, was indicted on a $250,000 tax fraud. The
government charged he gave most of it to two blondes--sisters--who
lived with him. The case was tried in Baltimore. (_Note_: Though
Washington is the nation’s capital, it is merely part of the Maryland
Internal Revenue collection district.)

When the case was called, the courtroom filled with poker-faced
orientals. The government called some, the defense called others,
including Wong, whom it put on the stand.

But not one Chinese witness testified coherently. They gave their
names, addresses, and so on, muttered and mumbled irrelevant replies.
Even the defendant remained mute after being put on the stand by his
own attorney.

The lawyers had read _Chicago Confidential_, in which these reporters
revealed that Chinese will have no truck with American courts or
American law. So they gave a copy to the court and D.A., hoping the
judge and jury would realize the impossible position in which the
defense legal battery was placed. It did no good. Wong got a year. The
blondes weren’t Chinese--and they convicted him.

Some go to Chinatown for chop suey and chow mein. We will write about
those who seek other delicacies.

Washington’s Chinatown is neither as large as Frisco’s, as colorful as
New York’s, nor as odoriferous as Boston’s. You will see no ancient,
pajama-clad women on its streets, and only a few young slant-eyed
Sadies.

Chinatown is a mere three or four blocks on H Street, beginning
in a block about 8th and extending barely to 5th. It’s almost all
neon-lighted restaurants, with the shops of a few wholesale merchants
and traders sandwiched in between. H is a typical wide Washington
street with set-back buildings. If it weren’t for the garish Chinese
characters on the illuminated signs and windows, and the pale
yellow-faced men with sad old almond eyes sprawling on the stoops,
you’d think you were anywhere but in a Chinatown.

As in all Chinese quarters, various locations and various businesses
are divided between the tongs. Only two operate in the East, though
there are scores in California.

The On Leongs are dominant here, though not in the nation, through an
alliance with the Hip Sings, cemented many years ago, when they drove
the competing organizations back to the West Coast. Then they turned on
their ally. After a series of bloody wars, they established themselves
as the top dogs, with the Hip Sings the poor cousins.

The tongs are, primarily, trade and benevolent associations. Their
membership is comprised of certain families or immigrants from certain
villages in Canton. When the authorities clamped down on tong wars in
the 1930’s, the tongs began to enforce their decrees and decisions by
peaceful means, which include trade and social boycott.

According to members of the Chinese colony in Washington, there are
only 500 of them, but these figures are far out of line with our
count of at least 7,500. There are hundreds of Chinese restaurants
and laundries in the town. Chinese always underestimate their
population, as do Negroes. But with them there are more concrete
reasons. Three-fourths are entered illegally, through many subterfuges,
such as forged birth and marriage certificates, as well as actual
body-smuggling over the Mexican and Canadian borders and from the West
Indies. The price of entering a Chinese now is $5,000, as against a
modest $1,000 twenty years ago. The fee is paid the smugglers by the
Chinaman’s tong or family society, for whom he then works to pay it
off. Nowadays most of this illegal entry is by air.

Chinese are cagey at census time, because if the rolls show anywhere
near as many in the country as there are, the difference in numbers
between those here and the ones on record would be so startling, it
would cause an investigation and wholesale deportation. Another reason
is that they are on a gentlemen’s agreement quota basis with agents of
the Federal Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. When an agent
runs across a group of illegally-entered Chinese, he gets practical
about the whole matter.

If he turned them all up at once, he’d get a pat on the back from his
superior, then have to go on a new job next week. But if he reports
only one every two weeks, he doesn’t have to do another lick of work
for months. So the agent makes a deal with the head of the tong, who
delivers the unfortunate Chinese at set intervals, and thus everyone is
happy: the government because it gets the Chinese, the agent because he
can loaf, and the wealthy Chinese laundry and restaurant owners, who
are not suddenly faced with labor shortages.

Washington’s Chinatown is important beyond its numerical strength
because it acts as a lobby for Chinese all over the country, regardless
of tong affiliation, and for Chinese merchants and enterprises all over
the world. There are not enough Chinese voters in the country to enable
them to influence elections, but they make up for lack of numbers by
intelligence, ingenuity, wealth and Oriental cunning developed by
centuries of intrigue with no qualms of honor owed the white man.

Communists never overlook a trick. They quickly took advantage of the
Chinaman’s unique possibilities. Many Chinese are vulnerable because
they have relatives in the old country. Thus they are subject to
pressure. Many are technical law-breakers or illegal entrants, so the
Reds, with their influence in high places, can threaten effectively.
Chinese societies make swell “drops” for the transmission of messages
and intelligence, and are being used, an angle not yet brought out
publicly.

They’ll tell you it isn’t so, but some of the recent tong fighting is a
war between Nationalists and Communists.

Chinatown, only a few blocks from the White House, the Capitol and the
center of the business and commercial life, is a focal point for all,
whites as well as Orientals, visitors and natives. In this town, where
almost everything shutters by midnight, the Chinese propensity for
staying up all night and sleeping most of the day has brought about
several phenomena. Unless you are welcome at a bottle club, there is
no late place to go to in Washington except Chinatown. Most of the
restaurants there are open all night, selling food. More than a few
serve liquor after 2 A.M., if they know you, in a tea-pot.

There is hectic activity all evening. Most of the white bag-swinging
street-hustlers work the neighborhood. Any cab-driver will direct you
there if you ask him, “Where can I get a girl?” These self-sellers
usually ask $20, but will take what they can get. They go on duty at
around 8, and by 10 most have made arrangements. From 10 to about 1 or
2, the restaurants are taken over by respectable people, mostly young
couples who stop in for a bite of exotic food after the movies. After
1, when the tarts have completed their rounds, they come back again
for more trade. At this time the drunks who have been ejected from the
cocktail lounges and night clubs are transported wholesale by cab to
Chinatown. Many of the drivers have deals with certain girls and some
of these girls have deals with the Chinese restaurants they habitually
visit.

Many of the hookers hang out at the Mai Fong.

We could find no Chinese whores in Washington. The proportion of
Chinese women to men is one to ten. Any Oriental girl, no matter
how homely, can make an attractive marriage. Many Chinese men are
married to white women. There are no Chinese waitresses in the Chinese
restaurants, except an occasional relative of the owner; they are
whites. Few are for sale, but many will help get you one who is.

When the tramps finish their second round with the guys they have
picked up at 2, they come back to Chinatown at 5 or 6 in the morning,
by which time the waiters, chefs and bartenders, all Chinese, are
locking up for the night and ready for a bit of shacking up themselves.
Many of the prostitutes live with Chinese men from the restaurants and
the gambling joints. These are useful to the Chinese colony, which
entertains influential white people lavishly. Many members of Congress,
high government officials and influential lobbyists are feted at
private parties, where they are served exotic twenty-course meals of
raw octopus and lambs’ eyes, washed down by shark’s fin soup. Police
Chief Barrett, always accompanied by his aide-de-camp, a lieutenant, is
frequently entertained in these private rooms.

Amiable blondes are supplied by the hosts if wanted, and rooms are
available down the block, at the Eastern House, a cheap Chinese and
white hotel, where federal agents frequently pick up dope-peddlers.

Selling narcotics is another large Chinese industry. Unlike other
cities, it is not confined to selling to Chinese. In all other Eastern
cities, opium, the favorite Chinese dream-smoke, is peddled by members
of the On Leong Tong, who have the cream of everything, won through
violence and chicanery.

