Capital Streetcars

by John DeFerrari

  Commentators agree that there were many factors that contributed to the eruption of violence.123 Certainly the demobilization of World War I soldiers played a critical role. Washington was filled with veterans, both white and black, who were returning to their homes or headed elsewhere around the country. Many were still in military attire, as they were allowed to continue to wear their uniforms after being discharged from active-duty service. Many were also at loose ends; peak wartime employment had dropped off, creating tension and competition for scarce jobs. It was these veterans who were the primary participants in the rioting.

  Black veterans, who had made as many sacrifices as whites and had fought just as heroically, were rightly proud of their service and expected to be treated with respect on their return home. Reality turned out to be very different. Although black veterans marched along with their white counterparts in the Welcome Home Parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in February, many whites were uneasy about African American participation in the war and did not want black citizens to have a continuing role in the military. In other parts of the country where race riots erupted in 1919, the sight of African Americans wearing military uniforms often provoked a white backlash. In fact, a white mob beat one African American to death in Blakeley, Georgia, for refusing to stop wearing his army uniform. Whites—particularly veterans and others throughout the South who had participated in civilian homeland defense leagues—were fearful of African Americans usurping their “place” in society and threatening the prevailing white-dominated order.

  Against this backdrop of racial tension, a series of newspaper articles throughout the month of July inflamed passions in Washington and was the immediate cause of the violence. The articles recounted a half dozen cases in which women were attacked by black men. Although the Washington Post is often faulted for inciting the 1919 riots, all four daily D.C. papers—the Post, Star, Herald and Times—sensationalized these incidents, with the Herald and the Times, both in tabloid format, trumpeting the most alarming headlines.

  The front page of the July 8, 1919 Washington Times displays one of the headlines that stirred up animosity toward African Americans in the weeks before the riots.

  One African American man, who was never caught, apparently committed several attacks on women in upper Northwest Washington, beginning with an African American schoolteacher, Louise Simmons, who was dragged into the woods near Fessenden Street and Connecticut Avenue and assaulted on June 25. Subsequently, several more women, all of them white, were also attacked in upper Northwest, including secretary Mary Saunders, who was struck on the head with a rock and raped near the D.C. border. Although these crimes were obviously very serious, they did not represent a pattern of increasing aggression. The overall level of crime in the District had not increased. Nevertheless, intense press coverage of the assaults made it seem to edgy whites that African Americans as a group were rising up to attack them. “Woods Scoured in Hunt for Negro” ran a headline on the front page of the Evening Star on July 8. “Phone Girl Chased by ‘Maniac’ at Chevy Chase Gives New Clue” was the banner on the Washington Times that day. “Another Girl Is Attacked Here” the Times announced a week later. Some Northwest D.C. residents even formed a Klan-like “vigilance committee” to seek revenge. Nervous about the effect of all this fear mongering, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) warned the newspapers that they were “sowing the seeds of a race riot.” That is just what happened several days later.124

  On the night of Friday, July 18, nineteen-year-old Elsie Stephnick, who had recently married a Navy Department employee, was supposedly accosted by two black men as she was walking home from her job at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. She was not harmed, but Charles Ralls, an African American who lived in the Bloodfield neighborhood (west of the Navy Yard, roughly where the baseball stadium is now located), was questioned by police about the attack and later released. Hearing rumors that he was the one who attacked the wife of a fellow navy man, a mob of soldiers, sailors and marines formed to go after Ralls and his wife, who were both beaten near their home in Bloodfield. Other attacks broke out that night in Southwest as well, setting the stage for broader violence throughout Washington over the following four days.

  The rioting mobs traveled largely on foot, scouring the streets for their victims, but occasionally they rode around in automobiles—called “terror cars”—and shot at bystanders. The mobs also often targeted streetcars. As African American journalist John Edward Bruce (1856–1924) pointed out, the “mixing of white and blacks on street railways” was one of the contributing factors that provoked whites to attack blacks.125 Streetcars also were convenient. As roving gangs from both races looked for trouble, the captive operators and passengers aboard the cars, confined as they were to fixed routes and stops, proved to be easy marks.

  The Pennsylvania Avenue cars suffered many attacks. “Two colored men were dragged from street cars near Pennsylvania avenue and 15th street during the night,” the Evening Star reported on July 21. “Street car passengers were greatly alarmed by the incidents…Numerous other colored persons were at the street car transfer station when the trouble started, and several of them failed to get away in time to escape the assaults of the uniformed men.”126 According to the Washington Times, “At Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania avenue an overseas soldier climbed through an open window of a street car and, grabbing a negro passenger by the coat collar, dragged him from the car. A woman passenger on the car became hysterical and was escorted from the scene by one of the soldiers.”127 In another case, the New York Times reported that “a band of soldiers and sailors dragged a young negro from a street car on G Street, Northwest, between Ninth and Tenth Streets. They beat him and chased him several blocks. His head was cut. He was taken home by the police.”128 Francis L. Thomas, a seventeen-year-old African American, was on the Seventh Street car headed home at about 11:15 on Sunday night when white sailors and soldiers stormed aboard and started beating him “unmercifully from head to foot” before throwing him out a window. In his subsequent statement to the NAACP, Thomas said that he had been so injured that it left him “in such a condition that I could hardly crawl back home.”129

  One of the striking features of the 1919 riots was that African Americans quickly responded by organizing their own defense and launching counterattacks on their white aggressors. As the white mobs grew on Sunday night and searched for new victims, they began heading north from Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Shaw/U Street neighborhood, then known as Uptown. They made it only to L Street, just north of Mount Vernon Square, where they clashed with hundreds of black residents and eventually retreated.

