by Steve Vogel
But in two days the measure would go to the Senate floor, where there were already signs of a real fight brewing. Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, the genial and eloquent Democratic warhorse from Kentucky, declared to reporters that he would “infinitely prefer” to see the building placed in Washington rather than Arlington. Somervell’s high-speed push had rankled some senators, including Harry Truman and other members of the Public Buildings and Grounds Committee, irritated that the War Department had not consulted them.
On top of that, Ickes publicly split with his absent president, issuing a statement declaring “such a vast structure” at Arlington Farm would “turn our parks into mere traffic ways and spoil the setting of such national symbols as the Arlington Lee Memorial and other monuments.” Ickes also sent a letter to Stimson August 12 warning that if the building should be erected “we would all live to regret it. It would be a blackmark against this Administration and a discredit to the Army. And so I, for one, protest.” Stimson politely but insistently defended the building. “The plan for Washington cannot be a fixed, inflexible affair which will not meet the needs of the Government,” Stimson replied, calling the building an “urgent necessity.”
The odds looked in favor of Somervell and his building, but the general complained about the fuss. “It’s all gummed up,” he groused to a group of reporters. “Well, you newspapers have so many engineers and architects who know better than the Army, you’ve got us in a hell of a mess with Congress.”
Most shockingly extravagant proposal
The Reverend Barney T. Phillips, rector of the Church of the Epiphany in Washington, opened the Senate session on the afternoon of Thursday, August 14, 1941, with a prayer: “In these fateful days, bind us with that bond of earnest devotion which portends freedom and emancipation, that we may yoke life’s hostile forces to the loving purposes of God.” It was a fateful day, certainly. Senator Barkley took the floor to incorporate momentous news into the Congressional Record: the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement from the president of the United States and the prime minister of Great Britain just released that morning. The secret meeting at sea had been revealed to the world. The charter was a statement of principles whose meaning had only begun to be debated, but the impression left was unmistakable: America and England were bonded in a struggle to end Nazi tyranny.
Discussion on the Senate floor immediately turned to the matter of the day, the $35 million War Department building. Barkley eloquently expressed his reservations. “I cannot divest myself of the feeling that in building up the Capital of the Nation we should have some idea of and some respect for beauty and symmetry as well as utility,” he said.
The diminutive senior senator from Virginia rose in defense. The evidence presented to his committee, Carter Glass told the Senate, had demonstrated “that the building is urgently needed immediately [and] that if any other site were selected there would be long delay.” The Senate had the assurances of Somervell that the building “would not detract in the slightest degree from the beauty of that section,” Glass said.
The floor was not full—many senators were absent from Washington in the middle of August—but the two-hour debate that followed was bruising: “a first-class battle,” in the words of the Star. A steady stream of senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, assailed the building. “If we take this step today, because of the argument of haste, we will rue it and regret it for many years to come,” warned Senator Abe Murdock, Democrat of Utah.
Frustrations poured out about the cavalier manner in which Somervell and the War Department had proceeded. “It is not so long ago that persons were charging the War Department was without imagination,” said Senator Francis Maloney, Democrat of Connecticut. “Someone at the War Department…must have heard that and decided that hereafter they would leave nothing to the imagination…. Here we have—and heaven knows where it came from—plans already drawn, without consulting the Congress, plans for the world’s largest office building.”
Arthur Vandenberg, the formidable Republican from Michigan, attacked the “shocking” size. “Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size? Or”—Vandenberg added to laughter—“is the war to be permanent?”
Senator Pat McCarran, Democrat of Nevada, warned that permitting the War Department to move to Virginia would unleash an exodus of federal agencies moving out of the capital. “Is there any reason why the Department of Agriculture should not be built in Iowa?” asked McCarran. He introduced an amendment requiring that the building be erected in the District of Columbia.
