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As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft, cheap gambling, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get, thrown on a large screen, a peep show of this stately concentration camp of cold monuments and hot mammas where there are four women for every three men. Murkier than the “smoke-filled room” so often used as a cliché to typify a corral of politicos, it is a vast bedroom with a jumbo bottle of bourbon beside the bed.

And yet its manners and morals are those of the barnyard and the railroad-junction town rather than the romantic intrigue of the salon and the scented boudoir.

Washington has a kind of glamor all its own. It is not the kind one finds in New York, or Paris, or even Atlantic City. The Washington feeling comes from being close to great events and to the memory of great people. It is, to a certain extent, similar to the public appeal of Hollywood’s famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, the place where the movie stars are interred. Forest Lawn there is a must for tourists. There is no sacred peace about this graveyard. Trippers photograph its ornate tombs and profane its dead. The tombs were purposely designed by hams who craved publicity even in death.

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