The Pentagon: A History (31 page)

Moving crews carried desks, file cabinets, and other furniture into the Pentagon twenty-four hours a day, though not always with the greatest of care. One night in May, movers dumped the contents of an Army office from the trucks onto the loading platform, leaving desks broken, bookcases with glass shattered, and cabinets scratched. “The actual handling of furniture was done by very unskilled workmen who did not have much regard for government property,” Major Bayard Schintelin, one of the victimized officers, complained to superiors.

The employees were packed into the Pentagon, with only eighty-five square feet of office space allotted per worker, a tight ratio that would allow 37,000 people to fit in the building if maintained. The biggest office bays were crammed with as many as 450 desks.

Senior officers wanted no part of such conditions and demanded partitions to wall off private office space. They wanted big, executive-style hardwood desks, too, complete with dentil molding around the edges. “If you gave a general an itty-bitty desk you’d be out of a job the next day,” recalled Allen Dickey, an architect overseeing the furnishing. Moreover, the generals were choosing the prime real estate, the offices on the outer E ring with windows looking out. It meant most employees were walled off from the outside. Renshaw, feeling a certain proprietary interest in the Pentagon, wanted to preserve what little ambience the building had. “They’re spoiling the outer ring in a lot of respects,” he complained to Groves in a telephone conversation May 14.

Groves was incredulous. “You aren’t getting esthetic, are you?” he asked.

“Almost,” Renshaw replied. “There are so few nice places in the building that I hate to ruin the nicest one by putting partitions there.” They should save the view for the masses.

Groves was having difficulty understanding Renshaw’s point. This was a military headquarters, not an experiment in egalitarianism. “You want the big shots to have the view, don’t you?” Groves said.

“I think the clerks would appreciate it more,” Renshaw persisted. In the same three hundred square feet needed to accommodate a private office for a general, he said, eight or ten clerks could have desks with a nice view.

Renshaw was fighting a losing battle. The comforts for the privileged outweighed the accommodation of the masses. The big shots would always get the private, walled-off offices at the Pentagon, as well as the nice views.

Overshooting the mark

Somervell finally notified Congressional leaders by letter in May that his building was $14.2 million over budget. He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that due to the outbreak of war, it had become “necessary to abandon any plan to reduce the originally contemplated size of the building,” and that he had in fact increased it by 650,000 square feet. To stifle any outcry, Somervell assured the chairmen of the Senate and House appropriations committees in his letter that he would not ask Congress for the money and would instead cover the overrun with unexpended balances from other construction projects. The Army “constantly expanded the size of the building yet Somervell never once went up and asked for more money,” Groves later marveled.

Groves offered no apologies himself about the additional cost when he appeared before a House Appropriations subcommittee on June 15 to brief members on the building’s progress. (Groves always took an aggressive approach with Congress. “I’m in favor of asking for a lot and letting them turn you down if they have the nerve—they won’t have the nerve,” he once explained to a fellow officer.)

“You have overshot the mark by a pretty big margin,” remarked the subcommittee chairman, J. Buell Snyder of Pennsylvania.

“The building has overshot the original conception both as to size and speed of completion,” Groves retorted. The building, he added, would total four million square feet. Asked how many workers it would hold, Groves offered no specifics. “It will have all of the capacity that was originally contemplated, and a great deal more,” he said.

No protest was raised at the increased size or cost. Instead, much of the hearing dealt with complaints that the floors of the Pentagon were dusty. “We can get rid of the dust inside the building, but we cannot get rid of the dust outside, and it keeps coming in,” Groves explained.

Renshaw was incredulous; they had been dreading Congress’s reaction to the overrun, and all the members cared about was the dust. “They listened to a $15 million deficit, and swallowed it without a comment,” he afterward told George Holmes, Somervell’s PR man. “When somebody said there was dust on the floors, they sent for me to come up and explain it.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” said Holmes.

