Capital Caravanserai (April/May 1979 | Volume: 30, Issue: 3)

Capital Caravanserai

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Authors: T. H. Watkins

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April/May 1979 | Volume 30, Issue 3


Everyone slept here but Washington. For nearly as long as there has been a national capital in the District of Columbia, there also has been a hotel on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The first was Fuller’s City Hotel, which was built in the early 1830’s and entertained the likes of Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. In 1850, Fuller’s was purchased by onetime steamboat steward Henry A. Willard and his brothers, who rebuilt it, gave it their name, and reopened it with a suitably gala banquet; one of the speakers was the renowned Edward Everett, who intoned what must be one of the most intelligent remarks ever heard upon such occasions: “There are few duties in life,” he said, “that require less nerve than to come together and eat a good dinner.”

For the next half-century, the Willard Hotel stood at the heart of Washington life. Franklin Pierce slept here the night before his inauguration; so did Abraham Lincoln—guarded against assassins by Allan Pinkerton himself. It was at the Willard that Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and it was the Willard’s lobby and bar that frequently attracted Ulysses S. Grant during the years of his Presidency. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stayed there frequently in the 1860’s, said that the Willard could “more justly be called the center of Washington and the nation than either the Capitol or the White House or the State Department. … At Willard’s, you exchange nods with Governors of sovereign states. You elbow illustrious men, and tread on the toes of Generals. You mix here with office seekers, wire pullers, inventors, artists, poets, editors … long-winded talkers, clerks, diplomats, mail contractors, railway directors—until your identity is lost among them!” And to soften the impact of such identity crises, he noted, one always could “adopt the universal habit and call for a mint julep, a whiskey gin, a gin cocktail, a brandymash, or a glass of pure old rye. …”

In 1901, amid cries of “Vandalism!” from Washington traditionalists, the old Willard was ripped down and a great stone edifice put up in its place.

And for well over another half-century the hotel continued to entertain Presidents and poets and celebrities—among them, Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas R. Marshall, who, so legend has it, was so outraged over the prices at Willard’s tobacco counter that he was driven to remark that “what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar!”

But as the Washington Post put it, “A hotel cannot live on its history, not even a history as illustrious as that of the Willard.” By the 1960’s, competition from newer, slicker hotels was cutting into business, and on July 15,1968, the 150 guests who had chosen to stay at the Willard in spite of bad plumbing and worn carpets