by Steve Vogel
The cat was now out of the bag. For the press and for Washington, the contretemps was the first word of what was being planned. Even within the War Department, few knew about it; high officials approached by reporters that day said they had never heard of the project. The War Department hurriedly put out a press release late in the day announcing that the president and secretary of war had approved construction of a new building to house the entire department. “It is believed that it will constitute the largest office building in the world,” the release said, taking pains to emphasize the spartan nature of the project: “The building will be strictly utilitarian in character and will be devoid of facilities except those relating directly to the business functions of the War Department.”
The Evening Star hit the streets with the news that night, and all the papers ran big stories the following morning. The Washington Post called it “a 35 million dollar ‘dream’ building” and ran a big illustration showing Red Stathes’s rendition of the odd-shaped structure. The Washington Daily News described it as a “proposal to carpet 67 acres of Virginia farmland with brick and concrete” and sardonically referred to the War Department’s need for Lebensraum. The Arlington County manager confessed to being “dizzy” at the prospect of a single building housing almost as many people as the rest of the county.
None of the planning agencies that had say over such projects had been consulted. Nor had anyone with the Arlington County government been notified. The Star was shocked. “The $35,000,000 War Department building project planned for Arlington County, Va., is so staggering in its proportions as to be difficult to grasp on short notice,” the paper editorialized, adding that “surely Congress will not adopt so far-reaching and revolutionary a project” without review by the proper agencies.
But that was precisely the intention. On Friday morning, Woodrum appeared before the House Rules Committee to report that Roosevelt and Stimson were urging quick congressional approval. The committee voted to recommend that the rules be waived and the $35 million appropriation be attached to the bill.
When the House reconsidered the matter on Monday, Hull was not ready to concede. “This proposition is so staggering, so astounding, that if my point of order did nothing more, it served to give the Congress and at least some of the press an opportunity to consider what was being brought in here under the guise of national defense,” he told the House. It seemed to him that before approving a building comparable in cost to and greater in size than “the great Empire State Building…the House at least ought to have the opportunity to learn more about what the proposition really means.” The cost, Hull warned, might be twice the $35 million estimated by the War Department.
Others took up the cry, incredulous that the War Department was again seeking a new building. “Think of it—after two months of occupancy of the present building they find that it is too small and they want to go somewhere else,” said Representative Robert Rich, a Pennsylvania Republican.
Representative Everett Dirksen, the flowery-speaking Republican from Illinois, broached the question that many would soon be asking: What possible use would this huge building have after the war? “Every Christian man or woman in the world hopes that somehow this great conflagration will come to an end speedily, and when it does, will we need a $35,000,000 monument on the other side of the Potomac?” he asked. August Andresen, a Minnesota Republican and part-time farmer, voiced suspicion of Roosevelt’s true intentions. “I understand that the report is quite current around here that they want these big buildings and large facilities so we can police the world after the war is over.”
Woodrum was ready to allay such concerns. War Department officials, he said, had assured him they could use the building after the war to store their increasingly voluminous records. (General Marshall, ever the soldier, had another suggestion, telling Somervell he wanted to move in an infantry regiment after the war and use the building as a barracks.)
Ominous global events loomed over the debate. Hitler was advancing steadily into the Soviet Union. A week earlier, Nazi aircraft had started bombing Moscow, and a spearhead of the German army was nearing Leningrad. Why was the War Department spending money on a new headquarters when money was desperately needed for American bombers, some congressmen wanted to know. “We cannot win wars with buildings,” Andresen declared. Woodrum countered by painting a dire picture of a “handicapped” American army preparing for war in badly overcrowded buildings. As for accusations that the building was a “palatial” waste, Woodrum insisted, “There are no frills or ruffles. There are no elevators, no trimmings, no gymnasiums or the like. It is to be a building designed for maximum service.”
Hull and his supporters tried three times to kill the proposal; each time they were beaten back without recorded votes. In the end, the House sent the $8 billion defense bill to the Senate with only eleven dissenting votes and the $35 million for the building intact. Woodrum had carried the day, and in the view of many, won a grand prize for his state. “We are giving Virginia a great deal,” said Representative Adolph Sabath, Democrat of Illinois. “When this structure is built we shall have given them the greatest building ever constructed anywhere by any nation.”
Sensitive to appearances, Woodrum put out a press release disavowing his role in launching the project: “I would like to point out…the project was wholly and entirely the idea of the War Department, of their own initiative, without any suggestions whatsoever, so far as I know, from anyone in Congress.” Technically, this was true. But it was Woodrum who had inserted the project into the appropriations bill and put his considerable clout behind building it in Virginia. Somervell and Woodrum in partnership were driving the project forward.
Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s curmudgeonly secretary of the interior, had no illusions. “It was easy to see how this greased pig went through the hands of Congress,” Ickes recorded in his diary. “Of course, it had the support of Congressman Woodrum in the House. Woodrum is all for economy except when the State of Virginia is concerned.”
