The war-whirl in Washington

Foreword

" He does n't want gloom, he does want efficiency," — that is the way one who is daily in closest touch with our war President described Mr. Wilson's attitude toward trying days like these. He golfs, he goes to the theatre, he motors. State dinners and similar social functions temporarily have been discontinued at the capital, largely for economic reasons; in bringing the social gayeties to an end the frame of Administrative thought was far from that kind of early Puritan gloom which forbid bear baiting, " not because the sport gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

The hardest of hard workers in the legions of war toilers in Washington would be the last to advise against moments of relaxation just now. And if the lighter sides of life in the capital are accented in the chapters that follow, the merrier phases are not gone into because of a lack of appreciation of the solemnities of the blackest

FOREWORD

of world tragedies, but solely with the hope that at least a semblance of a smile will be brought to the faces of a people who have so little time to seek out the sources of smiles just now, even in their moments of recreation.

The greater part of these pages was written about the time of the big Teutonic (and therefore fruitless), Spring drive of 1918, a military offensive which w^as coincident with the real beginning of a glorious speeding up of our own war policies. Indeed the garrulous lady quoted so frequently herein insists to-day that until w^ell into the present year she continued to hold a mirror to the pale lips of our military programme w^ithout noting the faintest mist of moisture on the glass. But although she remains firm in her belief, even at this late day, that what she says in the following chapters "still goes,'' it is worthy of note that as our war-whirling Washington day by day whirls faster and faster, just so steadily she approaches a state of cheerfulness that is ecstatic.

— F. W. O'M.

New York City, May, 1918.

Contents

CHAPTER PA(5E

I Knock!— And It Shall be Opened,

Maybe 3

Chapter II

THERE are only three ways of getting sleeping-quarters in the national capital when one and one's wife start out on a trip to see the war-whirl in Washington these days, especially when one and the wife debark, unannounced, round midnight from a train which, on the solemn promise of the compiler of the railwayschedule, is due to reach the Union Station, Washington, at the velvety, Avistful, cocktail hour of twilight. In the first place, one may spend the first night snatching bits of sleep in the meterless " taxicab " — rechristened an Auto-To- Hire — between fruitless visits to all the hotels there are, which was what the wife and I did; secondly, one may start out bright and early the next morning and begin by cruising back over the hotel route again to find any sort of Washington hotel room and bath, ending up, if one is lucky, by finding them in Baltimore, which was

ROOMS, EUM AND RUCTIONS

what the wife did; and, finally, one may spend the second night sleeping in a Washington bar-room, which was what I did.

It was the first time I had ever slept in a bar-room all night. Since the previous November 1, or the date upon which Congress had spread a big blue blotting-pad all over the District of Columbia and had rubbed the district as good as dry, the particular hotel bar-room in mind had n't been a practical bar-room to the extent of using it for alcoholic illuminating purposes. Still, the clerk of the hotel, which is on a Fourteenth and K Street corner, continued to speak of the room as a bar in a sentimental, fondly reminiscent way, in tones one uses when speaking of " grandpa's room '' long, long months after the dear old gentleman has perished.

This clerk, like all Washington hotel clerks in war-time, had laughed heartily when asked for a room and bath; then a softer emotion seemed to grip him, and he began to talk sentimentally about ^^ our bar." It was below-stairs, in the basement, he said, and seven beds had been placed therein only that very morning. For two dollars, the clerk continued, I might sleep all night in the bar. He added that I could take it or leave it, and he contributed the additional information that it would cost a great deal more than two dollars to sleep all night in a bar-room in any other town between New York and Sau Francisco, which is doubtless true.

The wife, of course, could not sleep there. Nevertheless, I decided to take an option on one of the two-dollar bar beds, which the clerk said I might do by paying something on account ; say, two dollars on account. Then followed a weary day of room-seeking, varied with real thrills every time the flivver of a war contractor, headed toward the Treasury to dig another scuttleful of money out of the bins in the Treasury basement, exploded past the eyelashes of anotlier lineal descendant of Captain Kidd who was navigating our meterless " taxi."" The hastening contractors hit us only twice that first day, and they were good enough to scatter their shots so that one contractor hit the wife's side of our Auto-To- Hire, damaging hor mud-guard, whereas the other contractor slammed in on my side of our car, thus avoiding all jealousy, and hit me back of the Pension Office.

