Historic PCC car no. 1101 stops at the passenger platform of the National Capital Trolley Museum in 2014. Photo by Ken Rucker, National Capital Trolley Museum.
An 1890s streetcar, similar to the one now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, undergoes restoration at the National Capital Trolley Museum. Photo by Ken Rucker, National Capital Trolley Museum.
The City of San Francisco operates restored streetcars on its Market Street line, including this PCC car that has been painted in the livery of the D.C. Transit System. Photo by the author.
One of the new streetcars made in the Czech Republic arrives in Baltimore in December 2009. District Department of Transportation.
A Czech-made streetcar undergoes testing in Greenbelt, Maryland. District Department of Transportation.
King’s unapologetic attempt to crush the union made him a pariah, as Washingtonians rallied around the struggling strikers. Special emergency funds were established to provide sustenance to the workers and their families, keeping them going through much of March. On the twenty-seventh, legendary workers’ rights activist Mary “Mother” Jones (1837–1930) addressed a packed meeting at the National Rifles Armory, joining other community leaders in advocating a government takeover of the city’s street railways. Jones was adamant that King and his fellow executives were the culprits. She told the strikers that they would be “measly miserable cowards to make any settlement with the robbers” and urged them to “get some fighting blood in them.”114
It was no use. WRECo continued to hire strikebreakers to cross picket lines. The scabs managed to keep many of the company’s lines running, although service was never at pre-strike levels. By April, WRECo began unilaterally announcing that the strike was over, even though union officials insisted that it wasn’t. A resolution mediated by the Public Utilities Commission finally brought most of the original WRECo workers back to their jobs but didn’t include recognition of the union. King continued to reiterate his steadfast opposition to the union when Congressional hearings were held in May and June but won little sympathy on Capitol Hill. The special Senate committee holding the hearings excoriated him in its final report, singling out his opposition to the union as the root cause of the strike:
In our opinion, if Mr. King had not been obdurate; if he had understood present-day social economics; if he had been willing to meet at all—not half way, but measurably—the men, some of whom had worked for him more than a quarter of a century, there would have been no strike in the city of Washington in last March, the public would not have suffered the grossest inconveniences, the capital of the nation would not have presented a sorry spectacle to the world, and what is more important, there would not have occurred the misery and heart-breaking of men admittedly of good character and of their wives and their children.115
The strongly worded report did little to directly aid workers, however. While there was talk of a possible government takeover or stronger oversight by the Public Utilities Commission, nothing concrete was done to rein the company in. The ultimate impact of the strike and King’s ruthless response was to further sour the public about streetcar companies in general, leaving fewer supporters to defend the system in future years when it would be imperiled by competition from automobiles and buses. Meanwhile, WRECo tamped down opposition by quietly approving three wage increases between May and November 1917, satisfying its employees at least temporarily.
TAMING CRUSH HOUR
America’s entry into World War I in April 1917 accelerated problems of overcrowding and inefficient service that had been festering on both Capital Traction and WRECo car lines throughout the 1910s. The population of the city had grown more than 20 percent, from 331,069 in 1910 to 395,947 in late 1917, and it would soar to 526,000 at the peak of the war effort in April 1918. Thousands of new wartime government workers crowded into apartment houses, hotels and temporary quarters that had sprung up around the city. Most of the new arrivals took streetcars to their jobs, many of which were located in temporary office buildings near the Mall in East Potomac Park. Streetcar line extensions were planned to service those locations, although the war ended before they were finished. Capital Traction had cars running to Potomac Park in June 1918, while WRECo’s line was completed in April 1919.
The biggest problem, as usual, was overcrowding. Not only did congestion slow the cars down, but it was also harder and harder just to keep them on the streets because conductors and motormen were leaving to join the military. In December 1917, the Public Utilities Commission hired New York transit consultant John A. Beeler (1867–1945) to study streetcar congestion in D.C. Beeler deployed an army of observers on downtown D.C. streets to record precise details of how fast the cars moved and how frequently they were spaced. In his report, Beeler noted that delays due to traffic congestion were “most exasperating to the public” and were the worst during rush hour, which he considered a misnomer for D.C because “the cars do anything but rush. A better name would be the ‘crush hour.’”116
The worst congestion was around Fifteenth Street and New York Avenue Northwest, which Beeler called the “throat” of the Capital Traction network. A total of 211 cars was scheduled on an average workday to pass through the intersection between 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. In January 1918, the packed cars crawled through at an average speed of about four miles per hour. By 6:00 p.m., that had dropped to just under three miles per hour, not much faster than a brisk walk. No wonder that anybody who could walk to work preferred it to being wedged into these slow-moving cars.
Streetcar patrons crowd a platform on F Street in 1918. Library of Congress.
Beeler made many recommendations, not only for the Capital Traction “throat” but for the rest of the city’s car lines as well. The cars made too many stops—sometimes several within a single block. Beeler recommended eliminating many stops to keep the cars moving. He also advocated better-designed streetcar platforms to improve passenger loading and unloading, changes in traffic patterns and better fare collection methods, including the use of fare boxes. Automobiles were a big problem; Beeler said that parking should be much more severely restricted and that on some routes automobiles should be banned altogether to prevent obstructions to streetcars. Numerous other recommendations were made as well.