In other cities, Hip Singers must content themselves with the sale
of white stuff--heroin, morphine and cocaine--which is seldom used
by Chinese. In Washington, Chinese are among the main retail dope
purveyors for the white trade as well as their own people. There are
few Puerto Rican and Italian drug passers available. So both tongs sell
everything. Junkies cruise Chinatown at all hours of the day and night
in search of dope, and can make a buy without any trouble. If anyone
stands on a corner and looks sad for more than five minutes, he will be
approached by a peddler.

The net result is that, with narcotics as with girls, the Chinese find
a potent weapon with which to further the interests of their fellow
Orientals all over the country. More than one high government official
is on dope, which he procures from Chinese dealers, who in turn have
him at their mercy because they control the source and because they
have the power of blackmail.

The Chinese import some, obtain the rest from the central Mafia sources
in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, or directly from abroad, as
will be described later. They frequently cooperate with the Mafia in
smuggling narcotics and other contraband. It is a matter of record
that many Chinese secret societies have worked with their ancient
Sicilian counterpart, the Mafia, over the centuries. Both Cantonese
and Sicilians are widely dispersed over the world, but each faction
is bound together by a common language and secret societies. Chinese
societies are remarkable transmission belts. And among Chinese are many
natural-born gangsters--sly rather than bold in white men’s countries.

Dope can be hidden in rice, vegetables and even wet-wash. The Chinese
societies also provide the Mafia with facilities for transporting
contraband money from country to country or from town to town.

There’s hardly a location in Chinatown without some form of gambling
going on, quite often open to the street. Almost every restaurant has
a game in the rear. Many stores are blinds for the huge wagering that
goes on behind. If you came in and asked to buy some article you saw
in the window, you’d be laughed at; they are usually dummy props. Huge
sums are won and lost in these games, and bankrolls of a hundred or
two hundred thousand dollars on the table are not unknown. This is
always syndicate money. Sometimes as many as 500 or 1,000 partners all
over the country are in the play. These games go on 24 hours a day,
without pause. Each syndicate’s players are chosen for their ability as
gamblers. They play in teams with others who relieve them.

We saw open gambling in the Fong Wah Co., in Eng Hon, in the On Leong
building, and at numbers 601, 603, 606, 607, 608 H Street, in Chinatown.

The police know all about this gambling, but take no action unless
white men put in a beef. They explain you can’t make a pinch stick on
Chinese: the games they play are not understandable to whites, and it
is almost impossible to make an identification of an Oriental, or to
get one to testify, for or against.

When the Chinese hook a fat white sucker, the game moves every hour to
a different location.

Sixth Street, at H, is the dividing line between Hip Sing and On Leong
territory, with the Hip Sings below 6th, the less desirable part of
town. The division of businesses gives all restaurants to On Leongs
and the laundries to Hip Sings, therefore all chop suey parlors in
Chinatown are above 6th Street.

Kwon Seto is the local On Leong boss and one of the most powerful men
in Washington. George Moy, secretary of the On Leongs, is the “mayor”
of Chinatown. A man named Yee is the real boss. Moy owns the Joy Inn,
where an investigator for a crime committee was steered by a District
official, then “mickeyed.”

9. THE OVERFLOW

Of every 100 residents of the metropolitan district, 45 live in the
suburbs--over the line in Maryland and across the Potomac in Virginia.
The take from these sections, in legitimate taxes and the proceeds of
vice and crime, is so attractive that the city fathers of Washington
have their greedy eyes on annexing this adjoining land onto the
voteless District.

Almost everywhere else, unincorporated territory across city lines is
a world apart. These county sections usually look different, smell
different and are different from the city. They are bad or good,
where people go to get away from the law, or go to get away from the
lawlessness of the big city.

The border of D.C. is arbitrary. As the population of the capital grew,
it spread. For all practical purposes, nearby Maryland and Virginia are
as much a part of the city as any part of the city itself. Most of the
residents of the suburbs work in the capital.

The entire area is really one municipality, though those living in
Virginia and Maryland can vote.

There are no caste or social lines between the District and the
suburbs. Society people may live in Washington, Virginia or Maryland.
Residences of high government officials are spread over the three. The
big wheels of the underworld are likewise scattered. The same overlords
control the rackets in the entire metropolitan district.

The state lines provide gangsters with yet another safeguard.
Extradition warrants are required to move them from one area to
another. For some specific crimes, the authorities are hampered by the
fact that no extradition is authorized. Smart lawyers take advantage of
these false barriers. For instance, each day’s collection of lottery
money in the District is moved into Maryland. Conversely, much of
Maryland’s bookmaking take is deposited in District banks. That is all
done on legal advice.

Technically, police officers in hot pursuit may cross state lines
to make arrests, even for traffic violations. But few crimes are
committed in the presence of a cop, and almost never any involving the
upper echelons of crime. The satellite regions are remarkably free
of Negroes, who prefer the city which they have all but taken over.
That’s why the suburbs grew in size to such extent that Silver Spring,
Maryland, adjacent to the District, of which outsiders seldom hear or
read, is now the second largest city in the state.

The suburbs run the scale from swank sections where only those of
great wealth reside to dingy squatters’ rows where moonshining, murder
and mayhem are daily dillies. Most of the ritzier suburbs are on the
Virginia side. Chain Bridge Way, Warrenton and Middleburg are peopled
by the horsey set, where there are great estates lived in by possessors
of ancient, honorable family names, as well as by the newly-made
aristocrats of the New Deal, union officers, left-wing lawyers,
five-percenters and State Department aides. Chevy Chase, partly in
the District, but mostly in Maryland, is tony, too. So is Bethesda,
Maryland.

But the great mass of suburbanites in both states are middle-class
government employes who commute to and from work, play bridge, go to
the movies and propagate.

As will be seen here, you can find almost anything in the way of crime
or vice in Washington, but what you miss can usually be met in some
of the Maryland suburbs when the heat isn’t on, especially in Prince
Georges County, which, for its size, probably has more slot-machines,
strip-teasers, resident hoodlums and general deviltry than any other
place in the world--subject to a “clean-up” in progress at this writing.

_A. Maryland_

This is the Free State, where anything goes.

Chicago has Cicero, Washington has Prince Georges County.

The same cause which gives Washington the unenviable lead as the Number
1 law-breaker among cities--public apathy--is what usually makes Prince
Georges County unique among county areas of the country. Washington
does not have the vote, the residents of Prince Georges do have it.
And they exercise it by usually voting Democratic and corrupt. Last
November they kicked over the traces for the first time since 1864.
But the Republican county commission won’t get far, even if it tries.

Without a dream of winning, the GOP nominated well-meaning nonentities
without a policy, organization or knowledge of the local problems.
Their victory was as surprising to themselves as to these reporters.

The facts for this chapter were gathered shortly before the November
election. The new county government was sworn in on December 5.
We returned to Prince Georges in early February for a recheck and
found little changed. The new sheriff, Carlton Beall, made ten raids
since New Year’s Eve. But the strip-joints still ran, though not so
blatantly. Instead of featuring the nudies in their ads, they gave them
second billing and headlined the male M.C. instead. But the babes were
just as bare.

The gambling was under wraps, too, but it still flourished. The big
gamblers took the precaution of moving their books and their bank
accounts back to the District, whence they had fled a decade ago.

