Chapter VIII: Part TWO: THE PEOPLE (Confidential!) (3)

Neighborhood stores adjacent to schools also purvey bootleg liquor and take bets from the juveniles, not only for their own school games, but on the horses and numbers.

Juvenile delinquency is almost as bad in the suburbs. There kids have cars, and “hot rod” races are common.

Youngsters ape their elders when they see the callousness of parents to the processes of law. Laxity, favoritism, New Deal “liberalism,” a general spirit of contempt for law enforcement are reflected in the growing generation. The solid virtues are “old hat.” Youth is on a rampage.

Washington has no monopoly on young criminals, but it has more of them per capita than any other city in the nation.

Lame-brains like to point out that only colored people are confined to “slums” in Washington; that no whites live in ghettos in the capital. If so, how come that juvenile delinquency among the whites is as startling as among the blacks, more so, in fact? As reported elsewhere in this book, Washington’s crime rate leads the nation. It is all the more startling to discover how many of these crimes are committed by children.

19. BOOZE AND BOTTLES

Washingtonians imbibe three times as much as you do, friend voter. Except for a few silly restrictions, no place in the country offers as many inducements to the potential alcoholic. The answer is, 14,151 drunks last year created a jail “housing crisis.” The number more than doubled in the last five years. Liquor consumption of the District is three times the U. S. average. Every resident, including new-born infants, soaked up almost four gallons of hooch last year.

Even allowing for thirsty tourists, conventioners, and Virginia and Maryland commuters, Washington drinks more than any other U. S. city, including dissolute New York and debauched Chicago.

This is the place where price control was invented, yet the District has no peacetime minimum price law on bottled goods. You can buy standard brands for a dollar less than anywhere else. Many unnamed whiskeys and gins are cheap; it doesn’t pay to cook your own. Whiskey costs less than $2.50 a fifth, and gin can be bought for $1.75. Yet the bootleg business is a major industry. Millions of gallons sold in the District, on which no tax was paid, swell the known figures.

The liquor control situation is an anomaly. Like the District of Columbia, itself, the liquor laws were born of compromise, this between Congressmen from the wet and bone-dry states.

You can drink hard liquor in restaurants and cocktail lounges, but only when sitting at a table. Beer and wines may be dispensed over the bar, but not to standees. You’ve got to find a stool. Some genius figured you can’t get plastered sitting down, forgetting that many who drink and sit can’t stand up again.

Hard liquor may not be sold on Sundays, though beer and wine can be. Bars can remain open until 2 A.M. every night except Saturday and Sunday, when they must shutter promptly at 12. You can’t line drinks on your table; anything in your possession at the closing hour will be swept out of your hand. Most places issue the last call 15 minutes before the limit and in that final quarter-hour there are wild drinking scenes as customers try to get drunk all at once.

Liquor for off-premise consumption is sold in bottle stores, of which there are about 350. They close at nine on weekdays and at midnight on Saturdays and all day Sundays. A package store license costs $815 a year, but it will cost you $50,000 to buy one, as the ABC Board has frozen the rolls.

Those who can’t get a bun on by closing time have no trouble locating an oasis after the curfew. At this writing there are 613 so-called bottle-clubs running in the District, in addition to hundreds of gin flats in Black Town, where almost any cab driver will steer you. Bootleggers work certain street corners, where you can buy bottle goods after hours.

The legal age minimum is 18 for beer and 21 for hard stuff, but this law, like almost all other rules and regulations, is breached more often than honored.

Citizens and Congressmen seek sporadically to rationalize local liquor laws, in hope of cutting down violations. But the dry bloc buries the bills in committees. Everyone was surprised when the House District Affairs Committee managed to bring up a bill permitting sale until two on Saturday nights. This turned out to be a piece of parliamentary jockeying in the fight against the President’s FEPC Bill, of all things. That law, obnoxious to Southerners, would have come up for a vote unless one with legislative priority could be sent in ahead. And that bill, according to the calendar, was a proposed law to liberalize drinking habits in the District. So the Southerners brought it up, side-tracked the FEPC, and, a couple of weeks later, when it came time to vote on the booze act, roundly routed it.

The thirsty visitor finds it easy to find a bottle-club and become a full-fledged drinking member on the spot. The names, locations and owners of these after-hour spots vary from day to day. Occasionally, after clean-ups, all or most close for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. As these words were written the District was recovering from its most painful drought, brought on by revelations before the District Crime Investigating Committee, headed by Attorney Fischbach.

The front-page stories forced the cops and U. S. Attorney Fay to close some joints. Others lay low awhile. A murder in the Hideaway Club didn’t help, either.

We made an intensive study of bottle-clubs. Of the score or more we visited, we found only one apparently operating legitimately and according to law. That was the Lyre’s Club, about which more later. Of the 600-plus such clubs in Washington, it is possible that a few adhere to the book, but we didn’t hear of them.

On paper, bottle-clubs are supposed to be membership organizations, incorporated for social and benevolent purposes. Members bring their own liquor, which is held for them, their names on the labels. The clubs sell setups and food.

Charlie Ford, a Washington attorney to whom we will have occasion to tip our hats in much more detail later, is the lawyer for a number of clubs. He officiated at their births.

Here’s how most of them really work. Regular patrons, i.e., “members,” are supposed to pay annual dues of about $10, depending on the club, but most regulars pay nothing. Transients, i.e., guests, are charged a door-fee of one or two dollars, depending on the club.

Setups are sold, to those who bring their own liquor, at a nominal price of 35 cents and up. If you haven’t your stuff parked or with you, most clubs will sell it to you under the counter or advise you it can be had from a guy seated in front of the entrance in a car.

