Capital Transit streetcar no. 1101, its first PCC car, sits parked outside the Navy Yard car barn in this 1937 photo. National Capital Trolley Museum.
In one sense, the PCC cars were a huge success. Capital Transit would ultimately acquire 489 of them, making for the third-largest fleet in the United States, after Chicago and Pittsburgh.154 But this triumph of American engineering prowess was still just a streetcar, and it was unable to turn the tide away from buses and automobiles. A Washington Post editorial from 1935, just after the first streamlined cars hit D.C. streets, captured the prevailing sentiment:
[T]he new, pastel-green and slick-running street cars that have made their appearance in Washington…are vastly superior to their creaking predecessors, but still they do not seem to be the final solution to the District transportation problem. There is more hope of developing a modern transportation system in the pending plan to substitute buses on the northern reaches of Connecticut avenue…. [B]uses offer quiet, speed and comparative comfort…. It is some years now since the last “tram” was seen in the heart of either London or Paris. As well as in art galleries, we might seek to emulate the older capitals in transportation efficiency.155
If the handwriting had not already been on the wall, it clearly was at this point, although not everyone was ready to consign streetcars to the scrap heap. They remained a highly efficient way to transport large numbers of people through densely traveled urban corridors. And they were soon to experience a sudden and dramatic—albeit brief—resurgence.
Chapter 9
WAR AND PEACE
THE WORLD WAR II YEARS AND AFTERWARD, 1940–1950
The World War II years and their aftermath were extraordinarily paradoxical for Capital Transit and other American streetcar companies. The war wreaked suffering and deprivation on many, but to Capital Transit it brought unprecedented patronage. As war workers swarmed into the city, ridership soared, reaching peaks that would never be equaled again. The decline that had pervaded the system since the 1920s completely vanished. And then, when the war ended, the reverse occurred. The nation at large experienced renewed growth and prosperity, while Capital Transit, like other streetcar companies, once again faced soaring costs and declining patronage. By 1949, when its parent company was compelled to sell out, the company was seized by corporate raiders and faced an uncertain future.
Ridership actually began increasing on Capital Transit in the late 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration dramatically increased government employment under the New Deal. An alphabet soup of government agencies set up shop around town, hiring thousands of new workers. The city’s population grew 26 percent in the 1930s, from 486,869 in 1930 to 663,091 in 1940. Federal employment alone grew 22 percent in 1939 and another 27 percent in 1940, all before the influx of wartime workers.156
By 1940, Washington was preparing for a war it knew the country would eventually join. Thousands of men lined up at local elementary and high schools to register for the draft. After Pearl Harbor, gun emplacements were established on and around government buildings, and air raid sirens wailed across the city as drills were held. Blackout shades were fitted into windows in homes, businesses and public buildings alike, striving to make the city less of a target in the event of an attack. The already sprawling “temporary” Navy and Munitions Building near the Washington Monument, left over from World War I, was overwhelmed with new employees, and additional tempos were soon built lining the Mall. Ordinary people opened unused rooms in their homes to newly arriving war workers, and everybody struggled with rationing, which drastically limited the consumption of gasoline, rubber, certain types of food and other commodities.
Streetcars compete with automobiles on Fifteenth Street alongside the Treasury Department in July 1936. Library of Congress.
Noted photographer Esther Bubley captured this scene in March 1943 of non–rush hour riders on the 40 line headed to Lincoln Park. Library of Congress.
Capital Transit was swamped with riders, more than it could possibly accommodate. Private automobiles, dependent as they were on scarce gasoline and rubber tires, were no longer a viable option for most commuters, who turned back to streetcars. Because streetcar transportation was vital to the war effort, manufacturers were allowed to continue producing limited numbers of new PCC cars, despite the fact that virtually all other vehicle manufacturing plants around the country were converted to strictly military use. Cities competed for the right to buy the cars, and Washington fared well. Although it had asked for even more, Capital Transit was allowed to acquire 66 new PCC cars in 1942, 141 in 1944 and another 50 in 1945.157 The new cars helped, but even with all of them on the streets, most were overcrowded, especially in rush hour.
A young boy rides on one of Capital Transit’s new PCC cars in this April 1943 photo by Esther Bubley. Library of Congress.
Buses offered little relief. In April 1942, the government ordered bus service reduced by up to 20 percent. Operating hours were staggered, stops eliminated and the use of charter and school buses sharply curtailed. Joseph B. Eastman, director of the Office of Defense Transportation, wrote that the new policy was “determined almost entirely by the stoppage of rubber imports and the desperate need of conserving all the rubber now in our possession. Waste of rubber tires under present conditions is little short of disloyalty to the national interest.”158
“THE COMPANY PREFERS HUSKINESS”
A greater wartime challenge for Capital Transit was in maintaining an adequate workforce. Large numbers of motormen and conductors left to join the military. Of the 2,881 motormen, conductors and streetcar operators on the rolls in January 1942, 1,172 left the company that year. While 980 replacements were found, more employees left in the coming two years, including 1,937 in 1944.159
Washington’s streetcar operators and conductors had always been white males, and disrupting that racist and sexist tradition was not easy, even with wartime pressures. During World War I, some thought had been given to temporarily hiring women as conductors on streetcars—it had been done in other American cities—but Washington was too conservative in 1917 for such a bold leap. World War II, in contrast, finally gave women their chance.