Too much was enough. Half a dozen squares to the east of the Pension building loomed the

^7'

to

Union Station. There we repaired forthwith, and by telephone the wife got in touch with the Baltimore Young Woman's Christian Association and a room. I had just time to grab off a seat for her in an outgoing day-coach of one of the late afternoon sections of the Washington- Baltimore Liquor Local, w^hich reaches Baltimore just before the dinner-hour, and is known, I believe, to some of the district natives as the Martini Flier, and by many more as the Bronx Express, each according to taste. Anyway, this particular aperitif section was ready to get under way toward the dinner-hour; so the wife and I parted regretfully, but cheered by the realization that temporarily, at least, w^e would have comfortable sleeping-quarters; the wife in the Baltimore Y. W. C. A. and I in the Washington bar-room. Fair enough !

With no sleep so far on our little pleasurejaunt since leaving the old home in Manhattan the day before save the occasional taxinaps on the previous night's cruise of the city in search of a room, I w^as keen for my bar-room bed the minute the wife had departed on the Baltimorebound Liquor Local. But the uncertainty of our future housing accommodations during our prospective Washington visit caused me to spend what was left of the day and evening searching the widths and depths of Washington in a last effort to find quarters. Betimes I broke the monotony of my lone motor-ride by telephoning to the houses of friends who had rented homes in Washington in ante-bellum days, and were still able to pay bellum rents. As I made my identity known to said friends over the wire, the news that I was in Washington was about as welcome as a coal bill in father's Christmas mail. One might have thought, to judge from the cordiality of the voice without the smile at the other end of the telephone line, that I was Billy Sunday calling up a friend and accidentally getting in touch with the Distillers' League.

One could n't, however, blame these Washington friends : that thought, long ago struck off, to the effect that " Providence provides us with our relatives, but, thank Heaven! we can pick our own friends," doesn't work out in Washington as well as once it did. In times like these, for instance, young Brother-in-law Horace, junior at Yale if he had gone back the autumn after the war declaration, decides to leave the dear old col flat on its back in New Haven and go down to WasJiington and look around for a governmental job, where he can grapple with some big work that requires brains and untiring energy and all that sort of thing. So in drops Horace, accompanied by much luggage, and stays at Brother-in-law Elmer's house, out Chevy Chase way, while looking for the best job in the army, navy, or civil department which will enable him to bring the kaiser to his knees, yelling for help, in the shortest possible time. And Horace has scarcely settled subacutely in the guest-room when young Cousin Estelle, the celebrated Philadelphia stenographer, comes to take the room opposite the one Brother-in-law Horace has commandeered, Estelle also in search of a job where she can save the nation. When a brand-new population about the size of a manufacturing city like South Bend drops in unexpectedly upon a small-sized large town, already comfortably filled, such as Washington, there are bound to be a few crates of relatives in the consignment. Consequently the residential sections of the national capital early in the war had become an omnibus family reunion, wherein pop and mom soon were all fed up with visitors.

" Come up and see us one day while you 're 39 here/' tliey said over the telephone to me, with all the warmth of Charles Evans Hughes opening his front door and finding a delegation of California voters on the front stoop. Now if they had only asked me to come up even for one night I might have given three rousing cheers. Not a chance. Still, I hold no grudges ; they 're more to be pitied than censured.