The crime syndicate’s technique was to keep moving across county lines
from Anne Arundel to Howard to Prince Georges in the area near Laurel,
where the three join.

The militant Republicans fired the Chief of Police and appealed
to Senator Kefauver for aid. At this writing, the Senate Crime
Investigating Committee tossed the hot potato right back into Maryland.
One of Kefauver’s four colleagues on the Committee is Senator Herbert
O’Conor, Maryland Democrat, elected with the aid of the corrupt
Democratic machine so soundly trounced last November.

The second act of the new Republican commission was to hire another
Democrat to succeed the ousted Democratic Police Chief.

The Prince Georges border is a 15-minute drive from the heart of
Washington. Depending on the road you take out of town, you soon reach
Bladensburg or Colmar Manor. The latter is Rum Row, with several blocks
of dirty drinking-joints where wind-broken broads solicit drinks, roll
drunks and whore, often as a pastime when no dough is available.

If you go to Colmar Manor to spend money, Silver Spring in adjoining
Montgomery County is the place where you can get money. This is no
gag. The entire main street of Silver Spring and nearby Mount Rainier
in Prince Georges is lined on both sides from the District border
for more than a quarter of a mile with personal loan agencies. This
is because D. C. law makes it almost impossible for small loan firms,
which lend you money on your own signature or that of co-signers,
to operate. It so limits the interest rate as to make the business
unprofitable, fixing it at one percent a month. On the other hand, both
Maryland and Virginia are much more liberal with the loan companies.
The former allows three percent monthly and the latter two-and-a-half.
The Washington wage-earner, working for the government or privately
employed, does his borrowing across the borderline. If he should
default, the loans are collectable in the District, though its courts
are increasingly looking into the conditions under which the loan was
originally granted and refusing to issue judgments where they believe
the interest is usurious.

Most Washingtonians know Prince Georges County as a place to go to have
fun. This is not because Maryland’s laws, or even their enforcement,
are more liberal than the District’s. With few exceptions, they are not.

The legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 A.M. in both. No hard liquor
can be sold at all on Sundays. They cheat in Prince Georges.

Prince Georges County is lined with dumps that specialize in
strip-teasers. There are also many fag-joints. Peeling isn’t against
the law in Washington, either. It goes on in the 9th Street burlesque
houses when they operate, and at Kavakos’, near the navy yard. But
Washingtonians prefer not to patronize the nuders near home. Their
feeling of delicacy is overcome when they drive five miles.

Washington’s huge homosexual colony overflows up to the Baltimore
Highway and into a place called the Conga. Mike Young’s occasionally
specializes in fairy shows, too.

Prince Georges is a long strip predominantly devoted to gaiety,
night life, gambling and whoring. At this writing, one of its most
famous places is in a barnlike structure called the Crossroads. It
has strippers and corny shows. Its huge bar is loaded for a pick-up.
In case you do, but are not prepared, “sanitary rubber goods” are
dispensed in slot-machines in the men’s rooms. The night we were there,
we saw three fancy one-armed bandits whirring and swallowing. These
were manufactured by Bell, which means their take goes direct to Frank
Costello, instead of reaching him indirectly through other subsidiary
companies, which sell machines to local syndicates. The Crossroads is a
hangout for hoodlums. We recognized some well-known police characters
there.

One of its owners is local gambling overlord Snags Lewis, about whom
more later. Last year there was a shooting in the room, but Prince
Georges County Patrolman Burgess made no report because his father had
a piece of the place. Burgess is now off the force.

The Dixie Pig is a few yards down the road from the Crossroads. This
barbecue bazaar is a hangout for prostitutes and gamblers. It is owned
by Earl Sheriff, who, strangely enough, was the sheriff of Prince
Georges before he went to Lewisburg penitentiary on an income tax
charge, after pleading nolo contendere to protect the top shots.

Sheriff, now out on parole, is still electioneering, fixing and
collecting campaign funds for the local Democratic machine. He worked
hard for defeated Senator Tydings.

While Sheriff was having his troubles, Ralph Brown, late chief of
the Prince Georges County Police, settled with the government out of
court. The Democratic leaders of Prince Georges who were unaware of the
vice there, or blind, are Congressmen Lansdale G. Sasscer, T. Howard
Duckett, and T. Hampton Magruder. The latter two are attorneys.

Prince Georges County has a police force of 41 men, plus its village
and town cops. But the county never asks for State Troopers. That is
not surprising, because while we were gathering information for this
book the Prince Georges grand jury said there was no gambling in the
county. We saw a lot of it with our own eyes. Maybe state cops could
stumble on some of it. Maybe.

Clean-up or no, there usually are more floating crap-games, illegal
bookies and after-hour spots in Prince Georges than there are in Reno,
where all such things are legal. The Republicans may temporarily drive
them under cover--or back to the District--but those boys never stop.

The local Democratic machine was so powerful that, in 1947, the United
States Department of Justice had to intervene directly with Maryland’s
then Governor Lane to close down some joints. State troopers quickly
shut all gambling houses--save one run by Mike Meyers, who was too
cantankerous even for them. They finally drove him out by stationing
police-cars around his joint every night, and taking the names of
customers. After the heat was off, however, the county reopened wide.

The Prince Georges underworld was ruled until his death last year by
Jimmy La Fontaine, who is known in gangland circles to have been a
20-percent partner with Frank Costello, the Mafia boss in New York, who
handled the other 80 percent of the Prince Georges take. La Fontaine
was a big financial backer of the local Democratic machine, though his
own plush gambling casino across the street from the District line
is now closed, pending probate of his multi-million-dollar estate by
Attorney Charlie Ford, who gets the cream of all gambling, whoring and
other organized criminal cases in the District of Columbia, Maryland
and Virginia.

Now the underworld is run by lieutenants of those who operate as vice
overlords in Washington. Among them are Monk Seal, the bookmaker, who
also has a piece of the Crossroads, and the aforementioned Mike Meyers,
who handles the dice end. Snags Lewis is the local representative of
the nationwide horse wire service, owned by the heirs of the late Al
Capone, and is Frank Costello’s direct representative.

Policy-slip collections in the District are paid off to Pete Gianaris
at night at the close of business. Gianaris is an interesting character
who ran a $50,000 party in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel to
celebrate the christening of his young son. This was cheap, considering
that he imported such expensive Broadway stars as Buddy Lester to
entertain the cream of local society. He is a beloved, big-hearted
citizen.

The Costello interests were operating hundreds of slot-machines in
Prince Georges. Some years ago, they were legalized by local option,
but they remained contrary to state law, which was not enforced. Some
locals, pushed out of the picture by Costello’s strongarm boys, started
a tax-payers’ suit in the state courts and the Prince Georges local
option law was thrown out. But some of the officials apparently haven’t
heard of the decision yet.

That is not so surprising, since the sheriff, who seldom finds
time to enforce the state laws, is busy applying the lash and
cat-o’-nine-tails. Archaic Maryland law provides for whipping some
classes of prisoners, the sheriff acting in person.

Among other joints in the county is one called the Hilltop, in
Hillside. It was formerly a barbecue pit, now is a snake pit--a noisy
madhouse catering to school and college kids who want to see what the
well-undressed peeler isn’t wearing. The Quonset Inn, also in Prince
Georges, is run by the Chinese syndicate of the District, which has
established perfect harmony with the white bosses. You can see naked
women at the Senate Inn, Waldrop’s, and occasionally at La Conga.