These clubs are incorporated as non-profit private enterprises, not required to pay Federal amusement taxes even when they provide floor shows and dancing. Nor need they have ABC liquor licenses, because they are supposed not to be selling.

Many of them operate as follows: The prospective owner or owners and a couple of their friends or employes incorporate as a social or benevolent organization. The real owner then rents and furnishes the premises, which he in turn sublets to the so-called social club at a rent which will approximate all the “take” from membership and door charges. The “club” thereupon turns over the kitchen, the sale of setups and the hat-checking and cigaret stand to the real proprietor, as a concession, in return for a token payment, which in turn goes back to the proprietor with the rent.

In clubs that sell liquor illegally or provide gambling, records of such activities are not kept. The proceeds go directly into the owner’s pocket. If raided or threatened by cleanup drives, the clubs disband. The owner organizes a new club under the same terms and repeats the process.

A new twist is being added since the Fischbach exposé. Some club proprietors are making deals with units of legitimate bodies, such as veteran groups, labor unions, etc., whereby the clubs share some of the profits. One, the Amvets, closed after the Hideaway shooting, its Charter lifted by the national organization.

Bottle-clubs find customers in a variety of ways. Some employes of licensed night clubs and restaurants hand out guest-membership cards to patrons who inquire where they can go after two. These steerers write their names on the cards and draw a kickback for every customer, usually a dollar a head.

Many cab drivers shill for the bottle-clubs, as well as for gin flats. Cab drivers’ pay varies with the size of the party. They sometimes get as much as $5 a haul. They are the chief source of prospective patronage for the colored bottle-clubs. More than 500 after-hour spots in Washington are operated by Negroes or in the Negro district. All cater to blacks and whites. The twenty to thirty white bottle-clubs running are segregated as to Negro musicians and actors. In one club we saw three pretty blonde girls with two Negro men. They were all reefer-smokers, palpably.

Cabbies who hustle for the bottle-clubs not only do so in front of hotels and licensed cabarets and restaurants, but try to pirate customers away from opposition clubs. When they see a prospect waiting for the peephole to open, they tout him away “to a better place, where you won’t have any trouble.” The Hideaway, in Georgetown, depended almost entirely on such maneuvers, as it is far out and off the beaten track.

The pirates were acting so brazenly, police stepped in to curb the practice by giving tickets to drivers parked at strategic spots. The law requires cabs to cruise at all times, except in posted hack-stands, which are only outside major hotels.

Food, dancing, entertainment, and often dames are for sale at the clubs. Sometimes waitresses are available, but they work until 6 in the morning, by which time the average rounder has forgotten all about it. The price for a $10 girl picked up in a club is $20.

Some provide craps, stud poker and other games. The night we were there, a crap game ran on the top floor of the Atlas Club, on Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House, and at the Stage-crafters Club, another hangout of General Harry Vaughan. The Atlas applied for a private club liquor license, which would permit legal sales, but the application was held up by the ABC Board until the club president, Sidney Brown, who was abroad, could return for a personal appearance. It happened that Mr. Brown, the sponsor of this after-hour spot, was abroad because he is an employe of the State Department. Some months previously, gambler Gary Quinn said he was the president of the Atlas. The license was denied, so it is still running as a bottle-club.

Among the after-hour clubs operating at this writing are the Top Side, 501 12th Street, NW; the Guess Who, 811 L Street, NW; the Acropolis, 719 9th Street, NW (patronized by Greeks); the Culinary Arts, 307 M Street, NE, and the Yamasee, 1214 U Street, NW. The last two are colored clubs.

The most notorious of the after-hour-spots speaks, the Gold Key, was closed by Committee revelations. It has since reorganized as the Downtown Club, with some of the same characters. Most of the others are patronized by unimportant transients or night workers, such as musicians, waiters and bartenders.

The Gold Key got the cream and they’re back again. Among its regular patrons were local sports, including playboy Senators and officials. Waitresses there made as much as $150 a week in tips, whereas they are lucky to knock down $50 in other places. When lawyer Charlie Ford drew up the papers for the Gold Key, its original organizers were Albert Glickfield, alias Al Brown, Patsy Meserole, and Harry Conners, his brother-in-law. Meserole is a former New York gangster, one of the last surviving members of the late Legs Diamond mob. Glickfield is a gambler and associate of Frank Erickson. The accountant for this after-hour club was Henry W. Davis, a division head in the Accounting Division of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an agency of the U. S. Government.

Meserole left the Gold Key to open the Stagecrafters, 433 3rd Street, NW, and took a lot of the top political and theatrical business with him. His partner is Dominic Ferone, another ex-New York mobster. General Vaughan is a patron. It sells liquor openly and provides gambling, and waitresses will get women for them as wants ’em. Meserole testified under oath that many Congressmen and Senators were customers.

When Congressional investigations indicated the club was operated illegally, it was shuttered until the heat was off. But so heavy was the influence of its owners, through business ties with members of the New York Syndicate and the exalted position of its patrons, that as soon as the investigation shut down, the club reopened, not quietly, but brazenly.

