13 May 2009
 
The Right to Dry

Frances Freed was no Henry Ford, though her late husband Allie had made a decent go of manufacturing in the taxi business in New York.
 
When he passed away with the first Buckingham units just being completed, she picked herself up and executed the plan. She was a remarkable women, disciplined and industrious, and the completion of 1,800 rental units and two apartment towers is a record of accomplishment that anyone would be proud of.
 
Not that she didn’t have her quirks. As the Queen of Buckingham, mistress of all she surveyed from her office at Pershing and Glebe. She set the rents, determined where (or if) automobiles could be parked, and enforced strict standards of appearance. She could be imperious, though realistic. No one alive today knows precisely how she put down the great Buckingham rent strike of 1939; it must have been some accommodation with the renters.
 
Clearly it could not have been a brutal suppression. After all, Eleanor Roosevelt had an interest in the development as a model of the New Deal.
 
Old timers still talk about the long black car and Mickey the chauffeur and her irritating son. She was very much a hands-on manager of her realm, and the Buckingham community had standards. One of them was about the spring-fresh smell of the bureaucrat’s clothing.
 
I doubt if there is any more dramatic change in American life than the smell of our clothing. Think about the social aspects of it. Running water in the home was a huge deal, and that was not that long ago. Neighborhoods in Arlington like Hall’s Hill did not have city water for decades after the civil war. The implication for public health, not to mention odor, were stark.
 
Clean clothing is something else. Our concept of doing the laundry is not much older than Buckingham itself. Oh, sure, the wringer and tub go back to the latter part of the 18th century, and you have seen something of the horror show that went along with boiling water and brute force that went along with it in those reality shows featuring modern people attempting to live like our great-grand parents.
The earliest American washing "machine" was the scrub board invented in 1797, a device using a tub was perfected 1851, and though it resembled the machines of today, was still hand powered.
 
In 1858 a man named Hamilton Smith patented a rotary washing machine. In 1874, one of the most significant historical figures you have never heard of constructed a birthday present for his wife. It was a washing machine designed to be used in the safety and comfort of the American home.
 
William Blackstone’s contribution is not celebrated today, though what he did had as profound an impact of the way we live.
 
It was woman’s work, by and large, for the average family. A washer-woman- never a “washer-man”- would take sopping wet clothing and crank it through the wringer by turning a crank that compressed the material and squeezed out the moisture. Except for the Chinese, of course. In1900, a quarter of all the ethnic Chinese men in the U.S. worked in a laundry, typically working 10 to 16 hours a day.
 
Chinatown in downtown DC was a place that the well-to-do would send their laundry to be done, since it was brutal work to have clean sheets. 
 
The first electric-powered washing machine was introduced in 1908 by the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago, Illinois, It featured a drum-type galvanized tub hitched to an electric motor.
 
Think of it like the Bicycle Age of home economics colliding with the Automobile. Electric motors were later harnessed to the wringer. The wringer itself was eventually replaced by a perforated double tub, which spun out the excess water in a “spin cycle” that had nothing to do with the daily news.
 
That was the one side of the process. The other was dealing with the lingering damp. The symbol of the nation is the Stars and Stripes, right? I’d argue that the more representative one is the billowing white of sheets flying from the clothes lines behind every house, and from every tenement window.
 
Laundry drying was also mechanized, with clothes dryers. Dryers were also spinning perforated tubs, but they blew heated air rather than water. The end of the clothes line, and dependence on the sun and the wind was at hand.
 
Naturally, the washing machine and dryer was still bulky luxury. Designers of Buckingham were men of their time. There clearly was no room for Washington machines in the individual units; the whole idea was a scandalous waste of space. Each building block was constructed with a central laundry-room in the basement.
 
Clothes lines were banned, and the rule was strictly enforced. Drying sheets and undergarments outside was the edge of anarchy. Working class at best, and Buckingham was above all that.
 
There was no right to dry outside. Not in Frances Freed’s neighborhood.
 
It was an arrangement that no one thought to question at the time. But the central laundry-room, while necessary, was something that everyone hated.
 
Like the Laundromats. But there is something more to that, too. I’ll have to tell you about the social aspect of the laundry-rooms, and the hotbed of American Fascism at the Econowash on Wilson Boulevard.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com