CHAPTER XXXVAT THE HEART OF THE NATION
In the memory of those who knew it during the war Washington will ever stand out as an epitome of the titanic achievements of the country. There beat the heart of the nation and there could be felt, as nowhere else, its mighty and determined pulses. There was the source of every great activity and there, with the burning intensity of sunbeams focused through a lens, the spirit of the people was making itself manifest.
The war found the capital of the United States, just as it had been for many years, quiet and leisurely, aloof from business and industry, spacious and restful and lovely. And the war transformed it with lightning speed into a busy hive of war making industry, crammed with people, humming with prodigious labors, striving mightily to achieve what seemed the impossible in a hundred different ways at the same time.
The vast expansion in every war making or war administration agency of the Government and the creation of new agencies that began at once had, of course, their source and direction in Washington and there their machinery had to be housed and operated. First to outgrow its former allocation of space in the huge State, War and Navy Building,ample for the peace time needs of all three Departments, was the War Department. As the expansion in each of its divisions increased from day to day, it overflowed into other buildings, and one immense structure after another, nearly a dozen in all, was rushed to completion to house its activities. The Navy Department and the Treasury Department each had its own difficulties, although in neither was the expansion so great as in that of War. In the great Treasury building entrances were closed and corridors screened to make more desk room and buildings and office space were leased elsewhere to accommodate the many thousands of new employees who were needed for the vast amount of expert and clerical work suddenly made necessary in connection with the income tax, the War Risk Insurance, the Liberty Loan bonds, the War Stamps. The War Risk Insurance Bureau, newly created, alone required 17,000 workers. The new agencies that were being formed, each one of them growing like a Jonah’s gourd—such as the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the Council of National Defense, the War Trade Board, the War Industries Board,—each had to be put under a roof big enough for its constantly expanding forces.
An enormous building program was instituted almost overnight, planned and executed in an amazingly short time. And in the meantime these new, or expanding, war activities had to be housed anywhere that a vacant building or a few rooms could be found. Perhaps two or three old dwellings, hastily remodeled inside for office purposes, were thrown together, or a vacant theater was taken over, or rooms were rented in office buildings. The Council of NationalDefense began its work in three rooms in an office building and a year later it was overflowing into two other buildings from a huge structure of its own containing four hundred rooms which had been built from foundation to its last electric light fixture in seven weeks. The Food Administration grew within six months from two rooms and three people to an enormous organization whose headquarters in Washington filled a structure of nearly a thousand rooms, each room containing from two to ten people, and within the next year it had overflowed into and filled another building of almost equal size. The War Trade Building covered an entire block of space and in it were 2,200 employees while its mail, handled by its own service, numbered from 4,000 to 5,000 pieces daily. And the histories of the other war agencies are repetitions of these.
Altogether there were built a score of these huge buildings for various war work purposes. If massed together they would have covered sixty acres. Speed and economy were the two essentials in their construction and each of them grew with startling rapidity. Three months was a long time for the erection of any one of them. Seven or eight or ten weeks was the more usual time to elapse from the moment work was begun until the building was ready for occupancy, equipped with steam heating, electric lighting and sprinkler systems, aero fire alarm signals or fire towers, and telephone systems comprising in each one from four hundred to a thousand instruments. Some of the buildings were two and some three stories high. Most of them were built of metal lath finished on the outside with stucco and on the inside with wall board, but in the enormousWar and Navy buildings the materials were steel and concrete.
View from Washington Monument, August, 1917
View from Washington Monument, August, 1917
View from Washington Monument, August, 1917
Same View One Year Later, Showing War Buildings Constructed in the Meantime
Same View One Year Later, Showing War Buildings Constructed in the Meantime
Same View One Year Later, Showing War Buildings Constructed in the Meantime
Measuring approximately from four to six hundred feet by from two to four hundred, each of these great structures covered from three to five acres of ground space, while its floor space, if two stories high, was between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet, but from eight to fifteen acres if higher. Its long corridors, stretching out in separate wings in parallel lines from the front section, or “head house,” with rows of offices upon each side, if set end to end would have measured a mile, a mile and a half, three miles, in length. Office boys had to use roller skates up and down these hallways in order to economize time. Last and most enormous of these structures were the huge Army and Navy buildings, standing side by side, of steel and concrete, three stories high, containing forty-three acres of floor space and affording accommodations for 10,000 employees. The Navy Department building has a front section or “head house” 860 feet long with nine wings extending from it each 500 feet long and 60 feet wide, while the “head house” of the War Department building is 784 feet long and its eight wings of similar size. The contract for these two buildings was let at the end of February, 1918, and by the middle of the following August the occupants had begun to move in and six weeks later their offices were fully occupied. The cost of the entire building program for the housing of war activities at the capital was $15,000,000.
The work to be done required as much expansion in personnel as in buildings. From all over the country people went to Washington to put their hands, their heads, their shoulders, to the rushing forwardof the Government’s war program. There was something almost magical in the suddenness of their appearance and the steadiness with which this stream of humanity poured into the capital. From East and West and North and South came these thousands of men and women, from the seaboards and the mountains, from the middle plains and valleys—business men, captains of industry, lawyers, physicians, bankers, clergymen, college professors, magazine editors, scientific and technical experts, artists, authors, journalists, librarians, welfare workers, stenographers, secretaries, clerks, and each and every one of them found all that his or her hands could do. A great many of them, more than will ever be known, gave their services and the rest received salaries that were hardly more than sufficient, as prices were in wartime Washington, to cover their expenses. They were representative Americans, the cream of America in ability, training, character, patriotism and devotion to democratic ideals, and to see them at their work, to come into touch with their enthusiasm, their eagerness to render service, their teeming ideas, their resourcefulness, their efficiency, energy and determination and to witness the effective running and vast achievements of the huge organizations they were inspiring and directing was to watch the steady, sure beating of the very heart of the nation.
In April, 1917, Washington had a population of 360,000, with scant facilities for receiving and caring for the army of workers that almost at once began to stream into it. At the end of the next seven months a careful census that did not include transients nor men in camps within the city showed that 50,000 people had been added to the population. Andthey were still coming in answer to the need of departments and boards and commissions for more, and more, and ever more workers to carry on every phase of the planning, directing and speeding of the war. The War Department alone had 25,000 civilians in its employ. Each of the other great war agencies was using two, three, five or six thousand men and women, and each of them was still expanding. At the end of the first year of war the population of Washington had been increased by 90,000, and probably twenty or thirty thousand more were added before the signing of the armistice. Thus the capital’s population was increased during the year and a half by about one-third of its initial size. And, altogether, the expansion in building and population during that brief time makes a story more sensational than that of any mining town which ever leaped suddenly into world-wide fame.
This rapid increase in population led to serious housing problems and difficulties. House to house canvasses for the listing of available rooms, the seizing of vacant buildings and such emergency measures were not sufficient to provide even the most temporary and crowded of homes for all of the hundred thousand new residents. The problem could be met only by Government assistance and $10,000,000 was appropriated for the building of dormitories and apartments for the housing of the newcomers. Experts on apartment house and residence hall construction, on women’s welfare work, on heating, lighting and sanitation were consulted and buildings that would afford comfortable living accommodations for several thousand people were under construction when the armistice was signed.