All that was left for me to do was to hang up the receiver, climb into the old seagoing pirate craft, Auto-To-Hire, and pull up the mud-hook again. The later the hour, the more that bar-room bed invited ; but before giving up and turning in I tacked around circles and squares and in and out avenues and streets long enough to learn that in a war-time Washington there are, to wit: hall bedrooms (or if-you-can-get-'em hall bedrooms) of an ante-bellum rental of ten dollars a month which suddenly have puffed up into bellum if-you-can-get-'ems at forty and fifty dollars a month; that very swagger houses, which recently w^ere rented for ten thousand dollars a year now bring twenty-five thousand dollars yearly; that one lady, who had had an unfurnished apartment for which she paid ninety dollars a month, had patriotically rented the rooms,

KOOMS, RUM AND RUCTIONS

furnished, during the first war winter at a rate of only five hundred dollars a month, pocketing three thousand dollars for six months as her slight bit toward winning the war; that ante-bellum furnished apartments in the hundred and fifty dollars a month class bring very often three hundred and fifty dollars and more a month in bellum days; that befo'-de-wah — ouh wah — flats, unfurnished, at seventy-five dollars now commonly are rented at two hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty dollars furnished. About the only government priority certificate which a man of influence cannot get is a priority certificate for a room and bath.

Just three persons came to notice on that first day of cruising who seemed ecstatically happy over the sudden swamping of their home town. The three were young government clerks of vision. With the first of the war-time onrush the three had taken a running leap at the throat of a renting agent, and had corralled three vacant apartments, paying all of thirty-five dollars a month for each of the flats. Then they had raced into the nearest instalment house, and had carted away to the three vacuous flats enough bilious-looking yellow oak furniture to cause the late William Morris to turn three times rapidly in bis grave. And as most government employees round Washington seem to be able to knock off work about noon each day and keep absolutely out of the war until 2:30 o'clock in the afternoon, the three, within a luncheon " hour," had so thoroughly rented their, in a manner of speaking, furnished flats that thereafter they have been splitting up almost five hundred dollars rent profits monthly into three piles. Now they stand in front of the Treasury daily and laugh and laugh and laugh at it.

A late-arriving visitor can in a pinch, of course, look up a Turkish bath; but what's the use? There was the famous coal-baron magnate who came to Washington in recent days to confer with Fuel Administrator Garfield. When late in the afternoon the conference was ended, the coal magnate of millions decided to stroll toward one of the large hotels and casually select a pleasant room and bath, just like that! And some time after midnight, still sleepily seeking a room that was not, the magnate saw an electric lighted "Turkish Bath" sign in G Street. Down in the basement depths he came upon a bath as full as three aces and a pair of kings.

There was one barber-chair still vacant, however; the other chairs in the tonsorial salon of the baths had, hours earlier, been rented out for sleeping-quarters. And the coal magnate of millions, breathing a night prayer of tearful thankfulness, peeled off his coat and collar and climbed into the only vacant barber-chair berth and slept whatever sleep of innocence still is permitted to a coal-baron magnate. So far as can be learned, Washington has n't yet begun to rent sleepingspaces on the bootblacks'-chairs, but the war is young yet. Nor in dentists'-chairs. The chauffeurs of the Auto-To-Hire cars, freshly arrived from far scattered cities, to be in on the pickin's, were sleeping nightly, however, in their one-time taxicabs early in the war-days, even when the taxibrigands could find nothing in the way of a garage roof but the clear, cold skies of night.

When one stops to think that about the time America jumped into the war- whirl there were, all told, only about eighty-five persons in the offices of the Ordnance Department, including everybody from the boss to the office boy, and that before the following Christmas there were in the same department in Washington about thirty-five hundred souls, which promises to be closer to ten thousand by the time these lines stagger into print, then one must see that this, l)lus a like swelling of forces in innumerable other governmental departments, early resulted in a considerable hatful of new white folks around town. A couple of Easter bonnet-boxes would have housed the Ordnance Department, even as late as two years after General Leonard Wood had begun to say it was utterly impossible for America to keep out of the w^ar. Then shortly after it began to dawn upon Washington that General Wood not only was right, but could produce the papers and prove it, more than a dozen shed-like buildings, each a city square long, had to be thrown together down round Sixth and D streets, N. W., to house the ordnance forces. The figures should n't be disturbing. Washington always was a glutton for numerals of magnitude, and with the present jump in population, and trifles such as the billions voted every few minutes by Congress for something or other urgently needed, figures are flying in a war-time Washington which, at least by comparison, make even the grand total of the " Games Lost ■' column of the Washington baseball team almost look positively paltry. By the time I had finally headed toward my first, and last, sleep in my semi-private bedroom and bar in the little hotel in Fourteenth Street, it 's safe to say that the only vacant thing to be found in all Washington was the German embassy, which is still respected as an embassy, although empty — respected, one might say, a hodderned sight more than w^hen it was n't empty.

