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The Great Society Subway A History of the Washington
Metro 1st Edition Zachary M. Schrag Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Zachary M. Schrag
ISBN(s): 9780801882463, 080188246X
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 12.08 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
 Creating the North American Landscape

Gregory Conniff, Edward K. Muller, and David Schuyler

Consulting Editors

George F. Thompson
Series Founder and Director

Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places

Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Staunton, Virginia
The Great Society Subway:
A History of the Washington Metro

Zachary M. Schrag

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
© 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
98765432

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schrag, Zachary M.
The Great Society subway : a history of the Washington Metro / Zachary M. Schrag
p. cm. — (Creating the North American landscape)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-8246-X (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Subways—Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. 2. Subways—
Washington Metropolitan Area. 3. Local transit—Social aspects—Washington
Metropolitan Area. I. Title. II. Series.
he4491.w44w376 2006
388.4v28v09753—dc22 2005012141

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Frontispiece: The Washington Metro, 2004 (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit

Authority)
For Rebecca
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

1 The City, 1791–1955 11

2 The Plans, 1955–1965 32

3 The Stations, 1965–1967 65

4 The Region, 1966–1967 95

5 The Bridge, 1966–1971 119

6 The Builders, 1972–1976 142

7 The Money, 1972–1980 171

8 The District 196

9 The Suburbs 221

10 The Riders 243

Conclusion 273

Notes 285

Index 347
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a delightfully social activity, characterized by

intense interaction as well as lonely stretches in the archives. I particularly
enjoyed the company of the dozens of people—named individually in
the notes but thanked here collectively—who answered my questions in
the course of oral-history interviews. These conversations were the most
rewarding part of my research, and they are responsible for most of the
insights contained in these pages. Within this group I must give special
thanks to Cody Pfanstiehl and Tom Deen, each of whom was able, thanks
to his early involvement and varied roles, to comment on the broad histori-
cal significance of Metro as well as his individual experiences, and to put me
in touch with other Metro veterans.
I began this work at Columbia University, under the expert supervision
of Elizabeth Blackmar and Kenneth Jackson. Ken provided keen strategic
advice, prodding me to fit this case study into a broader view of transporta-
tion and urban history. Betsy read drafts with fearsome precision, spotting
every flaw, yet promising it could be fixed. In trying to reach her standards,
I have done my best work.
Other Columbia faculty proved equally supportive. Alan Brinkley’s in-
sights on liberalism, Marianne de Laet’s explanations of technology, Ron
Grele’s expertise on oral history, and the transportation-planning knowl-
edge of Owen Gutfreund and Elliott Sclar were all critical to my work. My
fellow students Rit Aggarwala, Chris Capozzola, Sara Gregg, Ellen Stroud,
and Ashli White carried me through graduate school, emotionally as well
as intellectually. The George Washington Plunkitt Benevolent Society and
the Public Policy Consortium were welcome sounding boards. Prior to Co-
lumbia, Sue Ikenberry, Helen Kimmelfield, and Judith Vichniac prepared
me to take on big writing projects. John Stilgoe told me to look at the
American landscape, and the undergraduate term paper on Metro I wrote
for him must count as the seed of this work.
I completed this book as a member of the Department of History and
Art History at George Mason University, a glorious intellectual home. Prior
to my arrival at Mason, the Department of American Studies at George
Washington University, and the departments of history at Baruch College
and Columbia were equally stimulating. I thank all my colleagues—too nu-
merous to list—and my students for making it thrilling to be a historian.
Scholars of cities, technology, and Washington helped me with their
x Acknowledgments

criticism and perspective. From my first groping toward a topic, Howard

Gillette, Clay McShane, and Mark Rose were particularly generous with
their time and wisdom. Themis Chronopolous, Tim Davis, Sarah Elkind,
Martin Gordon, Dolores Hayden, Matthew Klingle, Jeremy Korr, Carol
Herselle Krinsky, David Krugler, Bob Levey, Jane Freundel Levey, Alan
Lessoff, Jane Loeffler, Richard Longstreth, Stephen McGovern, Ray Mohl,
Robert Post, Martin Reuss, Mark David Richards, Anne Rollins, Matthew
Roth, John Staudenmaier, Joel Tarr, Alexander von Hoffman, Chris Wells,
and Patrick Zilliacus also gave vital pointers along the way. The Historical
Society of Washington, D.C., the Society for American City and Regional
Planning History, the Society for the History of Technology, the Transpor-
tation Research Board, and the Urban History Association were important
institutional actors in this regard. Washington History and the Journal of
Urban History published articles based on portions of chapters 2, 4, and 5.
Through years of research I depended on the expertise and patience of
librarians and archivists in Washington and around the country. From be-
ginning to end, Matthew Gilmore, first at the D.C. Public Library and later
at H-DC, offered constant encouragement and countless research tips, as
well as maps for chapters 8 and 9. At my main research site, the Special Col-
lections Department of Gelman Library, George Washington University,
Bernadette Boucher, Francine Henderson, Jennifer King, Nancy Richards,
Lyle Slovick, and, especially, La Nina Clayton provided hospitality and es-
sential help over the course of several years. Equally essential was the help
I received at the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library from
Peggy Appleman, Faye Haskins, and Susan Malbin. Although I never met
him, I salute the late Darwin Stolzenbach, whose research in the late 1970s
and early 1980s preserved documents and memories that otherwise would
have been lost forever. Cody Pfanstiehl and Peter Craig were also important
collectors of materials that made my research possible. Several key inter-
views were expertly transcribed by Doug Wilson.
I am also grateful to Heather Crocetto and Ingrid Kauffman of the
Arlington Public Library; Matthew Cook and Steven Peters at the Chicago
Historical Society; Geir Gundersen of the Gerald R. Ford Library; Cindy
Janke and Gail Rodgers McCormick of the Historical Society of Wash-
ington, D.C.; Robert Tissing at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; Ron
Sodano at the National Archives; Betsy Pittman of the University of Con-
necticut; Daniel Davis of the University of Wyoming; Tammy Beck of the
Washington Research Library Consortium; Pat Hodges and Betty Yambrek
of Western Kentucky University; and other librarians and archivists at the
D.C. Archives, the Fairfax County Public Library, George Mason Univer-
sity, the National Archives, and the Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford presiden-
tial libraries. Although this is by no means an official history of Metro,
I deeply appreciate the help I received from the staff of the Washington
Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, especially Leona Agouridis, Colin Al-
ter, Murray Bond, Matilda Broadnax, Cheryl Burke, Marilyn Dorfman,
 Acknowledgments xi

Larry Levine, Donna Murray, Mark Pohl, Phil Portlock, Susan Serrian, and
Pamela Wilkins.
Financial support for this project came from several sources, includ-
ing a President’s Fellowship and a Public Policy Fellowship from Colum-
bia University. The National Science Foundation’s Program in Science and
Technology Studies supported my work under grant number 0004242. In
addition to administering the grant, John Perhonis gave helpful comments,
as did the proposal reviewers. The American Society of Civil Engineers and
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation hired me to curate a website on the history
of Metro, now available at chnm.gmu.edu/metro. Thomas McLane and
Lorena Diaz of the ASCE oversaw the project, and it was a special pleasure
to work with Roy Rosenzweig, Dan Cohen, and Jim Sparrow of George
Mason University’s Center for History and New Media to launch and de-
velop the site. A grant from the Gerald Ford Foundation funded my travel
to the Gerald R. Ford Library.
I owe special thanks, as do my readers, to Steve Burt, poet and scholar,
who volunteered to edit the entire manuscript, trimming redundancies,
useless adverbs and unhelpful metaphors. More than anyone, he turned
a dissertation into a book manuscript. Once it reached that stage, Randy
Jones, George Thompson, and anonymous referees of the Center for Amer-
ican Places, and Courtney Bond, Glen Burris, Tara Lenington, Trevor Lip-
scombe, Juliana McCarthy, and Brian MacDonald at the Johns Hopkins
University Press guided me through the final stages and brought the book
to its present polish. Anne Holmes of EdIndex prepared the index.
Throughout the writing of this book I have depended on the support
of my family: Elizabeth Alexander, Rhoda Bernard, Sophie Davidson, Bob
Fenichel, Emily Fenichel, Lisa Lerman, Sam Lerman, David Schrag, Lala
Schrag, Philip Schrag, Sarah Schrag, Eve Tushnet, and Mark Tushnet. Re-
becca Tushnet—my best student and my best teacher—sought clarification,
as is her nature. And in a thousand ways she inspired me to learn, to work,
and to write. Leonard Tushnet Schrag arrived too late to help with this
book, but I look forward to taking his hand and exploring Metro anew.
This page intentionally left blank
Abbreviations

AH August Heckscher, White House Staff Files, Presidential

Papers of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library, Boston
AMB Andre M. Buckles, Files, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Li-
brary, Ann Arbor, Michigan
BART Bay Area Rapid Transit (San Francisco)
BLW Basil Lee Whitener, Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, &
Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham,
North Carolina
C100 Committee of 100 on the Federal City, Papers, Department
of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washing-
ton University, Washington, D.C.
CAH-JFKL Charles A. Horsky, White House Staff Files, 1961–1965,
Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library, Boston
CAH-LBJL Charles A. Horsky, Office Files, Lyndon Baines Johnson
Library and Museum, Austin, Texas
CDS C. Darwin Stolzenbach (Fairweather), Papers, Department
of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washing-
ton University, Washington, D.C.
CFA Commission of Fine Arts
CFA-NA U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, Project Files, 1941–1978,
and Minutes, Record Group 66, National Archives, Wash-
ington, D.C.
COG Council of Governments
CO-OPT Coalition for Optimum Growth, Collection, 1971–1977,
Record Group 61, Arlington Community Archives, Arling-
ton, Virginia
CPf Cody Pfanstiehl, Papers, George Washington University,
Washington, D.C.
DCCC District of Columbia City Council, Records, Department
of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washing-
ton University, Washington, D.C.
DHCD D.C. Department of Housing & Community Develop-
ment, Records, Record Group 14, District of Columbia
Archives, Washington, D.C.
xiv Abbreviations