We have before us an ad in a Washington daily which reads:

NOTICE....
Members and Their Guests
STAGECRAFTERS CLUB
NOW REOPENED
Same Place....
Same Policy....
Same Committees....
Same Benefits....
Membership Drive Now On
Help Get New Members!
EDWARD P. MESEROLE, Secretary

The Stagecrafters is the haunt of unsavory “introducers” who make contacts with wealthy chumps there, offering girls and gambling. Police recently arrested a lout, who, they charged, had become acquainted with William H. Engelmann, a photo-lithographer from Baltimore, out for a fling with friends in the Stagecrafters. The prisoner suggested a blackjack game and took him to a room in the Ambassador Hotel, which is owned by Gwen Cafritz’s husband. Engelmann was soon a $1,500 loser, and asked his host to cash a check. He said he would, at the hotel cashier’s booth, and left with Engelmann’s check. Engelmann became suspicious when the man didn’t return after an hour. He found the man had checked out. When the fellow was caught, police said, they found on him a deck of marked cards.

Another bottle-club that opened after the adjournment of the Congressional investigation is on the site of the Palm Grill, at 14th and Q, under a new name, the Sunrise.

The shuttered Turf-and-Grid was reborn as the aforementioned Amvets. The Turf’s owner, Richard O’Connell, has been employed by the government since the beginning of the New Deal, in such agencies as the original NRA, the Department of the Interior (under “Honest Harold” Ickes) and more recently in the Red-infested Wages and Hours Division of the Department of Labor.

Another club that operates on and off is the United Nations Social Club. When we visited it, its chief social activity was a crap game. Another is the Crystal Cavern.

When George P. Harding, a 39-year-old gunman and underworld fingerman, was shot to death by Joe Nesline, notorious Prohibition era bootlegger, in the Hideaway--an aftermath of last year’s conquest of Washington by the Mafia--Washington’s bottle-clubs took another shellacking.

Congressmen beat their breasts, newspapers shrilled, the DA promised action and the cops vowed to close all the joints. For a few days a couple of clubs went easy; at this writing most were again in action.

The Hideaway, scene of the crime, was reported “closed for good” by the precinct captain, but Joseph Horowitz, an owner, announced “business as usual” while the cops were telling everyone the premises were empty. At press time, the present and future status of the club was in doubt.

Legitimate clubs are a necessity until the District authorities amend the outmoded liquor laws. One which we liked is the Lyre’s. Most members of this club are night-workers whose hours are such that they could never get a drink or relax if they had no place to go after 2 A.M. Among them are musicians of the big hotels and night clubs, waiters, waitresses, hatcheck gals, government swing-shift people and visiting entertainers. We spent considerable time at the Lyre’s and noted everything was on the square. No patrons were permitted to enter who weren’t members or their guests, and no drinks were served except out of members’ bottles.

The Lyre’s is chummy. There’s a mainfloor bar and lounge and a basement dining-room and dance floor. Most of the musicians in town hang out there and put on jam sessions all night long. Its hosts are Vince and Mildred Carr, former Baltimore and Philadelphia night club operators. They have many friends in show business. The Carrs won’t tolerate hookers and drunks, allow no soliciting, gambling or hoodlums. But unfortunately the Lyre’s is unique.

Not all who want to drink late can afford to or can get into or know about bottle-clubs. Those who spend an evening in a licensed cabaret and find themselves still sober or out for fun at two, or at midnight on Saturday, are up against it. Licensed clubs and cocktail lounges can’t sell for off-premises consumption. If you tip your waiter liberally he will dig up an empty Coca-Cola bottle and let you fill it with the remaining liquor at your table.

Some people who run dry at midnight Saturdays drive to Maryland, where bars and package-stores close at 2 A.M.

Washington is loaded with bootleggers and blind tigers. We have already referred to the gin-flats in Black Town, where home-made gin--raw ethyl alcohol flavored with juniper and sometimes diluted with apple cider--is sold. Prices are reasonable, as low as 50 cents a drink and $3 a bottle. The flats, usually five- or six-room affairs, have juke-boxes. Parlor floors are cleared for dancing. Beds are handy. If cops come, it’s a private party. But cops don’t come.

We pulled up in our cab to the NE corner of Popner and U Streets, and waited five minutes. A colored man came over and asked us what we wanted. He had gin, Scotch and corn. We bought gin, trade-marked, $2.50 for a pint.

David Douglas Davenport, self-styled “Union Station bootlegger,” has been selling booze in the railroad terminal for years. He charges $5 for a pint of whiskey, which he keeps stashed in an automatic coin locker. Davenport has a record for court appearances, 115 in one year. He lost to the law once, and did two years in the District jail. The day he got out of the can he was in business in Union Station again and still was at this writing, though arrested again and out on bail.

Many after-hour bootleggers sell legitimate stuff, which they buy at Washington’s low prices, and retail at 100 or 200 per cent profit. Hundreds of other bootleggers, especially Negroes, dispense moonshine. Most of this is acquired from mob sources in Brooklyn and New Jersey, where the Mafia operates gigantic stills capable of producing thousands of gallons a day. According to Carroll Mealy, capable and efficient head of the Alcoholic Tax Unit, the rum-runners take this stuff to Washington in 1940 Fords, with Cadillac or racing motors in place of original power. This model is preferred for its carrying capacity, maneuverability and inconspicuous appearance. The souped-up motors can hit 120 miles an hour against pursuit.

Much moonshine is made in Washington, though none of the raided stills was found with a large capacity. The stuff is cooked at 2nd and G Streets, NW. But legitimate Washington sources supply liquor to be run into nearby dry and semi-dry states and counties.

Not all who buy from bootleggers get drunk. Some get robbed.

“The tough part about it was that I never got the whiskey,” Army Sgt. Filmore M. Broom, 41, moaned to police.

He said a Negro offered to sell him a bottle, but when the sergeant pulled out his wallet, containing $190, to pay, the Negro snatched it and ran--with the whiskey, too. This happened at 5th and Neal Streets, NW, and police are looking for a Negro with red suspenders and a white straw hat. No winter description available.