Nothing is usual

Like everyone else, Marjorie Hanshaw was still having trouble locating her desk—every day a new office had sprung up or a corridor was blocked with construction materials. Another employee, Robert Sanders, tried identifying visual landmarks to mark his way. Almost inevitably, by the time he made a second trip, the landmark had disappeared. Returning to their office from a meeting about manufacturing small arms, two Ordnance workers soon realized they were hopelessly lost but were too embarrassed to admit it; finally they followed exit signs outside to regain their bearings. It was happening all the time.

Adding to the confusion was the jumble of numbers and letters marking room numbers—2D-489, for example. Renshaw had come up with the numbering system on the fly shortly before occupancy started. Ordered one day to quickly develop a scheme, Renshaw sat down at an empty desk and drew a sketch of the building. It showed the five rings, labeled A for the inner ring through E for the outer ring, and the ten radial corridors, labeled 1 through 10 in clockwise order. Each office was numbered according to its floor, its ring, the nearest corridor, and then the specific office bay, in that order. Thus 2D-489 was on the second floor, on the D ring, off of corridor 4, in bay 89.

Groves was skeptical. “It already sounds like a procurement authority,” he complained to Renshaw. Actually, once mastered, Renshaw’s numbering system would prove a reliable guide to finding an office no matter where it was in the building. The interior setup of offices would change considerably over the years, but Renshaw’s method—drawn up in about ten minutes—has stayed intact.

Yet to newcomers, it was like reading Greek. Nobody could remember which number referred to what.

“Nothing is usual about your thing over there,” Groves told Renshaw. “Nobody can find his way around.”

My people are Americans

The cafeteria, at least, was well-marked. Henry E. Bennett followed the signs directing him through the maze of hallways and down to the first floor. Bennett, a clerk in the Ordnance Department, had moved into the Pentagon that morning, Thursday, May 14, part of the vanguard. Like about 10 percent of War Department employees, Bennett was black. He joined a group of Ordnance staff—several secretaries and another man, all black—for lunch. Entering the cafeteria, they got in line but were immediately intercepted by a cafeteria supervisor: Colored employees were to eat in a separate dining room in the back. Bennett started to object, but one of the secretaries grabbed him by the arm. Don’t make a scene, she said.

They went to the rear as directed, where a smaller, dustier, and shabbier dining room awaited, occupied and operated solely by blacks. Bennett got the lamb stew but was unable to take a bite. He had lost his appetite. A modest and serious-minded twenty-nine-year-old, Bennett had overcome a hardscrabble youth in Texas and Indiana—helping to raise his younger siblings by shining shoes—to graduate with honors from high school. He had interrupted his studies of mathematics and commerce at Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute to serve his country. Bennett sat at the table, seething, ignoring his companions’ pleas to eat. As the group prepared to leave, a cafeteria worker passed on some news: There was a young colored man who had refused to go to the back and was eating in the white section.

Bennett wanted to meet this man. He was easy to spot in the white section, sitting alone at a table, a slight young man, 5'7? and 140 pounds, wearing glasses. Bennett walked over and introduced himself. The young man was Jimmy Harold, a well-spoken, bright twenty-one-year-old who had come from Detroit six months earlier to join the war effort and had taken a job as an assistant engineer and draftsman with the Ordnance field service. This was his first day in the Pentagon too. Harold’s polite and mild manner could not disguise the inner steel of a man whose upbringing would not allow him to accept second-class citizenship. Bennett liked him instantly. If anything happens, he told Harold, come find me.

Roosevelt’s executive order barring discrimination in the federal government had succeeded in keeping the Pentagon’s restrooms from being segregated. The cafeteria was different. The Public Buildings Administration, which normally operated cafeterias in federal buildings, had refused to do so in the Pentagon until the building was finished; it was still a construction site. Yet some way had to be found to feed the employees; isolated as the Pentagon was, there were few places nearby where they could eat.