As Representative Woodrum watched nervously from the rear of the chamber, fellow Virginian Glass stood a second time to put down the insurrection. He insisted that thorough investigation had shown there were no adequate sites in the District of Columbia. McCarran’s amendment failed 20 to 28. It was the closest call yet for Somervell’s plan. A change of five votes would have forced the War Department to build in Washington, a requirement that quite likely would have derailed the whole project.
The fight was not over. Robert A. Taft, the diehard conservative from Ohio and avowed enemy of all things Roosevelt, rose next to lead the sharpest attack of the day. “Mr. Republican,” as he was known, pronounced himself staggered by the building’s size. “To my mind, there is not any evidence that we shall need such a tremendous building, the largest office building that has ever been built in the entire world…,” he said. “It seems to me that in some ways this is the most shockingly extravagant proposal that has been put up to Congress….”
Taft offered an amendment to cut the $35 million appropriation in half, gleefully claiming he was acting in accordance with Roosevelt’s own stated desire to halve the building’s size. Taft’s somewhat disingenuous amendment would effectively kill the proposal, as half the funding would not buy half a building. Taft’s amendment failed, 29 to 21. Having weathered the assaults, House Resolution 5412, including authorization to construct the War Department building, finally passed.
Harold Ickes held Carter Glass responsible. “Adams and…other senators went along with him like sheep although some senators did make a spirited fight,” the secretary wrote in his diary. The Washington Post blamed Somervell’s rush tactics. “It is impossible to avoid the belief that Congress has been maneuvered into an unwise decision by the emergency circumstances under which this project has been considered,” an editorial sadly concluded.
Most important, a majority of senators agreed with Somervell’s fundamental argument that the War Department was dangerously scattered. On the morning word of the Atlantic Charter was released, and on the eve of possible war, it was unacceptable.
The matter seemed settled. “The vote apparently assured that the structure would be built at the Virginia end of the Lincoln Memorial Bridge,” the Star reported on August 15. Roosevelt, still at sea on his homeward journey, could not veto the bill upon his return without delaying the enormous defense appropriation.
Clarke ceded battle too, and awaited the vindication of history. He sent a note to Caemmerer thanking the fine arts commission secretary for his help. “Now that we have been successfully beaten by the Army…there is nothing left to do but await public condemnation of this action by Congress,” Clarke wrote. “Our record is clear, and we made a fight for what we thought was right.”
The new War Department building, it seemed, would be built right where Somervell wanted it.
You’ve got to build it in a hurry
Somervell’s instructions to Captain Clarence Renshaw for constructing the world’s largest building were terrifyingly simple. “You’ve got to build it in a hurry,” the general told the rail-thin quartermaster construction officer, who had been chosen to head the project. “I’m not going to tell you how to do it.”
Somervell had promised to complete the entire building in one year and start moving people in half that time. Now, the general informed the wide-eyed thirty-four-year-old officer, i
t would be up to Renshaw to deliver.
Somervell had not waited for the blessing of the Senate to proceed with his plans, but the vote August 14 put matters into overdrive. At the Construction Division staff conference the next morning, Somervell directed his team to gather all the principals—including John McShain, the builder; Edwin Bergstrom, the architect; Colonel Leslie Groves, the deputy chief of the division; and Renshaw—for a meeting in four days officially “starting work on the new War Department building.”
Paul Hauck, McShain’s job superintendent, gave Groves a lengthy list of pressing business that needed immediate attention. The builder wanted excavation plans, contour maps, foundation drawings, and structural drawings for the first floor. McShain needed to know what part of the building to begin first. McShain had been hard at it for weeks, meeting with Groves to plan the building on July 25, even before his choice as contractor had been officially approved. Within days McShain and Hauck were “working desperately” on the plans for building, setting up a progress schedule, and ordering building material, supplies, and equipment.