Meanwhile, the temporary exodus of Prince Georges gamblers has
stepped up wagering activities in other nearby Maryland counties.
Montgomery, mainly residential, with swank Chevy Chase and hard-working
middle-class Silver Spring, woke up to find its Elks’ Club the victim
of a police raid.

Then Sam Morgan, also of Silver Spring, described as one of the most
important gamblers in the area, was locked up by State Troopers
when they swooped down on “lay-off” establishments near Laurel Park
and Ellicott City. These were nerve-centers for the transmission of
contraband money in and out of the District. Morgan drew a suspended
sentence. No one ever goes to jail.

The Baltimore Highway houses many tourist cabins, where pleasure-bound
Washingtonians can drive and hire a room without baggage for $3, if not
using it all night. A big turnover is the gravy for these guesthouses.
A few cabin resorts are reserved for Negroes only.

The Negro population of this part of Maryland is comparatively small,
most of its members doing menial or service labor for the white folk.
However, the well-heeled boys of Washington’s colored set like to drive
up the road a bit with their dusky dames in their Cadillacs.

The nearest amusement park to the city of Washington is Glen Echo,
about seven miles away, in Maryland. This is the typical smalltown
Coney Island, with swimming-pools, crazy rides, dancehalls, hot dogs
and the inevitable pick-ups. Many professionals work the park in the
summer, but they are outnumbered by the forlorn femmes from Washington
who come there in pairs or even larger parties, looking and hoping.

_B. Virginia_

The Virginia suburbs present a more respectable exterior, though under
the surface there’s plenty going on. The policy of the Old Dominion is
policy.

Virginia’s laws do not permit the sale of hard liquor for on-premises
consumption. Only beer and wine may be drunk that way. Hard stuff
must be bought at liquor stores and taken out. This isn’t conducive to
anything like gay night life. Virginians go into the District or up to
Maryland if they want hi-jinks. Otherwise, most of their fun-making
takes place at house parties. There are a few dives. But the after-hour
“bottle-clubs” which plague Washington are to be found in Virginia too.
One of these is the Commonwealth at South Pitt and Wolfe, in Alexandria.

The average resident of Virginia’s suburbs is financially a step or two
above his Maryland neighbors. There are more fine homes and estates on
this side of the river. The Negro problem is not so incendiary, because
this is Virginia, where Jim Crow is king by statute, and colored people
live in restricted areas and behave, or else. This is one of the
reasons why the Negroes floated into the District, where they changed
places with the whites, who overflowed back into Virginia. Remarkable
was Prince Georges 64-percent population increase in the decade; but
Arlington County, Virginia, had 125 percent.

The absence of night life in the nearby Virginia suburbs has been
noted. This minimizes prostitution. Gambling is an important industry,
as it is all over the nation.

Virginia authorities are disturbed by an influx of bookmakers and
policy-sellers, white and black, from the District. Recently a Negro
woman was arrested in Arlington with $3,000 in a paper bag, which was
picked up that day in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters--for numbers
bets.

Sam Lano, who used to operate the Syndicate slot-machines in Prince
Georges, is president of the Arlington Music Corporation, which flooded
the county with pinball machines, many being used as gambling devices
by local merchants. Lano came here from New York two years ago. Over
a year ago he was convicted in Marlborough Circuit Court for having
threatened a Prince Georges tavern-owner with prosecution on a bad
check if he didn’t keep Lano’s machines in his place. He was sentenced
to a year and his conviction was upheld by the Maryland Court of
Appeals. So far, however, Lano hasn’t served one day in the cooler, and
no effort was made to detain him when he transferred his operations
to Virginia. The police of Bangor, Me., are looking for him for the
removal and concealment of mortgaged property.

Considerable moonshine liquor is available in the Virginia suburbs. It
comes from stills operated in the mountains in the western part of the
state, and from Georgia.

On the whole, you might compare this area to the best of Westchester,
or Chicago’s North Shore outskirts, or Beverly Hills. That doesn’t mean
there isn’t plenty of dirt. It does mean it has to be something special
before it hits print.

Meanwhile, considerable friction is developing as well-heeled
northerners flock in; a repetition of the carpetbag days.

10. UNCLE SAM: LANDLORD

This is Washington’s largest segment--the federal domain. More than
40 percent of the property in the District is owned by Uncle Sam.
(Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands is said to be the largest private
owner of real estate in the District. She owned the huge Westchester
apartments, but sold the property recently to Hilton.)

Though not contiguous, it has an entity of its own. It is immune from
local law. That is important, because some federal property oozes
across District borders, such as the Pentagon and the National Airport,
both on the Virginia side.

To complicate the confused problem of law enforcement, this federal
potpourri has its own local police--not one force, but several. The
Capitol Police have jurisdiction on the Capitol grounds and several
blocks on either side, as far as the Washington Union station. The
Terminal Police police that. The White House Police are the cops for
the Executive Mansion and surrounding areas. They are under supervision
of the Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury. The Capitol cops are
under control of Congress itself. The terminal, owned by the railroads
and the government, picks its own bulls.

The Park Police are part of the National Park Police, a division of the
Department of the Interior. They are the law in the parks and squares,
on the boulevards, and on the road in Virginia leading to the Pentagon
and the Airport.

All other government buildings are policed by the Public Buildings
Police, a Treasury unit. The National Airport, in Virginia, has exempt
status. Its own cops not only patrol the grounds, but the main road.
The Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery and other military establishments in
the vicinity are under jurisdiction of the Armed Services Police.

Hundreds of thousands are employed in this federal domain. Many more
use its facilities or live in its lee. This makes the task of policing
almost too complex to be figured out by any court.

Elsewhere, when there is a conflict of authority over the situs of a
crime, both jurisdictions fight for the right to arrest and try the
accused. In the District it works the other way around. If it’s a
borderline case, both sides duck.

For instance, if you’re pinched for anything on or along the road
leading to the National Airport there is a conflict between the
National Park Police, the Airport Police, the local Virginia Police,
municipal and county police, and possibly, the MP’s. No one wants any
part of it. So there is merry law-breaking in this federal domain.

At this writing, 27,000 people are employed in the Pentagon. It is
a city within a city. Like all cities, it has its peccadillos. Many
elevator operators are runners for bookies. Many colored messengers,
male and female, sell policy slips. Reefers can be had. The cops--all
kinds--don’t know what to do about it. The military police don’t like
to arrest civilians, even those employed by the Army. The Virginia
police say they have no authority because it’s federal property.

The same apathy that marks everything in Washington pervades the
Pentagon and other federal buildings. A high Army officer, highly
placed because his brother is close to the President, is a homosexual.
He had gathered 95 other officers of similar inclinations to form what
was known as the “Fairy Brigade.” Though scandalously abnormal acts
have been committed within the Pentagon walls, no consequences ensued.
No one knew how to go about it. Instead, the suspected fairies were
transferred to distant posts--separately, of course--in the hope that
when they got into trouble in their new stations their commanding
officers would pick up the buck.

More recently a Signal Corps captain in the Pentagon was apprehended
lurking in the stair wells, where he exposed himself to young women.
The Army took the easiest way--transferred him to Fort Monmouth, where
he was eventually chased out of the service.