20. CAFE AU CORN

Foreigners who have never seen the United States dream of beholding its wonders, of which the first two are New York and Washington. They envision not the monuments or the Government Printing Office, but a glittering world capital swirling with diplomats in colorful costumes, officers in dress uniforms, and pageantry punctuated with dazzling dames of the haute monde and the demi-monde. For this is the capital of capitals, and it must have everything, including what none of the others has--dough.

If there is any spectacular life in Washington, that is not for the eye of the uninitiated stranger. The days are vapid and the nights are stupid. Washington is dominated by elected and appointed functionaries who are schooled to believe they must never be caught having fun. Therefore, after dark it is more like Paducah than like Paris.

There are many hotel grills and lounges, which are night clubs after a fashion, and some cafes; but their chief patronage depends on visitors and government dependents. Both classes are drawn largely from farms and villages, with only a minor proportion from centers of laughter and light. Washington’s night life is a dull, dismal and dreary reflection of our Main Streets, hard cider and juke-box roistering.

The few local sports and the free-fingered lobbyists seek their pleasure at private parties and behind closed doors of hotel suites, or fly northward to nearby New York with its El Morocco and the Stork Club.

The two principal night clubs in Washington are operated by Chinese, with American shows and dance bands. They are the Lotus and the Casino Royal.

Both are built for the mass-consumption trade, with popular prices and acres of dance floors. Hicks and tourists are dance-bugs. Dick Lam, host at the Lotus, is one of the town’s best-known and best-liked showmen. He was one of the original founders of the China Doll, in New York, and has uptown manners and know-how.

The Blue Mirror, around the corner, specializes in hot jive. Kavakos, as mentioned, features nudes, as does the Players, opposite the Center Market.

Not only can and do some Washington cabarets get away with stuff that would land their owners in the clink in New York, but there seems to be no police control or regulation of acts.

For instance, Billie Holiday, the Negro singer who has served time on narcotics and prostitution falls, is barred from New York night clubs through the ukase of the Police License Bureau, which fingerprints all entertainers and thumbs those with records out of town. But while this was being written, Miss Holiday was starring in Washington’s Brown Derby.

Washington caters to visiting theatrical celebrities. Hollywood stars, to whom the capital spells spotlight, are flattered by attentions of politicians who, in return for free shows and broadcasts, flatter them. This racket was invented by President Roosevelt, and, ever since, theatrical headliners have been welcome luncheon and dinner guests at the White House. In Washington they generally stay at one of the five leading hotels and may be found dining or drinking in the lounges and restaurants of the Mayflower, Carlton, Statler, Shoreham and Wardman Park. Autograph collecting is not a highly developed hobby in Washington; but some juvenile half-wits plant themselves outside the hotels when such celebs are in town.

There is nothing the equivalent of Morocco, 21, Colony, Stork, or Toots Shor’s. The Mayflower lounge, nicknamed “The Snake Pit,” is that--the mad gathering-place at cocktail time for the local celebs: the Senators, lobbyists, army brass and blondest cuties.

Most Washington night-life is as flat as those who patronize it. The headwaiters are off the beam. The major-domo of the Wardman Park’s Caribar, typical of most of the town’s, is so provincial he doesn’t know he could get rich trying to cater to the few spenders that stumble in. We watched him a whole evening and didn’t see him snare a buck.

Patrons of Washington supper-clubs are lousy tippers. Most smalltown Americans adhere to a strict ten percent. When they think they can get away with it, they stiff even that. Captains, headwaiters, cigaret gals and retiring-room attendants they ignore. Southerners are worse.

We were twitting one Senator from a border state about the free haircuts the tax-payers provide for the members of the upper house in their private barber shop. This Senator replied, in all seriousness, “It’s almost cheaper to go outside. When you get it for nothing, you gotta tip the barber.”

The best palm-warmers are South American diplomats, who apparently have no regard for American money. Lobbyists, who like to flash big bills, especially when they are entertaining impressionable legislators, run for place.

Few Washington waiters deserve much. The service they give is as terrible as the tips they don’t get.

Dance floors are crowded with jitterbugs. Rumbas never flowered in Washington. When a band plays one, flabbergasted hoofers try to jive to it.

Few clubs or rooms have rules against parties of unescorted women or stag men. If they did, they’d starve. It is not unusual to see half the tables in any room surrounded by all males or all females. The larger popular-priced clubs have signs on the tables reading, “Dancing permitted with your escort only.” This is a dead letter, or there wouldn’t be any dancers.

Prices are cheap compared with Gotham’s. A few hotels impose cover charges when they book expensive name acts.

No room has more than one band, which plays both for the show and the dancing. During intermissions, the silence is broken by noisy drunks. Like all towns with early closing, people get loaded early. In Washington serious guzzling begins at cocktail time. Many of those who drink are oafs who don’t know how to hold their hooch.

Most Washington saloon-goers are ill-mannered. On Saturday nights, when the last round is announced at 11:45, many arise as one and walk out, even in the middle of an act.

Washington has no cafe society. Its gathering places are utilitarian--for foods and drinks. No warm camaraderie, no light good fellowship, no wit, no animation. Corny commoners in stereotyped surroundings. Peoria on the Potomac.

21. CALL ME MADAM

This is a brief brush-off of the social parvenus who scrambled up as Society scrammed out--through death and Democratic administration.

