by Steve Vogel
The tales have never stopped; a recycled version was reported as fact by the Pentagon’s official newspaper in 1984. Marian Bailey, who started working in the Pentagon as a telephone operator in 1942 and stayed six decades, relished taking visitors on building tours and speaking mysteriously of workers buried in the concrete. Sometimes she would dramatically point to spots in walls or floors where some unfortunate was said to be entombed.
The stories, as Bob Furman put it, are “myths.” There is no evidence in any records that anyone died in such a manner. The most definitive answer came from Clarence Renshaw himself. Many years after Alan Renshaw’s visit to the Pentagon roof—after he himself had attended West Point and been commissioned as an officer in the Air Force—the son asked his father about the stories. “Are there really guys buried down there under that concrete?” Alan Renshaw asked.
Clarence Renshaw had to laugh. Nobody had been lost that way, he told his son. He would have known.
Don’t slip on it
Workers were dying in plenty of other ways, though, and not necessarily in more pleasant manners. Two workers were killed in early February operating a mechanical hoist, including one who stuck his head into a hoist shaft to see if the hoist was coming. It was, and he was decapitated. A few days later, on February 13, Guy R. Milliken, an electrician who came down from New York for the job, was fetching his lunch when he walked into the path of a concrete truck. His death brought the number of fatalities on the job to four.
Inspecting the site before the spate of deaths, Lloyd Blanchard, chief of the safety section, was dismayed to find that none of the urgent safety improvements he had recommended after Vernon Janney was crushed in October had been implemented. “It is still necessary for the general contractor to show a radical change in attitude toward providing safe working conditions,” Blanchard wrote.
Renshaw was unapologetic when queried by a reporter about the deaths. “We are lucky that we have not had 20 deaths,” he said. “We cannot have 13,000 men together on one job working at the rate we are going and not have some accidents. Considering that a normal job would take two years, our accident rate is very low.” Renshaw put the blame for the deaths on “human failure,” which was another way of saying it was the workers’ fault. “Real safety actually only comes from the men themselves,” he said. “At times, we have had trouble impressing that on them, particularly those who are new on the job.”
Labor leaders thought otherwise, and, given the cavalier attitude toward safety at the site, they had good reason to. At the demand of the unions, McShain and Army representatives met with labor leaders to review safety procedures. “They have been promising to institute proper methods, but we are very doubtful that they will,” C. F. Preller, president of the Washington Building and Construction Trades Council, told The Washington Post. The Virginia labor commissioner, John Hopkins Hall, Jr., wrote a letter to Stimson later in the spring expressing concern about the accidents. Stimson promised that “every effort is being made to keep preventable accidents at a minimum.” Some improvements were made and the accident rate fell as the months passed. After the two hoist deaths, a signal system was installed and an additional watcher was placed at the shaft. But the job site remained dangerous.
Further aggrieved by a wage dispute with the government, union leaders in March threatened to pull thousands of workers from the Pentagon job site to testify at a Department of Labor hearing. The threat was not carried out, but the labor-government truce that had ruled since Pearl Harbor was fraying.
There were racial tensions as well among the construction workers. About 40 percent of the work force was black; many of them worked as laborers, but because of wartime manpower shortages, others were given jobs as skilled workers. The prominent role of black workers bred resentment among some whites. The construction cafeterias had separate sections for black and white workers in accordance with the “Virginia Separation of Races” law. Out on the construction site, brawls broke out several times between groups of white and black workers; on one occasion, Furman arrived at the scene to find a large group of black and white workers facing off, hurling angry words at each other. “They were drawing lines, and I walked between the lines,” Furman said. “Whether it did any good or not I don’t know.” The standoff broke up but the tensions remained.
Discrimination created an absurd new concern for Renshaw: He was supposed to build a segregated Pentagon. The word came in a telephone call March 7 from one of Groves’s aides, Major Donald Antes. “Colonel Groves just asked me to call you and find out whether you have made any provisions for separate design for the different classes of people in the War Department Building,” said Antes, who then clarified his euphemism. “By that I mean separate toilet rooms for black and white as required by the Virginia law, and if you haven’t taken such precautions that you are to do so immediately.”
This was news to Renshaw. “Separate design of toilet rooms?” he asked. Yes, replied Antes, who added this coda from Groves: “He said don’t slip on it.” Renshaw promised to take care of it.
The matter was not as simple as Groves believed, however. While Virginia law required whites and blacks to be segregated in public places, Franklin Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802 the previous June, which forbade discrimination against government workers on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. Moreover, on March 11 Virginia governor Colgate W. Darden granted a request from Stimson to give the War Department exclusive jurisdiction over the land on which the Pentagon was being built. Still, whether out of ignorance or deliberate discrimination, the Army made preparations for separate bathrooms.
The road network
Renshaw’s biggest worry now was building the roads to the Pentagon. It would do no good to have the building ready for occupancy if no one could get there. An enormous road network was to be constructed, second only to the building itself in cost and scope.