The same situation applies in all government buildings in the District
and in the suburbs. No one wants to do anything about anything. There
is scarcely a government installation anywhere in Washington where
you can’t place a bet or buy a numbers slip. When elevator jockeys
aren’t selling them, clerks and typists, white and dark, are. Dates and
assignations are made on U. S. property by government girls looking for
fun or extra earnings, and by come-getters who barge in and solicit men
for dates after work--even sometimes for affairs right on overstuffed
leather couches which we own, you too.

Any punitive action in these cases is not by police officers. When
things get out of hand, department heads fire the culprits.

While the Kefauver Committee was investigating bookmaking, two elevator
operators in the Senate Office Building, in which the hearings were
conducted, were taking bets on horses with full knowledge of most
Senators, many of whom were placing wagers.

That guy you see at the corner of 1st and B, outside the House Office
Building, talking to a cop, is a bookmaker’s runner. That’s his
station. That’s where typists, messengers and other help in the House
of Representatives lay it on the line.

Many have fallen into debt because of the convenience with which
they can place bets all day. Hundreds are in the clutches of the
loan-sharks in Maryland and the shylocks, who work their trade right
in the government office buildings, exacting 100 percent interest for
a one-month loan. Many are in arrears on their income taxes for this
reason; those who owe more than what is withheld. This has posed a
serious problem for the collecting authorities, who are balked by a
quirk in the law which forbids them to garnishee tax delinquents among
federal employes.

The indifference to rules that apply in private employment results in a
sort of Alice in Wonderland atmosphere throughout the unwieldy federal
domain.

Humorist George Dixon’s story about the two crews hard at work in the
Pentagon sums it up:

One crew puts up partitions. The other crew takes them down. The paths
of the two crews seldom cross, though there have been embarrassing
occasions when they arrived at the same office simultaneously on
conflicting missions. But that was the fault of “inefficiency” higher
up, not of the putters-up and the takers-down.

Retired brass which had come roaring back to the Pentagon found itself
assigned to broom-closets because many mere swivel-chair warmers had
commandeered enough office space for a bowling alley.

That’s why the Pentagon has two crews, working independently, day and
night. One makes offices bigger for new brass, the other makes them
smaller for the old.

The confusion is proving hard on fixed Pentagon employes. They suffer
severely from wet paint.

PART TWO

THE PEOPLE (_Confidential!_)

11. THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DAME

Women are the same everywhere, except in Washington, where they not
only are different, but there are more of them.

Females generally fall into two categories, good and bad--the good
being so because they can’t get the necessary masculine cooperation to
be bad.

We have seen them all, all over the world, but nowhere else are they
like they are in Washington. This town has 100,000 more nubile women
than men. Forty-five percent of all its females earn their own livings.
Most of them are government employes, and thus have better security
than is provided by a husband. Many support husbands, or assist toward
the expenses of the mutual establishment. Being self-supporting, they
are, on the average, better dressed than you’ll find them anywhere
else. That is on the “average.” There is little “high-fashion” except
in diplomatic and social circles, because government salaries are
average, not high.

Most Washington men are only fair wage earners, too, and that limits
the loot. It is not so easy to promote a mink coat in Washington as it
is in New York, though there are more minks per corpus in Washington
than are won, wangled or plain bought in Philadelphia, Chicago or
Boston.

Our capital is a femmocracy, a community in which the women not only
outdo the men in numbers, but in importance. Males hold more exalted
positions, but such work as is accomplished could not go on without
the efficient, well-trained and permanent secretarial corps, almost all
female.

Everything in Washington is slanted toward dames. The accent in the
stores is on things women do or buy for themselves, instead of on
home-furnishing and children’s clothes, which are the bedrocks of
department store trade in other cities.

Elsewhere, femmes are divided into specific classes. They are wives,
whores, glamor girls, home girls and office workers. Here none matches
her opposite number as you know her. The females in the capital defy
classification by other standards, and lap over into categories not
laid out by economic divisions or natural vicissitudes of physical
appeal. Prim, bespectacled bachelor-girl secretaries enlist as $10
call girls after hours or on Saturdays and Sundays--not for the money,
but for adventure, substitution for romance. A friend of ours had to
entertain visitors. He phoned for three call girls. When they arrived
he saw to his horror one was his secretary.

Washington’s biggest she-group is made up of G-girls, government girls,
who will be taken apart in later paragraphs. Running a close second
are O-girls, those who work for organizations, such as unions, charity
groups, scientific societies, trade and mercantile bodies, and those
who do the paper work for lobbies which maintain permanent offices here.

Washington proves that the emancipation of women is baloney. See what
happens here. They have jobs and make as much as most men. They have
the freedom to live alone and like it, but they don’t. They have
the opportunity to do vital work, to carve out careers in the civil
service, as some do. But all, including most of the married ones, are
desperately unhappy. They are caught in the unreality of this huge
farce. It can’t be a home, it can’t be a place to live in and love,
it’s just a rat race running the same course every day.

Tens of thousands of young and ambitious girls flock into Washington
from every state, territory and dependency, and from foreign nations.
There are even two from Samoa, pretty Laida and Marion Kreuz, whose
brother, Peter Coleman, is a policeman in the House Office Bldg., and a
night law student. The mass migration is similar in number, but not in
purpose, to that which occurs in New York and Hollywood and to a lesser
degree in Chicago and San Francisco.

The girls that come from the farms, the inland cities and the tributary
towns to the other great metropolises come with stardust in their
eyes. Having discovered that what they have is too good for the local
cow-manicurists, soda jerks and grease station monkeys, they assume it
can be used to start them on the road to fame and fortune in the big
city. Most fail to find the golden pot at the end of the rainbow or
even get anywhere near it in New York and Hollywood. The disappointed
fall by the wayside or return home and marry the mailman.

The psychological urge which uproots girls from their native
environments to come to Washington is the same, but its manifestations
are different. The youngster who pulls strings to get a government job
may be, and quite often is, prettier than her neighbor who hitch-hiked
to Broadway. But apparently she hasn’t the same confidence in her
charms as her brasher sister, so she goes to Washington instead.

The young ones who come to the capital to work for Uncle Sam are
on the whole better educated than kids who want to make careers in
show business. Most of them must have graduated from high school and
business school to get a government job. There are some among the
chorines who stuck a toe in a college, but all they need for success
is to know the difference between the right and left leg, and remember
when not to cross them.

Not all girls who come to Washington come to work for the
government. Not all are high school graduates. Washington draws more
street-walkers, who are strictly out for business, than any other town.
They set out from the nearby hills of West Virginia, Maryland and the
Carolinas, and they are purposeful as to their objectives. Many aren’t
bad-looking. So the question again arises, why didn’t they go to New
York or Hollywood and try for bigger stakes where flexible morals pay
off better and the field for a killing is bigger?

The answer again is--no confidence. They don’t feel important enough to
make good in the big league. They are afraid of the megapolis on the
Hudson. Washington has small-town ways and the whores are small-town
girls. Street-walking requires no influential connections, deals,
financial backlogs, tests, skills. They step off a bus and can be in
business before they pass a crossing.

The general belief is that when girls leave home they dream of going on
the stage. Washington proves that many leave home just to get away from
Home.

They have one commodity they can sell. And they don’t have to carry
samples in a briefcase. And they must go on the road for customers--too
many complications where they are well known, have families, church
connections, lovers or husbands.