Ickes was alarmed at the prospect of this enormous edifice along the Potomac. “Here was another example of acting before thinking,” he fumed in his diary, annoyed that Roosevelt had so blithely agreed to the project. “As is so often the case…instead of seeing how vicious the plan was and what it would do in the way of dislocating the carefully considered plan for…the protection of Washington, [the President] gave a nod of approval,” he wrote. But Ickes was encouraged by a rising tide of opposition from Roosevelt’s advisers, federal agencies and boards, the press, and the public. As opponents recovered from Somervell’s surprise, the battle over the building was only beginning. The immediate focus was turning to the Senate, which would consider the matter later in the week.
Monitoring the progress of the opposition, Somervell was not daunted in the least; he barreled ahead, convinced that there was no time to waste. “There is an emergency, and we want to get to work…in the next few days so we can get a large part of this done before the bad weather in January,” Somervell said the day after the House vote. He had already lined up a builder.
A grand fellow
Across the Potomac, a little less than a mile downriver from where Somervell wanted to build his new War Department headquarters, another edifice was rising on the south side of the Tidal Basin. It looked like a Roman temple under construction, its neoclassical dome and white marble columns surrounded by cranes and hoists. A sign in front of the site read “John McShain, Inc.—Builder.”
Viewing the progress of the Jefferson Memorial with particular interest was the occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Franklin D. Roosevelt often would watch the construction work while breakfasting at the White House and had even ordered some trees trimmed so that he might have an unobstructed view across the Ellipse to the rising memorial.
Roosevelt was a great admirer of Jefferson, feeling himself closer in spirit and style to the Renaissance man who wrote the Declaration of Independence than to any other Founding Fa
ther, and he had been deeply involved in the memorial’s creation. He had approved the memorial’s Pantheon design despite furious attacks from critics who considered the conservative Roman style to be hackneyed and pedantic. (Frank Lloyd Wright called it an “arrogant insult to the memory of Thomas Jefferson,” while the Washington Times-Herald compared it to “an old-fashioned, overturned crockery thing of the sort you never see in anybody’s bedroom any more.”) There had been further controversy over the need to cut down or transplant some of the lovely Japanese cherry trees that ringed the Tidal Basin in order to make room for the memorial. A group of Washington society ladies chained themselves to the trees and threatened to disrupt Roosevelt’s groundbreaking ceremony on December 15, 1938. (“Dowager Row May Peril Rite at Memorial,” a Washington Post headline warned.) Roosevelt was undaunted. “If…the tree is in the way, we will move the tree and the lady and the chains, and transplant them to some other space,” he said. The dowagers eventually retreated. At the request of McShain, the contractor, Roosevelt returned to lay the cornerstone at the memorial in November 1939—with the condition “that there be some guarantee that we would bar the cherry tree ladies from the site,” McShain later wrote.
Roosevelt by then had become quite taken with the charming little Irishman building the memorial. At age forty-two, handsome with auburn hair and sharp blue eyes, McShain still looked young despite the neat mustache he had grown years earlier to make people think he was older. McShain stood only five feet seven inches but was a dynamo of nervous energy. He was a perpetual presence at his jobs, “trotting like a coon dog,” as described by one of his workmen. A natty dresser even at construction sites, he would briskly ask questions and issue orders in a voice a listener once described as sounding like a “Mummer’s parade.” McShain was a rarity among builders in that he never used profanity; a Catholic who attended Mass daily, he summarily ripped down any nude pinups he found in construction shacks.
McShain’s parents had emigrated from County Derry in Ireland in the early 1880s and settled in Philadelphia, where his father struggled but eventually established himself as a builder, constructing churches, rectories, and schools for the city’s Catholic archdiocese. John was born in 1898, the youngest of four children. He was four when his mother died in premature labor, possibly caused by her exertions when she rushed young John to a doctor after he cut himself falling from a rocking chair. Her death left a hole in his life, a loss that he still felt as an old man. “He was a deprived youngster, deprived emotionally because of his mother’s death,” McShain’s daughter, Sister Pauline McShain, said many years later. “His father didn’t give him a lot of affirmation.” The boy struggled at school.
In the summers he worked construction jobs for his father, who paid him a pittance. When the boy asked for a raise, his father told him he was not worth a raise. Young John quit to work in a shipyard. On his deathbed in 1919, John McShain, Sr., asked his eldest son, Jim, to take over the business. When Jim declined, the father asked his only other son, John, then twenty, who quietly said, “I’ll try.”
With a modest inheritance, McShain oversaw the firm from a one-room office over a garage at 1610 North Street in Philadelphia, surviving some lean years and slowly building up business. He was a familiar sight in his raccoon coat and derby hat, dashing around the countryside in his Ford Model T roadster to check on the progress of his jobs. He earned a reputation as a highly competitive builder who delivered projects on schedule and on budget. By the time he won his first federal contact in 1932 to build the twelve-story Philadelphia Naval Hospital, McShain had become a force in the city’s building industry.
What set McShain apart was his genius for pricing jobs. He would pore over estimate sheets and, with a sharp pencil, scribble in savings and shortcuts to underbid his competitors but still make a profit. Arriving at a construction site, McShain would ask a superintendent what he was paying for concrete or for moving dirt and instantly know whether he was making money. “John McShain can figure a job tighter than most men alive,” Matthew McCloskey, McShain’s friend and great rival for the title of king of Philadelphia contractors, once said. In 1936, McCloskey beat McShain by $1,600 on a $6 million job at Pennsylvania State College. A few minutes after the award was announced, McShain encountered McCloskey in the elevator. McShain was “fighting, snarling mad” and told McCloskey that “friendship was one thing, but it was him or me” from there on.
