Introduction

2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN 8 No relation to the wrestler, only sometimes he makes more sense than the rich big domes and fancy queers who reside in this made-to-order Greenwich Village.

3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE 12 North West is the only section of Washington which counts. On the other hand, what is there in it you won’t find in Denver, Detroit or Dubuque, except the White House?

5. HOBOS WITH NO HORIZONS 30 They can’t vote the bums in Washington’s flophouses, otherwise these skidrows are like your home-town Bowery, except there are three.

6. GREEN PASTURES 34 Here the poor, downtrodden colored folk are not equal, they’re superior. And there are more of them. This is a Negro Heaven.

12. G-GIRLS 77 They come in two grades: A. Government Gals—they’re many and not so glamorous. B. Glamour Gals—they’re few and not so glamorous.

16. THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS 99 Agrarian reformers—that’s what the bright State Department lads call them, in other countries. We call those in Washington traitors.

19. BOOZE AND BOTTLES 123 Washingtonians imbibe three times as much as you. Where they get it, how and why, with pointers on what to do with your hollow leg.

22. STRIPED PANTS 144 Elsewhere men who wear ’em bury the dead; in Washington most who wear them are dead but not buried. That’s the sad tale of what happened to the once oh, so gay diplomatic corps.

23. LOBBYIST’S LICENSE—THE RIGHT TO PETITION 155 The population consists of so many five percenters, lobbyists, fixers, lawyers, press agents and men from Missouri, you’d think everyone was taking advantage of the Constitutional guarantee.

24. RACKETS BY REMOTE CONTROL 171 Washington’s underworld is operated by local overseers for absentee landlords. This is how the system works.

35. BALTIMORE CONFIDENTIAL 258 Baltimore is less than an hour away, but what a difference! You’ll find things here they never heard of even in Chicago.

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 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.