And so, when I had the taxitiller turned to head me toward my bedroom bar or bar-room bed, whatever the term is, the sum total of my twenty-four-hour quest for a room was the exact knowledge that the late Count von Bernstorff's bed in the German embassy was vacant. Now, as I 've intimated, my bedroom bar had ceased functioning as a practical bar, having curled up into a little dry wad and perished on the eve of the previous November 1. When I told the night clerk that a day clerk, in exchange for one of those new two-dollar bills that fool one into thinking it's a hundred-dollar note, had given me at least a promise that I might use one of the seven beds in the bar, the night clerk first offered his congratulations and then opened the hotel safe and locked therein my watch and whatever change the Auto-To-Hire bandit chief had let me have back.

I had been leaning lightly against what I had mistaken for a black-walnut newel-post upon which, so I supposed, some one had thoughtlessly hung an admiral's dress uniform for the night. The clerk shook this entire upstanding arrangement into wakefulness while I still leaned against it. Sure enough ( or, " Yes, indeed," as Washington would say it), it was a long, slim half portion of smoked ham, garbed in the uniform of a bell-boy. Him I followed warily down a semi-dark stairway, thence behind a furnace, or maybe it was in front of the furnace ; and so, ever onward, past piles of baggage, crates of empty milk bottles, a door pathetically labeled, " Wine Room — No Admittance ! "

Finally, within a dark interior, the bell-hop, now clearly planning to wake up, turned on a lone electric bulb, which was just above the only unoccupied bed in the bar-room. In addition to the swaggerest-sized mirror I had ever slept in front of, there were four little white iron beds sticking out from one wall, with the bed I was to sleep in and two more jutting into the room from the opposite wall. And from the scents and sights and the all-penetrating tonal quality of snore sounds generally, I decided that either the room had been surreptitiously used as a bar until a very recent moment, or that all six of my unknown sleeping companions were a group of little pals who had just got in on a homebound excursion section — after an evening in the Monument City — of the Washington-Baltimore- Washington Night Liquor Local.

I had guessed right twice. The four in the beds across the room were gone beyond recall; I might have practised for an hour on my slip-horn, which I do in our apartment-house in New York nightly for at least an hour before turning in, and they never would have come out of their state of coma. But the two intellectuals on my side of the room evidently were putting up a better battle ; in fact, one of them came to sufficiently to reach out for what remained of a quart bottle beside his bed, once he had glimpsed a stranger beginning to undress in his boudoir, and hastily tucked the glassware under his pillow. I got only a glimpse of the bottle, but I remember being impressed with the fact that the label of the bottle was decorated with either three or five stars, and therefore probably was the property of at least a general, perhaps a ranking full admiral.

" They had n't ought ta done it ! "

The sudden words, their very pathos, coming as they did from the dim corner occupied by the third bed on my side of the room, caused me to whirl round and peer sharply beyond the bed of my full admiral neighbor. It was my neighbor's brother intellectual who was speaking, gazing the while at a framed advertising lithograph on the dim far wall, a picture representing the late Christopher Columbus, all togged out in red tights and things and quaffing a man's size seidel of some sort of Columbus, Ohio, beer on the sands of San Salvador. Long the man gazed at the lithograph, and his head began to droop, and gently he started to weep. He was crying, he told us between sobs, because Christopher Columbus, that greatest of Amurican admirals, that dauntless genius among sea-captains, that mighty discoverer who had given a world to the world, had been sent back to Europe in chains.