Faded and forgotten are the days and nights when Washington was ablaze with social brilliance and the gossip behind the fans reflected the sturdy foibles and feuds and infidelities of a class in superior strata of lineage, wealth and those graces which cannot be acquired with sudden fortune.

Society is always the shadow of one luminous, scintillant, predominant woman, such as Mrs. Potter Palmer was in Chicago and the dowager Vanderbilt remained until senility denatured her in New York. In Washington that woman, even though she seldom entertains or permits herself to be entertained, must be the wife of the President. She need not be a Dolly Madison. She can be a recluse, a Quaker like Mrs. Herbert Hoover; a New England villager, like Grace Coolidge; a grande dame like Mrs. Benjamin Harrison or an Ohio hick like Mrs. Warren Harding. But she is the undisputed ex officio queen bee of the social life of the capital. She sets its tempo, she elevates with a nod and she extirpates with a frown.

Few Presidents’ wives would have won social preference had their husbands not squirmed through the labyrinthian catacombs with that miraculous luck which makes one man what they say any American boy can become. But once he takes that oath, his lady assumes a crown. Whether she chooses to wear it or not, she can and must exercise its power over her realm, Society.

And Society withstood the hostesses of gentlemen, soldiers, backwoodsmen, a sheriff, a tailor, a school-teacher, a rail-splitter and a Buchanan. But it could not survive Eleanor Roosevelt.

Here came a woman of blood and millions, married to an equally high-bred, landed manor squire, perhaps the most charming and dynamic and handsome of all our Presidents. And the first tap of her flat heels across the White House threshold led off the funeral march of Society in the capital.

It is unnecessary to review her attitude and behavior; no First Lady was ever so unendingly publicized. That she became invested with certain homely and all-wooly virtues by the worship of millions is precisely why she choked the last breath out of social tradition with her Negro friends, her boondoggling, sweaty indigents, her professional Socialists, her dedicated slum-house guardians of gutter garbage, and her antics as the militant apostle of democracy and equality. The bedrock of Society is inequality, the existence and recognition of an aristocracy.

Whether it is good or not for fundamental Americanism, it was as lethal to the remnants of a baronial stratum in Washington as the Emancipation Proclamation was below the Mason and Dixon line.

No female in American history had ever been so despised in the drawing-rooms and so venerated in the kitchens and furnished rooms. But that hatred within the walls of the elegant was not enough to sustain even a social underground. A few dauntless matrons held out. They tried to continue executing the motions from memory, but they perished on the inglorious field of futility. They were the last. There were no wounded and no prisoners taken. A dynasty that had flourished for 150 years had been wiped out as were the Romanoffs.

And, surely, Bess Truman was not sent from above for the Restoration.

From the founding of the city until the recent demise of Evelyn Walsh McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond, Washington was celebrated for its intrigue, romance and scandal in high Society.

Eleanor “Cissie” Patterson and Mrs. McLean were the last of the city’s great hostesses. Mrs. Patterson retired from the tea-table wars when she became active in newspaper work. With her death, and that of Mrs. McLean, the Washington Society pages were taken over by the climbers.

One needs no long memory to remember when social leaders from everywhere converged on this city. Dupont Circle was Fifth Avenue refined and rarefied, the cream of established snobbery, wealth, officialdom and diplomacy.

Ambitious minglers from the Middle West, such as the Pullmans, the Leiters and others, bypassed New York’s fatuous 400 and came directly to Washington.

Social history there begins with beauteous Elizabeth Patterson, of Baltimore, who wed Napoleon’s younger brother. Its first tasty scandal was whispered in Jefferson’s time, about the French Ambassador who was reputed to have married his jailer’s daughter, who had saved him from the guillotine.

Early Washington Society was titillated by duels among high personages. The duel on the Hudson shore in which Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr, in 1804, was talked about for years, until 1820, when a new gory sensation arose to take its place: the mortal wounding of Commodore Stephen Decatur in an arranged meeting of gentlemen across the District line in Maryland.

After a hundred years, Washington still talks about Peggy Eaton and President Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. But, today’s mundane morsels will make no interesting reading, leave no spice for the raconteur.

Society is on the wane everywhere. Taxes, Communist and New Deal propaganda, the high cost of living, make it virtually impossible to keep up huge menages. Now only rich labor leaders, black marketeers, gangsters and grafters can afford the expense.

There are a handful of rich dowagers like Mrs. Jay Borden Harriman and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, but they are out of the running.

Cornelia Pinchot only entertains the “intellectuals,” and they are legion in Washington. Where you find an intellectual in the District you will probably find a Red. Mrs. Pinchot does not know it, but the Commies have taken the elderly hostess over and are making hay with her name.

She lives in a Gay Nineties mansion on Scott Circle, where she often throws parties for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, attended by white and colored college professors, pansies and political economists. Mrs. Pinchot looks her age, though her hair is dyed the most amazing shade of carrot-red.

Mrs. Robert Low Bacon, the hostess of the Republican intellectuals, rarely hits the gossip columns. Even Evie Robert and her mother, Mrs. Helen Walker, have been dormant for years. Evie, the wife of “Chip” Robert, a brilliant political wire-puller, does not and never did give parties for social advantage. They were to advance the political prospects of her husband.

Today’s Washington Society has no class levels. All you need is dough and the urge and the energy to spend it on freeloaders. If you can snag more important political people to your parties in any one calendar season, from October to May, than your neighbor, you are Number 1 social leader, regardless of whether you wore shoes before you were twenty.

Perle Mesta, a determined hostess who was lucky enough to have been gracious to Harry Truman when he was a secondary Senator from Missouri, is living proof of the potency of the Washington cocktail party. Her reward was the appointment as Minister to Luxembourg.