12. G-GIRLS

_A. Government Girls_

About 200,000 women work five days a week for Uncle Sam. They come
from every corner of the nation. And no matter how long they remain
here, few of them ever really live here. They sleep in various kinds of
barracks, rooming-houses, rundown hotels, board with retired married
ones, and in all constitute a class so large and so displaced that the
city cannot absorb them as it does working-women in other communities.

They are not all physically repellant, nor do they behave generally
like spinsters are supposed to. The deadly monotony of their routine
tasks and their lonesome lives wears out their charm before it destroys
their looks. They are a hard, efficient lot, doing men’s work, thinking
like men and sometimes driven to take the place of men--in the
proscribed zones of desperate flings at love and sex. Lesbianism is
scandalously rampant, frequently an acquired dislocation rather than a
pathological aberration.

The existence of the average G-girl revolves between routine grind and
physical frustration. She leaves her job at five. If she goes home, it
is to her tiny room or apartment to heat her dinner out of tin cans and
ponder whether to wash her panties or write letters home, or get drunk.

It isn’t all wrapped up in the fact of the female overflow. Left-over
women can learn to do with half their share of men. But strangely,
where every guy ostensibly could take his pick and date alternately,
it doesn’t work that way. The Washington male clerks and middle-class
bureau employes largely avoid their opposite numbers. They, too, are
hall-room habitués, and they fraternize by some unwritten rule with
other men, usually normal men. Propinquity does not work its magic
here as the dominant factor in the mingling of the sexes.

Thousands of visitors and thousands of servicemen from nearby
installations, most of them dame-hungry, don’t have to hunt; they are
hunted. Not only that, but often they are paid, and seldom are they
allowed to pick up checks without a struggle.

One of the sights of Washington is the outpouring of the janes at five
o’clock. Many of them dash for cocktail bars, where they compete with
the harlots, who violently resent them and call them “scabs.”

A favorite after-work guzzle-and-grab spot is the Cafe of All Nations,
in the Mayfair House, at 13th and F. Wise men in the mood are there
awaiting the stampede--not only for pleasure, but for the gigolo’s
mite. Men and women are paid the same for equal work. Therefore the
income is high for females and low for males as such things are usually
adjusted. We gave the place a play at the right time and sat at a table
with a third man who had come with us. A waitress shuffled up to us,
and in voice and manner characteristic of an old-timer doing a familiar
task, said, “The young ladies at the next table would like to buy you a
drink.” We nodded, the potables were delivered, our hosts raised their
glasses, and soon they joined us. We had another round, and when we
insisted on taking the tab, not only for our drinks but theirs, too,
they left us; they knew we weren’t “regular.”

A T-man in the course of a check turned up one instance where 12
G-girls had banded together and were keeping one man, in an apartment
on Q Street.

Of course, among hundreds of thousands there are thousands not so
situated. Many are beautiful, their intelligence is beyond the average,
and even humdrum government work cannot make eunuchs of all men.
Desirable girls quickly find that they get preferential receptions and
promotions even in civil service examinations. There is a middle-aged
woman with a superior position in the General Accounting Office, who
has risen because she functions as the procurement officer for members
of Congress and other dignitaries. The G-gals hear about her specialty,
get in touch with her, and if they have appeal they find fun and get
ahead. Outstanding ones are sometimes invited to entertain legation
attachés or visiting celebrities.

Second-class lobbyists, who cannot finance dazzlers in the top
echelons, have lists of typists and file-clerks and secretaries who
are happy to be taken out, or taken in, and are not prissy over how an
evening winds up.

Beyond these escapes from a circumscribed daily existence, there is
nothing else. A couple of gals will walk the Mall on Sunday, hoping to
get picked up; or they join a church, or go to one of the countless
dances held during the winter season by state societies, where they
find everyone else as desolate as they are; or they scrimp and save all
week for a thrilling breakfast-lunch on Sunday at the Statler, where
they find to their dismay everyone else in the room is a government
girl, too, and stranded for company.

Many secretaries of Senators, Congressmen and executives are their
office wives. All Congressmen’s offices contain sofas paid for by the
Treasury.

These females, when they arrive, usually have accents, idiosyncrasies
and dress foibles peculiar to their regions of origin. They quickly
fall into the common mold. This is not surprising to your authors, who
for years have been writing about Broadway showgirls. Within six months
after one leaves the farm to join the chorus, she has acquired a new
veneer which covers all she brought with her. You can’t, in any one
chorus-line, classify the girls, except by their current hair shades.
They are as uniform as if they wore uniforms.

The government is like a chorus; instead of 20 girls there are 200,000,
and they all talk the same--mainly about favoritism shown to another
by the immediate superior whom they accuse of sleeping with her. They
dress the same--usually in suits. They eat the same--salads and dainty
desserts. They live the same--in spick and span tiny rooms, with
intimate wash hung on the line in the bathroom, which does triple duty
as a kitchenette. They drink the same--martinis.

Their sex-lives are remarkably alike, too. Some are afraid they will.
Others are afraid they won’t. And it all boils down to the same
sustained jitters, but in different wrappers.

The G-girl is in an unnatural vacuum. She has no time-limits; her
sentence is for life, usually. She isn’t home and she isn’t away. Her
marriage outlook is bleak. No family ties console her. She is more
often wooed by women than by men.

She makes a mockery of the theory that a woman’s first instinct is for
security.

_B. Girls with Glamor_

Let it not be surmised that government-girls are all the girls. There
are wives and fiancées, college co-eds, a sprinkling of debutantes and
other daughters of the rare society clans, smart saleswomen, even a few
presentable sob-sisters.

But the true glamorette, as she is known on Broadway and Fifth Avenue,
Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, and even in such remote oases of joy
as Galveston, Texas, is virtually non-existent.

Chorines are but a memory of leg and lavender for the old inhabitants.
Except for a rare transitory line in a night club, there is no such
thing. Occasionally an imported single or sister-act plays the
vaudeville house. Some of the painted peelers who work in the suburban
dives sleep in Washington hotels. A movie celeb popping in for
publicity, to attend a birthday ball or be photographed smiling down on
Truman from the top of a piano, is an event. If there are any gorgeous,
dangerous, slinky spies, we didn’t find them. Judy Coplon, by the men
who specialize in the field, was called exceptionally lush for that
trade. So we stopped looking.

The indigenous flora shape up about as they do in Brooklyn, except that
they are better dressed and have less sooty complexions. They do not
come downtown in slacks. Sloppy galoshes are de trop. Most girls at 16
appear and behave grown up.

But few can enter the accepted avenues where beauty may command a
respectable commercial return. In any ranking hierarchy of glamor the
model comes first, having long since passed the chorus girl, because of
the more stable rewards and higher standards brought about by the great
advertising demands. Washington has little need for animated manikins.
Some of the choicer shops employ them to demonstrate clothes. There is
no extensive advertising field.

The most lucrative and the steadiest calls for models come from sources
not seeking those who might be employed in industrial cities for
modeling. They hook on as hostesses, guides, ushers, and to decorate
the booths and exhibits at conventions and trade shows, which are
numerous. Those who are engaged sporadically earn a minimum of five
dollars an hour, plus indeterminate tips. Their morals vary with the
personal equation. The models who are willing to pose in the nude
at stag-parties get fifty dollars an evening. These register with
surreptitious characters of the middle-world between flesh-market
procurers and shady promoters.

Among the better-known models’ agencies are Models Bureau, in the
Chastleton Hotel; Ralston, 711 14th Street, NW, and Phyllis Bell, 306
13th Street NW.

