Mark Twain on Washington, DC

He didn't like it here. Here's how he and Charles Dudley Warner described the place in 1873, with annotations for modern readers.

In 1873, Mark Twain published his first novel, coauthored with his Hartford neighbor, the lawyer, newspaper editor, and essayist Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, is a satirical Washington novel about the corrupt machinations necessary to build a fortune in post-Civil War America, of which bribing members of Congress was an integral part. It was Twain and Warner who coined the phrase “the Gilded Age,” and I’ve been reading and rereading a lot of Twain during Covid lockdown because we’re living through another one now.

In the following passage Twain and Warner set narrative aside and revert to travel writing, until then Twain’s métier. Twain had spent time in Washington as a newspaper correspondent and personal secretary to Nevada Sens. William Stewart and Joseph Nye, and he didn’t like it much. (See “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship.”) I’ve added footnotes to provide context for modern readers and some fact-checking as well; the great man was never what you’d call a stickler for accuracy.

Washington is an interesting city to any of us. It seems to become more and more interesting the oftener we visit it. Perhaps the reader has never been there? Very well. You arrive either at night, rather too late to do anything or see anything until morning, or you arrive so early in the morning that you consider it best to go to your hotel and sleep an hour or two while the sun bothers along over the Atlantic. You cannot well arrive at a pleasant intermediate hour, because the railway corporation that keeps the keys of the only door that leads into the town or out of it take care of that.* You arrive in tolerably good spirits, because it is only thirty-eight miles from Baltimore to the capital, and so you have only been insulted three times (provided you are not in a sleeping car—the average is higher there): once when you renewed your ticket after stopping over in Baltimore; once when you were about to enter the “ladies’ car” without knowing it was a lady’s car; and once when you asked the conductor at what hour you would reach Washington.

You are assailed by a long rank of hackmen who shake their whips in your face as you step out upon the sidewalk; you enter what they regard as a “carriage,” in the capital, and you wonder why they do not take it out of service and put it in the museum: we have few enough antiquities, and it is little to our credit that we make scarcely any effort to preserve the few we have.

You reach your hotel, presently—and here let us draw the curtain of charity—because of course you have gone to the wrong one. You being a stranger, how could you do otherwise? There are a hundred and eighteen bad hotels, and only one good one. The most renowned and popular hotel of them all is perhaps the worst one known to history.**

It is winter, and night. When you arrived, it was snowing. When you reached the hotel, it was sleeting. When you went to bed, it was raining. During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you got up in the morning, it was foggy. When you finished your breakfast at ten o’clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all-pervading. You will like the climate when you get used to it.

You naturally wish to view the city; so you take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and go forth. The prominent features you soon locate and get familiar with; first you glimpse the ornamental upper works of a long, snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees, and a tall, graceful white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace and pleasantly contrasting with the background of blue sky. That building is the Capitol; gossips will tell you that by the original estimates it was to cost $12,000,000, and that the government did come within $21,200,000 of building it for that sum.***

You stand at the back of the Capitol to treat yourself to a view, and it is a very noble one. You understand, the Capitol stands upon the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, and its front looks out over this noble situation for a city—but it don’t see it, for the reason that when the Capitol extension was decided upon, the property owners at once advanced their prices to such inhuman figures that the people went down and built the city in the muddy low marsh behind the temple of liberty; so now the lordly front of the building, with, its imposing colonades, its projecting graceful wings, its picturesque groups of statuary, and its long terraced ranges of steps, flowing down in white marble waves to the ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful little desert of cheap boarding houses.****

So you observe, that you take your view from the back of the Capitol. And yet not from the airy outlooks of the dome, by the way, because to get there you must pass through the great rotunda: and to do that, you would have to see the marvelous Historical Paintings that hang there, and the bas-reliefs—and what have you done that you should suffer thus? And besides, you might have to pass through the old part of the building, and you could not help seeing Mr. Lincoln, as petrified by a young lady artist for $10,000—and you might take his marble emancipation proclamation, which he holds out in his hand and contemplates, for a folded napkin; and you might conceive from his expression and his attitude, that he is finding fault with the washing.***** Which is not the case. Nobody knows what is the matter with him; but everybody feels for him. Well, you ought not to go into the dome anyhow, because it would be utterly impossible to go up there without seeing the frescoes in it—and why should you be interested in the delirium tremens of art?

The Capitol is a very noble and a very beautiful building, both within and without, but you need not examine it now. Still, if you greatly prefer going into the dome, go. Now your general glance gives you picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic asylum****** on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple******* which your eye dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful. Still in the distance, but on this side of the water and close to its edge, the Monument to the Father of his Country towers out of the mud—sacred soil is the customary term. It has the aspect of a factory chimney with the top broken off. The skeleton of a decaying scaffolding lingers about its summit, and tradition says that the spirit of Washington often comes down and sits on those rafters to enjoy this tribute of respect which the nation has reared as the symbol of its unappeasable gratitude.

The Monument is to be finished, some day, and at that time our Washington will have risen still higher in the nation’s veneration, and will be known as the Great-Great-Grandfather of his Country. The memorial Chimney stands in a quiet pastoral locality that is full of reposeful expression. With a glass you can see the cow-sheds about its base, and the contented sheep nimbling pebbles in the desert solitudes that surround it, and the tired pigs dozing in the holy calm of its protecting shadow.

