The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  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.

  The backup grew to over a hundred people. White employees trying to get into the cafeteria found their way blocked, and others who had finished their lunch were stuck. Crump telephoned Chief Dodge, asking for reinforcements.

  Four officers rushed to the cafeteria at 11:45, and they ordered blacks to stand back and let white people through. One of the guards, Theodore Lee, Jr., a stocky, 190-pound forty-year-old, decided to resolve the matter quickly. “There were white people and niggers all ganged around there at the door trying to go in,” he told an investigator several days later.

  Lee and another officer barreled through the crowd, yelling “Break it up” and roughly shoving black men and women aside. Lee pushed Harold in the back, knocking him off balance. Harold threw his arms up reflexively to protect himself, possibly grabbing at Lee’s nightstick. Lee drew his gun, and some of the women screamed. The crowd scattered, white and black; some ran and others backed against the walls. Everyone moved away except Jimmy Harold. He took one step back, but then stood still and kept his eyes on the gun until Lee put it back in his belt. Then Harold turned his back to Lee and, without a word, started to slowly walk away. He had taken one step when Lee’s stick sank into his head with a sickening thud, sending blood from his scalp spurting into the air. “Some of the girls screamed and the blood was flowing on the floor furiously,” Bush said. “The floor was saturated with blood and my dress was full of blood and another girl’s dress was full of blood.”

  Harold was staggering. Laurel Carson tried to stop the blood with her hand but it gushed through her fingers. Others put handkerchiefs on the cut but they were quickly sopping. None of the fifty or more white employees who witnessed the episode offered help. Co-workers brought Harold out of the cafeteria and half-carried him upstairs to a restroom. Charles Brown, an office mate, washed Harold’s wound with a handkerchief and cold water, but it was a long time before the bleeding was stanched.

  Henry Bennett stayed at the scene until he was able to comfort several crying women, one hysterical. He easily found Harold and the others by following the trail of blood that led from the cafeteria up to the second floor to the men’s washroom. Bennett and the others took Harold to the first-aid room, where an Army nurse cleaned the wound with alcohol and put a pressure bandage on it. It was a very nasty cut, the nurse told Bennett; she sent Harold to a public health clinic in Washington where doctors could stitch his wound.

  Back at the cafeteria, Theodore Lee twirled his baton, pleased with his work. “The niggers started going in their dining room and white people started to go in their dining room and the whole thing was quiet from then on out,” he said.

  Integrating the Pentagon

  Judge William H. Hastie was in his office in the Munitions Building that afternoon when a contingent of five black women, all Ordnance employees, came to his office, too upset to return to work at the Pentagon.

  They had heard Hastie, a civilian aide to Secretary of War Stimson, was the man to come to for such matters. At age thirty-seven, Hastie was one of the most distinguished black men in the country, a man of moral certitude. Raised on a chicken farm on the outskirts of Knoxville, he studied law at Harvard and eventually won appointment by Roosevelt as the first black federal trial court judge in American history. In 1941, Hastie joined the War Department and went to work combating rampant discrimination in the Army. Despite his respect for Stimson, Hastie was under no illusions. On one occasion, he spoke to Stimson about integration in the Army Air Forces, an area where Hastie was optimistic he was making progress. Then Stimson spoke: “Mr. Hastie, is it not true that your people are basically agriculturists?”

  Stimson, Hastie later said, “was a most honest and dedicated man, a patriot in the best and highest sense of the word, but he was a man whose whole life in his practice of law, in his social contacts, his whole background, had isolated him from the areas, the problems, of which I was basically concerned.” As for General Marshall, his attitude was that it was not the responsibility of an Army in wartime to right social wrongs.

  In his office, Hastie listened with al
arm to the women’s story about what had transpired at the Pentagon that day. Then a telephone call came from Henry Bennett, who was with Jimmy Harold at the public health clinic downtown. Hastie immediately drove over to pick them up in his car and brought Harold to his room at the YMCA for colored men on 12th Street, where he and Bennett saw him to his bed. The next morning, the judge sat down with Bennett and heard the full story. Dismayed, Hastie won approval that day from Stimson for an investigation by the War Department’s inspector general.

