HOT AIR - Professor John Wise Goes Up in Smoke

I find it short sided that Joseph and Jaques Montegolfier’s saw their invention merely as an extension of the family paper business. Thus it was that at two o’clock in the afternoon of 21 November, 1783, the first humans - neither of whom was a Montegolfier - made humanities’ first free flight. The brother’s built an open fire on a barbecue in a wooden basket suspended beneath their colorfully painted paper balloon. Then, surrounded by stacks of kindling, in a vessel that was built of kindling, the two volunteer aeronauts, Pilatre de Rozier and the marquis d’Arlenes, rose 500 feet above the Jardin du Chateau de la Muette outside of the palace of Vincennes. While the Montegolfiers were solidly grounded and accepting royal congratulations for their ingenuity, their two employees floated gently off toward Paris. The airborne pair had traversed some 5 miles before noticing their envelope was beginning to smolder and come apart at the seams. Desperately, Pilatre sacrificed his coat to smother the flames, and the cooling paper bag settled gently back to earth.

Meanwhile, back at the Chateau, a skeptical audience member asked, “What does Doctor Franklin conceive to be the use of this new invention?” And Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “What is the use of a new-born child?” He never explained his response. So I shall.  Not much, by itself.

When he was fourteen John Wise built a working model of a Montegolfier hot air balloon in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When it landed on a neighbor’s roof, the open flame in the basket almost burned down his neighbor’s house. John’s father insisted that henceforth the boy limit himself to non-flame powered kites and parachutes. In the long run this turned out to be an advantage.

John took a scientific approach to ballooning, so much so that he was generally refereed to as “The Professor”.  He studied mathematics and parachutes. And it was not until May of 1835 that John first became airborne when he undulated across nine miles of Pennsylvania farmland between Philadelphia and Hanover. He was so inflated by this success that he abandoned his career as a piano maker, and became a full time aerialist. And on 24 July, 1837, when Robert Cocking became the first parachute fatality,  John Wise was wise enough to realize that the problem was not the shape of Cocking’s parachute, but his 250 pound weight. The following year John invented a successful “rip panel” which, if pulled, would collapse a balloon’s envelope into a practical parachute, allowing a desperate aeronaut to float safely to ground.

On each flight, John made barometric readings, measured wind speeds, and went high enough, often enough, that he was the first to suggest that there were great rivers of wind in the upper atmosphere, which would one day be called the Jet Stream. And being a dedicated balloonist, John also became expert in the manufacture of coal gas.

The process began by “cooking” coal in an airless oven, so that it could not ignite. When the rock reached 2,000 degrees Celsius, all the water and aromatic hydrocarbons, the largest percentage of which was hydrogen, were released as an aromatic, to be captured. Actually it smelled a great deal like a huge fart, so clearly the nomenclature was not intended to imply the stench of a hydrocarbon was “aromatic”.

Now, the original goal of this process was the transformation of coal into coke, which was used to melt iron and steel without imparting any contaminates into them. But after this nifty bit of chemistry was completed the coke manufacturers were left with buckets of a stinking flammable semi-liquid substance called coal tar, and a stinking vaporous lighter than air substance called “coal gas”. Disposing of these vile and grotesque materials was both dangerous and expensive, so there was considerable motivation to find some profit in them.

In fact the search for profit from these waste products led directly to the entire field of organic chemistry, including the development of color dyes, explosives, fertilizers, even the creation of artificial rubber (plastics). Even today, most of what we call "organic chemistry" is really petrochemicals. As part of that new science,  the noxious coal gas would eventually be renamed “Town Gas” because of its popularity as an economical source of street lighting. Even Ben Franklin in 1783 had no idea the paper balloon he saw rising over Vincennes would led to all of that chemistry -  any more than a 1960’s taxpayer could know that the Apollo Moon program would lead to the 21st century micro-chip computer that now controls the stove used to make dinner.  How could they? In the Lafayette, Indiana of 1960, for instance,  there was only one computer, and it occupied an entire floor in a building especially constructed to house it in Perdue University.  