DOT U.S. Department of Transportation

FG Frederick Gutheim, Collection, Collection #7470, Ameri-
can Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie
GG Gilbert Gude, Congressional Papers, Department of Spe-
cial Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington Uni-
versity, Washington, D.C.
GRFL Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
GWU Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library,
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
HW Harry Weese, Collection, Chicago Historical Society
JFKL John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston
JLF II Joseph L. Fisher, Papers, Part II: U.S. Congressman (1974–
1981), Special Collections & Archives, George Mason Uni-
versity, Fairfax, Virginia
JRH Judith R. Hope, Associate Director for Transportation, Do-
mestic Council, Files, 1974–1977, Gerald R. Ford Presiden-
tial Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
LBJL Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Austin,
Texas
LCB Lyle C. Bryant, Personal Papers, Record Group 20, Arling-
ton Community Archives, Arlington, Virginia
LJ Louis Justement, Papers, George Washington University,
Washington, D.C.
MHPC WMATA Metro History Project Collection, Department of
Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington
University, Washington, D.C.
MNCPPC Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commis-
sion
MSC WMATA Metrorail Specifications Collection, Department
of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washing-
ton University, Washington, D.C.
MTS Mass Transportation Survey
NCPC National Capital Planning Commission
NCPC-NA National Capital Planning Commission. Records, 1900–
1976, and Transcripts of Proceedings and Minutes of Meet-
ings, 1926–1972, Record Group 328, National Archives,
Washington, D.C.
NCPPC National Capital Park and Planning Commission
NCRPC National Capital Regional Planning Council
NCTA National Capital Transportation Agency
NPMP Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives,
College Park, Maryland
NVTC Northern Virginia Transportation Commission
OMB U.S. Office of Management and Budget
OMB-NA U.S. Office of Management and Budget, General Budget-
 Abbreviations xv

ary Administration Subject Files, Subject Files for the Dis-

trict of Columbia Government, 1962–1969, Record Group
51, Series 60.23, National Archives, College Park, Maryland
PSC Peter S. Craig, Papers, Department of Special Collections,
Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washing-
ton, D.C.
REM Robert E. Mathe, Papers, Research Collections, Office of
History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Vir-
ginia
RLA Redevelopment Land Agency
RNG Robert N. Giaimo, Papers, Thomas J. Dodd Research Cen-
ter, University of Connecticut, Storrs
UMTA Urban Mass Transportation Administration
WHA Washington Housing Association, Records, D.C. Com-
munity Archives, Washingtoniana Division, D.C. Public
Library.
WHCF White House Central Files (Johnson and Ford libraries,
Nixon Presidential Materials Project)
WHN William H. Natcher, Papers, Western Kentucky University,
Bowling Green
WMATA Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
WMATA-A Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
(METRO) collected materials, 1961–1987, Record Group
39, Arlington Community Archives, Arlington, Virginia
WW William Walton, Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presi-
dential Library, Boston
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

When Metro began serving Washington, D.C., and its suburbs in 1976, it
was one of the first rapid transit systems opened in this country since the
popularization of the automobile in the 1920s. Along with its cousins, San
Francisco’s BART and Atlanta’s MARTA, it has pioneered new technologies
and uses. Stretching 100 miles, the Washington Metro is the largest post-
war system, and one could argue that it is the most ambitious effort ever
made to offer Americans an alternative to the automobile. And Americans
have taken up the offer, making Metro the most heavily used of the newer
systems. Its location in the national capital has made Metro particularly vis-
ible, and it continues to attract not only local attention, ranging from D.C.
neighborhood associations to the White House and Congress, but also the
admiration of tourists and visitors from around the world.
What is most surprising about Metro’s creation is that it took place
in an era when Americans passionately embraced the automobile. By the
mid-1960s four out of five families owned at least one automobile, and
many owned multiple cars. Officials at every level encouraged automobile
ownership and driving; gas was cheap, and low fuel taxes helped keep it that
way, while government funds supported massive road-building programs,
most notably the 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System. Jobs and people
stampeded to the suburbs, where driving was easier. Cities left behind tore
themselves apart to make room for roads and parking. In this context, in-
vesting in rail was a bold act of dissent. Unlike the pre-1930 transit systems
of Boston, New York, Chicago, and other cities, which were planned with
a captive market in mind, postwar systems were built by people who knew
they were competing with cheap, convenient, even luxurious automobile
transportation.1
How did this happen? Why in an age of highway building did Washing-
ton reject freeways and build rail transit instead? What does it mean that
this city was the nation’s capital? And what were the consequences of that
decision? In short, what is Metro for?
To answer these questions, we must understand Metro not only as a
work of planning, engineering, and architecture, but as a work of politics
and ideology. Any transportation system, whether based on privately owned
vehicles or shared conveyances, uses public space and is therefore a matter
of political debate. The particular system chosen by a community will ex-
press that community’s political values. And Metro, born in the Washing-
2 The Great Society Subway

ton of the 1960s and 1970s, reflects that community’s dominant ideology,
a set of beliefs held by many citizens and officials from both parties that
reached their fullest expression in Lyndon Johnson’s call for a Great Society.
“We have the power to shape the civilization that we want,” Johnson told
the nation, contributing to what historian Irwin Unger describes as “a time
of swaggering national confidence and a profound sense that with enough
will and money any goal was in reach.”2 It was from this confidence that
Metro was born.
Johnson and other liberals of that period believed in the power of gov-
ernment to do good. They treasured cities for their density, diversity, and
shared space. They promoted justice by bringing together people of varying
classes and races, and sought to balance vision and pragmatism, grandeur
and thrift, leadership and democracy. They promoted public investments,
from the National Endowment for the Arts to Project Apollo, suited to the
grandeur and dignity of the world’s richest nation. And, in an extraordi-
nary fourteen-year streak, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administra-
tions pushed through legislation that changed the way Americans plan and
build. Federal laws covering everything from transportation planning to
handicapped access to historic preservation to environmental protection
insisted that public projects take into account broad social goals. A product
of its era, Metro emerged as public transportation intended not merely to
transport commuters, but to build, in Johnson’s terms, “a place where the
city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of com-
merce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”3
This historical understanding may inform what is now a divisive de-
bate over the role of rail transit. On one side are those who see rail as the
answer to energy shortages, suburban sprawl, and greenhouse gases. Few
serious scholars expect to see the private automobile dethroned in their
lifetimes, but many believe that public policy can do more to offer alter-
natives to driving. They argue that rail transit can promote development
dense enough that people at least have the choice of traveling to work or
buying a carton of milk without getting into a car. The boldest visions are
those of California planner Peter Calthorpe and planning professor Robert
Cervero, who have made rail the centerpiece of “Transit-Oriented Develop-
ment” and “Transit Villages.” In their visions, dense, mixed-used clusters of
development around rail stations will allow people to eliminate automobile
trips both long and short. Other observers, while not emphasizing rail quite
as much, still see it as the best hope for American cities. Vukan Vuchic, for
example, writes that “rail transit is actually the only mode that makes large
cities possible with their diverse densities and human character.” Jonathan
Barnett acknowledges that transit-oriented development can border on the
utopian but still asserts that “ultimately every metropolitan region in the
U.S. should have the equivalent of the Washington Metro.”4
These planners and scholars see rail transit as the salvation of the city;
others see it as a fraud, a shiny toy that consumes public funds without pro-
3 Introduction

viding needed service. The bible of this critique is a 1965 book, The Urban
Transportation Problem, by John Meyer, John Kain, and Martin Wohl. In
the bland language of economic analysis, the book questioned urban transit
subsidies, which all agreed would be necessary to any new rail construction.
For forty years, these economists and their followers have criticized new
rail transit projects in strictly quantitative terms. First, they collect the rosy
projections of low cost and high ridership put forth by rail advocates in the
planning stage. Next, they compare actual figures showing high cost and
relatively low ridership. Finally, they argue that the same ridership could be
better served with buses, using dedicated freeway lanes, priority signaling,
and even underground busways.5
This approach has its merits; rail transit never lives up to the most ex-
travagant claims of its promoters, and improved bus service is often over-
looked as an investment with high returns. But many planners and econo-
mists are unpersuaded. John Bates questions the assumptions used in the
original Meyer-Kain-Wohl report, and Jesse Simon faults rail critics for
taking ridership projections out of context. Vuchic faults rail critics for at-
tacking systems that have not had a chance to prove their worth and points
out that, whatever complaints were made about San Francisco’s BART in
its first two decades, the service it performed after the collapse of the Bay
Bridge in the 1989 earthquake repaid the entire investment.6
Quantitative studies have their limits. One 1977 study of Metro ex-
cluded as “not susceptible to precise measurement” such benefits as pro-
viding transportation for people without cars, reducing pollution and fuel
usage, shaping land use, and “improved mobility of both urban and subur-
ban residents.”7 With these factors excluded, it is hard to know what is left.
Most quantitative studies also suffer from inattention to history. They may
include capsule histories of the project they evaluate, but they draw this
information from previous reports and studies, without asking who wrote
those studies and why.
Without the historical context in which a decision was made—non-
quantifiable considerations and all—it is difficult or impossible to know
what the real choices were. William Murin, for example, provides a book-
length critique of Metro’s failure to do more to serve Washington’s poorest
neighborhoods. By ignoring the effort that went into ensuring that those
neighborhoods did ultimately get service, he portrays as total defeat what
was in reality a substantial victory for champions of the inner city. Simi-
larly, Stephen Zwerling, in his book attacking the process that produced
BART, fails to note the hostility toward freeways that led San Francisco to
stop freeway construction in 1965. Meyer, Kain, and Wohl’s own proposed
alternatives to urban transit subsidies included such proposals as removing
highway subsidies or expanding urban boundaries to include the suburbs.
Although such solutions might make sense in the abstract, a more prag-
matic evaluation of American politics in 1965 (or since) would have led the
authors to see transit subsidies as the far easier path to take.8
4 The Great Society Subway