The girl who sets out to be a model in Washington is usually one of
those rare creatures--the native. An out-of-towner with such ambitions
would naturally head to New York.

(_Note_: Most model agencies are schools instead of employment
agencies. They seek to sign job-seekers to contract to learn how to
walk, instead of sending them out to work. Some, billing themselves as
agencies, provide girls--but not for modeling.)

Another reason for the shortage of really high class cheesecake is that
there is almost always a displacement movement in effect.

The trains and planes to Hollywood are loaded with lookers, sent there
with entree obtained for them by such influential VIP’s as cabinet
officers, four-star generals, bureau heads, etc. When a prominent daddy
gets fed up with his dame, he can’t just brush her off; she might make
trouble, and that might get into print.

So the procedure is to phone Hollywood, where a liaison contact is
instructed to obtain a job at a studio for the chick. The big film
companies employ scores of so-called “contract” gals at $150 a week or
so, who do nothing but pose for publicity stills, date chosen visitors,
like out-of-town exhibitors, and otherwise make themselves useful and
amiable around the lots. One in a thousand rises and may become a star.

The movie industry is always skating on such thin ice, what with
anti-trust laws, etc., that a request from Washington is a command. So
it’s a happy out all around. Mr. Big gets rid of his discarded girl,
she goes willingly because no girl can turn down a film contract, and
Hollywood stores up a favor for the next time it needs one.

Many girls with talent originated here but they scrammed as soon as
they were old enough to know better. Among them were Helen Hayes, Kate
Smith and Mary Eaton, all members of the St. Patrick’s Players.

Washington has no clubs or theatres with lines of girls. The best a
babe with light feet can do is get in as a teacher at a dance studio,
quite a business in Washington. The local classified phone directory
has four pages of listings of dance instructors. That’s because dancing
schools are a swell way for lonesome people to meet each other, and
that’s what Washington has plenty of. The local Arthur Murray licensee,
across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, is the largest Arthur
Murray studio in the world. At least 2,000 girls find full or part-time
employment working as instructors in the dozens of studios. Many of
these girls are little more than taxi-dancers.

Pretty, personable ones can make up to $100 a week with tips. Those who
take dates after hours do even better.

The real Washington glamor girl is the kept woman. You’d be surprised
how many there are. All the bigger hotels and the glossier apartment
houses around Dupont Circle and out Connecticut Avenue are loaded with
them. They are the ones you most often see in mink coats, in expensive
beauty parlors and fine shops. They are maintained mainly by important
government officials, Senators, sports and millionaires from all
over the country who make their headquarters in Washington. Many an
executive who commutes to the capital keeps a cutie there full time.

All Washington giggled when it heard the story of the tall, stately
blonde whose bills were paid by a Cuban sugar millionaire, and who fell
in love with an assistant manager of the Shoreham Hotel, where she was
living in high style. Her Latin lover found her in flagrante delicto
with the hotel employe. The men squared off for a fist fight, but
first locked the babe in a clothes closet. They blacked each other’s
eyes--but she fractured her ankle trying to kick the door down.

To add to the embarrassment of the unhappy Cuban, his wife had been
spying on him and his love through high-powered binoculars from Rock
Creek Park, across the street. She sued him for divorce in New York.

A genuine glamor-gal does pop up now and then. One was Evelyn Knight,
the radio and record star, who warbled for $75 a week in Washington
hotels until a couple of years ago, then clicked in Manhattan and is
now dragging down thousands.

Bette Woodruff, another home-grown dish, seems to be on the upgrade. A
dress model, Bette had a yen to sing. One day, on a dare, she phoned
maestro Dick Williams to tell him she was available. He didn’t know
her from Eve, took her name to shut her up. Next day his vocalist got
sick. He phoned Bette in a hurry. That was less than a year ago. Now
she’s thrushing regularly, and well.

But Jan Du Mond, a five-foot-three night club canary, pianist and
composer, drives a cab by day.

“My little coupe broke down,” she told a reporter. “I couldn’t afford
a new car. Becoming a taxi-driver provided me with transportation at
night to get to my engagement--the company lets me take the car home.”

Besides, she meets the most interesting people!

Sometimes a government gal switches to a glamor gal. One was Sandra
Stahl, “Miss Washington,” in last fall’s Atlantic City beauty contest.
Sandra was a secretary for Air Force Intelligence, but she has a face,
a figure, a noodle and a voice. She was the dark horse when she sang
before 3,000 people in Rock Creek Park, but 14 judges, including the
Treasurer of the United States, sent her to Atlantic City.

Sandra comes from Long Beach, California. In our “New York,
Confidential,” we noted that many of Gotham’s orchids on display come
from Southern California. Maybe Sandra got on the wrong train.

13. COMPANY GIRLS

This is a specialty known only to Washington.

With the procuring situation as it is, the business of getting girls
for fun, friendship, or what have you in mind is so commercialized,
it’s incredible.

In our excursions into life in New York and Chicago, we found that
girls you pay for an evening can be divided into two classes:
party-girls and call-girls.

You summon the former, but they are not necessarily whores. You whistle
for the others only when there’s to be a party.

If this seems contradictory, it’s because the dividing line is so
tenuous, it usually isn’t there. But for our purposes, we shall group
them together and call both “C-girls,” which stands for company girls,
which is just what the womanless men who call them want them to be.

There are as many kinds of C-girls as there are kinds of women. They
range from the lowest, who will come to your room for $5 for a quickie,
to the most ultra, who expects $100, plus expenses, as a fee for her
company for an evening, and nothing guaranteed. If it happens, it must
be romanced or financed with honorarium.

The C-girls include the cheapest cocottes and some of the smartest,
prettiest New York models. The only thing they have in common is you
can phone them or someone who acts as an agent to make a deal, sight
unseen, for their presence. The more they get the less they give. The
true party-pretty undertakes only to appear for the evening, maybe
entertain an important customer or that Congressman who’s going to
investigate you or that general who places the orders. The call-dames
are cheaper and more reliable.

They are available from all hotel bell-boys. A friend who lives
in Washington said they weren’t necessary, for you can find a
street-walker on any avenue or a hustler at almost any bar. We asked
how about the transient, who doesn’t know that, so doesn’t know
where to look, or is afraid. The bell-captain, who can get anything,
including booze after hours, is the functionary out-of-towners over the
age of puberty call. Using his services also means no raid from the
hotel dick, who is an ally.

Lobbyists have lists of company-girls whose services they utilize as
required. They exchange names with each other, so most of them have
a master-list. In addition, there are agents, quite often apparently
respectable, middle-aged women, who run “secretarial bureaus” that
supply company-girls, often do contract businesses with large users,
whom they bill by the year.

The secretarial bureau is important in the blind date business in
Washington. Without much trouble, you can get the kind of girl you want
by calling almost any of them. The procedure is this: You phone for
a stenographer to be sent to your hotel room. She, however, is never
the “date.” After giving her a nominal amount of dictation, you remark
you are alone and friendless. She tells you one of her girl friends is
lonesome, too, and would consider a date. You wait in. She arrives.

A problem for those who must entertain men of class is the low quality
of the female commodity obtainable except from specializing agencies.
Government gals, many of whom are on call, are superior intellectually,
have better manners, though the professional predators run prettier.
With the short supply of charmers, those who maintain a superior
standard import them. Many big lobbyists and others who entertain
frequently have lists of New York models and showgirls who will come
down to Washington for fun, expense money, and maybe a mink.