  The next morning, some editions of the Washington Post carried an infamous (and entirely unfounded) call for the “mobilization of every available service man stationed in or near Washington” to participate in a “clean-up that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.”130 While the effect on young white ex-servicemen, who were already engaged in the fight, is unknown, the ominous threat certainly mobilized more African Americans, who responded by buying up firearms and preparing for the race war to continue.

  That evening, the newspapers reported attacks on streetcars by black residents that mirrored earlier white attacks. In Uptown, for example, the “trouble started at 7th and T streets about 1:15 o’clock in an attack upon Lewis C. Mueller, white, twenty-five years old, who was waiting for a street car. He was attacked by several colored men and severely beaten. His face and hands were cut and he was otherwise bruised and scarred, but he would not go to a hospital.”131 Across town, a “mob of between twenty-five and thirty negros, at 3 o’clock this afternoon, boarded a street car at Twenty-sixth and G streets northwest, in the vicinity of the U.S. Hospital, and beat the motorman and conductor. They then ran east to Twenty-fifth street, and scattered.”132 The aggression continued on both sides through Monday night and into Tuesday.

  By Tuesday afternoon, however, the loca
l and military authorities had finally taken control of the chaotic situation. Hundreds of active-duty troops under the command of Major General William G. Haan (1863–1924), a veteran of the fighting in Europe, were put on the streets with orders to arrest any and all persons causing disturbances. The massive official military presence suppressed renewed violence, and the riots of 1919 finally ended.

  The short-lived race war did little to resolve tensions between whites and blacks. White racists continued to chafe at the progress that African Americans had made, something that was more evident in Washington than in other southern cities and included the non-segregated streetcar system. Southern congressmen continued to advocate for Jim Crow cars; William Lankford of Georgia pushed the idea again in 1923. But among the broader populace, the riots, if anything, were shocking and extreme, an embarrassment to the nation’s capital and something to move beyond. The newspapers that had been the immediate instigators of the violence seem to have learned their lesson and didn’t foment further racial disturbances. While the race “question” was still far from being resolved, the integration of the city’s streetcars had survived unscathed, and African Americans who mixed with whites on those cars no longer needed to fear for their personal safety.

  The front page of the July 23, 1919 Washington Post shows how coverage of the riots emphasized black violence, although whites were just as aggressive and had started the rioting.

  Chapter 8

  YESTERDAY’S TECHNOLOGY

  COMPETITION WITH AUTOMOBILES AND BUSES, 1920–1940

  The period between the wars, from the 1920s through the 1930s, was an era of transition for streetcars in Washington and around the country. The clanking, thundering cars remained the preferred means of travel for hundreds of thousands of Washington-area residents; their efficiency in moving large numbers of people in and out of town was unrivaled. To observe the streams of cars, all packed to the gills at rush hour, shuffling along the major downtown routes, it must have seemed that they were the very bedrock of the city’s transportation system, and in many ways they were. Yet streetcars were an endangered species, here and in almost every other major U.S. city. Urban planners and industry officials were quietly resigning themselves to dramatic reductions in a mode of transport that only a few decades earlier had been crucial to the growth and prosperity of the American city. How could such a reversal happen?

  Automobiles and buses, of course, were the culprits. According to the Washington Post, the first “horseless carriage” rode the streets of the nation’s capital on April 2, 1897, and was an immediate sensation, startling pedestrians and horses alike. Ironically, the strange vehicle was built and brought to Washington for William Schoepf, the court-appointed receiver of the bankrupt Eckington & Soldiers Home Railway. The particular machine in operation that day ran on compressed air (like the streetcars the Eckington line was experimenting with at the time), but gasoline-powered vehicles were not far off. The Post reporter who tagged along for the joyride in the new contraption was clearly thrilled with the cutting-edge technology and speculated about how motorized buses might soon be built:

  This may be done by attaching a tractor, or powerful motor, to the front of the bus, and drawing it about the streets. The motor, in such a case, would be condensed to the exact space occupied by horses, and will take the sharpest curves even easier than did the flesh and blood tractors. If this is not desired, the motor may be attached directly to the wheels of the vehicle, and driven in the same way as a carriage.133

  The technological revolution came swiftly. In May 1900, just three years later, automobiles were beginning to appear around the city, and people were already talking about getting rid of streetcars. The Post reprinted a brief article from the Chicago Record making a prescient forecast:

  There are those bold enough to predict that the car designed to run on rails laid in the streets will in time give way entirely to self-propelled vehicles, that require no other street foundation than the ordinary pavement…. It will only be necessary for the authorities to provide first-class pavements throughout the city, when all who desire to engage in the business of carrying passengers can do so. Thus cost and quality of service could be left to regulation by competition, which is now out of the question, because but a single corporation can be permitted to lay tracks and to operate cars in any given street.134

  While streetcar systems in Washington would continue to expand and grow in ridership for several more decades—and the entire system would continue to operate for another six—its ultimate fate was largely sealed at the very beginning of the twentieth century.