A good example of the advantages and disadvantages of the quantitative

approach is Andrew Marshall Hamer’s chapter on Washington in his 1976
book, The Selling of Rapid Rail Transit. Hamer, a student and admirer of
Meyer and Kain, makes a two-part criticism of transportation planning in
the Washington region. First, he mathematically demonstrates the fragility
of the traffic projections published by transit planners and their consul-
tants in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, he argues that because actual ridership
figures are unlikely to reach the level projected, the city would have been
better served by a system of buses running on dedicated freeway lanes and
exclusive downtown streets. Hamer’s critique of traffic projections exposes
the sensitivity of computer models to mistaken assumptions.
Yet Hamer’s argument is limited by his failure to consider context.
Hamer misrepresents the origins of the demand projections he derides, fail-
ing to report that they were the joint product of rail and road agencies, and
thus were inflated by pro-freeway forces at least as much as by pro-rail plan-
ners. Conversely, he takes at face value a 1963 pro-bus, antirail response by
Martin Wohl rather than understanding Wohl as a participant in the debate
of the time (see chapter 2). Similarly, he is silent on how the various studies
he criticizes were interpreted. It is one thing if an overly optimistic study
misleads naive officials, another if it is accepted with a wink and a nod by
canny policy makers.9
As for Hamer’s bus proposal, only by ignoring the intense freeway fight
that raged throughout the 1960s and early 1970s (not to mention the long
history of urban planning in Washington) could he believe that Washing-
ton’s citizens, merchants, and political leaders would even consider, much
less accept, a proposal to convert downtown’s most prominent streets into
corridors carrying hundreds of buses each rush hour. Ultimately, Hamer’s
argument about how one set of estimated projections could be recalculated
and reinterpreted to support a hypothetical bus system tells us little about
the real city of Washington and the people who live there.10
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the gap between purely quantitative
arguments and lived experience is an exchange published in the Washington
Post in 1996. Martin Wohl, still skeptical of Metro after thirty-five years,
complained of Metro’s failure to meet its projections of ridership and cost.
A few days later, Ken Schellenberg of Prince George’s County responded:
“If I understand Martin Wohl, Metro shouldn’t expand to Dulles because in
1969 Metro made predictions that didn’t come true. So what? Can anyone
in his or her right mind seriously maintain that Metro is not the single best
thing that’s happened in the metropolitan area in the past three decades?
If Metro is keeping ‘only’ a half-million people off the road every day, isn’t
it worth every penny?” Wohl answers no, but even he conceded that his
condemnation of transit planners’ projections could not in itself prove that
Metro was misguided. “I am only looking at some things,” he explained. “I
am not looking at a big picture at all. . . . I don’t pretend to measure what
the people of this community want.”11
5 Introduction

I write as a member of that community. I moved to the District of

Columbia at age seven in 1977, when Metro consisted of a single line with
seven stations. Metro and I grew together, and when I was fourteen years
old, the Red Line reached my neighborhood, giving me the freedom of
the city a year and a half before I got my learner’s permit to drive. Since
then, as a resident of the District and, now, Arlington County, I have used
Metro for daily commutes, for errands and entertainment, as the first and
last leg of overseas trips, and, while researching this project, to get to librar-
ies and archives around the Washington region. Though I have lived in
several cities, all told I have spent half my life in the Washington area, and
I credit Metro with helping make the city such a pleasant home. Because
I believe that many share my experience, I seek to bring attention to some
of Metro’s achievements, once the objects of bitter fights, now largely taken
for granted. Washingtonians and visitors remark on the stunning beauty of
Metro’s stations and the cleanliness of its trains, but they are less likely to
think of the neighborhoods preserved from expressway construction, the
growth of regional cooperation, or the addition of an important public
space to the region. Yet it is these and other unquantifiable measures, as
well as the number of passengers carried, that have made and will make the
case for Metro. On the other hand, close attention to the history of Metro
reveals the paths not taken. Instead of criticizing Metro’s creators for not
pursuing impossible dreams, I point out what I consider shortsighted deci-
sions made when real alternatives were at hand.
Understanding Metro’s history may illuminate today’s debates. To con-
servatives who decry Metro’s expense—around $10 billion in nominal dol-
lars—this book serves as a reminder that Metro was never intended to be the
cheapest solution to any problem, and that it is the product of an age that
did not always regard cheapness as an essential attribute of good govern-
ment. To those who celebrate automobile commuting as the rational choice
of free Americans, it replies that some Americans have made other choices,
based on their understanding that building great cities is more important
than minimizing average commuting time. This book may also answer rad-
icals who believe that public funds should primarily—or exclusively—serve
the poor, which in the context of transportation means providing bus and
rail transit for the carless while leaving the middle class to drive. It suggests
that Metro has done more for inner-city African Americans than is gener-
ally understood. And to those hostile to public mega-projects as a matter of
principle, it responds that it may take a mega-project to kill a mega-proj-
ect. Had activists merely opposed freeways, they might well have been dis-
missed as cranks by politicians and technical experts alike. By championing
rapid transit as an equally bold alternative, they won allies and, ultimately,
victory.12
Most important, this book recalls the belief of Great Society liberals that
public investments should serve all classes and all races, rather than func-
tioning as a last resort. These liberals believed, with Abraham Lincoln, that
6 The Great Society Subway

“the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people,

whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well
do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”13 This ap-
proach justifies the government’s role in rail not as a means of redistributing
wealth, but as an agent for purchasing rapid transit—a good that people
collectively want but cannot collectively buy through a market.
And for Metro’s fans, who ask why Metro failed to become a model for
other cities, why it took so long to build, and why it does not serve every
destination, this account suggests that Metro embodies the limits, as well
as the hopes, of 1960s liberalism. Like many of the grand projects of the
Kennedy-Johnson years, it emerged from an ambitious, idealistic blend of
top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy making. It depended on a
fragile consensus among a wide range of interest groups. Such an approach
made the most sense when the economy was booming, and a few million
more dollars could smooth over differences among various factions. As the
Vietnam War competed for public funds and drove up inflation, many ob-
servers began to eye Metro, like so many other liberal projects, as a luxury
of questionable value.
Metro survived proposed cuts, and today it functions as a vital organ of
the Washington metropolitan region. Few of the hundreds of thousands of
people who ride the system each day know the story of how it came to be.
Yet that story matters, for it reminds us that public works do not arise from
easy consensus among policy makers or from the neutral assessments of dis-
passionate engineers. Rather, they emerge from study, assumptions, ideas,
and, most of all, debate. In rejecting freeways and building rapid transit
instead, Washingtonians proclaimed their love for their city as it stood,
their desire for equality, and their confidence in the largesse of the federal
government—in short, their faith in the public realm. Whether they agree
with those values or not, those who would judge Metro should consider
doing so on those terms.
In addition to presenting Metro’s virtues and its flaws, this study makes
an argument about how big technological investments should be evaluated.
The story of Metro demonstrates that quantitative arguments are uncon-
vincing without a consensus on the proper function of a given program.
For Meyer, Kain, Wohl, and their followers, a transit system exists to move
as many bodies for as little money as possible, period. This assumption can
make a plausible, though still flawed, case for buses. But for Cervero and
Calthorpe, rail is a planning tool. For an architect, rail is an opportunity to
design a stunning interior; for a civil rights leader, it is a chance to correct
past discrimination; and for an ordinary rider, such as Ken Schellenberg, it
may simply be a source of hometown pride. Metro is many things to many
people, and without agreement on what factors constitute success, there
can be no agreement on whether Metro is a success. Throughout Metro’s
history, waves of numbers—cost-benefit studies, ridership projections, and
budget analyses—have crashed against the solid confidence of the people of
7 Introduction

Washington that Metro was worth building, for reasons beyond enumera-
tion.14
At first glance, Metro might seem to be an odd case study, for Wash-
ington, as a metropolitan region, appears exceptional. Politically, its center
city is cut off from any state and denied full self-government, while eco-
nomically, the city has little heavy industry and enormous dependence on
a single employer, the federal government. But as Carl Abbott has shown,
the region is not as exceptional as it first appears. Many metropolitan ar-
eas share Washington’s demography of a majority African American central
city bordered by majority-white, politically independent suburbs. While
no other city has been as closely controlled by Congress, in the postwar era
every American city has worked within the constraints set by such federal
programs as urban renewal and the Interstate Highway System. Washing-
ton’s paucity of smokestack industry and dependence on government agen-
cies, government contractors, and information-based businesses resembles
many Sunbelt cities and may well exemplify the future American economy.
Moreover, as Howard Gillette has observed, Washington has long served as
“a national workshop for urban policy.” Policies tested in Washington have
often spread.15
The factors that make Washington important to urban history apply
to its transit system. Throughout the political debate over planning and fi-
nancing, advocates and detractors of rail transit hoped or feared that Wash-
ington would set an example for other cities. As Congressman John McFall
noted a few weeks after Metro’s opening in 1976, “Metro runs within two
blocks of the Capitol Building. Congress may judge the efficacy of heavy
rail transit to a good extent by what happens right here in our own back-
yard.” In practice, Metro has not been the model for other cities. With
Congress funding the system generously, and the General Services Admin-
istration dominating the office real-estate market, the federal government
worked hard to give Metro advantages not enjoyed by other systems. As a
result, Washington is, in one observer’s opinion, “the only U.S. city that can
boast of an up-to-date, world-class transit system.” This book tells the story
of a path not taken by American cities. Nevertheless, as a best-case scenario
for rail transit, Metro is worthy of study, for its successes and failures can
tell us a great deal about what rail transit can and cannot do.16
Nor is Washington only significant as a place where policy is made; the
metropolitan region is home to close to 5 million people. The creation of
Metro marks an important milestone in the maturation of that region, yet
it is a story that has not been told. Out of sight is out of mind, and under-
ground is out of sight. General histories of Washington, or studies of the
capital’s present condition, often ignore Metro entirely or mention it only
in passing. Howard Gillette scarcely mentions Metro in his superb history
of federal planning and social policy in Washington, though it was a major
step in both. Even authors who regularly ride Metro forget it when they sit
down to write. For example, the preface of Carl Abbott’s Political Terrain
8 The Great Society Subway

notes that he began work on the text while a visiting professor at George
Washington University and a daily Metro commuter from Bethesda to
Foggy Bottom. Yet his only mention of Metro in the text of the book itself
is a dismissive comment that “Red, Yellow, Orange, and Green Metro lines
notwithstanding, present-day Washington has been built around the needs
of two-car and then three-car families.” Similarly, Ray Suarez’s pessimistic
portrait of the District of Columbia mentions Metro only to complain that
it attracts some suburbanites who park their cars in his neighborhood be-
fore boarding their trains. Although Suarez notes that he too rides Metro to
work, he does not pause to ask if the system provides a counterpoint to his
story of parasitic suburbs and victim city locked in eternal competition.17
Wedded to a master narrative of Washington history that asserts per-
petual antagonism between federal and local, city and suburb, and black
and white, these and other observers too easily overlook Metro or try to
shoehorn it into an ill-fitting scheme. Some depict the city’s recent fate as
nothing more than the scandalous career of four-term D.C. Mayor Marion
Barry, while failing to look beyond the District’s borders to see metropoli-
tan Washington as a unit. It is easy for them to conclude that “racism and
racial insecurities made Washington what it is today.”18 I agree that ra-
cial antagonism has shaped Washington and that the District of Columbia
is the heart of the metropolitan area. But by calling attention to Metro’s
importance to postwar Washington and by taking the suburbs seriously, I
hope to complicate the narrative of racial animosity and suburban parasit-
ism with a story that includes cooperation and symbiosis.
This book is not an encyclopedic history of Metro or the Washington
Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. It only brushes against such topics as
labor relations, bus operations, and maintenance. As important as those
matters are, they are secondary to my basic questions of how an entire
metropolitan area faced its choices about transportation. At the very least,
this question matters to all Americans who live in or near large cities. And
in an age when the earth’s health and prosperity are threatened by carbon
dioxide emissions, it may prove a question of world-historical significance.
I have therefore focused on events that may explain why people chose to
build rapid transit in Washington, why they built it the way they did, and
the consequences of their decisions.
Because my focus is as much on process as on results, the story that
evolves is less an argument for a specific outcome—a 100-mile heavy-rail
system—than a recounting of a political regime that balanced idealism and
pragmatism, direction and democracy. While recognizing that power is
never evenly distributed, that democracy on some level depends on selfish-
ness, and that people make mistakes, it applauds a moment in history when
millions of people were able to make a collective decision based on hope,
trust, and imagination.
Finally, a note on names. Prior to 1968, Washingtonians debated the need
for what they called “rapid transit.” Unlike local mass transit—city buses
9 Introduction