There is a middle-aged woman in New York, who gives her name as Mrs.
Hansen, who makes regular monthly trips to such Eastern cities as
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, where she meets prominent
businessmen and offers to introduce them, at a fee of $10 each, to
any of a hundred Powers and Conover models whose photos she has in
a scrapbook and whose names she has on a typewritten sheet. She
guarantees to produce any girl thereon in Washington within 24 hours,
the girls to receive $100 and expenses for each day’s company.

But that is still run-of-the-mill. A babe named Teddie, with an
apartment in the building on the southwest corner of 16th Street, in
the 1600 block, handles knockouts, some married, for as much as $250 a
night.

Virginia Wall, who lives at 2500 Q Street (phone Hudson 8783) at this
writing, was chosen by those who know her as--“the most promising
younger company-girl in Washington.” She knows many other company girls.

Florence Bowers, a Southerner who lives at 1716 Newton St., phone
Hobart 5634, is a well-known company girl who will get others when
needed.

Elizabeth Morley, 2124 P St., phone Hobart 7421, will get company-girls.

Mary Lou Vane, 1205 Clifton St., NW, is a superior company girl.

Washington has its corned beef and cabbage, but don’t say we don’t
bring out its caviar.

14. FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES

It may startle you, though not necessarily stop you, to know what very
few know--it is a felony to transport a female one step up or down or
sideways in the District of Columbia with what grandma used to call
“dishonorable intentions.”

The Mann Act was invented by a Chicago blue-nosed representative named
Mann, after a hophead parlor-whore in melodramatic mood threw a note
out of the window of the late Harry Guzik’s cathouse on which she had
written “I am a white slave.” A milkman found it and turned it in at
the 22nd Street police station. A puritanical young prosecutor named
Clifford Roe, instead of laughing, made it so scandalous that the
term “white slave” became the common synonym for a prostitute. Mona
Marshall, the girl, was no slave at all, and when she came out of her
fog she proved it. Her case history showed that she had been seduced
in Wisconsin and brought to Chicago and placed in the house, quite
willingly, by a traveling man who thought it was wasteful to give it
away.

That came out in testimony and Congressman Mann fathered the law making
interstate transportation a penitentiary offense. Too many jokes about
crossing state lines have gone into the legend since then for anyone
not to understand the possible consequences of taking ’em in one state
and making ’em in another. But what has been very sparsely advertised
is a phrase in the Mann Act which states, “or on federal territory.”
Washington is federal territory.

So, if you meet one in the lobby and take her up in the elevator,
you’re a candidate for Atlanta.

This clause has been enforced with ultimate results. But for many
years, by unwritten policy, the Department of Justice stopped paying
attention to private, non-commercial infractions. But in no way has the
letter been ameliorated, and at any time this statute could be applied,
as the income tax evasion law was used to convict murderous gangsters,
if an Attorney General so instructs. It can be used without even the
technical provisions required to substantiate an attempted rape. The
language states, “for immoral purposes.” Such purposes need not be
successful. There is a mistaken notion that paying a female’s fare has
something to do with it. It has not, except as evidence of the intent,
which is the res gestae.

Let it not be assumed that this is a major deterrent for the Washington
wolf, before whom is spread a field alabaster with white lambs
generously interlarded with black sheep. Yet the fine art of subtle,
sophisticated flirtation, with skill, poise and aplomb, which has
illuminated the finest works of the masters through the ages in every
form of expression, seems extinct here.

Those in residence are boors; the transients are in a hurry; and the
distaff defense being negligible, no true swordsman deigns to fence
when he can hit a broad on the head with the handle.

Chief among Washington ladies’ men is handsome Warren Magnuson,
bachelor Senator from the state of Washington, where some of his I.W.W.
constituents would probably kick over the traces if they saw the
highfalutin’ fillies he runs with in Washington. The Senator is a man
among men, with the reputation of seldom wooing one girl at a time. He
often entertains several in one evening in his Shoreham apartment. We
know. They talk.

Not all wolves are single. We will not divulge names, or tell how
they cover up. Your imagination will picture how easy it is in a town
where so many are seeking favors, to get a stooge to come along as the
cutie’s alleged “date,” while the principal apparently came along only
for the ride.

Not all wolves, of course, are Senators or such with official immunity.

A simple way to get acquainted is to watch the papers for announcements
of State Society dances. Most lonesome G-gals belong to these
societies, composed of expatriates from their home states. Once every
week, throughout the year, one of these groups throws a party or a
dance. Admission is open to all. The Officers’ Service Club dances are
swell, too.

At this writing there are no public ballrooms of the type of Roseland
in New York or the Aragon in Chicago, not because they’re illegal,
but because they have been unprofitable. In the summer this lack is
filled by moonlight cruises of the Wilson Steamship Line on the river.
The boats leave from the 7th Street wharf nightly, at 8:30, and the
charge, including dancing, is one buck. Plenty of unattached women go.

The Potomac is mighty important to wolves. Practically the last of the
night-boats in the country plies from Washington to Old Point Comfort
and Norfolk, Virginia, summer and winter.

In years gone by, the fabled Albany and Fall River boats to Boston
could have told such stories.

Steamers of the Old Bay Line charge $4.67 each way, with staterooms at
from $1.50 to $5.50.

Last fall, a couple of evangelists chartered a Wilson liner for an
evening prayer service on the Potomac. Many pious people showed up, but
so did a swarm of scarlet sisters.

With all the game flying low you’d scarcely think it worth while for
entrepreneurs to promote stag-parties. Yet many hotel ballrooms are
engaged for shows at which talent, imported from Baltimore, is seen and
appropriately appreciated. These nude nymphs perform also at Waldrops
on Rhode Island Avenue, across the Maryland line.

Lots of smooth, mysterious guys in Washington, not pimps, make livings
introducing lonesome men to pretty babes. One, named Al Walters, ran
a series of dances called the “UN Victory Girls.” He was investigated
by the Washington vice-squad, which found nothing illegal, though it
did determine that his net income from promoting these get-togethers
was $325 a week. Walters is still around town, always surrounded by
eight or ten pretty bimbos, usually blonde, and he can get to the right
people because he is a great introducer.

Young love gets a break in Washington, too, because the burg with its
environs is small-town in construction, with front and back porches,
lawns and alleys, and plenty of dark streets and nearby country nooks
to drive to. Chief among the lovers’ lanes are Hains Point and the
Anacostia Flats, along the Anacostia River, where the Bonus Army of
’32 made camp. Not all who court Eros in these secluded spots are
juveniles. Many adults take their occasionals there, especially white
men afraid or ashamed to check into free-for-all assignation houses.

We got the following story from a cop who worked the case. A
blonde waitress at the Copacabana restaurant, a rendezvous for
Latin-Americans, went with a stranger in his car to the Anacostia
Flats. A woman’s screams tore the night air. Startled householders in
the vicinity, rape-conscious because of the front-page sex murder of
a girl the day before, phoned police. The squad car cops sped to a
surprised girl and an embarrassed gent. “I always scream at a time like
that,” she elucidated, with indignation.

WISDOM OF A WASHINGTON WOLF

When you see someone waiting for a bus or streetcar, it’s considered
polite to offer a lift in your car. Washington gallants are very
polite, especially if the hitch-hiker is cute.