The Army had turned to McShain for help. The builder’s food subcontractor was already feeding thirteen thousand–plus construction workers every day. Renshaw asked the subcontractor, Industrial Food Systems Inc. of Washington, to operate a temporary cafeteria inside the Pentagon for War Department employees until the building was finished. The contractor set up the Pentagon employees’ cafeteria with separate sections for black and white workers, the same as the construction cafeteria. The building had not been officially turned over to the Army, the contractors reasoned, and thus remained subject to Virginia law. However, Virginia had ceded the entire site to the federal government in March.

Whatever the legal rationales to justify the discrimination, Jimmy Harold was not going to stand for it. On Friday, he and Bennett, accompanied by two other black Ordnance employees, went back to the cafeteria for lunch. A white woman supervising the line approached them. “I’m very sorry, she said, but we don’t serve people in here.” Bennett looked around the vast dining room, filled with white employees eating lunch. “Apparently you are mistaken,” he said in a deadpan manner. “There are quite a few people in here.” The woman’s demeanor hardened. “You know what I mean,” she said coldly, and asked for the men’s names. Harold took off his badge and showed it to her. The four men got their food, sat down at a table in the white dining room, and ate.

The rebellion of the black Ordnance employees was creating a stir. Walter P. McFarland, president of Industrial Food, called for help, and a guard from McShain’s building security force, Officer Horace W. Crump, arrived shortly before noon. Instructions came from Renshaw’s office—relayed by Captain Bob Furman—to make no move to evict the black employees, but to warn them not to eat in the white section again. Crump stationed himself outside the entrance and warned black employees as they left: “Tomorrow, you’ll eat in the place provided for you.” There was a hint of menace in his tone.

The chief of the Pentagon police force, Sumner Dodge, called McShain Saturday morning for instructions. McShain was no more but no less prejudiced than most men of his day; he considered separate facilities for whites and blacks critical for healthy relations with the labor unions. McShain told the police chief to back McFarland. When the cafeteria opened for lunch that day, Crump and a second officer were stationed at the entrance. Signs had been put up directing black employees to a separate entrance leading to the “colored cafeteria.” Harold came down, accompanied by Bennett and two women. When Harold stepped in the line for white employees, Crump told him he was in the wrong cafeteria and should leave. Harold refused. “No, I am eating in here today,” he said, walking past the guard, and the others followed. Laurel Carson and her friends did the same. The black Ordnance workers ate in the white section, ignoring hostile stares.

On Monday, the line was drawn. McShain notified Renshaw in the morning that he intended to have the security guards enforce segregation. “We see no reason whatever, since the colored people have equal facilities and conveniences as the white people, why they should not use their own dining room exclusively,” McShain wrote. Guards were given orders to block any blacks from entering the white dining room and take the badge numbers of any trying to get in.

Gladys Lancaster, a black messenger in Ordnance, was one of the first to go down for lunch that day. Unnerved by the guards, she turned back, afraid even to go into the colored section. Back in the office, she begged the others not to go to the white dining room. Ruth Bush, for one, was not cowed. Bush, a junior clerk typist from New York, went down around 11:30
A.M.
with a half dozen others for lunch. A guard stuck a nightstick in front of the door and said they could not enter.

“This is America, not Germany,” Bush angrily told the guard. Her three brothers were in the Army, and she would not back down. “I am an American; I’ll die for America, therefore I have every right that any other American has,” Bush said. “Just think, I have brothers in the war now, fighting.” She started to cry. “We are just as good as they are,” she told her companions.

At 11:35, Harold stopped by Bennett’s desk and said he was going to lunch. Bennett followed a few minutes later. They arrived to find the entrance blocked by a crowd. Ruth Bush was angrily giving the guards an earful. Harold worked his way to the front.

McFarland had arrived and pleaded with the black employees to use the colored dining room, insisting it was “just as good, with the same food and same furniture, same everything.” Harold, polite but determined, pressed for an explanation. McFarland said it was a McShain cafeteria, not a federal cafeteria.