When he had sold the building to Congress and the commissions the previous summer, Somervell had played down the need for roads, describing the problem as “perhaps less serious than getting people to and away from a ball game.” The reality was quite different. “It is almost like providing highways for a city of 100,000,” Thomas H. MacDonald, the longtime director of the federal Bureau of Public Roads, warned a congressional committee in December.
Planners for the War Department and the roads bureau designed a futuristic swirl of roads, ramps, and access lanes emanating from a triangle of highways surrounding the building. The idea was to speed cars and buses from Washington by building the roads without crossroads or traffic lights. Counting access roads and ramps, the equivalent of forty-seven miles of twenty-four-foot-wide roadway were to be constructed. In all, twenty-one bridges needed to be built, most of them overpasses carrying ramps and roads across one another. The design included three freeway-scale cloverleaf interchanges, among the first to be constructed in the United States and a concept still foreign to most American drivers.
The basic plan for the main highways had been on the books since long before the Pentagon was conceived. In 1934, Frederic Delano’s National Capital Parks and Planning Commission had approved a system of roads that would provide approaches from Virginia to the three main bridges leading into Washington. But no money had been allocated to build the roads; they existed only on planning maps.
Roosevelt took care of that problem, giving the War Department and the roads bureau the green light to spend millions acquiring the needed land. Somervell and MacDonald negotiated who would build and pay for which roads; the roads bureau director was delighted when Somervell offered to pay not only for the circulatory access roads immediately around the building, but also $6.3 million for the portion of the highways that went through War Department land—roads that the bureau would have been expected to fund.
To speed the work, Somervell further promised the roads bureau up to $4 million in War Department funding “to assure the early initiation of actual construction,” he told MacDonald. Some
rvell added one condition, though. He had a score to settle with Gilmore Clarke, the Commission of Fine Arts chairman who had been so nettlesome during the battle over the building’s location. As an accomplished landscape architect who often worked on parkways, Clarke regularly served as a consultant to the roads bureau and had helped design the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway running along the Potomac shore to George Washington’s estate. According to the story later related by Clarke—quite believable, given Somervell’s lust for revenge—the general promised to give MacDonald the money on condition that the bureau not allow Clarke to have anything to do with planning the roads for the new headquarters. “I need hardly add that I was not employed by the Bureau of Public Roads for this project,” Clarke recalled. Instead, William S. Chapin, a New York highway engineer, was hired at $50 a day plus expenses to design the road system.
Colonel Edmond Leavey, one of Somervell’s top engineers, was worried the initial plans for access roads were impractical. Leavey assembled a sand-table model of the headquarters with the access roads built to scale in an old building near the construction site; he sent an aide, Captain Bob Colglazier, to a five-and-dime store in downtown Washington to buy a fleet of small toy cars and trucks. “I brought these little vehicles back to all these high-powered engineers so they could sit around and start from here and take a coal truck and see how you got to the power plant,” Colglazier recalled. “[W]ith the sand table model, and these little trucks, we were able to spend all afternoon making the necessary changes to make it very practical.”
By normal standards, the roads program moved rapidly through the fall and winter. Groves had steamrolled objections raised by the War Production Board against demolishing the West Brothers Brick Company to make way for a cloverleaf interchange; bricks were needed for construction of war plants, and the board recommended that the road plans be altered to spare the brick plant. Board member Herbert J. Weber personally appealed to Groves, but the colonel refused to consider any change that might delay the roads. “I might just as well have talked to a brick wall,” Weber later complained.
But the roads program was not keeping up with the pace of the work on the Pentagon. The Federal Works Agency, which oversaw the roads bureau and was in charge of acquiring land for the highways, did not feel the same urgency as the War Department. “The real estate people have not moved at all on the land to be occupied,” Renshaw reported to Somervell in February. “They still have not condemned it, but are wasting time appraising it.” Renshaw predicted disaster if something were not done: “The probability of having the road construction schedule meet the building occupancy dates is decidedly in jeopardy, and further delays will have serious consequences. To meet our schedules everything must click.”
This was a nice little neighborhood
To make it click, the Army needed Queen City. About 150 black families lived at the southeastern edge of the construction site in a cluster of houses in the area known as East Arlington, which included the Queen City neighborhood.
It was a small collection of homes, many rundown, and some lacking toilets. Yet Queen City was still the strong community that the man who cleaned up Arlington, Crandal Mackey, had praised thirty years earlier. It had stores and a barbershop, two Baptist churches, and a feeling of shared history among proud residents, many of them descendants of the freed slaves evicted by the Army from Freedmen’s Village a half-century earlier. Now, the Army again needed their land. East Arlington sat on the north side of Columbia Pike on twenty-five acres needed for a highway and an interchange near the building’s south parking lot. All the residents would have to leave.
This was not seen as a problem by the men planning the roads. Quite the contrary. Jay Downer, the highway consultant who had played such a critical role in selecting the former quartermaster depot site as the location for the headquarters, saw it as a nice bonus to uproot the black families. The road network “takes out some troublesome darkey slave cabins,” Downer told the National Capital Planning Commission in October 1941. “This cleans up that strip.” No one raised any objections. Roosevelt had approved the plan when he surveyed the site in August. Plans went forward to raze the community, though no one bothered to consult or even inform the residents.