  “ELEGANT, COMFORTABLE, AND EASY-RUNNING CONVEYANCES”

  A certain rivalry between streetcars and buses had always existed. Although the Washington & Georgetown Railroad had bought Gilbert Vanderwerken’s competing omnibus line in 1862 specifically to eliminate competition, its monopoly on mass transit was short-lived. In 1875, the Washington Chariot Company was formed to reintroduce regularly scheduled horse-drawn coaches to compete with the cars. The new company deployed patented “Murch Chariot” omnibuses, which were enclosed carriages seating sixteen people on benches along the sides of their passenger compartments. These chariots looked a lot like streetcars, except for the large wheels; they even had straps hanging in the aisles for standees to grasp. The chariot was “an elegant, comfortable, and easy-running conveyance,” according to the National Republican, and in time, the company kept nine of them running continually in each direction along Pennsylvania Avenue, with headway of just three or four minutes. At a fare of eight cents, the chariots pressured some of the competing street railways to lower their fares.

  A Washington Chariot Company bus. D.C. Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post.

  They lasted only a few years, however. The Washington Chariot Company folded in about 1880, and the Philadelphia-based Herdic Phaeton Company quickly stepped in to take its place. The company had been founded in 1879 by Peter H. Herdic (1824–1888), an energetic Pennsylvania entrepreneur who had patented his own omnibus design. The “herdic,” similar in many ways to the Murch Chariot, featured a rear entrance (like a bobtail streetcar) and was lightly built but had better suspension. As with bobtail streetcars, passengers had to make their way to the front of the herdic to pay the driver. The five-cent fare was highly competitive.

  Herdics would not die nearly as readily as the chariots. First deployed on the reliable Pennsylvania Avenue route, they were later extended to other major thoroughfares. The first Herdic Phaeton Company went out of business in 1896, but within a year, it had been replaced by the Metropolitan Coach Company. The new company found that it could fill an important niche by providing service on major routes not served by streetcars, such as Sixteenth Street Northwest, a major north–south artery. Early twentieth-century Washingtonians grew to depend on herdics as an alternative to streetcars, but they were expensive to operate and service was often unreliable.

  A horse-drawn herdic stops on Capitol Hill. D.C. Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post.

  In time, the Metropolitan Coach Company struggled to earn a profit, just as with many suburban street railways. While expenses for the horse-drawn vehicles were high, fares had to be kept low and thus profits remained elusive. This proved true even after the company converted to primitive motorized buses in 1909. Service became erratic, and maintenance of the rickety vehicles declined, all the while that the company fought in court (to no avail) to get the streetcar companies to accept transfers from its vehicles. The motorized herdics eventually became notorious for their bad service. “Theoretically, the herdics are supposed to operate in the public interest and to carry passengers. But their real functions and activities are sealed in mystery. Mostly, they are used by Washingtonians to point out to visitors as one of the transportation jokes of the National Capital,” the Washington Times reported in 1911.135

  The joke finally ended in 1915, when the insolvent company ended its erratic service. That same
year, the Public Utilities Commission authorized “jitney” bus service for the first time in the District. Jitneys, which had been invented in Los Angeles just the preceding year, were cars or small trucks converted to passenger service that, like the herdics, offered rides for a nickel (“jitney” was a slang term for a nickel). They generally seated only a few passengers. The first applicant in D.C. was a certain Percy S. Wyerxa, who lived on Sixth Street downtown. He was informed that all he needed to go into the new business was a standard taxicab license.

  A horse-drawn streetcar encounters two herdics on a busy stretch of F Street in front of the Patent Office, circa 1890. Author’s collection.

  Suddenly jitney buses were everywhere. They drew scorn and resentment from streetcar companies, which were constrained as much by elaborate regulations and high taxes (including fees to pay for traffic cops at major intersections) as by the rails that defined their routes. In contrast, the carefree jitneys had few overhead costs and could change routes on a whim. They were even known to “steal” passengers from streetcars by driving around them and picking people up from the car stops ahead.

  Often unreliable and even unsafe, the unregulated jitneys did not last long. The Public Utilities Commission soon brought bus service under tight regulation, essentially driving jitneys out of business. Officially sanctioned buses were not allowed to compete directly with streetcars, which were recognized as more efficient for transporting large numbers of people along major commuter routes. Buses were permitted instead primarily on routes not served by streetcars. Early bus routes included Sixteenth Street, several cross-town lines and commuter routes connecting Northeast residential neighborhoods with downtown.