or streetcars—rapid transit uses an exclusive right-of-way, so its vehicles do

not get stuck in street traffic or highway congestion. Unlike commuter rail,
rapid transit operates on relative short headways (anywhere from ninety
seconds to ten, or occasionally twenty, minutes between trains) rather than
fixed schedules, and fares are collected on entry into a station, rather than
on board the vehicle. Rapid transit can use a variety of technologies and
may operate underground, on aerial structures, in open cuts, in the median
strips of highways, or alongside long-distance railroads. In part for this rea-
son, advocates of rapid transit in Washington preferred not to use the term
“subway,” with its emphasis on underground tunnels.
Since 1968 Washington’s rapid transit system has been called “Metro.”
Because this name is used for transit in many cities, many publications,
and this book’s subtitle, refer to “the Washington Metro” for clarity. Af-
ter Metro’s operator took over the area’s private bus companies in 1973, it
termed the merged bus service “Metrobus.” Soon afterward, some Wash-
ington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority documents began referring
to “Metrorail.” This term—apparently coined by the Washington Post and
Washington Star reporters—was never officially adopted, nor has it caught
on among riders, but it remains in some Authority documents and signage
and in the Washington Post.19
Even the shorter version has undergone changes. When designer Mas-
simo Vignelli first proposed the name, he argued that because the same
term was used in many cities, “metro” was a common noun that should
be spelled in lowercase letters. To this day, the official logo consists of a
capital M with “metro” (lower case) underneath. But in the 1970s, the Bay
Area Rapid Transit system (BART) and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid
Transit Authority (MARTA) began operation, flaunting their all-capital,
anthropomorphic acronyms. Though Metro is not an acronym, policy
makers became confused: many official documents of that decade refer to
“METRO.” Eventually, the extremes compromised on capitalizing just the
first letter; even Vignelli is content with that.20
I have tried to write this book using my own sense of the Washington
vernacular. To my ear, one may ride the Metro to work or one may ride
Metro to work. It is also appropriate to ask if there is a Metro (station)
near one’s destination. I have, however, rejected one common usage. Many
Washingtonians and journalists use “Metro” to refer to the Washington
Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the interstate body created in 1967.
I refer to this body as WMATA (pronounced w’mah-ta) or the Authority,
but not as Metro. While WMATA is certainly a very important player in
Metro’s history, to conflate the two entities would be to diminish players
outside the Authority: predecessor agencies, political officials, consultants,
contractors, developers, taxpayers, voters, neighbors, and riders. Metro be-
longs not to WMATA but to the people of the region, and it is their story
that I have tried to tell.
This page intentionally left blank
 1791–1955

1 The City

On 22 February 1955—George Washington’s Birthday—Walter Washing-

ton testified before the United States Senate’s Committee for the District of
Columbia. He asked, “When does a community become of age?”1 Wash-
ington, an African American lawyer, destined to become the city’s first
elected mayor in a century, cited the grown-up problems faced by the city
that shared his name. Housing, public works, zoning, traffic, education,
and recreation demanded a real government, and he called on the senators
to give the District, then run entirely by Congress and by presidential ap-
pointees, the chance to vote for a mayor, city council, school board, and
nonvoting congressional representative.
By 1955 Washington had come of age. For a century and a half, the city
had largely failed to live up to the dream of that first Washington, George,
that it would serve not only as the national capital but as a city in its own
right, thriving and prosperous. Now, almost a decade after VJ-Day, it was
clear that the flood of World War II would not ebb. The Washington met-
ropolitan area, though no match for New York or Chicago, had to be taken
as seriously as Philadelphia, Cleveland, or San Francisco.
Walter Washington and his fellow witnesses that February knew that
being a real city was not all roses. Sturgis Warner of the Washington Home
Rule Committee spoke of “big city problems.” Philip Graham, publisher of
the Washington Post, warned that “we are beginning to see the center of our
city decay.” Senator Frederick Payne, cosponsor of the home rule bill under
consideration, agreed, noting that “some of the foulest slums in the United
States exist right here in the shadow of the Federal Government.”2
As hard-eyed as these witnesses sounded not only about slums but also
about corruption and racial tension, they did not emphasize what in retro-
spect appears to have been a greater problem facing the city. Washington
was finally a big city, but in 1955 Americans as a whole were turning away
from big cities. They were buying more cars than ever before and using
them to move away from old cities, to suburbs and sparse Sunbelt settle-
ments. Transportation expert Wilfred Owen would write in 1959, “we have
begun to doubt that the city can survive the automotive age, or even that
it should.”3 Had the automobile made the city obsolete? Had Washington
arrived at the party just as it was breaking up? In 1955 Washington decided
to confront such questions.
12 The Great Society Subway

The Unfulfilled Promise

Washington arose out of a distrust of cities. During the Revolutionary War,
the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, Anglo-America’s largest city
and a major commercial port. Had Congress wished to create an American
London, it could have found no better starting place. But delegates to Con-
gress were ambivalent about cities in general and Philadelphia in particular,
where they had been gouged by merchants and attacked by mobs, feeding
every republican worry about the viciousness of cities and their power to
corrupt government. The final straw came on 21 June 1783, when mem-
bers of Congress, meeting in the State House, were menaced by hundreds
of drunken troops. Congress responded by abandoning Philadelphia and
seeking land where it could exercise its own jurisdiction and build fresh. Ex-
ercising its constitutional power to carve out a seat of government, in 1790
Congress settled on a ten-mile by ten-mile square straddling the Potomac
River near its highest point of navigation.4
Congress called on President George Washington—whose Mt. Vernon
plantation was close by—to pick the exact site, and he set the boundaries to
include two river-port towns: Georgetown on the east bank and Alexandria
on the west. But rather than naming either of these towns as the capital,
in 1791 he chose to build a new federal town on open land southeast of
Georgetown. Not only was this land cheaper, but it provided a blank slate
on which to draw an ideal plan.5
President Washington gave that task to Peter Charles L’Enfant, a French
artist who had served with the Continental army. L’Enfant gave the new city
a rectilinear, compass-oriented grid, like that of Philadelphia, but modified
it with a more elaborate, Baroque design, based in large part on the boule-
vards of Versailles, where he had spent part of his childhood.6 Paying close
attention to the natural topography of the chosen site, L’Enfant picked the
grandest hill for the Capitol, reserving other hills for less important public
squares. These he connected with wide diagonal avenues, superimposing a
series of stars over the rectangular grid. These avenues and their intersec-
tions (several of which were later built as circles) gave the plan a hierarchy
absent from either the organic plans of Boston and New York or the grid
of Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, the State House had been built far from
the central square designated by Penn; after all, one rectangular block was
much like another, and the central square was inconvenient from the Dela-
ware waterfront. In Washington, the Capitol and President’s House could
only fit where L’Enfant placed them, no matter how many people grumbled
about the inconvenient distance between the two.
Transportation was central to both the city’s location and the L’Enfant
Plan. As a fall-line city with a deepwater harbor on the Anacostia, Wash-
ington could hope to attract some of the Atlantic trade that had built the
cities of Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk,
and Charleston. And to improve on nature’s highways, L’Enfant provided
the city with a canal connecting the city’s two rivers. Washington was to be
13 The City, 1791–1955

The L’Enfant Plan, 1791 (Library of Congress)

both the nation’s capital and a great commercial city. L’Enfant explained
that his plan was “proportioned to the greatness which . . . the Capital of a
powerful Empire ought to manifest.”7
Washington soon fell short of such hopes. In 1800, when the ten-year-
old city became the nation’s capital, it remained unfinished, with tree
stumps along the street and few urban diversions. In 1814 British troops
torched the city’s public buildings, including the White House. In the long
term, Congress was an even greater threat than the Royal Marines. New
York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were all supported by state governments
who could invest in their futures. The Erie Canal, financed by New York
State, did not bring New York City to dominance, but it did keep it there.
Washington City, in contrast, had no state legislature to boost it, but rather
a national legislature reluctant to fund a potential rival to the home cities of
14 The Great Society Subway