Bergstrom and his team had been busy as well, refining the design and layout of their pentagonal building. The project was top priority for the Construction Division, and Somervell gave Bergstrom carte blanche to hire anyone he wanted, inside or outside the Army. Bergstrom turned to his home turf in California to hire top talent. He chose as his chief assistant his friend David J. Witmer, a Los Angeles architect who had become prominent in the 1920s as a designer of Mediterranean-style homes and was considered a pioneer in the field for his expressive use of concrete for exterior work. Bergstrom also persuaded two other well-known California architects to leave their work in Los Angeles and join the project. Robert D. Farquhar, who had designed the California Club, a Los Angeles landmark, and Pierpont Davis, a Baltimore native who had established a successful practice in Los Angeles, were placed in charge of the architectural treatment of the building. All three Californians were considered “particularly conversant” with reinforced concrete, which would be used on a massive scale for the new War Department building. Just as important, Bergstrom had worked with all of them for years in California and could be assured of their competence and loyalty. The core group of architects who would design the Pentagon—a building so closely associated with solid, utilitarian architecture—was thus a group of Southern Californians more experienced at designing breezy hillside villas than dour government buildings.
Renshaw was the most crucial addition to the team. Groves would oversee the project, ensuring everything was properly planned, constructed, and done on time. But as deputy chief of the Construction Division, Groves was responsible for hundreds of war projects around the country, all desperately needed for the mobilizing army. While Groves kept the new War Department headquarters “under my rather close direction,” as he later said, the constructing quartermaster would manage the project day to day and was ultimately responsible for its success—or failure.
Renshaw, from Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania, was a happy-go-lucky eldest son thrust into a position of family responsibility at age sixteen, when his father stepped on a nail and died from a tetanus infection. His mother had to prod the boy to leave the family to attend West Point, where he had earned an appointment. Rennie, as he was known, was quite bright but more interested in enjoying life than worrying about grades. He was a track star and a superb tennis player, but he preferred the fun of intramural company football. His joie de vivre was mixed with a formidable drive. Fellow cadets knew him as “a fierce competitor who would fight to the death for an extra point, and then give away the farm without a second thought or a backward glance.”
In those days, West Point cadets never selected the Quartermaster Corps as their branch of choice upon graduation. Unlike the elite Corps of Engineers, which always drew the cream of the crop, men like Somervell and Groves, the quartermasters were seen as a dead end. Quartermaster General B. Frank Cheatham, determined to change this, made recruiting trips to West Point in 1929, the year Renshaw was to graduate. Rennie and his friend and roommate Elmer Kirkpatrick listened to Cheatham promise rewarding careers in Army construction. The roommates, without telling the other, each applied for a commission in the Quartermaster Corps, and each was accepted. Instructors were not encouraging; one warned that any cadet who joined the quartermasters would likely spend his career issuing shoes and buying groceries.
But Rennie bucked expectations. He loved construction, and the Quartermaster Corps had plenty of that. Throughout his career, Renshaw was happiest when he had mud on his boots. His first project was to help build a memorial to the Wright Brothers atop Big Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina, the sand dune on the Outer Banks where the inventors made their historic first flight on December 17, 1903. A quarter-century of wind had moved Big Kill Devil Hill 450 feet southwest of its 1903 location, and the sand dune was still moving. Rennie’s job was to figure out a way to stop it. A mixture of exotic and native grasses planted in the dune along with a wooden mold did the trick. The eighty-ton solid granite memorial, rising sixty feet above the hill, was dedicated in November 1932, and Renshaw was quite proud of it.
Assigned to the Washington, D.C., office, Renshaw assisted in the restoration of the Arlington home Robert E. Lee left on the eve of the Civil War. Congress had approved legislation in 1925 to turn the mansion into a memorial to Lee. The depredations of the Civil War, followed by decades of neglect, vandalism, and casual use as a cemetery office, had left the mansion little more than a shell. The Army was placed in charge of restoring it, a painstaking project that took years; former Lee family slaves still living were consulted to restore the mansion to its antebellum appearance. Renshaw also constructed the formal approaches—walkways and steps—leading up to the nearby Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. From his work in Arlington Cemetery, Renshaw was thus probably more familiar than any officer in the Army with the stirring view from the Lee mansion that he was now supposed to defile.