The first female Capital Transit employee to operate a streetcar was Helen Blau, who quietly joined the company ranks in October 1942. “Shattering all precedents of the Capital Transit Co., a young lady has been seriously going through the processes of learning to operate streetcars in the District for the past 10 days,” the Evening Star reported with astonishment.160 At the time, company president Edward D. Merrill (1885–1984) assured reporters that the whole thing was just an experiment, that Blau was only operating empty streetcars during off hours and that there were positively no plans to have women operating in-service streetcars in the District.
Merrill’s comments were disingenuous; just five days later, the company announced that it was indeed hiring women and that it planned to have them on the job within just a few months. As reported by the Washington Post, the company stressed that it wanted women of a certain physical type: “Strong-arm women who’ve done the family wash without muscle pain and who’ve driven trucks” were desired. “Physique is important. The company prefers huskiness: ages between 25 and 35 years are desirable. If the applicant is married her chances are better.”
It was these strong recruits who formed the Women’s Auxiliary Transit Service (WATS), Capital Transit’s answer to the WACS and WAVES then joining the military. Among the early recruits were Dorothy Berlett and Betty Whitehurst, who started training runs in January 1943 and became the public face of the new service. As they were introduced to the press, Berlett and Whitehurst endured a barrage of patronizing questions by journalists, who seemed much more interested in their supposed feminine frailties than their actual skills in handling the cars. Asked if she would be ready to respond to any “wise cracks” from passengers, Whitehurst cheerfully replied that she “didn’t work as a waitress for 11 years for nothing.”161
Hattie
B. Sheehan, a WATS employee, gets training as a streetcar operator in this June 1943 photo by Esther Bubley. Library of Congress.
Woman-operated streetcars began appearing during rush hour in March 1943, and there were no indications that the women had to weather any unusual harassment. Nor did any of them become flustered and break into tears, as some feared would happen. By July, thirty-five women were operating streetcars and buses, including the first husband-and-wife streetcar team of operator and conductor (the wife was the operator). “Some passengers, mostly nervous women, have gotten off buses and streetcars after discovering women were operating them but now, after a couple of months, they all stay and seem to be at ease,” the Star observed.162
The versatile Hattie B. Sheehan is seen here working as a conductor. Library of Congress.
As many as 77 women worked streetcars and buses during the war years, but this represented only a fraction of the workforce of more than 1,700. Most left their jobs at the end of the war as male operators and conductors with greater seniority returned to Capital Transit. Just a handful—fewer than 10—stayed on through the 1950s into the early 1960s.163
“DOMESTIC FASCISM”
While women gained a toehold in the male-dominated Capital Transit Company, African Americans faced a much tougher battle. Blacks could ride with whites on streetcars, but none had ever served as motormen or conductors. Some lines—such as the 90/92 on U Street, the 60 on Eleventh Street and the 10/12 on Benning Road—served predominantly African American patrons, linking black residential and commercial areas with downtown, yet the cars were always driven by white men. Capital Transit employed hundreds of African Americans in menial positions, primarily maintenance and custodial work, but barred them from “platform” jobs—operating streetcars and buses. Black workers kept the cars in good working order and maintained the underground conduits that powered them but were denied the ability to operate them outside of maintenance yards.164
In 1941, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, working with Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women, and NAACP secretary Walter White, planned a mass march on Washington to end job discrimination. The march of fifty thousand people down Pennsylvania Avenue was planned for July 1 but never took place. President Franklin Roosevelt was determined to keep the march from happening, and in exchange for calling it off, he issued an executive order at the end of June establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to investigate cases of discrimination in wartime hiring. The committee had little enforcement power, was poorly funded and was seen as largely ineffective, but for activists like Randolph, it could be a tool to raise awareness of discriminatory hiring and put pressure on companies to change their practices.
By the following year, the wartime manpower shortage had become acute, and the injustice of Capital Transit’s refusal to hire African Americans to fill its pressing need for operators and conductors fueled renewed outrage. Local African American leaders formed a Committee on Jobs for Negros in Public Utilities, which petitioned President Merrill to change the company’s policy. When he refused, the committee took the matter to the FEPC, which in November ordered Capital Transit to employ African Americans equitably in all positions within the company.
As a consummate technocrat, Merrill was perhaps not the kind of leader best suited to address this problem. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first worked as a civil engineer for the Union Pacific Railway. He served in streetcar companies in Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago before coming to Washington in 1926 to head the Washington Rapid Transit Company. After taking over as president of Capital Transit in 1937, he had been widely admired as a prudent and capable leader.
This Capital Transit advertisement appeared in the Washington Post in December 1942.