its members. Congress did allow Washington a locally elected government

and occasionally favored the city with investment, most notably a decision
in 1825 to subscribe $1 million toward the construction of the Chesapeake
& Ohio Canal, a project designed to give Washington the same access to
the Ohio valley that the Erie Canal provided to New York City. But the
canal, like so many others of that period, was a disappointment. Railroads
offered much cheaper connections to the West, and Baltimore beat out
Washington in this more significant contest, becoming the premier port of
the Chesapeake. In 1846, disgusted with the District’s stagnation and fear-
ing congressional interference in the slave trade, the residents of Alexandria
and the rest of the District on the west bank of the Potomac gained the
return of their land to Virginia. Washington’s commercial potential with-
ered. Through the 1850s, the city rattled around in a street plan too big for
the 40,000 residents who served the federal government in one manner or
another.8
The Civil War brought a boom in population. Thousands of Union
troops came to defend the city and to use it as a staging area for campaigns
against the Confederate capital at Richmond, only 100 miles away. As these
troops marched south into Virginia, another column marched north: slaves
seeking freedom. The 1867 District census revealed that “more than two-
thirds of black Washingtonians and half of all white residents had arrived
since 1860.” Quick gains could be quickly lost; that same census showed a
population decline from 140,000 in 1864 to 106,000, threatening the city’s
boosters with a return to stagnation. Even worse, victorious midwesterners
proposed removing the capital from a place so recently tainted with slavery.9
President Ulysses Grant’s opposition to removal of the capital assured
Washington of its status, and in 1871 Congress attempted to improve local
government by giving the District of Columbia territorial status, similar
to that enjoyed by western territories with aspirations to statehood. The
capital’s elite seized the chance to improve the physical appearance of the
city, where senators could still be splattered by the swine, goats, and sheep
that ran free along muddy avenues. Alexander Shepherd, a local business-
man, led the effort, first as the vice president of the Board of Public Works
and later as territorial governor. He pushed through a $6.25 million public
works program of sewers, paving, and tree planting. The program improved
the city’s physical infrastructure; it also vastly overspent the city’s debt limit.
Congress responded by revoking all suffrage for District residents while
promising to finance and organize public works. In 1878 it passed the Or-
ganic Act, concentrating most municipal powers in the hands of three presi-
dentially appointed commissioners: two local civilians plus an officer of the
Army Corps of Engineers to serve as the engineer commissioner responsible
for public works. Congress retained for itself the power to review District
budgets and major policy decisions, vesting these powers in House and
Senate Committees on the District of Columbia. The congressional coup
d’etat led Ambrose Bierce to define a Washingtonian as “a Potomac tribes-
15 The City, 1791–1955

man who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage
of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not
want to.”10
In revoking the city’s self-determination, Congress displayed contempt
for the city’s residents, yet it retained a fondness for its buildings and parks.
In 1900, the centennial of the federal government’s move to Washington,
many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not
have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Sena-
tor James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Commit-
tee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens
to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan
Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition,
based on the White City of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their
plan reaffirmed L’Enfant’s avenues as the best guide for the city’s growth
and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical com-
positions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite
sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted
in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lin-
coln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building
of Burnham’s Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of
the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash
Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite
monument to rail transportation.11
The City Beautiful was not built in a day; the Lincoln Memorial was not
dedicated until 1922. Lest that be the end of the beautification of Washing-
ton, in 1926 Congress institutionalized the process by creating the National
Capital Park and Planning Commission (NCPPC) to create, in President
Calvin Coolidge’s words, “a city of stately proportion, symmetrically laid
out and adorned with the best that there is in architecture.” Notable efforts
in this regard included the Federal Triangle complex of government offices
along Pennsylvania Avenue, joined, during the Hoover administration, by
the massive Commerce Department, at the time the world’s largest office
structure. Meanwhile, developers and government planners took advantage
of new transportation technologies—the railroad, the streetcar, and the
parkway—to extend the metropolis beyond city limits. In the 1890s devel-
opers built exclusive residential suburbs in Chevy Chase and Silver Spring,
Maryland, just north of the District. In 1932—the bicentennial of George
Washington’s birth—the Department of Commerce opened the Mount
Vernon Memorial Highway from the city to Washington’s home: its state-
of-the-art parkway design included the nation’s second cloverleaf. The New
Deal provided its own ideal planning in 1935 with the building of Greenbelt,
Maryland, a suburb built by the Resettlement Administration.12
This growth was a mere prelude to the boom of World War II. Even
before Pearl Harbor, the Pentagon was under construction to house an
16 The Great Society Subway

enormously expanded military bureaucracy, and 4,000 people were arriv-

ing in the city every month. In the year after Pearl Harbor, another 70,000
arrived. As war-related bureaucracies expanded, Washington had plenty of
jobs, but it was short on office space and housing. Newly hired workers
from around the country slept in shifts, and, in the recollection of news-
man David Brinkley, “government offices spilled into skating rinks, where
the ice was melted and the floors covered with sawhorses and plywood
desks. . . . Secretaries could be seen sitting in front of bathroom sinks,
their typewriters perched on boards laid across the basins, their steno pads
propped on the toilet seats.”13
War is the health of the state, and the state is the health of Washington,
so perpetual Cold War meant continued prosperity for the metropolitan
area. As the nation girded itself against international communism, whole
new federal agencies and departments sprang up. The National Security
Act of 1947 alone created the Department of the Air Force, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Close to a quarter
of a million federal civilians worked in the metropolitan area, accounting
for more than one out of every four jobs. National organizations set up
lobbying offices, while military contractors set up both offices and manu-
facturing plants, mostly on cheap land in the Virginia suburbs. These were
good jobs, and by 1949 the region had the highest mean salary per family
of any major metropolitan area, and one of the highest levels of education.
The census of 1950 showed Washington to be the nation’s ninth largest city,
edging out Boston and gaining on St. Louis.14
By 1955 Washington was finally approaching the goal that its founders
had set for it a century and a half before. To be sure, the federal govern-
ment, and private employers doing business with it, remained the heart of
the city’s economy. By 1955 those sectors could support the magnificence
envisioned by L’Enfant, even in peacetime. Washington had an airport, a
major-league baseball team, and several universities. As the home-rule wit-
nesses acknowledged, it still had problems, but at least they were “big-city
problems.” To disparage Washington was to disparage all American cities.
Many were prepared to do just that.

The Challenge of the Automobile

Washington was designed as the ideal city of the eighteenth century. In 1955
another ideal city was born. Like Washington, this twentieth-century ideal
city was laid out along a central, ceremonial axis and divided into multiple
sectors. Like Washington, it drew power from resonant symbolism. Like
Washington, it was designed to serve not merely its region but its nation
and took its name from a great American visionary. Unlike Washington,
this new ideal city was private, not public; Western, not Eastern. And it
avoided potential headaches like slum clearance and schooling by having
no resident population at all. It was called Disneyland.
Disneyland, of course, was not a real city, but a 140-acre amusement
17 The City, 1791–1955

park near Anaheim, California. In large part it was designed to be the op-
posite of a real city, specifically the opposite of New York City, with its dirt,
decay, chaos, and cynicism. And the key to this anti–New York was the au-
tomobile. The Santa Ana Freeway allowed Walt Disney to transform orange
and walnut groves, twenty-five miles from Los Angeles, into a mechanical
playground for middle-class, automobile-owning Californians, almost all
of whom arrived by car. Although the park’s 1959 monorail would inspire
many transit fans, it was the miniature freeway, Autopia, that proved the
most durable vision of the future in Tomorrowland. Disneyland told Amer-
icans that the easiest way to escape all the problems of the city—smog, dirt,
crime, disorder, and poor people—was to drive away.15
American cities had been grappling with the automobile since Henry
Ford turned on his Highland Park assembly line in 1913. Washington was
no exception; during the 1920s alone, District automobile registrations
quadrupled. But the Depression limited purchasing power, and just as the
Depression eased, World War II prompted the government to impose gaso-
line rationing and to command Detroit to cease production of civilian au-
tomobiles in favor of war machines. Only with the resumption of full-scale
automobile production after the war did American cities face a second wave
of change. In 1948—the first full year of automobile production—only 54
percent of American families owned automobiles, scarcely more than in
1929. Fifteen years later, the number of cars registered nationwide had dou-
bled, and 80 percent of families owned at least one.16
The expansion of automobile ownership was both a cause and effect of
suburbanization: auto-owning families took advantage of their mobility to
move to the suburbs, and suburban families found that they needed cars.
Although the vast bulk of the nation’s population growth took place in
metropolitan areas, much of that went to suburbs, not central cities.17
Washington followed the trend. The census of 1960 was the first to show
a decline in the District’s population; in 1953 for the first time less than half
the population of the metropolitan area lived in the District of Columbia.
As in other regions, wealthier families led the movement to suburbs, partic-
ularly Montgomery County, Maryland, where the median family income of
$7,600 dwarfed the $4,750 median in the District. With greater means and
motives, suburbanites purchased cars even more eagerly than city dwellers.
Between 1940 and 1950, automobile registrations increased 178 percent in
suburban Maryland and Virginia, compared with a 22.6 percent rise in the
District. By 1958 one Arlington planner could declare that “suburbanization
has made us a nation of automobilists.”18
Suburbanization radically changed Washington’s ethnic composition.
In every census between 1810 and 1940 (except for 1860), the proportion of
African Americans in the District had hovered between 20 and 30 percent.
With postwar suburbanization, that changed rapidly. Between 1950 and
1960, the District’s white population declined by 167,000, while the black
population increased by 131,000. As a result, in 1957 the District became the
18 The Great Society Subway

Population growth, 1930–1955 (Arlington County, Virginia, Office of Planning, Land

Use in Arlington County, Virginia, 1955. Virginia Room, Arlington Public Library)

first major American city to be majority African American. The city’s fed-
eral status muted the political effects of this demographic change. Integra-
tion proceeded fairly peacefully; however southern in their attitudes, white
Washingtonians owed their livelihood to the federal government and dared
not openly defy Supreme Court rulings on racially restrictive covenants and
school integration. Moreover, lack of home rule denied the new black ma-
jority the chance to govern. Until 1963 the presidentially appointed Board
of Commissioners remained all-white, and the nearly all-white House
District Committee remained dominated by its South Carolina chairman,
John McMillan, and a clique of subcommittee chairmen also from rural
southern districts.19
The new suburbs remained primarily residential, and the president of
the Montgomery Council expressed pride in her county’s being called “the
bedroom of Washington.” But by 1955 the classic model of suburbaniza-
tion—a downtown office worker using transit or his (occasionally her)
19 The City, 1791–1955

car to commute into the city in the morning and back at the end of the
workday—was getting more complicated. Employers across the country
began considering suburban locations for factories and office complexes.
In Washington, the federal government led the movement out. During the
war, federal offices had spilled over the borders of the District of Columbia.
Most famously, the army set up shop in the Pentagon—the world’s largest
office building—across the Potomac from Washington itself. Other facili-
ties followed the pattern of “a campuslike federal installation located on a
major transportation artery, surrounded by new communities of single-
family homes.” Many of these installations were designed as temporary,
wartime measures, but as long as the Mall remained cluttered with rickety
temporary office buildings (as it would through the 1960s), there was little
chance for the spread-out agencies to return to the District.20
Nor did most policy makers see recentralization as desirable. In its 1950
Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, the NCPPC
warned of the “danger of further overconcentration of Federal employment
centers, in terms of traffic congestion and security,” and called for “wider
distribution of administrative establishments in the central area; and for
locating other functions farther out.” To be sure, the commission did not
want “drab, unorganized urban sprawl” (who would?), but with proper
zoning and other controls, it was confident that the suburbs could provide
“uncrowded living . . . sunlight, and clean air.” Decentralization would
also reduce the government’s vulnerability to atomic attack. In 1950 the
General Services Administration—charged with finding offices for federal
executive agencies—announced its plan to move agencies, especially the
new ones concerned with atomic power and national security, away from
the crowded downtown, where a single nuclear bomb could vaporize them.
Thus the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Agency, and
the Central Intelligence Agency found themselves in Maryland and Vir-
ginia, several miles from the Capitol.21
Recognizing that the city no longer stopped at the District line, many
proposed to enlarge Coolidge’s NCPPC to include Maryland and Virginia
representatives. As the Evening Star commented, such a change would rec-
ognize “the phenomenal construction boom and population growth” that
had made the suburbs “so much a part of Greater Washington.” But it was
not easy for parties to agree on how power should be allocated. A 1950
proposal that would give Virginia only one vote out of fifteen brought
complaints from Richmond. On the other hand, a plan giving two votes
each to Maryland, Virginia, the District, and the federal government drew
criticism from President Harry Truman’s friend, renowned city planner
Harland Bartholomew. Bartholomew complained that “the federal interest
in the national capital is dominant and should not be impaired by sec-
tionalism.” To address such concerns, in 1952 Congress decided to replace
the NCPPC with two agencies. The first, the National Capital Planning
Commission (NCPC) would plan primarily for the District of Columbia,
20 The Great Society Subway

