Notwithstanding all the preparations and efforts of the enemy to breed disloyalty and create disorder and lawlessness and our own lack at first of legal machinery with which to meet the situation, Germany’s underground operations were squarely met and wholly defeated and the country was never more quiet and law-abiding than it was during all the period of the war.
CHAPTER XXXV
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.
View from Washington Monument, August, 1917