A century earlier, Lafayette, Indiana was in many ways an average Midwestern parochial American town. It had a two story courthouse, a half dozen churches, a synagogue, two banks, three newspapers, several hotels, two breweries producing 4,000 bottle of beer a year, a bathhouse, a steam locomotive maintenance shop and businesses manufacturing everything from wagons, and farm machinery to bicycles, electric meters, steering gears, safes, and a meat packing plant. What made the town special was the Lafayette Gas Light Company, where coal was converted into coke and town gas.

And it was because of the Lafayette Gas Works, and because the nationally respected chemist Charles Wetherill was in town to meet his new in-laws and to encourage the Hoosier wine industry, that history, and John Wise, paused in the village of 10,000 souls for a single momentous moment. For “Professor "Wise was convinced, “…our children will travel to any part of the globe without the inconvenience of smoke, sparks, and sea-sickness, and at the rate of one hundred miles per hour.”  Okay, he was off by 400 miles an hour, but it is still a pretty impressive prediction.

On Tuesday, 16 August, 1859, next to the gas works at Fourth and Union Streets in Lafayette, the fifty-one year old “Professor” John Wise began inflating his balloon with town gas.  Despite the large crowd gathered, estimated at 20,000, to witness the launch, a leaky value caused a 24 hour postponement. (an event which should be familiar to any who watched a launch at Cape Kennedy during the 1960's.) So it was “precisely two o'clock the next afternoon (Wednesday, 17 August, 1859) in the presence of a smaller crowd of citizens” that John’s gas bag finally rose into the sky.

John carried with him a number of scientific instruments, in order to conduct airborne experiments of the “ozone” for Mr. Wetherill. He also carried copies of the local newspapers, as well 123 letters consigned to him by the local postmaster, making this fight the first official “air mail” delivery attempt in the United States. All the mail was addressed to people in “New York City”. The likelihood of success was doubted by the Daily Courier; “The fact is, that the aerial ship "Jupiter" is about as well adapted to the navigation of the "upper current" as Mr. Wise is adapted to preach the gospel.”

The temperature was 94 degrees when the restraining ropes were released, and “The Jupiter” rushed straight upward, to an altitude of perhaps 12,000 feet. And there the gas bag hung in mid-air, fully visible to the townsfolk, suspended in a breathless sky, for hour after hour.  “Professor” Wise noted in his diary, “My friends below wonder why I was not going on my voyage east. I thought so myself, but what can I do? Jupiter was full as a drum—no wind—not a breath!” After an hour of motionless hovering, John released 55 pounds of ballast, and the balloon rose to 15,000 feet, until the Wabash River was little more than “a crooked thread of water”. Still there was no discernible movement toward New York City or even New York state. That balloon envelope, John reported, was, “now quite flaccid in her lower hemisphere.” Finally, at 3:55 p.m., the barest breath of air began to move the Jupiter – south.

Forlorn and still sailing south, 25 miles later, “Professor” Wise floated over Crawfordsville, Indiana. With the sun setting, and not enough ballast left to compensate for the cooling of the gas with nightfall, Wise set the Jupiter down on the road, six miles south of Crawfordsville. As the Lafayette Courier explained, “So endeth the "trans-continental" voyage. That it was only trans-county-nental is no fault of the great Aeronaut.” The air mail was delivered to New York via the railroad. The deflation of spirits in Lafayette was attended to by Herbert’s brewery, and the town became, according to a local reporter, the scene of “a colossal drunk”.  “Ever light pole had a lien on it”, wrote another newspaper humorist. Surely Doctor Franklin would have never foreseen that such a mass intoxication would be the result of his newborn child’s hesitant first steps.