Not all of Beeler’s recommendations were implemented—particularly the limits on automobiles—but many were. After the war, service improved, but streetcars had cemented their reputation as slow, crowded and unpleasant. However vital Beeler’s improvements may have been to achieving respectable service levels, they were never enough to reverse this increasing disenchantment. And for some passengers—notably African Americans—a streetcar ride could at times be a downright harrowing experience.
A view of pedestrians and streetcars on Fifteenth Street just south of New York Avenue in 1918. Library of Congress.
Chapter 7
A VAST AMOUNT OF HARM
THE STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN EQUAL ACCESS, 1900–1920
Twenty-two-year-old Joseph Smith was fortunate to start the twentieth century with a new job—night laborer with the Washington Traction and Electric Company. Smith, an African American, lived on Champlain Street near Meridian Hill in what surely was a humble abode. His new job was to serve in a group of workers that went out on the lonely streets of Washington late at night to clean the streetcar conduits after the cars had stopped running.
At two o’clock in the morning on June 27, 1900, Smith was hard at work on a conduit at Eleventh and G Streets Northwest when he received a devastating shock. The electric power, which had been cut off for the cleaning work, unexpectedly came back on momentarily and electrocuted Smith. As he lay in the street “turning and writhing with pain,” a beat policeman arrived at the scene and immediately “sent a hurry message to the Emergency Hospital, stating that the young negro was probably dying.”
Identifying him as an African American was a bad call. The responding hospital physician apparently was highly dis
pleased at having to rescue a black man. It took twenty-five minutes for him to get to the scene in his horse-drawn ambulance, despite the very short distance (about five blocks) from the hospital. Smith’s white supervisor, who was on the scene, “thought it was an outrage to delay so long.”117 When the doctor finally arrived, he apparently started cursing at Smith. According to the Evening Star, the physician later refused to admit his irresponsible behavior: “The doctor denies having used the language ascribed to him, and says there was no unnecessary delay in responding to the call.”118 Fortunately, Smith seems to have survived the ordeal.
The incident was emblematic of whites’ growing hostility toward African Americans at the turn of the century. The legal framework that had protected African American rights had been crumbling since the end of Reconstruction in 1876. A turning point had come in 1896, when the Supreme Court infamously ruled that “separate but equal” public facilities were acceptable under the Constitution, paving the way for states to begin enacting Jim Crow segregation laws, often limiting access to streetcars. By 1900, neighboring local jurisdictions, including Alexandria, Virginia, had segregated both their streetcar and railroad systems. Virginia passed a statewide Jim Crow streetcar law in 1906. Conductors on railroad cars entering Virginia from the District often scrupulously followed the rules, going through the cars at the border and ordering passengers to separate themselves into white and “Colored” cars. Whites and blacks alike had to follow the humiliating rules. In one case, Robert E. Lee’s daughter Mary Custis Lee was arrested for refusing to move out of a car designated for African Americans as the train left Washington for Alexandria.119
Astonishingly, D.C.’s streetcars remained officially integrated throughout this difficult period. The 1864 law establishing equal access to D.C. streetcars was never overturned, and African Americans made good use of their streetcar rights. “Colored people are very fond of car riding, and constitute a large percentage of our patrons,” one anonymous conductor told the Evening Star in 1900. Many white Washingtonians supported integrated streetcars, as evidenced by the opinions of the local press. In a 1902 editorial, the Washington Post—not particularly known as a liberal newspaper at the time—commented on the failure of New Orleans’s Jim Crow streetcar law: “Upon the whole, we think that the Jim Crow street car is both nonsensical and mischievous. It does no good. It may do a vast amount of harm.”120
African American community leaders, including prominent church ministers, began organizing in the early years of the twentieth century to express their opposition to Jim Crow laws that were taking hold elsewhere in the country, as well as the threat of Jim Crow hanging over Washington. As they feared, D.C.’s integrated streetcars increasingly came under attack, mostly from southern congressmen. The first major case involved James Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin (1869–1951), a white supremacist from Alabama who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1904. In 1906, he first introduced a bill to amend the D.C streetcar law, and in February 1908, it was debated fiercely on the floor of the House before being soundly defeated by a vote of 140 to 58 that closely followed party lines. Heflin’s controversial argument was that it was better for both races to be separate because trouble inevitably ensued when the two races mixed. After the acrimonious debate over his bill was well publicized in the press, Heflin decided to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun in public, ostensibly for self-protection.
Just a month later, on March 27, 1908, Heflin ended up playing out his own imagined fears. As he rode a streetcar that night on Pennsylvania Avenue, two African Americans boarded who had been drinking and were carrying a bottle of whiskey. There was also a white woman aboard, and Heflin, who was on his way to deliver a lecture on the merits of temperance, apparently told the men not to drink in the presence of the lady. An argument ensued, voices were raised and when the streetcar stopped in front of the St. James Hotel at Sixth Street, Heflin pushed the two men off the car. He then proceeded to shoot at them through an open window. One shot hit one of the men, Lewis Lundy, in the neck, critically injuring him. Another ricocheted off the pavement and struck a bystander, Thomas McCreary, in the leg.