  The resulting investigation was almost as disgraceful as the incident. The Army attorney appointed to perform the inquiry, Colonel Carl L. Ristine, adopted an accusatory and condescending tone with all black witnesses, referring to Harold, a draftsman and engineer, as “that colored boy.” “You are rather an innocent looking person to cause a riot down there,” he told Ruth Bush.

  “Riot? Did they call it a riot?” Bush replied. “If it was a riot it was their causing; they are the ones who started fighting and pushing our women around like they were dogs.”

  Ristine suggested the black employees had a premeditated plot to block the cafeteria entrance, and he accused Harold of “subterfuge.” Most infuriating of all was Ristine’s insistence—repeated to almost every black witness—that segregation was not discrimination. “If the whites were segregated in one room as the colored in another, it is just as much segregation for the whites as it is for the colored, isn’t it?” he asked one employee.

  In their testimony, Theodore Lee and the other security guards stuck to a story that Harold was about to assault Lee and that the guard had clubbed him in self-defense. Their account was corroborated by several white witnesses. Yet not a single Ordnance Department witness—including many who did not know Jimmy Harold and others who were clearly intimidated by the questioning of a white Army colonel—agreed that Harold had threatened Lee, despite constant prodding from Ristine.

  Moreover, Charles Meisel, a white retired Army master sergeant disturbed by what he had seen, testified that Lee had swung “almost indiscriminately…. That is what really shocked me, it was handled so crudely….There was no occasion to use the club.”

  Reporting his findings May 25, Ristine concluded that the guards were “justified” in using force. The “colored employees” were at fault for blocking the entrance, he wrote, and “their failure to…disperse constituted an unlawful assembly.” Ristine ignored the fact that it was the guards themselves who had blocked the door.

  Hastie had to fight for permission to review the testimony; reading it, he was appalled at the conduct of the investigation. In a memorandum to Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Hastie pointed to the “singularly unjudicial attitude of the investigating officer.” While dismissing the testimony of black witnesses, Ristine had accepted without reservation all the testimony of the white guards and contractor employees, all of whom had “a clear interest…either in protecting a fellow guard or in protecting their employer.”

  An aide to Patterson, agreeing that Ristine “was clearly not an objective investigator,” asked the inspector general to review the report. Examining his own office’s findings, Major General Virgil Peterson, the inspector general of the Army, backed Ristine’s investigation, and the matter was dropped. It was yet another dispiriting case for Hastie and his allies; around the country, physical violence and insults had been directed at blacks entering the Army.

  Yet the rebellion of the Ordnance employees at the Pentagon succeeded. Immediately upon hearing of the cafeteria disturbance on May 18, Somervell that day issued orders to Groves “to insure the discontinuance of any enforced segregation of negro employees in the cafeterias in the Pentagon building.” McShain, backed by Renshaw, protested that he had to comply with Virginia law and warned that allowing blacks and whites to eat together could cause labor disturbances among construction workers. But Somervell’s order stood.

  McFarland kept the colored dining room open in case black employees decided to eat in there voluntarily, but it was to no avail. “Not one of them would enter that room,” McFarland reported several days later. Henry Bennett, Ruth Bush, Laurel Carson, and, most of all, Jimmy Harold, had integrated the Pentagon.

  Popular Science schematic from 1943 showing interior of Pentagon.

  Miss Ten Thousand

  Opal Sheets did her best to ignore the parade of officials walking past her desk, but they would not go away. The twenty-four-year-old from Parsons, West Virginia, an administrative assistant to a colonel in the Services of Supply, had just moved into the Pentagon on that hot July day in 1942. “She’s the one,” she heard someone whisper.

  Before she could protest, Sheets was whisked away from her desk and brought outside the building to pose before waiting newspaper photographers. Next she was feted at a luncheon, given the seat of honor next to Lieutenant Colonel Renshaw. War Department PR men had decided it would be good publicity to make a big deal about the ten-thousandth employee to report to work at the Pentagon, and they made sure they picked an attractive woman. “Officially she is ‘Miss Ten Thousand,’ but off the record she is typical of the thousands of girls who keep the wheels moving in the War Department’s new building,” the Washington Daily News reported.