The final act in this drama was perhaps easier to predict. John Wise was last seen alive on this earth suspended beneath yet another gas bag, at 11:14 p.m., on 28 September, 1879, about 20 miles to the west of La Port, Indiana, headed north, out over lake Michigan.  John had been accompanied on his last flight by a paying customer, Mr. George Burr, who was a cashier at the Bank of St. Louis, Missouri. Their flight had only been intended as a test, to last only a few moments. But the wires holding the balloon down were weak, the wind was strong,  and without adequate warning, the bag was pulled into the air, then blown across Illinois and Indiana, and then North over the chilly waters of the lake, giving passenger Burr much more flight time than he had paid for. A body assumed to his was washed ashore in Indiana several days later.  But “Professor” John Wise was never seen again, and was presumed dead.

But I am certain that old Ben Franklin could have predicted that tragedy, because he never risked his own life in a balloon. He just sold them. Still, it was clear, that old Ben could recognize a revolution when he saw one, even if he could not imagine the details.

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STARK RAVING SANE, Charles Guiteau and the insanity of an insanity defense

I judge it a victory for the legal process that no one answered the exhausted, exasperated plea of a spectator,  who responded to the umpteenth outburst by defendant Charles Julius Guiteau (pronounced “Gitto”, above) by begging, “Just shoot him, now.”  There is no doubt Charles was looney, or funny in the head. But if he had murdered some random schmuck on the street , he would have been locked safely away in an insane asylum, where he could die quietly of tuberculous like most of the 19^th century mentally ill.  If that had happened, then with time he would have been considered “ha, ha” funny.  As it was,  the children who grew up with Charles noted his “offensive egotism”, thirty years before he shot President James Garfield in the back.  Because of that murder, because he had murdered the President of the United States, Charles was not, as Sarah Vowell suggested, “the funniest man in American History”. But he still comes close.

Just after nine on 2 July, 1881, as he got out of the cab in front of the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station (above), his ex-girl friend, Pauline Smolens, asked, “What are you plotting now, Charles dear?” He was plotting to gun down President Garfield inside the station. But her asking the question raises the question why Miss Smolens got in a carriage with dear Charles after showing the common sense to break up with this lunatic exhibitionist.  Fifteen years earlier Charles' long suffering wife Anne Bunn had divorced him only after he re-gifted her the syphilis he had received from one of the prostitutes he frequented. The judge who granted Anne's divorce ordered Charles to never marry again.  Legally the judge couldn't do that, but that was the effect Charles Guiteau eventually had on everybody who knew him - they were all driven to extremes.

Having shot the President, Charles was run to a nearby police station by officer Patrick Kearney.  All the way there Charles kept shouting, “I have killed Garfield!...I have a letter that will tell you all about it!” Charles' note read, “I have just shot the President. I shot him several times as I wished him to go as easily as possible...I am a lawyer, theologian, and politician.... Very respectfully, Charles Guiteau” Almost nothing in that note was true.

First, Charles was a no theologian. As a teenager he joined the free love cult of John Humphrey Noyes.  But Charles' groundless arrogance offended so many members, he literally couldn't get laid in a free love commune.  After five years of celibacy “Charles Git Out”, as his fellow cult members called him, tried suing Noyes, and failing that, then plagiarized two of the leaders' books. Then Charles became an itinerant preacher (above). One newspaper described a typical performance by the self described “Little Giant of the West”, “...The impudent scoundrel talked only 15 minutes.” Charles then ran out the back with the ticket receipts in his pocket.  According to one member, the abandoned audience, “had a conference and all came to the conclusion that he was crazy.”

Charles was also not really a lawyer.  His bar exam was four questions long, and a passing grade was just 50%....so he did get his law degree.  But he only used it to make himself a bill collector, keeping whatever he collected whenever he felt like it.. Oh, and President Garfield was not dead – yet - and would not die easily. And Charles was never respectful of anybody. The only truth in the note was that being an egomaniac Charles did fit the working definition of a politician. He decided Garfield owed him an ambassadorship, and when he did not receive it, Charles bought a gun and began stalking President Garfield.  But that was just the latest in a life time of arrogant fantasies.  It seemed as if before he shot the President,  everybody in Chicago, Boston and New York thought Charles ought be hanged. So after he pulled the trigger, he set out to convince everybody in Washington, D.C., as well.   

