Brinkley's Beat People, Places, And Events That Shaped My Time

Theodore Bilbo I arrived in Washington in 1943, when the city was fast becoming a crowded, bustling war capitalfilled with clerks and businessmen and diplomats and exiled foreign leaders. But my life was pretty simple: riding the segregated trolleys downtown to work at the NBC offices in the old Trans-Lux building on Fourteenth Street; living in rented rooms in private housesthe only housing available at any priceand having to deal with cranky landlords and landladies who constantly posted on the walls new rules of behavior and reminders of the need for neatness in the bathrooms. I had come to Washington from the South, and despite the new bustle, it had a very familiar feeling. It was sleepy, often slow-moving, inbred, and thoroughly segregated. Local Washington, through presidents, wars, and depressions, had settled into an acceptance of George Washington's poor choice of location in a sprawling, slow-moving Southern city. People from real citiesNew York, Chicago, Boston, cities with factories and immigrants and subwaysthought it astonishing. There were few restaurants offering anything not fried in deep fat. On Connecticut Avenue there was a place called Old New Orleans featuring in its front display window a large, plump black woman wearing a long gingham dress and a red bandanna on her head and sitting in a rocking chair, rocking by the hourthe restaurant's trademark. Only a river's breadth away lay the old Confederacy. Robert E. Lee's house, Arlington, still stood on the opposite bank. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn of Bonham, Texas, had not one but five pictures of Lee on his office wall, symmetrically arranged and all facing south. For whites as for blacks, Washington was southern. Capital of the United States, yes, but southern in manner, style, and appearance and southern in climate and culture. I lived in Washington for fifty-five years after that, and saw it change a great deal before I left. But the image that has always stayed with me is of the quiet town I visited first with my mother in the 1930s, when we stayed at the old Hotel Harrington downtown, and of the only slightly noisier town I found when I moved there in the early 1940s. To me, as a sometime Capitol Hill reporter, the antiquated character of the city was most visible in Congress, which was still carrying on in the manner of a fading aristocracy, in a setting of marble stairways, horsehair sofas, polished brass spittoons, snuffboxes on the senators desks, potted palms, Oriental rugs, leather chairs, and Havana cigars. There were even a few members still affecting frock coats, wing collars, and black string ties. Through the 1930s, it was a gentlemen's club with but one woman senatorHattie Caraway of Arkansas, who sat in the chamber every day knitting, listening, and saying nothing. "People don't give a damn what the average Senator or Congressman says," the columnist Raymond Clapper wrote. "The reason they don't care is that they know what you hear in Congress is 99 per cent tripe, ignorance and demagoguery and not to be relied on." Clapper's description applied to many politicians on Capitol Hill, but it fit no one better than a man from Mississippi, one of the most extraordinary and preposterous figures I ever encountered in my many years as a Washington reporter. United States Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo (known at home as "The Man") was somewhere between five feet and five feet six inches tall. He was a vain man, often described as a "strutting peacock," and he refused to reveal his exact height. But one Mississippian who helped vote him into the Senate said, "When Theo Bilbo is on the stump, he's seven feet ten inches tall,&Brinkley, David is the author of 'Brinkley's Beat People, Places, And Events That Shaped My Time', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345426796 and ISBN 0345426797.