But Mrs. Mesta is by no means the only social climber in Washington, though she is and was the most publicized.

We would like to tell you about Mrs. Gussie (Gushie) Goodwin, formerly a Chicagoan. She is the wife of Federal Judge Clarence Norton Goodwin, who sentenced Harry Bridges in the Communist leader’s first round before the courts. They were friends of the Woodrow Wilsons, which gave them some kind of claim to social standing. Meanwhile, Judge Goodwin started to go deaf, which handicapped him as a social figure. Gussie’s star was setting.

Then came a turn to her fortunes. She met a charming Latin gentleman, Ramon Ramos, at a cocktail melee. He was a professor of Spanish. Gussie got an inspiration. She was going to cement Latin-American relations and her own social relations. She started a private class. Her little study group met once a week at her home. During the first year, there were eight women in it, each of whom chipped in a buck towards the professor’s fee.

Gussie began calling the wives of the more important officials and Senators, and invited them to join her group. She was very careful to see that it was equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. One of the ladies who gladly became a member was the wife of Senator Harry Truman. After the Trumans succeeded to the White House, the Secret Service wouldn’t allow Mrs. Truman to go to the lessons at Gussie’s house, so all the meetings were moved to the White House, though Gussie continued to be its leading spirit. Mrs. Goodwin was very offish. When Dean Acheson resigned as Undersecretary of State, his wife was not asked back.

Meanwhile, Professor Ramos showed he had hidden talents. His hobby is cooking. The ladies were charmed. So an extra feature was added. Each week the program was expanded to include a luncheon, held at a different woman’s house. The Professor masterminded the menu, while the ladies did the cooking and waited on the others. Mrs. Truman came to these parties and pitched in with the work. The luncheons were run on a Dutch treat basis, and each woman continued to pay her dollar fee per lesson.

By this time there were sixty or seventy ladies in the group, including good Queen Bess. Some took private Spanish lessons on the side. Mrs. Truman was one of the few who was really serious and wanted to learn the language. Most of the others apparently came to the meetings because the Professor had the personality to hold “menopause Minnies.” Among the students were a few who thought they should come along for the ride without paying for lessons or the luncheon, because of their social position. One was Mrs. Robert Patterson, wife of the then Secretary of War. Mrs. Truman always paid.

When the Professor began to get too much publicity, Gussie busted it up. After all, the whole purpose was to make Gussie a figure, not the Professor. Gussie even went so far as to ask newspaper society writers to use her name instead of his, saying Mrs. Truman had complained about the Professor’s publicity, which was not accurate.

Anyway, no one learned much, but that wasn’t the Prof’s fault.

In the absence of Madame Mesta, Gwendolyn Cafritz is ballyhooed as Washington’s leading hostess. She is a social climber who invites only those in office or who she thinks are due to be in. She sadly misjudged the 1948 elections. She excommunicated the Democrats. So she had a hell of a time recouping her position. She still has her eye on the Republicans in 1952.

Compared to Madame Mesta, Mrs. Cafritz is a good-looking woman, in early middle age. She may have been a raving beauty when she was a slim, black-haired girl.

Her husband, Morris Cafritz, is a millionaire Washington real estate owner. His office, in the Ambassador Hotel, which he owns, is next door to the hotel’s High Hat cocktail lounge, which is favored by the pick-up gals as a hunting preserve. Gwen drives her husband slightly nuts with her parties. He would prefer to play poker, at which he is adept. A lot of hogwash has been written about the Cafritzes since they zoomed into political and social prominence. Gwen was born in central Europe and may or may not have been the daughter of a college professor or a nobleman, as the stories go.

Cafritz’s father ran a grocery store in Washington. The son’s early days were spent in a bowling alley which he owned and operated. Then he turned to real estate in boomtime and found the Midas touch.

Gwen’s enemies spread catty stories about her. One says she was a Broadway chorus-girl before she met her husband. If she was, she must’ve been a beaut. The other is that she was employed in Cafritz’s bowling alley. The researcher finds it difficult to separate the truth from the chaff. There are no clippings about her early days in the Washington newspaper morgues. Cissie Patterson was her close friend. It is reported she destroyed the clippings in her own library and asked the publishers of Washington’s other papers to do likewise.

Meanwhile, Mmes. Mesta and Cafritz had better look to their laurels, because a new assault is being made on Washington’s social citadel, this time by a bullet-proof princess--Tawhida Halim, a cousin of King Farouk of Egypt, and immensely rich. She and Frank Rediker, a denizen of Gotham’s cafe society set, were recently wed, repeat engagements for both.

The princess then acquired a mansion at 2339 Massachusetts Avenue, in which she and her bridegroom began to give lavish parties, designed to outdo any of the Cafritz woman’s, with the elan that goes only to those born to the purple.

(_INSIDE STUFF_: The Redikers’ social campaign is being managed by Leonard McBain, elegant publicist and society arbiter of New York’s plush El Morocco, where the snootiest people on earth gather. Leonard has steered royalty before. He could do marvels for Tawhida.)

Since the old aristocrats died or went into hiding, it is easier to get into Washington’s society columns, if you care to horn in with inferior white trash.

Almost anyone, including justices of the United States Supreme Court, will go to any party to which they are invited. Many who aren’t invited will also show up. The trick nowadays is to entertain lavishly and often, and sooner or later the papers will have to write about you, because there is nothing else to write about.