While James Garfield was slowly dying of septicemia, Charles Guiteau was writing his autobiography and planning his lecture tour. From his prison cell Charles offered the suit he wore while shooting Garfield, for sale, as well as photographs of himself. Again, after only a few weeks, most of the people in the closest contact with Charles, his jailers, wanted to kill him..

On 11 September, Sargent William Mason, of the 4^th Artillery regiment, got so fed up with “coming to work every day to protect a dog like Guiteau.”  Mason shoved a pistol through the grate in Charles' cell door and ordered the assassin to “Get up and meet your death like a man.” Instead Charles began screaming and running back and forth in his tiny cell, while Mason kept firing and missing him. In desperation Mason yelled “Stay still, you rotten shit!” just before the gun was knocked from his hand by another guard.  Despite widespread public acclaim, and funds raised for his family, Sargent Mason was sentenced to eight years in jail, perhaps because he missed.

After James Garfield finally died on 19 September, 1881, Charles was charged with murder and hate mail began to flood the new jail at 19th and B Streets, SE (above). Typical was the opinion of one writer who called Charles a “dirty, lousy, lying rebel traitor”, adding, “hanging is too good for you, you stinking cuss... You damn old mildewed assassin. You ought to be burned alive and let rot. You savage cannibal dog.”

Perhaps the most inventive suggestion was that Charles be forced to eat two ounces of his own cooked flesh every day, as long as he lasted.. About this time, another guard was driven to attack Charles with a knife. Again, Charles' screams brought help. But none of this seemed to shake Charles' reality, or lack thereof.  He assured courtroom spectators, “I've had plenty of visitors...everybody was glad to see me...they all expressed the opinion without one dissenting voice that I be acquitted.”  He sound only slightly more sure of himself than Donald Trump!

The serialization of Charles' arrogant autobiography in the newspapers would have poisoned the jury pool if those waters were not already putrid with hate. Worse, Charles complained that while a fund had been set up to support the newly widowed Mrs. Garfield, he still needed money for his expected dream team lawyers. 

The trial began on Monday, 14 November, 1881, in the courtroom of Walter Smith Cox (above), a longtime D.C. attorney, who had only been on the bench for two years. Fearing any verdict might be appealed, Judge Cox allowed Charles to to act as one of his own attorneys. 

“I came here...as an agent of the Deity,” asserted Charles, “and I am going to assert my right in this case.” As a practical matter this meant Charles kept springing up whenever he was inspired to, to argue or spew insults and obscenities on witnesses and his own “blunderbuss lawyers”, ordering his brother-in-law to “Get off the case, you consummate ass!”, telling Judge Cox, “I would rather have some ten-year-old boy try this case than you!”, and often spitting and foaming at the mouth while he did so.

Meanwhile the search for an impartial jury eliminated 175 on grounds they wanted Charles dead. Prospective juror John Lynch suggested that Charles “ought to be hung or burnt”, adding, “I don't think there is any evidence in the United States to convince me any other way”. Potential juror John Judd said Charles ought to be hung – not for murdering Garfield, but because he had once cheated Judd out of $50. A writer to the New York Times suggested, “it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.”  After three days, Charles' great objection to the chosen twelve was that one of them, Ralph Wormley, was black.

On Saturday the doctors offered their account of the President's injuries, introducing a preserved section of Garfield's spine (above).  It was passed among the hushed jury, and was eventually handed to Charles, who looked it over and handed it back without comment. Much to everyone's relief.

According to the papers, that night, “a wild and reckless youth” named Bill Jones - who was actually 29 and had been drinking heavily - rode up next to the carriage returning Charles to jail, and let loose a shot. “The Avenger” then lead police on a high speed (one horsepower) chase, south to the outskirts of Fredricksburg, Virginia, where he was arrested. Worse, in most estimations, was that Jones had missed.

“People will learn after awhile”, said Charles, “ that the Lord is with me and will not allow me to be killed!” The Washington Times labeled young Jones a hero, despite his record for impersonating police officers and threatening strangers with arrest. Several thousand dollars were raised by “The Evening Star” to support Jones' wife and child and hire attorneys while he sat in jail for two years. In 1884, a jury quickly acquitted Bill Jones of the assault, which must have made Sargent Mason feel like a complete fool.

