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This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly flooded with a horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists, ballet-dancers and economic planners, there was no place for them to live. They abhorred the modern service apartments. These people were “intellectual.” The women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New Thought. The men, if you could call some of them that, wore their hair longer than we do, read advanced literature, and talked about the joys of collectivism, though all of them were so individual they couldn’t bear to live in skyscrapers.

Most of these people had dough. The others got good government jobs, became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and wrote for publications sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide automobiles and other luxuries for the needier pinks.

Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but in the early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one of the fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered” Georgetown and conceived it as a genteel bohemian community where her sandal-shod friends could find congenial company. She wouldn’t allow the WPA to alter anything though sewage comes up from the river. Georgetown is overrun with rats, which frequently chew up Negro infants.