" They had n't ought ta done it, Billy," he sobbed. " Billy, I leave it to you. As man to man, am I right or am I wrong? "

Then I knew I was in a bar-room. One may be led, blindfolded, into a boiler factory, a stamping-mill, a Broadway cabaret, or even a Democratic convention, and perhaps be unable to cry out while sightless the nature of the institution; but let one be led, sightless, into a gathering where one overhears the stock question, " I leave it to you. As man to man, am I right or am I wrong? " then one is n't possibly or probably in a bar-room. It is a bar-room. As best we could we soothed him. His sobs over the ill-treated Columbus grew fewer, and at last he lay asleep, great tear-drops gemming his lashes as he slept a sweet sleep as if of childhood, tousled locks spreading in care-free fashion over a tear-wet pillow just beneath another lithograph entitled, " Learning Baby to Dance."

There 's the great trouble with these bone-dry towns like Washington and Charleston and Bangor ; a lot of the folks take to drink.

For a long time I lay awake in the basement darkness of the bedroom bar, thinking about the new wonders of this war-born Washington. Too long it had been merely the mecca of brides and grooms and job-hunters. To the whole people, for more than a century, it had been simply a seat of government. And now in a day it had become, now and forever, not a mere interesting real-estate site upon which by chance had been piled enough freestone and marble to house the seat of government, but the capital of the whole nation.

And as I thought this wondrous new-born capital over, I began to feel a bit sorry that I had taken the wife with me to view it. The wife is so irreverent — and everything. She has a pesky habit of knowing what she likes and saying so out loud. Now I, like all the rest of the hundred million except the wife, believe that everybody running the war is a great statesman, general, executive, even if he is n't, for that 's patriotism; but the wife! Even the short glimpse she had had that day, before starting for Baltimore, of the new Washington at war had caused her to say things that made me blush for her. Her caustic comments on the most trifling things gave me deep distress. The weird and unauthorized fur collars fastened to the supposed-to-be uniform overcoats of the newly created officers of the very new army; glinting spurs attached to the boots of right-off-the-shelf lieutenants in the aviation service — she stormed

BOOMS, RUM AND RUCTIONS

because the very best that the foremost poster draftsman of the whole country could turn out were lithographs which in thought and composition and general technic climbed to the sublime intellectual heights of a peaches-and-creamy show girl, garbed variously in the third-act clothes of Columbia or in the uniform of a blue-jacket, who seemed to be calling out coquettishly, above the gun-throbs and the groans of the greatest of world tragedies, '' O Fellahs, Ain't You The Mean Things! Enlist To-day, Dearie!'' Heavens! how I dreaded what she would say, once we had penetrated further and had begun to stumble into the tangles of red-tape, the petty party politics and a general scheme of war program teeming with all that unity so noticeable whenever a Kansas tornado hits a Saturday night performance of the circus.

It 's impossible to convince the wife that the truly patriotic should sit tight and say nothing when, to take an example, the Government insists upon saying, "Is this potential appointee the best Democrat (or Republican, as the case may be, and in former wars often was) to handle this big war job?" instead of simply asking, "Is he the best man to handle this big war job?"

Again and again I 've told the wife that the appointment of a given Democrat, instead of a given man, will at its worst merely result, say, in the unnecessary deaths, perhaps, of a few thousand young men in army camps or at the front. I try to show her that if nobody tries to right existing wrongs, the war may be prolonged, but in the meantime everybody will enjoy the sublime ethical satisfaction of knowing that he and all his compatriots have been intensely patriotic. " Pooh ! " says the wife. " The trouble with you and the rest of the patriots of Bromidia is that you confuse criticism of a stuffed shirt in office with the office itself. If the people of New York impeach a governor and kick him out, how can such action be construed as even remotely a reflection upon the great office of Governor of New York? "

She 's hopeless. I don't go so far, of course, as to carry these ideas of patriotic silence into my wool-sponging business in lower Broadway; none of my fellow-patriots does, because that 's an entirely different matter, into which patriotism does n't enter. Or when I go to a ball-game at the Polo Grounds in New York with the rest of the fans on a Saturday afternoon. If I see