Ambitious hostesses buy the “Social List of Washington, D.C.,” and invite names from it at random. The odds are 90 percent will show up, but the odds are as high that 95 percent of the 90 per cent aren’t social. This list competes with the standard “Social Register.” It contains most of the names in the latter, plus an amplification consisting of prominent politicians and diplomats. It is published by Carolyn Hagner Shaw. Mrs. Shaw told us a “board” selects the candidates for entry in the book. The board, however, is highly secret. One Washington newspaper insists it is as mythical as the balanced budget. Mrs. Shaw claims no one ever tells her why a name is added or dropped.

If you thought Maj. Gen. Harry Vaughan was part of the _crème de la crème_ of the Washington social whirl, you’d better change your mind. He isn’t any more. Not if you take the word of Mrs. Shaw. She omits the military aide to the President from her fancy green directory of the socially prominent. Mrs. Shaw doesn’t know why General Vaughan isn’t socially correct any more. She blamed it on the anonymous board.

About 200 who sought to make the list were turned down. Again no reasons given. Many bought copies at 12 bucks, hoping to see their names in. They didn’t.

However, Guy George Gabrielson and William Marshall Boyle, respective chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, were among the new names added this year. The book also has the _dernier cri_ on what to do about cards. They should not be left at Blair House, but given to the guard at the northwest gate of the White House.

“A courtesy call should be made on the President and his family once a year. This is a mark of respect that should not be neglected.” (This was before two Puerto Rican enthusiasts tried it.)

Mrs. Shaw reminds her readers “During World War II, formal observance of the conventional days set aside for leaving cards on various officials was canceled. A return to formal recognition of these traditional days has yet to take place, and it is doubtful that it will ever again become obligatory to leave cards on certain days.”

As to protocol, it notes: “It is well to remember personal friendships do not count. The rank of one’s guest must be the deciding factor.”

If you are not sure of the comparative ranking of any guest, it is better not to invite him. Many of the biggest social wars were caused by such things. Still remembered is the feud between Alice Roosevelt Longworth, then wife of the Speaker of the House, and Dolly Gann, sister and hostess of Vice-President Curtis, over their respective precedence.

Officials and embassies receive advice on protocol matter from the State Department, but non-official hostesses are on their own. Mrs. Shaw supplies a service which gives assistance in seating.

An important fixture in Washington is the debutante party. These have almost disappeared in New York, where each year’s crop of young hopefuls is introduced in a mass get-together. In Washington, the girl who doesn’t get a dinner-dance on her own is a social slob. Washington’s Elsa Maxwell for these parties is Mrs. Curt Hetzel, who succeeded Mrs. Merriam. Mr. Hetzel is a pianist in a restaurant--Ted Lewis’. Mary Stuart Price, a young woman, handles some debby parties as a sideline.

Club life is another sacred institution. Many important political decisions are reached at such places as the Burning Tree Club, the Chevy Chase Club, and the Sulgrave, famous for the McCarthy-Pearson battle of the century--more maybe than in the Senate and the House cloakrooms. The 1925 F Street Club, where ranking members of the Senate give parties, was once the exclusive home of Mrs. Laura Curtis Gross, who lent her house for parties. It is now a sanctuary for the whipped-cream of Washington society. Its dining-room seats about 60 and the club’s membership is strictly limited.

Washington’s newest aristocracy is evidenced by stone piles. The wife of the man who can build the biggest and plushiest office building is the reigning social leader.

Those currently with the highest batting average are Morris Cafritz, of course, Gus Ring, Garfield Cass and Preston Wire, all with gleaming new structures named after themselves. Much of the money of the real estate _nouveau riche_ came from wise investments in Black Belt housing, or from refugee sources.

Until very recent years the august justices of the United States Supreme Court remained aloof from social functions, but during the days of the New Deal and Fair Deal, when the court was packed with soft-shirted politicians, the custom changed. Judges like Douglas are avid party-goers. The late Frank Murphy was a mixer with true CIO deportment, a hoofer and Saturday night sport. The result is that the opening of the fall season is now coincident with the convening of the Supreme Court. Then the jurists can meet the typists and clink cocktails with mobsters’ mouthpieces.

The easiest way to get into what is called “society” is to be elected or appointed into it. Every ex-cow-puncher, dirt-farmer, smalltown lawyer and big-city ward-heeler who now has an “Honorable” in front of his name is as social as those who were born into it, bought their way in, or got in through a diplomatic passport.

All 96 Senators and 435 Representatives, nine cabinet officers, countless under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, judges, department heads and military brass are social, with a listing in the directory, though some never wore ties or socks until they got to Washington. These ex-officio lions became the life of the party in 1933.

Washington once thrived on dirt in high places. Grover Cleveland’s bastard child didn’t interfere with his electoral or social standing. Nor was Woodrow Wilson ruined when a certain lady was booted out of Washington by the Secret Service. President Harding’s house on K Street is still remembered. There’s nothing like it now. And his village sweetie and her baby have vanished. President Truman’s poker games are penny-ante, not the lusty ones of yore.

The late Roosevelt administration is credited with more snappy spice than any other in history. Out-of-school tales were told about most of his children. The President and his wife were not spared by gossipers. But President Truman’s personal life is treated as dull and austere.

His advisers are farmers or aging professors. They were pirates in the first Roosevelt decade. The sports, drinkers and rounders who held high cabinet and military rank then are either gone or too old. Now most official vice is grubby stuff, with call-girls supplied by a protected vice-ring, about which nothing is ever heard, and which no Congressman or Senator will admit he knows.