Monday, 21 November – the first court date after the Bill Jones assault - the only actual criminal lawyer working for Charles Guiteau, Mr. Leigh Robinson, resigned from the case. The 49 year old Confederate veteran had only taken the thankless job at the request of Judge Cox. 

But Robinson was now clashing with Charles' brother-in-law, George Scoville (above), whose legal career had focused on property rights. George wanted to plead Charles temporary  insane.

But Charles refused to admit he was insane, shouting at George in open court, “You are no criminal lawyer! I can get two or three first-class criminal lawyers in America to manage this case for me.!” 

No he couldn't. Where those lawyers might have been hiding was unclear, so Judge Cox finally had the lunatic handcuffed in his chair. As the bailiffs struggled with him, Charles kept shouting, “Mind your own business. Mind your own business!” Once restrained, Charles sulked, and Robinson was released from his painful duties.

George Scoville put Charles' older brother John (above left) on the stand, who said of Charles, “His life is a wreck and worthless."   When John wrote to ask when he could expect repayment of a loan, Charles wrote back, “Find $7 enclosed. Stick it up your bung hole and wipe your nose on it...” However there was no money in the letter. Charles' big sister Francis (above, right) testified Charles had “gone daft” without warning and chased her with an ax. And then Charles spent a week on the stand, driving his legal defense six feet under ground.

Charles insisted medical malpractice had killed Garfield, not him.  Besides,  he was not crazy in the moral sense, because “The Deity” had ordered him to kill Garfield, but he was definitely insane in the legal sense, in that the jury should not convict him.  Twenty psychiatrists (called alienists) watched this performance, one telling a newspaper that Charles was the most fascinating psychotic he had ever seen.  District Attorney George Corkhill, disagreed, asserting that Charles was “no more insane than I am...he's a cool, calculating blackguard, a polished ruffian... He wanted excitement..and notoriety, and he got it.”

Prosecutor Corkhill asked, “Who bought the pistol, the Deity or you?” Charles (above) responded, “The Deity furnished the money...I was the agent.” Corkhill asked directly, “Are you insane at all?” To this, Charles tried a clever answer. “A good many people think I am badly insane”, he told the jury, ”My father thought so, and my relatives thought so and still think so.” And that was when Corkhill sprung his  trap. “You told the jury you were not insane,” he reminded Charles. The madman smirked, certain of his own cleverness. “I am not an expert. Let the experts and the jury decide whether I am insane.” At least half the people in the courtroom, the jury included, were probably willing to lynch him right there, because of that smirk.

One of the few spectators able to hold onto their own sanity in the presence of Charles' pretentious hubris, was Fredrick Douglas. The great man pointed out that if Charles were merely acting crazy, “he is the most consummate actor in the world.” Meanwhile Douglas's old ally, Henry Ward Beecher, announced he believed Guiteau, “sane enough to hang.”

After 100 witnesses and 10 weeks of testimony, the case went to the jury. They came back with a verdict in 20 minutes. Allowing them five minutes to use the toilet, ten minutes to elect John Hamlin as foreman, and count the ballots, and five minutes to reassemble courtroom security: it cannot have been a contentious deliberation. At the reading of the verdict, Charles jumped to his feet, screaming at the jury, “You are all low, consummate jackasses! My blood will be on the heads of that jury!”. A Chicago Tribune headline caught the general public reaction. “The Hyena Hangs!”

Six months later, after his breakfast on Friday, 30 June, 1882, a clean shaven Charles Guiteau asked that the flowers and cards sent by his supporters be delivered to his cell. The warden informed him there were none. Charles then placed an order for his evening meal, which the warden optimistically took. Just before noon Charles was led out of his cell by a clergyman, his brother John and a pair of guards. He was led into the rotunda of the jail, where the permanent gallows awaited him. At the foot of the stairs, Charles paused to weep. Then he climbed the 13 steps, and found himself facing a crowd of 250 who had paid up to $300 to watch him die. Hundreds more stood outside the walls, waiting to cheer the event.

