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Show World's Greatest Capital Has Its Seamy Side Too! By BAUKIIAGE News Analyst and Commentator. WNU Service, 1616 Eye Street, N.W., Washington, D. C. WASHINGTON A boy joined the staff of a four-page paper of which ne was one day to become editor. The office was a rattle-trap building build-ing whose notable i characteristics, he later said, were "sewer gas, rats, dirt, overgrown over-grown rowdy newsboys who had to be held in check by ,a long whip and Are-arms,"anditwas f lu 4 $1 children who might pick up the bait. In places where there was no danger dan-ger to human beings the deadly "1080" was distributed. The campaign cam-paign was successful. Meanwhile, ft clean-up of potential rat-breeding premises was started with court orders or-ders to enforce it Today Washington Washing-ton has a complete scientific rat-control rat-control program which will cost u about $75,000 annually. However, It still leaves a few rats for energetic cats. War Profiteering Will Be Scandal The juicy scandal uncovered by the senate war investigating committee com-mittee in which "profiteering at it worst," as Senator Mead called it, was exposed, is, I fear, only the beginning. be-ginning. Any moment I expect to hear an. explosion in connection with surplu property. War breeds waste, and the cloak of patriotic endeavor as. Samuel Johnson Indicated evert more bluntly, often covers skullduggery. skulldug-gery. The same thing happened after the last war, and on a smaller scale, after all wars. But what is probably prob-ably making people squirm all over Washington is the revelation of th fact that telephone wires were pretty pret-ty generally tapped, and heaven knows what may be in the FBI files. It is a strange thing about the telephone. tele-phone. People have just come to take for granted that because you can't see anybody on the line, nobody no-body is there. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that telephone conversations with most of the government department are being recorded right now. I have reason to believe that when the question of installing these recorders re-corders in the White House was brought up, it was flatly turned down. White House employees have-a have-a long and excellent record for fidelity. fidel-ity. Of course they are carefully screened, and when the campaign to get everybody fingerprinted (am excellent idea if you have nothing to conceal about your past and no plans for an over-adventurous future) was begun, the White House employees voluntarily came forward and offered of-fered their thumbs, fingers and hands for the ink-pad. 'When the People - Vote, They Win' The June "Economic Outlook,'" published by the Congress of Industrial Indus-trial Organizations, contains an article ar-ticle entitled "When the People Vota They Win." That might be Interpreted In-terpreted in more ways than one. The article points out that an "off year" is so designated politically not only because the presidency is not at stake, but because the politicians poli-ticians know that general apathy on the part of the voter has marked those elections in the past: 1938 (off) thirty million voters, went to the polls; (1940 (on) fifty million votes; 1942 (off) twenty-eight million; 1944 (on) forty-eight million. The CIO takes the attitude that what the people as a whole want is what they (the CIO) want, and that the people get what they want when they vote for it. They say: "Mass registration and mass voting is the-best the-best guarantee of liberal progressive progres-sive government." They might also add that if you, want conservative rather than liberal lib-eral progressive government, you have to vote for it, too. In any case you can't get what you want unless you go after it. The "Outlook" "Out-look" prints a table showing how the vote shifted in certain districts in off-years. The table showed that when the vote fell off, it was the Democratic vote. Districts which swung from Democratic to Republican Repub-lican candidates in most cases shifted shift-ed with a decrease in the total vote . . . "the Republican vote remaining remain-ing relatively stable, while the Democratic Dem-ocratic vote dropped sharply." Does this prove that Democrats are sleepier than Republicans, or that the Republican is a creature of habit? positively dan- gerous at times to go into me alley al-ley which they infested, leading to the composing room." The town as the boy had grown up in it was a straggling overgrown over-grown country village "with zigzag grades, no sewerage, no street cars, no water supply except from pumps and springs, unimproved reservations, reserva-tions, second-rate dwellings and streets of mud and mire." That doesn't sound like the nation's na-tion's capital whose budget for the coming year is $76,755,009 but that was the way it was in 1858 as described de-scribed by the editor of the Washington Wash-ington Evening Star, Theodore Noyes, who died early this month. He joined the paper in 1877. Except for the Australian capital of Canberra which arose almost as Camelot at a wave of Merlin's wand, there ,is nothing to compare with the bizarre history of a city whose site was based on a political deal and no city which has gone through more vicissitudes than this Bagh-dad-on-the-Potomac. No city was ever more magnificently magnifi-cently planned, or more discreditably discredit-ably neglected in its early days, as Mr. Noyes' description indicates. Today, To-day, as the undisputed capital of the world, it still has to battle with a grudging congress for its budget. It remains the chief city , of the greatest democratic republic whose 938,000 citizens have no voice in their own government and whose citizenship citizen-ship itself is a bar to the basic privilege priv-ilege of a democracy the ballot. Mr. Noyes was, as is the newspaper news-paper he served, a Washington institution. in-stitution. He will be remembered for his long campaign to give Washington Wash-ington a vote in congressional and national matters. Rats Were Menace To City's Health Some time ago I had occasion to mention the invasion of Washington by rats and how the city hired a modern Pied Piper who has done an effective, if silent, job. This was brought to my mind recently when I encountered a fat, black cat on my way to work early one morning. The cat had a guilty look, and I had a hunch he had spent the night in riotous living and was merely sneaking in to change his collar. However, the cataclysm caused by the rat-invasion in which, believe it or not, a baby's hand was eaten brought hasty action and I see that it was considered worthy of comment com-ment by experts, including the editors edi-tors of the magazine of the American Amer-ican Museum of Natural History. The campaign began when a case of typhus which is spread by fleas and mites on rats, was discovered. Traps set in the neighborhood caught a number of rats whose blood was typhus-infected. The United States Public Health service got busy, shocked to learn that the scourge of Europe. two centuries ago was a possibility right here in our fair capital. An expert was called in. He first sealed up all points where commercial commer-cial transportation entered the city. Then 300 traps were set up in the zone where the infection had been found. Five days later the traps were taken in and the area was thoroughly dusted with DDT, the insecticide in-secticide which the army perfected. Next red-squill bait was distributed. distrib-uted. It kills rats, but not pets or In 1940, 50 million votes; 1942, 28 million; 1944, 48 million. |