A caricature of “Cotton Tom” Heflin appeared in the Washington Post on February 6, 1908.
The brazen attack made headlines around the country. While some readers were outraged, many others supported Heflin’s violent aggression. The police, to their credit, arrested him immediately after the incident and charged him with assault. However, as he was brought to a nearby police station, more than a dozen of his fellow representatives, mostly from southern states, gathered at the station in a show of support. In the coming days, Heflin openly boasted of his feat, suggesting that his irresponsible act had actually helped preserve the social order. “He Shot a Bad Negro,” read the headline in the Baltimore Sun, capsulizing a widely held sentiment. After the mysterious white woman he was supposedly protecting failed to materialize as a witness, prosecutors dropped charges against him. Lundy, who was an ex-con, recovered from his wound but was soon in jail because of a separate incident, fueling the smug conclusion that he deserved what he’d gotten from Heflin. The bystander, Thomas McCreary, also eventually recovered from his wound.
Tempers flared again after another streetcar altercation on Pennsylvania Avenue three years later. This time it involved Seaborn A. Roddenbery (1870–1913) of Georgia, who had been elected to the House of Representatives in 1910. Roddenbery, like Heflin, was a strident white supremacist. In his short tenure in Washington, Roddenbery was best known for proposing a Constitutional amendment outlawing interracial marriage. One day in 1911, Roddenbery and three other congressmen, including Speaker of the House Champ Clark (1850–1921), were riding on a Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar when an African American couple boarded at Tenth Street. The couple tried to sit down in the space available next to Roddenbery, but it was a tight fit. The man squeezed in next to Roddenbery, allegedly elbowing him. This enraged the high-strung southerner, who immediately started slugging the black man in the face. As other frightened passengers screamed to be let off the car, Roddenbery’s colleagues intervened to stop the fight. Although the unnamed African American man was injured, no charges were filed against Roddenbery due to the brief mêlée. Neither of the two newspapers that reported the incident, the Washington Post and the Washington Herald, challenged Roddenbery for resorting to violence. Instead, both celebrated his pugilistic skills, noting that he was much smaller than the African American man.
While incidents like these were certainly not a daily occurrence, they contributed to increasing anxiety among African Americans, who never knew when sudden violence might be directed their way as they rode on city streetcars. The cars remained a mixing bowl for the races, just as they had been during the Civil War, and uncomfortable whites repeatedly attempted to segregate them. In December 1911, just six months after the Roddenbery incident, Representative Frank Clark of Florida introduced another District streetcar segregation bill in Congress. Once again, it failed to pass.
An out-of-town newspaper, the Chicago Defender, smugly asserted that Washington’s African Americans had nothing to worry about. Ignoring the fact that Congress was the chief regulator of public life in the nation’s capital, the newspaper claimed that there were three reasons why D.C.’s streetcars would never be segregated:
First, the traction companies do not want to be bothered with the expense or embarrassments that such a separation would entail upon them; second, the rich white people, who ride in their own automobiles, carriages, etc., are not concerned about the present mixing of the races; third, nobody is worked up over the matter except a few out-of-the-way neighborhood associations, representing, in most part, a bunch of non-voting poor white folks, and their narrow-minded protests are not likely to weigh very heavily against the two influences just mentioned. So the Negro needs to lose little sleep over the prospect of having “jim-crow” street cars in the District of Columbia.121
Neighborhood associations did weigh
in on the issue, but for every one that favored segregation, such as the Citizens Northwest Suburban Association, which represented Tenallytown, there was another that openly opposed it, like the Randle Heights Citizens Association. Resolutions by such organizations had little impact on D.C. streetcar laws and regulations.
Meanwhile, southern congressmen made many more attempts to push segregation. Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi announced a streetcar segregation bill in 1913, as did Representative Byron P. Harrison, also of Mississippi. In 1915, Frank Clark of Florida reintroduced his version. African American ministers protested each time. Reverend Simon P.W. Drew, president of the Colored Baptist Evangelic Alliance of America, called for forty days of fasting and prayer against Clark’s bill, which he called “unwise and unchristianlike in motive and an insult to every colored citizen and a disgrace to our country.”122 None of the bills passed.
“BEATEN UNMERCIFULLY FROM HEAD TO FOOT”
These scuffles must have seemed minor in comparison to the extraordinary outbreak of racial violence that occurred on the streets of Washington from Saturday, July 19, through Tuesday, July 22, 1919. The riots that took place in D.C. were the first to gain national attention that year, but many other cities saw racial violence as well, including Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha and many smaller towns, mostly in the South. It was as if the decades of increasing white hostility to African Americans in cities around the country had finally reached a boiling point, touched off by the end of World War I. The D.C. rioting, which was centered downtown but spread across the city, claimed seven lives and injured hundreds more. Unlike the riots of 1968, the focus in 1919 was not on looting or destruction of property; it aimed to attack individuals.
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