No man of his day, unless it were Grant himself, endured more wholesale denunciation or found more valiant defenders than he. Like Grant, who believed in him thoroughly, he had an iron will which treated all obstacles as negligible when he had set himself to accomplish a certain end. As a plumber by trade and a very competent one, he had accumulated a fortune before middle life. Early in his business career he had made up his mind that Washington’s failure to fulfil L’Enfant’s ideal of a beautiful capital was due to the sluggishness which pervaded it, and this he resolved to dispel. Grant listened to his projects and encouraged them. The first step was to abolish the existing form of municipal government and to substitute a Territorial form, with a Governor and a Board of Public Works. Shepherd was made vice-president of the Board and virtually its dictator.
What he had to face in his effort to launch the city afresh can hardly be conceived by an observer of to-day. Although ten years had elapsed since the outbreak of the great war of which Washington was the focal center, local conditions had improved but slightly upon those described toward the close of the previous chapter. The road-bed of Pennsylvania Avenue had received a pavement of wood, which was fast going to pieces. A single square in Vermont Avenue was surfaced with a coal-tar product that had proved its unfitness. A few other streets had been spread with a thick coat of gravel, which, as it was gradually ground down, filled the air with fine grit whenever the wind blew. The rest of the highways were either paved with cobblestones or left in their primitive dirt, which became nearly impassable in very wet weather for mud, and in very dry weather for dust. It was not uncommon for a heavy vehicle like a fire-engine to get stalled when it most needed to hurry, and to avoid this contingency the engines sometimes ran over the sidewalk. In the northwestern quarter, now so attractive, the marshes were undrained, and the people forced to live there suffered tortures from chills and fever. There was no efficient system of scavenging, but swine were kept in back yards of dwellings to devour the kitchen refuse. Poultry and cattle roamed freely about the vacant lots in thinly settled neighborhoods. There were several open sewers; and the street sweepings, including offal of a highly offensive sort, were dumped on the common south of Pennsylvania Avenue and strewn over the plots set apart for lawns.
Because Shepherd foresaw the hostility he would excite by his program of reforms, and that what he did must therefore be done quickly, he crowded into three years what might well have consumed twenty. To save time and cut red tape, he awarded contracts to friends whom he believed to be as much in earnest as he was—a practice which of course laid him open to accusations of favoritism; he experimented with novel materials and methods, many of which proved ill-adapted to his needs; and his expenditures reached figures which surprised even him when he found leisure to foot up his debit page. But he shirked nothing because of the danger or trouble it might involve for himself, and his opponents had to lie awake nights to outwit him.
For instance, there stood on the present site of the Public Library in Mount Vernon Square a ramshackle old market building, the owners of which had contrived so to intrench themselves behind legal technicalities that they could not be ousted by any ordinary process. One evening, after the courts were closed, a platoon of brawny laborers was marched up to the building, armed with battering-rams, axes, and sledge-hammers, and, before proprietors or tenants could hunt up a judge to interfere, the party had reduced the market to kindling wood and prepared the ground for conversion into a public park. Again, when the time came to improve the lower end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a railroad crossing stood in the way. It had been laid during the war, with no legal warrant but as a temporary military necessity, and the company had repeatedly refused to remove it. So at one o’clock one Sunday morning, when injunctions were out of the question, Shepherd brought down a gang of trusty men and proceeded to tear up the rails, which could never thereafter be replaced.
The boldness of this performance so stirred the admiration of John W. Garrett, one of the most powerful railway magnates of the day, that he offered Shepherd a vice-presidency of the Baltimore and Ohio Company. But Shepherd was not to be lured away. He was promoted by Grant from the vice-presidency of the Board of Public Works to the Governorship of the District, a move which, though flattering, made him all the more shining a mark for attack; and a group of large landowners, shuddering at the prospect of further increases in taxation, induced Congress to reorganize the local government, wiping out entirely the Territorial system and popular suffrage, and putting the administration of affairs into the hands of three Commissioners to be appointed for limited terms by the President. This plan has remained substantially unchanged for more than forty years, to the satisfaction of the citizens who have most at stake in the welfare of the city.
Having entered office rich at the age of thirty, Shepherd quitted it at thirty-three so poor that he had to begin life anew in the Mexican mining country. He left as his monument a record expenditure of twenty-six million dollars, about half that amount remaining as a bonded debt; many miles of newly opened or extended streets; a splendid achievement in shade-tree installation and parking improvement; modern water, sanitation, and lighting plants; and, above all, an awakened popular spirit as to civic advancement. Albeit his ways of working out his plans often were so crude as to shock the sense of quieter people and not to be commended as a continuing force for
On the Ruins of Fort Stevens
good, they served their time, which needed the application of a crowbar rather than a cambric needle.
True to his human type, Shepherd was an odd mixture of incongruities. He poured out public funds like water, yet profited never a cent himself. In his own fashion he was pious, yet he could swear like a trooper when aroused, and once halted in the midst of family prayers to order a servant to “drive that damned cow out of the rose-bushes!” He was overheard, after hurling imprecations at some contractor who had mishandled a job, murmuring a prayer to the Almighty to forgive and forget his momentary loss of temper. A lady who once engaged him as a plumber to hang a chandelier in her parlor noticed that it swayed under her touch, and sent for him again to make sure that it would not fall upon the heads of her guests. His answer was to mount a chair on one side of the room, pull the chandelier toward him till he could grasp it with both hands, jump off, and swing his whole weight of two hundred and twenty-five pounds across to a chair on the opposite side. This exhibition of his confidence in his work completely restored hers.