“I’ll beat you, McCloskey,” McShain spat, “if it’s only by the price of a nail. And I’ll beat you every chance I get.” That McShain did, “too often and by more nails than I want to remember now,” recalled McCloskey, who would become John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland.
The building business in Depression-era Philadelphia was not big enough for McShain, and he soon set his sights on Washington, where New Deal dollars were flowing. His first jobs in the capital came in 1934, when he built foundations for the Internal Revenue Building and a Library of Congress annex, and more soon followed. “We were on our way,” McShain later wrote. “Each month we continued to win larger contracts.”
It was glory, and not cash, that most motivated McShain. “I’d rather break even on a monumental building than make a million on an uninspired warehouse,” he would say, and his construction of the Jefferson Memorial proved him true to his word. McShain’s impetus for building the memorial came soon after he started in Washington, when he brought his family down to see the sights. They rode around town in a limousine, with his young daughter Polly in the jump seat. Walking up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, his daughter asked, “Daddy, did you build this?” The proud father somewhat abashedly admitted he had not. “Right away I got a great inspiration,” McShain said years later. In 1939, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission put out a request for bids, he got his chance. “I sent word to all my competitors: ‘Don’t waste your time bidding; it’s going to be our structure,’” he said. “When they submitted the bids, I reduced the price to a point where I barely could see the possibility of coming out even.” McShain’s bid of $2.157 million was low enough to win the contract though not enough to break even; he ended up losing $43,000. The prestige of building the memorial might have been reward enough for McShain, but it was good for business too. The job had an incalculably valuable side benefit: It made him Franklin Roosevelt’s personal builder.
McShain was just a few months into the construction of the Jefferson Memorial when he bid on another project even dearer to the president’s heart. In the latter half of his second term, at a time when he was contemplating retiring to Hyde Park and writing his memoirs, Roosevelt had become consumed with the idea of creating the nation’s first presidential library. With one eye on his historical legacy, Roosevelt wanted a repository for his vast collection of papers, books, and memorabilia that would be turned over to the government and open to the public, yet that he could use as a private office. He carved a sixteen-acre lot from his Hyde Park estate for the library, raised private funds for the project, and in July 1939 signed legislation passed by Congress authorizing the whole deal. Now he had to select a builder. Roosevelt, who had not yet met McShain, did some checking on the man building the Jefferson Memorial. He asked the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, Joseph F. Guffey, about McShain’s ability. “He is the best builder in the country,” replied Guffey, who added a caveat: McShain was an ardent Republican.
On September 5, 1939, McShain learned that he had been awarded the contract to build the Roosevelt Library with his bid of $291,400. Three days later, McShain received word that the president wanted to see him the following morning in Hyde Park. After McShain arrived on the grounds of the estate, Roosevelt drove up in his dark metallic blue 1936 Ford Phaeton, specially equipped with hand levers that allowed the president to control the brakes and throttle despite the polio that left his legs partially paralyzed. The top was down, and Roosevelt invited McShain to take a seat in the front. McShain was coming to him “with a splendid reputation,” Ro
osevelt said. “I’ve checked on you,” the president added. “I find you’re a Republican.” But Roosevelt “hastened to assure me that such a situation would in no way interfere with our plans,” a relieved McShain wrote in a diary he kept of his encounters with the president.
The two men hit it off. Though in the midst of a great international crisis, Roosevelt was unable to resist taking time out for the library. Hitler had invaded Poland a week earlier, and England and France had declared war on Germany. German troops had reached Warsaw and the battle for the city was under way. Roosevelt told McShain he had just been on the telephone with Ambassadors Joseph Kennedy in London and William C. Bullitt in Paris, and the president appeared “nervous and alarmed” by the news; FDR said he would be unable to stay long from the house. But looking over the library site, Roosevelt soon forgot his cares and expounded on his vision for the building. They drove around surrounding Dutchess County looking at examples of the Dutch colonial architecture and stonework that the president wanted McShain to emulate. After touring for two hours, Roosevelt dropped McShain off with a hearty farewell and an invitation to return with his family in two weeks, when news crews would be on hand to film the start of work. McShain was soon a regular at Hyde Park, visiting generally once a month in the ensuing year to supervise construction with the president.
McShain’s Republican leanings were strongly held—inherited from his father and reinforced by his wife’s family—and he never wavered from them in his entire life. (McShain would later refuse to apologize about all the work he received during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, replying with irritation when a newspaper columnist asserted he was the darling of Democrats: “Great guns, is it my fault that they’ve been the only ones around for the past 20 years to sign the contracts?”) Yet McShain genuinely liked Roosevelt, finding him “a high-class gentleman” and relishing the president’s joviality. “He was like a young boy, joking and he told wonderful stories,” McShain later wrote. The two shared a vitality, a love of life, and supreme self-confidence.