AT 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 National Defense 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 enormous War and Navy buildings the materials were steel and
concrete.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM WASHINGTON MONUMENT, AUGUST, 1917]
[Illustration: 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 forward
of 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.
And they 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.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation errors have been corrected.
Page 29: “Ameriman Expeditionary Force” changed to “American
Expeditionary Force”
Page 38: “to the serivce” changed to “to the service”
Page 49: “debarkation hosiptals” changed to “debarkation hospitals”
Page 73: “were mutiplied by” changed to “were multiplied by”
Page 114: “and at Gibralter” changed to “and at Gibraltar”
Page 139: “over the Goverment’s” changed to “over the Government’s”
Page 174: “will be born” changed to “will be borne”
Page 285: “war service oganization” changed to “war service
organization”
Page 319: “a women architect” changed to “a woman architect”