After thirty years in the legal profession, I’ve come to the belief that the law consists of one part idea, one part procedure, and one part historical accident of personalities and events. That underexplored third part – the idiosyncratic and human contingencies that shape the law – drives my desire to understand the life of State Department bureaucrat Wilbur J. Carr. People like Carr don’t usually drive the ideals that shape the law. They often play an important role in running through the procedures necessary to get the laws accomplished, however. And because it’s their boots on the ground, the contingencies of their lives, skills, relationships, and insecurities fundamentally shape the laws we end up living with.
Carr, as longtime director of the consular service, had that shaping effect on immigration policy for the next century and a half. I want to go back to Day One and ask key questions about how his environment shaped him and how he shaped the law, questions of justice and equity and moral responsibility that trouble us more, or at least occur to us differently, than they did his generation.
This summer I’m exploring Washington, D.C. as Carr found it in the 1890s, because I want to know how it influenced a young government clerk on his own there. There seems to be a gap in the historical treatment of this era in Washington. Contemporary reflections usually came from high government officials or their wives and focused on policymaking or the entertaining that necessarily accompanied it. Twentieth-century historians became interested in the previously ignored Black community, which comprised one third of the city’s population around the turn of the century. But few historians seem to have teased out the differences in life and lifestyle between then people who drove policy and the people, like Carr, who made it happen day to day.
Washington the Way Carr Found It
Wilbur J. Carr arrived for his first day of work as a clerk in the Department of State on June 1, 1892. Though he’d lived nearly all his 21 years on a farm in Highland County, Ohio, State Department records listed his place origin as “New York.” He’d spent the previous two years in that state as a stenography student and then as a military academy quartermaster, and would maintain New York as his place of residence for voting purposes throughout this career at State – whether for its geographic convenience or for its suggestion of a more distinguished lineage, I tend to wonder.
In 1901, Mrs. John A Logan (her preferred pen name) in her book Thirty Years in Washington described the feel of the city of around 240,000 people that the young Carr found himself living in. Mrs. Logan, born Mary Simmerson Cunningham, had accompanied her husband on backwoods travel through his district as an Illinois congressman and senator, had effectively served as what we would call his chief of staff, had rushed to a Civil War battlefield to tend to him when he lay critically wounded, and after his death edited The Home Magazine and wrote for the Hearst syndicate news service. (If you’ve lived in D.C. or Illinois, you know General Logan – that’s him on the horse in Logan Circle, and in Grant Park in Chicago. Chicago’s Logan Square bears his name, as does Logan County in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and North Dakota.) Mrs. Logan wrote:
A city without factories, without tenement houses, without many foreign-born citizens; a city without a mayor or aldermen, and in which no one votes; a government city without a city government; a city of streets without a curve and most of them without names, streets which, running their many miles of smooth asphalt, are a paradise for bicyclists and far better for pedestrians than its brick sidewalks; a city of American who come from every state in the Union, and yet a city in which the servants, coachmen, drivers, and many of the business men, even policemen, are Afro-Americans; a city in which the most famous men in the country are such familiar figures that they attract little attention; a city in which the President walk without creating the least excitement and yet be recognized by everybody; -- a city unique in all these respects and in many others, is Washington.
Carr found a room and board in a house at 1622 Q Street Northwest near Dupont Circle. The house is still there; if you’re an habitué of the District, you might know it as the townhouse right next door to Hank’s Oyster Bar’s Dupont Circle location. I haven’t yet traced back to see who owned the house at the time, but many boarding houses in the city were owned by military officers’ widows.
Nowadays, Q Street is the trendy heart of the city, but in 1892 it was on the outskirts of the ever-expanding Washington City. Personal vehicles hadn’t yet appeared and stables for horse-drawn cars were limited in the city, so most people lived close to the buildings of the government that supported the majority of inhabitants.
The Grande Dame of 1890s Washington: The State, War, and Navy Building
Leaving his boarding house, Carr likely walked the ten blocks south on 16th or 17th Street to arrive at his workplace, in the south wing of the not-yet-completed State, War, and Navy Building, right next door to the White House. Just two months after his arrival, on August 6, 1892, a streetcar line began travelling down 14th Street to New York Avenue just east of Pennsylvania Avenue, so some days he might have chosen to save his shoe leather.
Now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (saving it from the humbling name of “Old Executive Office Building”), in 1892 it was among the grandest government buildings in existence anywhere. Mrs. Logan left us with a description of the building that tells us as much about how contemporaries felt about it as about the building’s appearance. (You can see that for yourself from the street, or from inside if you ever get invited to meet with White House staff. A friend of mine once told me a hilarious story about trying to unobtrusively snoop around the building during her vetting interview while using an electric scooter to rehab after foot surgery. I suspect the feeling was not the same.) Mrs. Logan wrote:
Just west of the White House and separated from its grounds by a narrow, smoothly-paved street which in the olden days used to be kown as “Lover’s Lane,” stands now the largest and most magnificent office building in the world, popularly known as the “State, War, and Navy Department.” This majestic pile of granite was begun in 1871 and completed in 1893. Its rooms open from two miles of marble halls. The stairways are of granite and the entire construction is fireproof, for within the massive walls ae many priceless records and archives. The fires which had several times destroyed the most valuable records in the Patent Office and Treasury, taught the government that parsimony in its departmental buildings did not pay. …. There is an atmosphere of dignified formality, of studious quiet, almost of elegant leisure in these rooms which is found nowhere else in the busy government buildings.
The third floor contained the Library of the Department of State, an elegant, wood paneled room with four tiers of shelving opening onto the main reading room, each lined with an ornate. Five years before the opening of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, the State Library housed the originals of the country’s most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation. A century before the cloud, it also served as the repository for the most critical and sensitive workings of government: the original versions of all federal statutes, the original papers of the founders, and the “cipher” or secret code through which State officials communicated with its diplomatic agents throughout the world. These environs must have made a deep impression on a quiet and serious Ohio farm boy.
Scholarship Is for Everybody
I’ll share more of these stories of turn-of-the-century D.C. and Carr’s experiences as a young clerk at State as I work through them this summer, researching a book about Carr’s life and how he influenced immigration policy. You can sign up below to receive stories by email and participate in a different kind of conversation about U.S. immigration law and policy.