Planned decentralization (NCPPC, Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital

and Its Environs, 1950)

representing the federal interest. The second agency, the National Capital
Regional Planning Council (NCRPC) would address regional concerns.
The two were instructed to work together on a regional plan and a trans-
portation plan.22
The National Capital Planning Act did not directly address the prob-
lems of the center city. In 1955 Washington was a crowded place, with few
attractive housing vacancies. Particularly affected were Washington’s Afri-
can Americans, whose plight was only aggravated by World War II. Hous-
ing reformers, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, had a simple solution: build better
houses, whether by building public housing directly or by enforcing hous-
ing codes. They were not particularly pro-automobile or anti-automobile,
and many of their reforms would have made just as much sense for a city of
pedestrians and horse-drawn buggies.
In contrast, Washington architect Louis Justement hoped to make the
automobile central to the city of the future. After working on both public
and private housing developments before World War II, Justement, in his
words, “became convinced that the question of what to do with slums was
merely a part of the question of what to do with cities.” In 1946 he pub-
21 The City, 1791–1955

Justement’s plan (Louis Justement, New Cities for Old. Copyright 1946 McGraw-
Hill Book Company)

lished a manifesto called New Cities for Old. Unrelentingly modernist, it la-
ments the “disorder caused by the crazy-quilt pattern of land ownership and
the haphazard fashion” of development. It then proposes a gradual program
of condemnation that would eventually result in all land being owned by
a municipal corporation which could “completely rebuild our cities in ac-
cordance with modern needs”—that is, in accordance with the automobile.
The result would be a version of Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse: a city shorn of
many or most of its houses, shops, and side streets, filled instead with large
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
“If plenty of water were used, the change in color would hardly be
perceptible.”
“Thank you, doctor; we can release you now.”
The doctor stepped down, whereupon a recess was called, to the
disappointment and evident chagrin of a great many.

XXIX
The mood of the Coroner changed with the afternoon session. He
was curter in speech and less patient with the garrulity of his
witnesses. Perhaps he dreaded the struggle which he foresaw
awaited him.
He plunged at once into the topic he had left unfinished and at the
precise point where he had left off. Wealthy had resumed her place
on the stand.
“And where did you put this soothing mixture after you had prepared
it?”
“Where I always did—on the shelf hanging in the corner on the
further side of the bed—the side towards the windows. I did this so
that it would not be picked up by mistake for a glass of water left on
his stand.”
“Tell that to the jury again, Mrs. Starr. That the soothing medicine of
which you speak was in a glass on the shelf we all can see indicated
on the chart above your head, and plain water in a glass standing on
the table on the near side of the bed.”
“Excuse me, Doctor Jones, I did not mean to say that there was any
glass of water on the small stand that night. There was not. He did
not seem to want it, so I left the water in a pitcher on the table by the
hearth. I only meant that it being my usual custom to have it there I
got in the habit of putting anything in the way of medicine as far
removed from it as possible.”
“Mrs. Starr, when did you prepare this soothing medicine as you call
it?”
“Soon after I entered the room.”
“Before Mr. Bartholomew slept?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“Tell how you did it, where you did it and what Mr. Bartholomew said
while you were doing it—that is, if he said anything at all.”
“The bottle holding this medicine was kept, as I have already said,
with all the other medicines, in the cabinet hanging in the upper
passageway.” Every eye rose to the chart. “The water in a pitcher on
the large table to the left of the fire-place. Filling a glass with this
water which I had drawn myself, I went to the medicine cabinet and
got the bottle containing the drops the doctor had ordered for this
purpose, and carrying it over to the table, together with the medicine-
dropper, added the customary ten drops to the water and put the
bottle back in the cabinet and the glass with the medicine in it on the
shelf. Mr. Bartholomew’s face was turned my way and he naturally
followed my movements as I passed to and fro; but he showed no
especial interest in them, nor did he speak.”
“Was this before or after you dropped the curtain on the other side of
the bed.”
“After.”
“The bed, I have been given to understand, is surrounded on all
sides by heavy curtains which can be pulled to at will. Was the one
you speak of the only one to be dropped or pulled at night?”
“Usually. You see Miss Orpha’s picture hangs between the windows
and was company for him if he chanced to wake in the night.”
Again that sob, but fainter than before and to me very far off. Or was
it that I felt so far removed myself—pushed aside and back from the
grief and sufferings of this family?
The heads which turned at this low but pathetic sound were soon
turned back again as the steady questioning went on:
“You speak of going to the medicine cabinet. It was your business,
no doubt, to go there often.”
“Very often; I was his nurse, you see.”
“There was another bottle of medicine kept there—the one labeled
‘Dangerous’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you see that bottle when you went for the soothing mixture you
speak of?”
“No, sir.” This was very firmly said. “I wasn’t thinking of it, and the
bottle I wanted being in front I just pulled it out and never looked at
any other.”
“This other bottle—the dangerous one—where was that kept?”
“Way back behind several others. I had put it there when the doctor
told us that we were not to give him any more of that especial
medicine without his orders.”
“If you went to this cabinet so often you must have a very good idea
of just how it looked inside.”
“I have, sir,” her voice falling a trifle—at least, I thought I detected a
slight change in it as if the emotion she had so bravely kept under up
to this moment was beginning to make itself felt.
“Then tell us if everything looked natural to you when you went to it
this time; everything in order,—nothing displaced.”
“I did not notice. I was too intent on what I was after. Besides, if I had
—”
“Well, go on.”
Her brows puckered in distress; and I thought I saw her hand
tremble where it showed amid the folds of her dress. If no other man
held his breath at that short interim in which not a sound was heard, I
did. Something was about to fall from her lips—
But she was speaking.
“If I had observed any disorder such as you mention I should not
have thought it at all strange. I am not the only one who had access
to that cabinet. His daughter often went to it, and—and the young
gentlemen, too.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What should take them there?”
Her head lifted, her voice steadied, she looked the capable, kindly
person of a few moments ago. That thrill of emotion was gone;
perhaps I have overemphasized it.
“We all worked together, sir. The young gentlemen, that is one or the
other of them, often took my place in the room, especially at night,
and Mr. Bartholomew, used to being waited on and having many
wants, they had learned how to take care of him and give him what
he called for.”
“And this took them to the cabinet?”
“Undoubtedly; it held a great variety of things besides his medicines.”
The Coroner paused. During the most trying moment of my life every
eye in the room turned on me, not one on Edgar.
I bore it stoically; a feeling I endeavored to crush making havoc in
my heart.
Then the command came:
“Continue with your story. You have given us the incidents of the
night such as you observed them before Mr. Bartholomew slept; you
will now relate what happened after.”
Again I watched her hand. It had clenched itself tightly and then
loosened as these words rang out from the seat of authority. The
preparation for what she had to tell had been made; the time had
now come for its relation. She began quietly, but who could tell how
she would end.
“For an hour I kept my watch on the curtained side of the bed. It was
very still in the room, so deathly still that after awhile I fell asleep in
my chair. When I woke it was suddenly and with a start of fear. I was
too confused at first to move and as I sat listening, I heard a slight
sound on the other side of the bed, followed by the unmistakable one
of a softly closing door. My first thought, of course, was for my
patient and throwing the curtains aside, I looked through. The room
was light enough, for one of the logs on the hearth had just broken
apart, and the glow it made lit up Mr. Bartholomew’s face and
showed me that he was sleeping. Relieved at the sight, I next asked
myself who could have been in the room at an hour so late, and what
this person wanted. I was not frightened, now that I was fully awake,
and being curious, nothing more, I drew the portière from before the
passage-way at my back and, stepping to the door beyond, opened
it and looked out.”
Here she became suddenly silent, and so intent were we all in
anticipation of what her next words would reveal, that the shock
caused by this unexpected break in her story, vented itself in a sort
of gasp from the parched lips and throats of the more excitable
persons present. It was a sound not often heard save on the
theatrical stage at a moment of great suspense, and the effect upon
the witness was so strange that I forgot my own emotion in watching
her as she opened her lips to continue and then closed them again,
with a pitiful glance at the Coroner.
He seemed to understand her and made a kindly effort to help her in
this sudden crisis of feeling.
“Take your time, Mrs. Starr,” he said. “We are well aware that
testimony of this nature must be painful to you, but it is necessary
and must be given. You opened the door and looked out. What did
you see?”
“A man—or, rather, the shadow of a man outlined very dimly on the
further wall of the hall.”
“What man?”
“I do not know, sir.”
She did; the woman was lying. No one ever looked as she did who
was in doubt as to what she saw. But the Coroner intentionally or
unintentionally blind to this very decided betrayal of her secret, still
showed a disposition to help her.
“Was it so dark?”
“Yes, sir. The electrolier at the stair-head had been put out probably
by him as he passed, for—”
It was a slip. I saw it in the way her face changed and her voice
faltered as with one accord every eye in the assemblage before her
turned quickly towards the chart.
I did not need to look. I know that hall by heart. The electrolier she
spoke of was nearer the back than the front; to put it out in passing,
meant that the person stopping to extinguish it was heading towards
the rear end of the hall. In other words, Clarke or myself. As it was
not myself—
But she must have thought it was, for when the Coroner, drawing the
same conclusion, pressed her to describe the shadow and, annoyed
at her vague replies, asked her point blank if it could be that of
Clarke, she shook her head and finally acknowledged that it was
much too slim.
“A man’s, though?”
“Certainly, a man’s.”
“And what became of this shadow?”
“It was gone in a minute; disappeared at the turn of the wall.”
She had the grace to droop her head, as if she realized what she
was doing and took but little pleasure in it. My estimation of her rose
on the instant; for she did not like me, was jealous of every kindness
my uncle had shown me, and yet felt compunction over what she
was thus forced into saying.
“If she knew! Ah, if she knew!” passed in tumult through my brain;
and I bore the stare of an hundred eyes as I could not have borne
the stare of one if that one had been Orpha’s. Thank God, her veil
was so thick.
Further questions brought out little more concerning this incident.
She had not followed the shadow, she had not looked at the clock,
she had not even gone around the bed to see what had occasioned
the peculiar noise she had heard. She had not thought it of sufficient
importance. Indeed, she had not attached any importance to the
incident at the time, since her patient had not been wakened and late
visits were not uncommon in that sick-room where the interest of
everybody in the house centered, night as well as day.
But, when Mr. Bartholomew at last grew restless and she went for
the medicine she had prepared, she saw with some astonishment
that it was not in the exact place on the shelf where she had placed
it,—or, at least, in the exact place where she felt sure that she had
placed it. But even this did not alarm her or arouse her suspicion.
How could it when everybody in the house was devoted to its master
—or at all events gave every evidence of being so. Besides, she
might have been mistaken as to where she had set down the glass.
Her memory was not what it was,—and so on and so on till the
Coroner stopped her with the query:
“And what did you do? Did you give him the dose his condition
seemed to call for?”
“I did; and my heart is broken at the thought.” She showed it. Tears
were welling from her eyes and her whole body shook with the sob
she strove to suppress. “I can never forgive myself that I did not
suspect—mix a fresh draught—do anything but put that spoon filled
with doubtful liquor between his lips. But how could I imagine that
any one would tamper with the medicines in that cabinet. That any
one would—”
Here she was stopped again, peremptorily this time, and her
testimony switched to the moment when she saw the first signs of
anything in Mr. Bartholomew’s condition approaching collapse and
how long it was after she gave him the medicine.
“Some little time. I was not watching the clock. Perhaps I slept again
—I shall never know, but if I did, it was the sound of a sudden gasp
from behind the curtains which started me to my feet. It was like a
knife going through me, for I had a long experience with the sick
before I came to C—— and knew that it foretold the end.
“I was still surer of this when I bent over to look at him. He was
awake, but I shall never forgot his eye. ‘Wealthy,’ he whispered,
exerting himself to speak plainly, ‘call the children—call all of them—
bid them come without delay—all is over with me—I shall not live out
the coming day. But first, the bowl—the one in the bathroom—bring it
here—put it on the stand—and two candles—lighted—don’t look;
act!’ It was the master ordering a slave. There was nothing to do but
to obey. I went to the bathroom, found the bowl he wanted, brought
it, brought the candles, lighted them, turned on the electricity, for the
candles were mere specks in that great room and then started for
the door. But he called me back. ‘I want the two envelopes,’ he cried.
‘Open the drawer and get them. Now put them in my hands, one in
my right, the other in my left, and hasten, for I fear to—to lose my
speech.’
“I rushed—I was terrified to leave him alone even for an instant but
to cross him in his least wish might mean his death, so I fled like a
wild woman through the halls, first to Mr. Edgar’s room, then
downstairs to Miss Orpha and later—not till after I had seen these
two on their way to Mr. Bartholomew’s room, to the rear hall and Mr.
Quenton’s door.”
“What did you do there?”
“I both knocked and called.”
“What did you say?”
“That his uncle was worse, and for him to come immediately. That
Mr. Bartholomew found difficulty in speaking and wanted to see them
all before his power to do so failed.”
“Did he answer?”
“Instantly; opening the door and coming out. He was in Mr.
Bartholomew’s room almost as soon as the others.”
“How could that be? Did he not stop to dress?”
“He was already dressed, just as he rose from dinner.”
What followed has already been told; I will not enlarge upon it. The
burning of the one will in the presence of Orpha, Edgar and myself,
with Wealthy Starr standing in the background. Uncle’s sudden
death before he could tell us where the will containing his last wishes
could be found, and the shock we had all received at the
astonishment shown by the doctor at his patient having succumbed
so suddenly when he had fully expected him to live another fortnight.
The excitement which had been worked up to fever-point gradually
subsided after this and, the hour being late, the inquiry was
adjourned, to be continued the next day.