Renshaw had developed a reputation as a capable and conscientious officer, one who despite his modesty worked with obvious confidence. Renshaw survived the purge when Somervell came over from the Corps of Engineers to head the Construction Division in December 1940. Groves thought highly of Renshaw’s organizational skills, relying on him as an expediter to keep construction projects around the country on track. The lanky, chain-smoking Rennie, his head rapidly going bald but with a young and handsome face, somehow managed to be easygoing and efficient at the same time. In the madness of the Construction Division, Renshaw’s office was one of the few calm ports. His low-key, nonauthoritarian style won the loyalty and affection of his officers. “He told me immediately he didn’t give orders. Just a suggestion was enough,” Robert Furman, an officer on Renshaw’s staff, remembered more than sixty years later. “He was a prince of a guy.”
In August 1941, as Somervell considered whom to place in charge of the enormous War Department project, Groves proposed Captain Renshaw. There were several other candidates, among them Renshaw’s friend and former roommate, Elmer Kirkpatrick. Renshaw had a little more project experience than Kirkpatrick and the others. But what Somervell and Groves wanted above all else, Renshaw said years later, was someone they were sure would not fail.
Renshaw added, “I wasn’t so sure.”
This rape of Washington
Bronzed and refreshed from his two-week adventure at sea, Franklin D. Roosevelt returned to the mainland aboard the Potomac, which moored in Rockland, Maine, on August 16. Aboard the yacht, he good-naturedly faced down a pack of reporters “angry as a bunch of bears with sore haunches” about being fooled by the supposed fishing expedition, for which Roosevelt was unapologetic.
An overnight train carried Roosevelt to Union Station in Washington, and he arrived back at the White House on Sunday morning, August 17. The aura of good cheer from his dramatic rendezvous with Churchill did not last long. Roosevelt was quickly brought back to earth by awaiting problems. The Soviets ha
d suffered worrisome reverses in the Caucasus, a major strike had paralyzed a New Jersey shipyard, and there was a headache in the form of the new War Department building in Arlington.
His secretary of the interior was in outright revolt against the project and had written the president “a very vigorous letter…begging him not to permit this rape of Washington.” A telegram also arrived Sunday from Frederic Delano, traveling out west. The planning commission chairman told the president he was “greatly concerned” by what had transpired in their absence from Washington. In a follow-up letter sent the same day, Delano urged his nephew to take action, recommending that “you ask Congress…to reconsider the decision that has been made so hurriedly by the Appropriations Committee. An examination of the record shows that this decision was in many ways predicated on erroneous assumptions and fallacious conclusions.”
The newspapers were pleading with Roosevelt to act. That morning’s Sunday Star carried a front-page cartoon showing Roosevelt arriving at Union Station, travel bag from the USS Potomac in hand, catching Henry Stimson in the act of spiriting the War Department across the river. “I’m glad you’re back, Mr. President,” Roosevelt is told. “They’re about to steal all the furniture.”
It all struck a chord with Roosevelt. Unhappy that the Senate had ignored his recommendation that the building’s size be halved, the president now was further chagrined that he had agreed to the Arlington Farm site in the first place.
Roosevelt already felt a lingering sense of guilt for his leading role in a previous desecration of Washington. As assistant secretary of the Navy when America declared war on Germany in 1917, Roosevelt had persuaded President Wilson to allow the construction of large temporary buildings on the Mall along Constitution Avenue to house the Navy and Army, then in desperate need of office space. “My plan was…to make them of such superlative ugliness that their replacement would have been insisted upon even before now!” Roosevelt later wrote. “However, as on some other occasions, my well-laid plans fell through!”