EOOMS, RUM AND RUCTIONS

the shortstop repeatedly come close to losing the game by booting the ball all over the infield, I just climb right npon my hind legs back of third base and start the yell, "Take him out! Kill 'im ! "

Doubtless, if the great managerial baseballist, Mr. John McGraw, should insist, day in and day out, upon retaining a player who persistently impeded the pennant progress of my beloved Giants by booting the ball from Saturday to Monday to Saturday, I 'd be ready to head a committee that would lock up Mr. McGraw forever and then throw the key away. Such extreme measures would undoubtedly bring dov/n upon my head accusations of a disgraceful lack of loyalty toward the revered Giants, but the measures would go a long way toward winning the pennant.

The wife not only agrees with me in such matters as keeping office politics out of my wool-sponging business, or in my outspoken criticism around the house when we get a cook that can't cook, in all these little ideas that have to do with efficiency in our own small systems of domestic, business, and social economics; but she also, alas ! goes to the extreme of standing right up in meeting and insisting that even the Government of the United States, from the President down, in war-time should cut out office politics, inefficiency, red-tape. And I tell her, everybody we know tells her (everybody, at least, among our patriotic friends who still speaks to her) that she 's no true American and ought to be ashamed of herself.

The important matter of the price of prunes in a Pennsylvania Avenue hotel restaurant, w^here we breakfasted after our all-night Auto- To-Hire search for a room, started the wife off on one of her distressingly unpatriotic tantrums. The hotel management, in a noble effort to help win the war by conserving food, charged the wife and me five cents a prune, five prunes in a saucer, at twenty-five cents per i^rune order, or fifty cents for our total of ten prunes. I was mortified to death the way she w^ent on.

" Waiter," she said with cold finality, as if the poor waiter were to blame, — " AA^aiter, I have only this to say : You may report back to your chief, with my compliments, that I said in passing that even if Jess himself is the Willard that owns this hotel, he couldn't CARRY fifty cents' worth of prunes ! '^

Now as I lay awake in tlie darkness of my bedroom bar and recalled all she had said at that breakfast-table, I tried to excuse her on the ground that a more or less sleepless night in the good ship Auto-To-Hire had caused her to go to irritating extremes. Whatever the cause, once the wife had disposed of the prune incident, she had rambled on, I remembered sleepily, with an unpatriotic harangue that was most obnoxious. The very head-lines on the Washington morning papers, lying face-up beside our plates, had seemed to goad her on. Why this? Why that? I recalled that I had blushed crimson while she raved.

" Shucks ! Starting out to capture Berlin, and the whole darn country can't dish up enough unity of action in two weeks of effort to carry one quart of coal three quarters of a mile across the Hudson River to our flat. Oh, hush yourself! I could see the loaded coal-cars, I tell you, on the Jersey side of the river from the windows of pa's apartment on the drive. Lookit this newspaper head-line here: ^ Mrs. Macgillicuddys-Reeks, Sinn Fein Leader, Received At White House.' Sickening! This is a fine time for the President to encourage German propaganda by — o-o-o-o-oh, I — will — not — hush — up ! This Siun Fein person is violently pro- German; says so in effect from platforms; so ai'e all her little group of co-workers. I 'd like to see her and her crowd ring the door-bell down at Oyster Bay, that 's all I They have the impudence to stand up in halls paid for out of German funds, admission free, in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, everywhere, with a lot of Germans filling the front seats, and the whole crowd, even while our boys are fighting Germany in France, cheering wildly every time a speaker tells of German victories. Less than a month ago this same woman who was ' received at the White House ' yesterday was the star speaker at a pro-German meeting in Terrace Garden, back home, where a country-woman of hers had girls pass the hat through the aisles for ' silver bullets,' as she called the collection, to be fired against our most powerful ally. They want our biggest ally crushed, smashed by Germany, which means that our American boys fighting beside the Tommies would have to be smashed, too; leaving us, with England gone, to fight it out with Germany and her allies single-handed, or be crushed and smashed ourselves."