XXX
In my haste to be through with the record of a testimony which so
unmistakably gave the impression that I was the man who had
tampered with the medicine which prematurely ended my uncle’s
fast failing life, I omitted to state Wealthy’s eager admission that
notwithstanding the doctor’s surprise at the sudden passing of his
patient and her own knowledge that the room contained a previously
used medicine which had been pronounced dangerous to him at this
stage of his illness, she did not connect these two facts in her mind
even then as cause and effect. Not till the dreadful night in which she
heard the word poison uttered over Mr. Bartholomew’s casket, did
she realize what the peculiar sound which had roused her from her
nap beside the sick-bed really was. It was the setting down of the
glass on the shelf from which it had been previously lifted.
This was where the proceedings had ended; and it was at this point
they were taken up the next day.
I say nothing of the night between; I have tried to forget it. God grant
the day will come when I may. Nor shall I enter into any description
of the people who filled the room on this occasion or of the change in
Orpha’s appearance or in that of such persons towards whom my
eyes, hot with the lack of sleep, wandered during the first half hour. I
am eager to go on; eager to tell the worst and have done with this
part of my story.
To return then to Wealthy’s testimony as continued from the day
before. The casket in which Mr. Bartholomew’s body had been laid
on the morning of the second day had been taken in the early
evening down into the court. She had not accompanied it. When
asked why, she said that Mr. Edgar had asked her to remain in the
room, and on no account to leave it without locking both doors. So
she had stayed until she heard a scream ringing up through the
house, and convinced from its hysterical sound that it came from one
of the maids, she hastened to lock the one door which had been left
unfastened, and go below. As in company with Mr. Quenton and
Clarke she reached the balcony on the second floor, she could see
that there were several persons in the court, so she stopped where
she was, and simply looked down at what was going on. It was then
she got the shock of her life. The girl who had uttered the scream
was pointing at her dead master’s face and shouting the word
poison. One can imagine what passed through her mind as the
clouds cleared away from it and she realized to what in her
ignorance she had been made a party to.
She certainly made the jury feel it, though she was less garrulous
and simpler in her manners than on the previous day; and hardly
knowing what to expect from her peculiar sense of duty, I was in
dread anticipation of hearing her relate the few words which had
passed between us as Orpha fell into my arms,—words in which she
accused me of being the cause of all this trouble.
But she spared me that, either because she did not know how to
obtrude it without help from the Coroner, or because she had enough
right feeling not to emphasize the suspicion already roused against
me by her previous testimony.
Grateful for this much grace, I restrained my own anxieties and
listened intently for what else she had to say, in the old hope that
some word would yet fall from her lips or some glance escape from
her eye which would give me the clew to the hand which had really
lifted that glass and set it down a little further along the shelf.
I thought I was on its track when she came to the visit she had paid
to the room above in the company of Edgar and Orpha. But I heard
little new. The facts elicited were well-known ones. They had
approached the cabinet together, looked into it together, and,
pushing the bottles about, brought out the one for which they were
seeking from the very place in the rear of the shelf where she had
put it herself when told that it would not be required any longer.
“Yes, that is the bottle,” she declared, as the Coroner lifted a small
phial from the table before him and held it up in her sight and in that
of the jury. As he did this, I could scarcely hide the sickening thrill
which for a moment caused everything to turn black around me. For
the label was written large and the word Poison had a ghastly look to
one who had loved Edgar Quenton Bartholomew. When I could see
and hear again, Wealthy was saying:
“A few drops wouldn’t be missed. My memory isn’t good enough for
me to be sure of a fact like that.”
Evidently she had been asked if on taking the phial from the shelf
she had noticed any diminution of its contents since she had last
handled it.
“You say that you pushed the bottles aside in order to get at this one.
Was that necessary? Could you not have reached in over them and
lifted it out?”
“I never thought of doing that; none of us did. We were all anxious to
satisfy ourselves as to whether or not the bottle was there and just
took the quickest way we knew of finding out.”
“But you could have got hold of it in the way I suggested? Reached
in, I mean, and pulled it out without disarranging the other bottles?”
She stopped to think; contracting her brows and stealing what I felt
sure was a look at Edgar.
“It would have been difficult,” she finally conceded: “but a person
with long fingers might have got hold of it all right. The bottles in front
and around it were not very large. Much of the same size as the one
you just showed us.”
“Then in your opinion this could have been done?”
(I heard afterwards that it had been done by one of the police
operatives.)
“It could have been done.”
Almost doggedly she said it.
“Without making much noise?”
“Without making any if the person doing it knew exactly where the
phial was to be found.”
Not doggedly now, but incisively.
“And how many of the household, to your definite knowledge, did?”
“Three, besides myself. Miss Orpha, Mr. Edgar and Mr. Quenton, all
of whom shared my nursing.”
The warmth with which she uttered the first two names, the coldness
with which she uttered mine! Was it intentional, or just the natural
expression of her feelings? Whatever prompted this distinction in
tone, the effect was to signal me out as definitely as though a brand
had left its scorching mark upon my forehead.
And I innocent!
Why I did not leap to my feet I do not know. I thought I did, shouting
a wild disclaimer. If men stared and women shrieked that was
nothing to me. All that I cared for was Orpha sitting there listening to
this hellish accusation. So maddened was I, so dead to all human
conditions that I doubt if I should have been surprised had the
ghostly figure of my uncle evolved itself from air and taken its place
on the witness-stand in revolt against this horror. Anything was
possible, but to let the world—by which I meant Orpha—believe this
thing for a moment.
All this tumult in brain and heart, and my body quiet, fixed, with not a
muscle so much as quivering. By what force was I thus withheld?
Possibly by some hypnotic influence exerted by Mr. Jackson, for
when I looked in his direction I found him gazing very earnestly in
mine. I smiled. It must have been a very dreary smile and ironic in
the extreme; for my heart was filled with bitterness and could
express itself in no other way.
The decided shake of the head which he gave me in return had its
effect, however, and digging my nails into my palm, I listened to what
followed with all the stoicism the situation called for.
I was still in a state of rigid self-control when I heard my name
spoken loudly and with command and woke to the fact that Wealthy
had been dismissed from the stand and that I was to be the next
witness.
Was I ready for it? I must be; and to test my strength, I cast one
straight look at Orpha. She had lifted her veil and met my gaze fairly.
Had there been guilt in my heart—
But I could pass her without shame; and sustained by this fact, I took
my place on the stand with a calmness I had hardly expected to
show in the face of this prejudiced throng.