Now you wrench your gaze loose, and you look down in front of you and see the broad Pennsylvania Avenue stretching straight ahead for a mile or more till it brings up against the iron fence in front of a pillared granite pile, the Treasury building-an edifice that would command respect in any capital. The stores and hotels that wall in this broad avenue are mean, and cheap, and dingy, and are better left without comment. Beyond the Treasury is a fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome grounds about it. The President lives there. It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the eye, if it remains yet what it always has been.

The front and right hand views give you the city at large. It is a wide stretch of cheap little brick houses, with here and there a noble architectural pile lifting itself out of the midst—government buildings, these. If the thaw is still going on when you come down and go about town, you will wonder at the short-sightedness of the city fathers, when you come to inspect the streets, in that they do not dilute the mud a little more and use them for canals.

If you inquire around a little, you will find that there are more boardinghouses to the square acre in Washington than there are in any other city in the land, perhaps.******** If you apply for a home in one of them, it will seem odd to you to have the landlady inspect you with a severe eye and then ask you if you are a member of Congress. Perhaps, just as a pleasantry, you will say yes. And then she will tell you that she is “full.” Then you show her her advertisement in the morning paper, and there she stands, convicted and ashamed. She will try to blush, and it will be only polite in you to take the effort for the deed. She shows you her rooms, now, and lets you take one—but she makes you pay in advance for it. That is what you will get for pretending to be a member of Congress. If you had been content to be merely a private citizen, your trunk would have been sufficient security for your board. If you are curious and inquire into this thing, the chances are that your landlady will be ill-natured enough to say that the person and property of a Congressman are exempt from arrest or detention,********* and that with the tears in her eyes she has seen several of the people’s representatives walk off to their several States and Territories carrying her unreceipted board bills in their pockets for keepsakes. And before you have been in Washington many weeks you will be mean enough to believe her, too.

Of course you contrive to see everything and find out everything. And one of the first and most startling things you find out is, that every individual you encounter in the City of Washington almost—and certainly every separate and distinct individual in the public employment, from the highest bureau chief, clear down to the maid who scrubs Department halls, the night watchmen of the public buildings and the darkey boy who purifies the Department spittoons—represents Political Influence. Unless you can get the ear of a Senator, or a Congressman, or a Chief of a Bureau or Department, and persuade him to use his “influence” in your behalf, you cannot get an employment of the most trivial nature in Washington. Mere merit, fitness and capability, are useless baggage to you without “influence.”********** The population of Washington consists pretty much entirely of government employees and the people who board them. There are thousands of these employees, and they have gathered there from every corner of the Union and got their berths through the intercession (command is nearer the word) of the Senators and Representatives of their respective States. It would be an odd circumstance to see a girl get employment at three or four dollars a week in one of the great public cribs without any political grandee to back her, but merely because she was worthy, and competent, and a good citizen of a free country that “treats all persons alike.” Washington would be mildly thunderstruck at such a thing as that. If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents who doesn’t know anything, and does not want to go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can’t earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, “Come, my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment elsewhere—don’t want you here?” Oh, no: You take him to a Department and say, “Here, give this person something to pass away the time at—and a salary”—and the thing is done. You throw him on his country. He is his country’s child, let his country support him. There is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless.***********

*The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which deposited travelers at a depot located at New Jersey Ave and C St. NW. Not to be confused with the train station where James Garfield would later be shot; that was the Baltimore and Potomac, at Constitution Ave. and 6th St. NW. Both stations were replaced in 1907 by Union Station.

** The Willard. Twain boarded there in 1867 with Stewart. The hotel opened in 1847, and within two decades Nathaniel Hawthorne would write that it “more justly could be called the center of Washington than either the Capitol or the White House or the State Department.” The original structure was replaced in 1904 by the current Beaux Arts building.

***According to the U.S. Capitol architect, the cost of building the Capitol was $11.5 million as of 1867, putting it well below the $12 million estimate Twain and Warner cite. It seems doubtful that a mere six years later any additional construction would have exceeded $22 million. As of 2003 the total cost of building the Capitol, including additions and renovations, was $133 million.

**** It’s true that the Capitol faces east, with its back to downtown Washington, D.C. I have no idea why. Looking west you can’t really tell you’re at the top of a hill. A seemingly insurmountable obstacle to Twain’s and Warner’s greedy-speculators explanation is that the Capitol and White House were built concurrently, making it a foregone conclusion that the city would be built between these two points.

*****Vinnie Ream is described as the first woman ever commissioned to create a work of art for the U.S. government (though Betsy Ross might object). I think Twain and Warner do her a disservice; judge for yourself. Her Lincoln-as-Emancipator statue has certainly aged better than the one protesters tried to pull down in June. That was sculpted in bronze, not marble, by a guy, three years after The Gilded Age was published.

******St. Elisabeths. One of the loveliest spots in Washington, D.C., and future home of the Homeland Security Department.

*******I have no idea what this building is. Any guesses?

********The last D.C. boarding houses closed shop in the 1980s or 1990s, I think. In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) the space alien Klaatu lives in one. The Dupont Circle boarding house where Ralph Nader famously lived was demolished some time ago.

********* Tell it to Chris Collins (R.-N.Y.) or Duncan Hunter (R.-Calif.), but yes, it was pretty uncommon in Twain and Warner’s day.

********** The Pendleton Civil Service Act was passed 11 years after this was published.

*********** A few years ago I’d have said this description of government patronage was out of date, but Donald Trump went a long way toward reviving such practices. Nowadays, though, the hiring is run through the White House, not Congress.