Charles could not go without a speech. As his hands were tied behind his back, and his legs were bound together, he recited: “I am now going to read some verses which are intended to indicate my feelings at the moment of leaving this world....I wrote it this morning about ten o'clock.” He than recited in a child like voice, '“I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad, I am going to the Lordy,...”  His poem went on for five stanzas and then Charles bent his head so the genial hangman, “Colonel” Robert Strong, could slip the hangman's noose over his head.

The papers called Strong "the jolliest Jack Ketch in the whole country",   and bestowed on the long time city jail guard the honorary title of “Colonel” (above).  The 56 year old was best known for his genial nature, who once earnestly chided a condemned man, “If you don’t cheer up you’ll never learn how to look on the bright side of life.” Said a fellow guard of Robert Strong's work, “His noose for the neck was simply perfection.” As this noose was tightened on his neck, Charles begged the hangman, “Do not pull it too tight, Mr. Strong”. Robert assured him, “I won't hurt you, Charlie.”

With the hood closed, Strong and the clergyman stepped away, and Charles shouted, “The Angels are coming to me!” He opened his left hand, dropping a square of paper. Before it hit the platform floor, Charles shouted, "Glory, ready, go!” and “Colonel” Strong jerked the lever, opening the trap door. That quick, and almost without a sound, Charles Guiteau dropped six feet and jerked to a stop. A cheer went up from the crowd, inside and outside the jail.

The body hung still for 40 seconds, and then jerked. After three minutes the body was lowered until the feet just touched the ground. The heart kept beating for another 14 minutes. After it stopped, the body was left hanging for another half an hour - just to be sure -  and was then lowered into its coffin and cut down. On autopsy Charles Guiteau was found to have died of suffocation. His neck was not broken by Mr. Strong's noose. Charles' brain weighed 49 ½ ounces, and had asymmetry of the hemispheres and signs of Syphilitic paresis, which can produce grandiose delusions. 

Charles has never been buried. His skull (above)  and most of his bones are in the National Museum of Health and Medicine while sections of his brain are in the Mutter Museum, both in Philadelphia. His head, minus his skull, was part of a private collection in Indiana for some years, before it was destroyed in a fire.  Free at last.

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LITTLE GREEN HOUSE ON K STREET Chapter Four

I believe that houses are like the people who occupy them. If they remain standing long enough  they can become all things. First the little house on K street was a home,  and then it was a bordello and a bar, and then it sat empty for a few years. I mean, who would want to live in such an infamous den of inequity? That question was answered during the roaring twenties, when 1625 K street became the home of various fraternities associated with George Washington University - the campus is one block south across Pennsylvania Avenue, between 24^th and 19^th Streets. But the frat parties came to abrupt end with the onset of the Great Depression.

One in four Americans lost their jobs. Those who still had a job saw their wages fall by almost half, at the same time that the price of food went up. Those who lost their home or apartment threw up shacks and shanties on vacant land and called them "Hoovervilles". Empty pockets turned inside out were called "Hoover Flags". There were literally millions of Americans in agony. Industrialist Henry Ford proclaimed that the Great Depression had been caused by “an era of laziness”, and President Hoover, from his government subsidized home three and ½ blocks south of the Little Green House, seemed to agree. But to the vast army of unemployed, that did not seem to be so much an answer as a justification as to why Ford's family was not going hungry like theirs. The District of Columbia in 1930 had a population of 607,000 people, and almost half of them had no regular income.

Still the town should have barely noticed when on 5 December, 1930 some 3,000 communists came from all over the eastern half of the United States to stage a “hunger march” in Washington. The march was badly organized. The timing was stupid. Two marchers died from exposure to the harsh winter weather, fifteen others came down with pneumonia, twenty with the flu. Still the government managed to overreact. There were more cops than marchers. Great sums had been spent to isolate the communists, far more than was spent in relief efforts. If the American Communists had been better organized, they might have posed a real threat to the capitalist system, because President Hoover decided the best capitalism could do was to encourage those with money to invest it. See if their response sounds familiar. They did invest their American profits, but not in America.