XXXI
As my story, sometimes elicited by questions and sometimes
allowed to take the form of an uninterrupted narrative, differed in no
essential from the one already given in these pages, I see no reason
for recapitulating it here any more than I did the one I told days
before to the Inspector. Fixed in my determination to be honest in all
I said but not to say any more than was required, I was able to hear
unmoved the low murmurs which now and then rose from the center
of the room as I made some unexpected reply or revealed, as I could
not help doing, the strength of the tie which united me to my
deceased uncle. No one believed in that and consequently attributed
any assertion of the kind to hypocrisy; and with this I had to contend
from the beginning to the end, softened perhaps a little towards the
last, but still active enough to make my position a very trying one.
The result of my examination must be given, however, even if I have
to indulge in some repetition.
My testimony, if accepted as truth, established certain facts.
They were these:
That Mr. Bartholomew had changed his mind more than once as to
which of us two nephews he would leave the bulk of his fortune:
That he had shown positive decision only on the night preceding his
death, declaring to me that I was his final choice:
That, notwithstanding this, he had not then and there destroyed the
will antagonistic to this decision, as would seem natural if his mind
had been really settled in its resolve; but had kept them both in hand
up to the time of my departure from the room:
That late in the night after a long séance with myself in the library on
the lower floor, I had come upstairs, and in my anxiety to know
whether my uncle were awake or resting quietly after so disturbing
an evening, had stopped to listen first at one of his doors and then at
the other; but had refrained from going in, or even seeing my uncle
again until summoned with the rest of the family to hear his dying
wishes:
That when he handed one of the wills to his daughter and bade her
burn it in the large bowl he had ordered placed at his bedside, I
believed it to be the one I had expected to see him burn the night
before, and that I just as confidently believed that the one which had
been taken from the other envelope and put away in some spot not
yet discovered was the one designating me as his chief heir
according to his promise, and should so believe until it was found
and I was shown to the contrary. (This in justification of my
confidence in him and also to refute the idea in so far as I was able,
that I had been so fearful of his changing his mind again that I was
willing to cut his life short rather than run the risk of losing my
inheritance.)
For I was sensible enough to see that to minds so prejudiced, the
fact that the will favoring myself having been the last one drawn,
afforded them sufficient excuse for a supposition which seemed the
only explanation possible for the mystery they were facing.
A few were undoubtedly influenced either by my earnestness or the
dignity which innocence gives to the suspected man, but the many,
not; and when at the conclusion of my testimony I was forced to
repass Orpha on my way back to my seat, I found that I no longer
had the courage to meet her eye, lest I should see pity there or, what
was worse, an attempt to accept what I had to say against reason
and possibly against her own judgment.
But when her name was called and with a quick unveiling of her face
she took her place upon the stand, I could not keep my glances
back, for I was thinking now, not of myself but of her and the
suffering which she must undergo if her examination was to be of
any help in disentangling the threads of this involved inquiry.
That I was justified in my fears was at once apparent, for the first
question which attracted attention and drew every head forward in
breathless interest and undisguised curiosity was this:
“Miss Bartholomew, I regret that I must trespass upon matters which
in my respect for yourself and family I should be glad to leave
untouched. But conditions force me to ask if the rumor is correct that
you are engaged to marry your cousin, Edgar, with whom you have
been brought up.”
“No,” she answered at once, with that clear ring to her voice which
carried it without effort to the remotest corners of the room. “I am
engaged to no one. But am under an obligation, gladly entered into
because it was my father’s wish, to marry the man—if the gentleman
so pleases—to whom my father has willed the greater portion of his
money.”
The Coroner raised his gavel, but laid it down again, for the
excitement called forth by the calm dignity of this answer, was of that
deep and absorbing kind which shrinks from noisy demonstration.
“Miss Bartholomew, do you know or have you any suspicion as to
where your father concealed the will which will settle this question?”
“None whatever.”
And now, the sweet voice wavered.
“You know your father’s room well?”
“Every inch of it.”
“And can imagine no place in it where he might have thrust this
document on taking it out of the envelope?”
“None.”
“Miss Bartholomew, you have heard the last witness state that your
father distinctly told him on the night before his death that he had
decided to make him his chief inheritor. Did your father ever make
the same declaration to you?”
“He has said that he found my foreign cousin admirable.”
“That hardly answers my question, Miss Bartholomew.”
The pink came out on her cheeks. Ah; how lovely she was! But in
what trouble also.
“He once asked me if I could rely on his judgment in the choice of my
future husband?” came reluctantly from her lips. “Up till then I had
not been aware that there was to be any choice.”
“You mean—”
“That I had never been given reason to think that there was any man
living whom he could prefer for a real son to the nephew who lived
like a son in the family.”
“Can you remember just when this occurred? Was it before or after
the ball held in your house?”
“It was after; some weeks after.”
“After he had been ill for some little time, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Coroner glanced at the jury; and the jurymen at each other. She
must have observed this, for a subtle change passed over her face
which revealed the steadfast woman without taking from the
winsomeness of her girlishness so well known to all.
She was yet in the glow of whatever sentiment had been aroused
within her, when she was called upon to reply to a series of
questions concerning this ball, leading up, as I knew they must, to
one which had been in my own mind ever since that event. What had
passed between her and her father when, on hearing he was ill, she
went up to see him in his own room.
“I found him ailing but indisposed to say much about it. What he
wanted was to tell me that on account of not feeling quite himself, he
had decided not to have any public announcement made of his plans
for Edgar and myself. That would keep. But lest our friends who had
expected something of the kind might feel aggrieved, he proposed
that as a substitute for it, another announcement should be made
which would give them almost equal pleasure,—that of the
engagement of his ward, Miss Colfax, to Dr. Hunter. And this was
done.”
“And was this all which passed between you at this time? No hint of
a quarrel between himself and the nephew for whom he had
contemplated such honor?”
“He said nothing that would either alarm or sadden me. He was very
cheerful, almost gay, all the time I was in the room. Alas! how little
we knew!”
It was the spontaneous outburst of a bereaved child and the Coroner
let it pass. Would he could have spared her the next question. But
his fixed idea of my guilt would not allow this and I had to sit there
and hear him say:
“In the days which followed, during which you doubtless had many
opportunities of seeing both of your cousins, did the attentions of the
one you call Quenton savor at all of those of courtship?”
“No, sir. We were all too absorbed in caring for my sick father to think
of anything of that kind.”
It was firmly but sweetly said, and such was the impression she
made on the crowd before her, that I saw a man who was lounging
against the rear wall, unconsciously bow his head in token of his
respect for her womanliness.
The Coroner, a little impressed himself perhaps, sat in momentary
silence and when he was ready to proceed, chose a less
embarrassing subject. What it was I do not remember now, nor is it
of importance that I should enlarge any further on an examination
which left things very much as they were and had been from the
beginning. By the masses convened there I was considered guilty,
but by a few, not; and as the few had more than one representative
in the jury, the verdict which was finally given was the usual one
where certainty is not attained.
Murder by poison administered by a person unknown.
 BOOK III
WHICH OF US TWO?
XXXII
Solitude! How do we picture it?
A man alone on a raft in the midst of a boundless sea. A figure
against a graying sky, with chasms beneath and ice peaks above.
Such a derelict between life and death I felt myself to be, as on
leaving the court-house, I stepped again into the street and faced my
desperate future. I almost wished that I might feel a hand upon my
shoulder and hear a voice in my ear saying: “Here is my warrant. I
arrest you for murder in the name of the law;” for then I should know
where my head would be laid for the night. Now I knew nothing.
Had Edgar joined me—But that would have been asking too much. I
stood alone; I walked alone; and heads fell and eyes turned aside as
I threaded my slow way down the street.
Where should I go? Suddenly it came to me that Orpha would expect
me to return home. I had no reason for thinking so; but the
impression once yielded to, I was sure of her expectancy and sure of
the grave welcome I should receive. But how could I face them all
with that brand between my eyes! To see Clarke’s accusing face and
Wealthy’s attempt not to show her hatred of me too plainly! It would
take a man with a heart of adamant to endure that. I had no such
heart. Yet if I failed to go, it might look to some persons like an
acknowledgment of guilt. And that would be worse. I would go, but
for the night only. To-morrow should see me far on my way to other
quarters—that is, if the police would allow it. The police! Well, why
not see the Inspector! He had visited me; why should I not visit him?
An objective was found. I turned towards the Police Station. But
before I reached it I met Mr. Jackson. He never admitted it, but I
think he had been dogging me, having perhaps some inkling as to
my mood. The straightforward way in which he held out his hand
gave me the first gleam of comfort I had had that day.
Could it be that he was sincere in this show of confidence? That he
had not been influenced by Wealthy’s story, or his judgment palsied
by the fact patent to all, that with the exception of myself there was
not a person among those admitted to my uncle’s room who had not
lived in the house for years and given always and under all
circumstances evidences of the most devoted attachment to him?
Or did he simply look upon me as the millionaire client who would yet
come into his own and whose favor it would be well to secure in this
hour of present trial?
A close study of his face satisfied me that he was really the friend he
seemed, and, yielding to his guidance, I allowed him to lead me to
his office where we sat down together and had our first serious talk.
He did believe me and would stand by me if I so desired it. Edgar
Bartholomew was a favorite everywhere, but if his uncle who had
loved him and reared him in the hope of uniting him with his
daughter, could be moved from that position to the point of having a
second will of an opposing nature drawn up and signed by another
lawyer on the same day, it must have been because he felt he had
found a better man to inherit his fortune and to marry his daughter. It
was a fact well enough known that Edgar was beginning to show a
streak of recklessness in his demeanor which could not have been
pleasing to his staid and highly respectable uncle. There was
another man near by of characteristics more trustworthy; and his
conscience favored this man.
“A strong nature, that of our late friend. He had but one weakness—
an inordinate partiality for this irresponsible, delightful nephew. That
is how I see the matter. If you will put your affairs in my hands, I think
I can make it lively for those who may oppose you.”
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