Saturday, May 25th, 2013

Go West, Young Man; Washington Is Not a Place to Live In

Posted by: Ghosts of DC on June 12, 2012 in Notable People & Places 3 Comments

Emmanuel Leutze, "Westward the Course of Empire"(1861)

Emmanuel Leutze, “Westward the Course of Empire”(1861)

GoDCer Ryan sent me a cool fact — or possibly historical rumor — that I’d like to share with the rest of you. It’s a simple, yet well-known quote, but there is some debate as to whether these words were actually spoken (or written), as claimed in 1865.

Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley

These are popularly attributed to Horace Greeley, former Congressman and then-newspaper editor for the New York Tribune. Others claim that John Soule wrote the words in his Terra Haute Express back in 1851. The founder of Grinnell College in Iowa even claims to have been the young man who heard Greeley speak those words.

Either way, these words were the embodiment of Manifest Destiny … America was to expand west, from sea to shining sea.

Also, the part about the rent still rings true today. Everything else is false. I don’t find this place to be dusty at all and the food is dramatically improving. Screw you Greeley, don’t insult my city.

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About Ghosts of DC

Ghosts of DC is a blog about the history of Washington, D.C. and its surroundings. We live in a great city, and it's important for everyone to know a little more about their communities, neighborhoods and city.
  • gonzodc

    disagree…i think it still holds. food sucks, rents are too damned high and there is plenty of dust on my car every morning. :p

  • Anon20009

    From the day the first building was built within the District of Columbia, it has been national sport to ridicule and belittle the CIty of Washington. You see it over and over again, in the writings of famous visitors such as Dickens and deTocqueville, or the housing shortage comedies produced in WWII Hollywood and on, to the reaction to the contemporary shenanigans of our local politicians. (The fact that Greeley was from the great metropolis to the north is part of a whole other story of sniping back and forth between the two cities.) Sometimes it’s done with good reason, sometimes it’s just spiteful, but I think it has become part of our national DNA by now, in part reflecting the American people’s ambivalent relationship with government in general. But still they come to Washington, on family visits or class trips, or fight hard multi-million dollar campaigns to land a job here; some still end up mocking it, or marvelling at it, or both…. and a lot come back to stay.

  • http://twitter.com/thejonrose Jonathan Rose (@thejonrose)

    Hi, this is a common sentiment in history, it is the classic push-hypothesis of migration that was especially made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner, but is largely a misconception. Poor city residents did not have the capital to migrate west and settle farms. Not sure what I expect from a blog on history, but I’m not aware of strong evidence that poor urban residents were ever pushed out of city in the manner envisaged by these platitudes.

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