But Merrill never complied with the FEPC order to end discrimination. Instead, he presided over a prolonged campaign of delays, excuses and intransigence. In asking for a postponement of the order, the company argued that compliance would be disastrous because white employees would refuse to work if African Americans were hired, crippling transit service in Washington. Then, at a large employee meeting in December, Merrill appeared to change his mind, stating that the company would follow the order and hire black motormen and bus drivers. Black newspapers around the country celebrated the news, but it turned out to be a mirage.165 As predicted, white motormen and conductors bitterly opposed hiring of blacks, threatening to walk off the job. “We’ll fight side by side with ‘n……s’ but we won’t work side by side with them,” one worker reportedly yelled during a contentious meeting of the Amalgamated Transit Union.166 Merrill then backed away from his commitment.
Capital Transit’s unwillingness to carry out the FEPC order, either because it did not want African Americans operating its vehicles or because it was incapable of standing up to the threats of its employees, increasingly made the company appear incapable of controlling its own workforce. The company made a feeble attempt to hire a few black workers in February 1943, when it brought on Bernard Simmons, an experienced chauffeur, as a motorman trainee. However, none of the instructors at the Benning Car Barn was willing to take Simmons as a student, and the company apparently never pushed any of them to do so. Simmons was told that the best the company could do was offer him a job as a janitor (he declined).
The push for equal opportunity at Capital Transit peaked in May 1943, when labor groups organized a large protest rally that was attended by civil rights leaders and several top D.C. government officials. A march of more than eight hundred protesters began in the heart of black Washington at Tenth and U Streets Northwest and proceeded to Franklin Park downtown, where rousing speeches were given. Major Edward J. Kelly, superintendent of police, joined the group, as did District Commissioner John Russell Young. Representative Vito Mercantonio of New York, a popular socialist firebrand, stirred up the crowd by declaring that race segregation and discrimination were “domestic Fascism” and must be stamped out.167
Despite the drama of the rally, it did little to change Capital Transit’s policy. In January 1945, President Merrill testified that he was “embarrassed and humiliated” by his inability to comply with the FEPC order, fearing, as he claimed, the repercussions if white workers walked off the job en masse. Yet later that year, Capital Transit workers did just that, striking for higher wages and shutting the system down for more than a day until President Truman temporarily seized the company to get the streetcars and buses running again. The Washington Post commented wryly on the fact that Capital Transit had previously “asserted in highly moral tones” that it could not hire African American streetcar and bus operators “because to do so might precipitate a strike by white employees afflicted with race prejudice.” And yet faced with demands for higher wages, the company “has shown no hesitation about challenging the intransigency of its employees.” As a result, “the unthinkable interruption of public transportation is now in progress.”168 If anything was an embarrassment for Capital Transit, this should have been.
Protestors marched in May 1943 to demand that African Americans be hired as streetcar and bus operators. D.C. Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post.
But bad press was nothing new, and it was certainly not enough to change the status quo. In fact, for nine more years, the company continued to refer to the 1943 Simmons incident as “proof” that hiring African Americans was impractical and that whites would walk off the job in droves if it were to occur. The intransigence was finally broken only after other racial barriers started to fall. “Discrimination has been broken down in theaters, restaurants and a host of other public activities,” the Post wrote in February 1954. “The transit policy is lagging behind the community attitude, and there is every indication that the community would support a change and the improvements it would permit in transit operations.”169
By January 1955, when Capital Transit was facing other serious prob
lems (more on these in the next chapter), its management agreed to end the discrimination policy. Likewise under new leadership, the transit union also consented to the change. With little fanfare, the first handful of African Americans began operating streetcars and buses in March. There was no white backlash; not a single white employee walked off the job. A turning point had been reached, although the numbers of black transit operators would remain low for at least another decade.
CUTTING THE “FAT”
With the end of the war in 1945 came a gradual return to the city’s peacetime norm, and the broader social trends that had been interrupted by the war soon returned. More than ever, the American dream was to have a spacious house in the suburbs and at least one automobile in the garage. As new home construction mushroomed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, more and more of it was unreachable by streetcar. For the first time since the Civil War, large numbers of Washingtonians didn’t consider streetcar transportation essential to their daily lives.
Capital Transit spent much of 1946 restoring service that had been cut during the war due to manpower and materiel shortages, including non–rush hour streetcars and buses. Bringing service back to normal also meant addressing deferred upkeep on a sprawling network of tracks and underground conduits, which had always been difficult and expensive to maintain.
The conduit system had fulfilled its objective of keeping overhead wires out of downtown Washington, just as the Evening Star’s Crosby S. Noyes had so fervently advocated, but there had always been a substantial cost to pay for that luxury. In addition to the usual grinding and screeching of metal wheels on metal rails, Washington’s streetcars were equipped with plows whose metal shoes clattered noisily as they rode over the iron conductor rails under the streets, especially at intersections, where they banged over gaps in the rails. Two cars approaching an intersection from opposite directions could make quite a racket.
Capital Streetcars Page 16