Construction had been scheduled to begin around Queen City the week of January 19, but notices were not sent to the more than 150 families until early February, telling them they had to leave by March 1. Most residents had no idea the Army headquarters being constructed a quarter-mile away meant the end to Queen City. “We just thought they were going to build a building over in the field, but we had no idea it was going to be as big as it was,” George Vollin, Jr., who grew up in Queen City and was then thirty-nine years old, recalled decades later. “Then they came to building the roads, and that’s when they took all the houses.”
“It was a predicament,” Gertrude Jeffress, then nineteen and living in Queen City with her mother and sister, later said. “Where in the world where we going to find a place to live?”
The desperate residents bound together and had an attorney send a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the great champion of the disadvantaged. Lifelong residents of Arlington had been given only thirty days’ notice to leave their homes, the president’s wife was told. Moreover, the letter said, the amount the government was paying for their homes was paltry, certainly not enough to exchange for new homes—not that any were available in wartime Washington anyway. The First Lady forwarded the letter to the House Military Affairs Committee, which held a hearing on February 13.
Thomas MacDonald was unapologetic about the short notice. “It is a matter of split-second timing,” the roads bureau chief told the committee. “Any delay would be very serious.” The congressmen did not pursue the matter. Complaints about the low sums being paid to the residents likewise went nowhere.
There was little public outcry over the plight of 150 black families losing their homes. The Arlington County Board expressed sympathy that lifelong residents were losing their homes for little recompense, but raised no objections. The federal government—perhaps because Eleanor Roosevelt had poked her head into the matter—promised in court papers to put the residents up in trailers until permanent housing could be found. The U.S. District Court in Richmond granted the government possession of the land as of March 1, contingent upon trailers being provided. The government deposited a check for $369,427 to be divided among about 180 property owners, which worked out to about $2,052 per owner. On March 6, condemnation notices began to be served on the residents. Albert Shanklin, a lifelong resident of Queen City, was in agony when he was served. “I remember his going crazy almost because they were taking his home,” his daughter-in-law, Ruth Shanklin, recounted.
Renshaw was not concerned with historical injustices, not with Somervell and Groves breathing down his neck. He fumed all through a three-week delay while the trailer camp was set up. “Nobody has moved,” Renshaw said on March 23. “That little spot is going to throw the whole road program out. Everything, if they don’t come to life.”
At the end of the month, the Queen City residents began moving into a camp set up nearby in a muddy lot off of Columbia Pike. In court papers, the government had promised “accommodations practically as comfortable as those from which persons will be required to move.” The residents found themselves living in cramped trailers with stoves and convertible couch-beds, meant to accommodate four persons but often holding more. There was no running water—the trailer occupants had to walk over to a water-dispensing station inside a lattice-metal shack to get water. Some of the residents were still living in the trailers when the war ended.
With the families out of Queen City and the rest of East Arlington, workers quickly fired the frame houses, while bulldozers knocked down brick homes. Grading equipment soon reshaped the land into something unrecognizable. Not a trace of the neighborhood was left. Queen City was nothing but a memory, and not much of one at that. Fact sheets handed out to visitors to the Pentagon a h
alf-century later describe the building location as “nothing more than wasteland, swamps and dumps.”
“Whoever said it was nothing but shacks, well, that ain’t true,” Gertrude Jeffress said more than sixty years after leaving her Queen City home. “This was a nice little neighborhood, I’ll say that.”
Some change, eh?
With the arrival of spring, it was possible to stand at the site of Queen City and imagine what the Pentagon would look like once it was finished. Long limestone façades now covered much of the southern and western walls, each of which would stretch a fifth of a mile when completed.
So much limestone was needed that it was being quarried from multiple locations in Indiana’s limestone belt, a twenty-five-mile-long deposit in the southern part of the state formed by remnants of shellfish and other particles that collected on the bottom of a shallow sea covering much of the Midwest more than three hundred million years ago. Unlike monumental Washington landmarks such as the National Cathedral, which was built with pristine, tightly grained Indiana limestone blocks, the Pentagon was using rougher, less expensive grades of limestone known as rustic buff and variegated, with gray and tan shades. The limestone ran from the ground to the roofline; a course of hard stone—which would have served as a base for the limestone and provided a more finished appearance—was omitted to save time and money. On the roof, a thin strip of light-green slate was visible, merging the limestone with blue sky. It was not beautiful, but the limestone lent a properly imposing and dignified look to what was to be the nation’s war headquarters.
Each of the façades was dominated by a central colonnade of sixteen columns, bordered by smaller four-column pavilions. The columns, purely ornamental, ran flush along the façade’s middle section, which projected about ten feet from the rest of the exterior wall to break up what would otherwise be a long, flat, monotonous surface. The middle façade included a parapet, Bergstrom’s answer to an optical illusion known to architects at least since the Greeks placed a slight arching curve on the roof ridge line of the Parthenon in Athens. If built perfectly level, the 960-foot-long roofline of the Pentagon would appear to sag; the parapets broke the line.