In response to Hoover's pleadings, some investments were made. In 1931 the frat house at 1625 K street was remodeled into office space. But by then there was not much call for new office space, even in Washington D.C. The economy did not need old spaces given new names. It needed new purposes. The little Green house, now a little green office building, sat empty, waiting for something to happen.

In 1932 fifteen thousand well organized WWI veterans marched on Washington, petitioning their government for early payment of their long promised war bonuses. The money was supposed to be paid in 1945, but the men were hungry now -  their children were hungry now. But this time the government had the tools to respond to such a petition. This was why Washington had been established. The power structure called out their District of Columbia police force (above). Shots were fired. Two veterans were killed. A few cops were beat up. The Federal government decided that the problem was not that the working stiffs had been pushed to far, it was that not enough force had been applied to keeping them under control.

That “enough force” had a name – General Douglas MacArthur (above, left). Ordered to clear the “Bonus Army” from around Jenkin's Hill, the imperious MacArthur sent in tanks and troops with fixed bayonets and tear gas. Crowds of government workers shouting “Shame, shame” at the soldiers. But their shouts did not shame MacArthur.

Once the area around capital had been cleared the General led his little army across the river to attack the shanty town  where the desperate veterans had left their families (above). This had not been ordered. MacArthur did this on his own. The two infants who died in this assault were MacArthur's trophies, as were the hundreds of mostly women, who were beaten and bloodied in this lesson for the lazy. Major Dwight David Eisenhower, who was the liaison with the district cops, described the burning of the shantytown as “pitiable.” MacArthur, who had pity only for injustices suffered by himself, was quietly retired and given a  job in the far off Philippines where it was to be hoped, he would never be heard from again.

In 'upper crust' Washington, “Old” Washington, the removal of General MacArthur was a defeat equal to surrender at Appomattox Court House. He had been one of them. And they never got over it, nor over him.  Still, with the incoming new administration there was reason for the wealthy denizens of Washington to hope. Wrote the Saturday Evening Post, “No occupants of the White House since Theodore Roosevelt had been so significantly favored as to birth and material circumstances (as FDR). Even the so called "Cave Dwellers" of Washington dropped their masks of indifference and cheered openly. At last the nation was to have a President and First Lady who have enjoyed exceptional privileges due to family position and wealth”.

The upper crust of Washington had acquired the nomen of The Cave Dwellers, because they were rarely seen outside their Kalorama neighborhood, to the North of K street. And the subsequent invasion of Washington by the army of Roosevelt's New Deal technocrats now destroyed “the incomparably delightful relationship between the official and social life” of Washington.

The small southern town inside Washington was suffering a revolution - as usual, hardest felt in the mundane things of life. In 1937 some 40,000 people jammed Washington's Union Station (above) twice a day, coming and going.  Suddenly, Washington (and the government) was going to work.

Federal clerks toiling away in unairconditioned offices now numbered a daily invasion of  200,000, since most could only afford to live outside the district. And then came the final insult.  In 1937 plans were announced to cut down 50 of the imported Japanese Cherry trees to make room for the planned Jefferson Memorial.

Outraged, a group of female Cave Dwellers chained themselves to the trees – their final line in the sand had been drawn at trees, not people. But it was a pitiable last stand. A brainy New Dealer came down in person and served the ladies coffee in china cups. He listened to their passion for tradition. He served them more coffee and promised to replant any trees damaged. Then he served them more coffee, and when the ladies slipped their chains to escape to the toilet, the trees were bulldozed, and the construction proceeded. (The trees were later replaced, but the ladies never forgave the insult.)

Like an ancient totem which had lost its magic, in early December of 1941 the Little Green House on K street was also bulldozed. The safe in the backyard, if it was ever there.  was plowed over as well. And in its place an 11 story steel frame concrete structure would rise. And like the rest of Washington, it would be filled with lobbyists.

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