  Off the record, Miss Ten Thousand was impatient with the frivolity. Her brother Cecil—the youngest of the four Sheets boys from Parsons, a kid who joined the Army to see the world—had been in the Philippines when the Japanese landed and had surrendered with the rest of the U.S. and Filipino force in April on the Bataan Peninsula. He was now officially listed as missing in action. It would be years before she learned of the hell he went through on the Bataan Death March and his eventual death of malaria as a prisoner at Camp O’Donnell. Right now, Opal Sheets wanted to help her brother the best way she knew how, which was to get back to work.

  Yet she represented another remarkable milestone. It had been exactly a year since Somervell dreamed up the project, and already there were ten thousand employees working in the Pentagon, more than in any building in Washington. McShain’s workers had finished a million and a quarter square feet, and the Pentagon was two-thirds complete.

  By the time Opal Sheets posed for the cameras, it was obvious to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy that the Pentagon needed to be bigger. McCloy was in charge of allocating space in the building, and by July, every inch—including in the sections still under construction—had been assigned. Army departments clamoring for offices were told there was no more room in the Pentagon.

  Critical days were at hand for the War Department. After months of debate about where the Army should launch its war to liberate Europe, a decision was close. At the order of Roosevelt—and despite the misgivings of Henry Stimson and George Marshall—secret preparations would begin by the end of the month for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Stimson and Marshall were still in the Munitions Building, but the plan was to bring the high command into the Pentagon in the fall and guide the course of the war from there. The more of the War Department that could fit in the Pentagon, the better. “Without some cohesion there, without some center, we would have been in a bad way in the war,” McCloy later said.

  McCloy had an idea how to wring out more space. The building as designed included a fifth floor atop only the inner and outermost rings, A and E. This area, designed primarily as an attic to hold machinery and equipment, included space for storage but not much for people. On July 13, 1942, McCloy dashed off a memorandum to Somervell: Why not build a fifth floor atop all five rings of the Pentagon, and use as much of the space as possible for more offices? “In view of our growing need for space, I am wondering if it would not be wise to do this while the contractor is on the ground,” McCloy wrote. “It could be done much cheaper now while his equipment and personnel are on the job.

  “I am aware of the fact that we are short about $12,000,000 to complete the building as now planned, but since we are going to concentrate, why not do a good job of it?”

  Reviewing McC
loy’s suggestion, Somervell’s deputy, “Fat” Styer, agreed with the reasoning. “A decision should be made immediately if we are to go ahead with this,” he told Somervell. The latter’s reaction was succinct: “Okay. Where is money coming from?” Somervell wrote back. That was a good question. Nor was it the only one.

  Without a doubt, adding a full fifth floor at this late stage would delay the Pentagon’s completion. About 40 percent of the roof had already been put on the three intermediate rings, and roofers were hard at work building more. All that effort would be for naught. The building’s heating and cooling system, designed for four floors, would be thrown out of kilter. Areas of the building that had already been occupied by Army workers would become construction zones again. On top of all their other tribulations, the plank walkers would have to cope with construction workers building a new story over their heads.

  Groves notified Renshaw the next day that he might have to build a bigger Pentagon. Renshaw, likely numb to the prospect, raised no protest, but he begged for a quick decision. Memories were still fresh of the debacle after Pearl Harbor, when construction was paralyzed by the debate over whether to bombproof the building. Renshaw reported July 17 that adding a full fifth floor would provide 340,000 square feet of additional office space, room enough for another four thousand employees at the rate they were cramming them in.

  As he awaited a decision, Renshaw ordered a stop to all roofing work. “Each day we go ahead is going to cost us about $5,000 a day to rip out,” he said. But stopping the work meant finished areas of the building would be exposed to the elements. A powerful thunderstorm hit the site the night of July 20, accompanied by lightning that struck two Fort Myer soldiers on sentry duty and nearby flash floods that swept a three-year-old girl to her death. The storm dumped more than an inch of rain in less than a half hour onto the open building. “We had a gang—a couple hundred men—doing nothing but stopping leaks last night on those roofs that aren’t covered,” Renshaw complained the next day to Gar Davidson, Groves’s aide.