President Truman’s pal, General Harry Vaughan, is comparatively quiet now, held to mama’s apron-strings. There’s gambling for him and the President in the White House. There’s no liquor shortage, either. The President likes his bourbon. He never smokes. He will not countenance whoring in his official family, though he doesn’t put detectives on official tails.

Probably the only real sport in town is Senator Warren Magnuson. The others save their skylarking for New York. When they do it in Washington, they are as frightened as schoolboys at it, and often as unimaginative.

What a change from the Roosevelt days, when sex was the prerogative of all government officials, and usually paid for by the grateful tax-payers! Uncle Sam even had to help Harry Hopkins do it. A monkey-gland doctor grafted sex virility on Hopkins and two other aging administration stalwarts, one of whom recently resigned from a little-cabinet post.

The doctor billed the wealthiest of the three $3,000 for each treatment. He charged the other two $1,000. Hopkins had already stiffed the medico for three operations when he asked for the fourth, in view of his pending marriage to a young woman. The doctor’s verdict was no money, no honeymoon. But Hopkins had a way out. He suggested the doctor needed a vacation anyway, so he offered to get him an appointment to make an inspection trip to army medical bases in the West Indies, with all expenses paid for self and wife, plus $35 a day fee until the $3,000 was paid. The doctor took the trip and Hopkins took the honeymoon.

High military brass is quiet today compared to the lusty generals and admirals of the ’20s and ’30s. Washington is still talking about how General Pershing, then chief of staff, ordered young General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines after MacArthur married Mrs. Louise Cromwell Brooks, of the Philadelphia Stotesbury clan. Mrs. Brooks, after her divorce from her first husband, met “Black Jack” Pershing abroad. When she returned to America, she became his official hostess in Washington. She was 25 to his 60. Two months after their wedding, in 1922, the MacArthurs were shipped to the Philippines. Washington cats said Pershing sent his successful young rival into exile to get even. He had also exiled the captain of the Army polo team, who was attentive to the rich, beautiful Louise. She is now Mrs. Alf Heiberg, the proud owner of Washington’s only private atom-bomb shelter, which she constructed under her Georgetown Mansion.

The late General of the Armies, a widower, was quite a man with the women. He kept a Roumanian babe and her mother at the Shoreham Hotel for 20 years.

“Thirty” was written to Washington Society when a local paper fired its social editor because she refused to print the names of Negro hostesses!

22. STRIPED PANTS

Elsewhere, men who wear them bury the dead; here, most of those who wear them are dead but not buried.

The decadence of the diplomats ran parallel with the fadeout of society, though not for the same causes. Continental and cosmopolitan life on Embassy Row was a war casualty.

The democratization and bolshevization of Europe turned their extra-territorial domains here into tawdry outhouses reflecting monarchies and empires riddled into busted republics and dictatorships, either scrabbling for the necessities of life or committed to the political policy of shabby proletarianism.

The kings are no longer king. The courts of Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Madrid, Rome, and of the giddy little Balkan states are now the headquarters of Labor Parties and worse. The crowned heads of England, The Netherlands and the Scandinavian kingdoms are kept figureheads. Diplomatic display is a sin against poverty and the world rash for unilateral social and economic status.

There is not an embassy in Washington which does not cost far more than it did 20 years ago. That is because they have become workhouses where the press of international business is sordid and tremendous. Gone are the Thursday and Friday open-house hospitalities and grand balls in Technicolor, animated by gowns and costumes and uniforms of galaxies of all nations.

“These are difficult and different days,” the deans of diplomacy sigh.

The old spirit has vanished not only from the governments, but from their representatives, who are living close to the vest, hoarding precious American dollars against revolution or overturn by popular vote of their countries. Ambassadors and Ministers are salting away what they can skim off in Black Belt real estate, farms and U. S. securities. Some go much further. They are actual dealers in American goods which they can procure and can send home free of import duty to their countries. At the same time they blackmarket merchandise here, where they can buy liquor, cigarettes, cosmetics and other excised products free of internal revenue tax. For the best whiskey and champagne they pay $13 a case.

During Prohibition, a small Central American legation was actively in the rum-running business, importing huge quantities under diplomatic immunity, then reselling to Jack Cunningham, a local bootlegger. One day rival gangsters caught up with Cunningham in an alley in I Street, and there he was knocked off. The killing was hushed up. It would have involved too many untouchables.

These business opportunities and the degree of austerity which is still light as compared with most of the globe--all of it except Canada and South America--have made Washington the choice diplomatic plum, in place of London and its Court of St. James’.

The diplomats here are timid, precise and industrious. They are fearful of a false step which might mean recall, for here they are saving against eventual retirement. But their caution cannot withstand their greed and some smuggle dope in via their sealed and search-proof official pouches. They have discovered the glories of the American installment plan and buy not only land and houses, but cars and mechanical gadgets unobtainable at home. If they are transferred they rent out their properties here, which, in the only currency still reasonably dependable, makes them rich wherever they go, even into exile.

Another factor which helps reduce the gaiety and glamor of Washington diplomatic life is the competing diplomatic corps accredited to the United Nations, in New York. It is gradually getting the ace publicity breaks.

The question of sex looms big on the agenda of every ambassador. He prefers all his aides married, with wives in residence, so they will create no scandal. Many of the younger members of the various staffs, with modest jobs and salaries, are bachelors. These men are usually forbidden, under pain of being sent home, to fool around with women in Washington. Their chiefs, from time to time, order them to go to New York “to have a party.”

If the press of business is too great to allow for long weekends, when the ambassador notes that the young men on his staff are getting hot britches he sends them to Baltimore, where they are unknown and nothing is barred.