THE PENTAGON WARS LEGENDADO DOWNLOAD
THE PENTAGON WARS LEGENDADO DOWNLOAD
THE PENTAGON WARS LEGENDADO DOWNLOAD
THE PENTAGON WARS LEGENDADO DOWNLOAD
The creation of the Pentagon in seventeen whirlwind months during World War II is one of the great construction feats in American history, involving a tremendous mobilization of manpower, resources, and minds. In astonishingly short order, Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell conceived and built an institution that ranks with the White House, the Vatican, and a handful of other structures as symbols recognized around the world. Now veteran military reporter Steve Vogel reveals for the first time the remarkable story of the Pentagon's construction, from it's dramatic birth to its rebuilding after the September 11 attack.
At the center of the story is the tempestuous but courtly Somervell–"dynamite in a Tiffany box," as he was once described. In July 1941, the Army construction chief sprang the idea of building a single, huge headquarters that could house the entire War Department, then scattered in seventeen buildings around Washington. Somervell ordered drawings produced in one weekend and, despite a firestorm of opposition, broke ground two months later, vowing that the building would be finished in little more than a year. Thousands of workers descended on the site, a raffish Virginia neighborhood known as Hell's Bottom, while an army of draftsmen churned out designs barely one step ahead of their execution. Seven months later the first Pentagon employees skirted seas of mud to move into the building and went to work even as construction roared around them. The colossal Army headquarters helped recast Washington from a sleepy southern town into the bustling center of a reluctant empire.
Vivid portraits are drawn of other key figures in the drama, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who fancied himself an architect; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, both desperate for a home for the War Department as the country prepared for battle; Colonel Leslie R. Groves, the ruthless force of nature who oversaw the Pentagon's construction (as well as the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb); and John McShain, the charming and dapper builder who used his relationship with FDR to help land himself the contract for the biggest office bui lding in the world.
The Pentagon's post-World War II history is told through its critical moments, including the troubled birth of the Department of Defense during the Cold War, the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the tumultuous 1967 protest against the Vietnam War. The pivotal attack on September 11 is related with chilling new detail, as is the race to rebuild the damaged Pentagon, a restoration that echoed the spirit of its creation.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Washington Post journalist Vogel provides an incisive history of the Pentagon both as an architectural construct and as an American symbol, though not as an institution. Vogel traces the politics and design considerations involved in planning a new home for the previously scattered War Department (forerunner of today"s Department of Defense) in the early 1940s. Wartime conservation subsequently forced builders to use the least amount of steel possible, and much concrete. The Stripped Classical building—erected in 16 months at a cost of $85 million—was made with five sides chiefly because it lay on remnant acres between five appropriately angled roads. At the time, it was a massive undertaking: five concentric rings of offices, 17.5 miles of corridors and a five-acre central courtyard. Vogel demonstrates how planners conceived the structure as fitting into L"Enfant"s original plan for Washington, D.C., and goes on to depict it as a national icon. In thi s vein, Vogel describes the building as a target for protesters during the Vietnam War (with special attention to October 1967"s March on the Pentagon, immortalized in Norman Mailer"s Armies of the Night), and, of course, the 9/11 attack. Throughout, Vogel artfully weaves architectural and cultural history, thus creating a brilliant and illuminating study of this singular (and, in many ways, sacred) American space. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The Pentagon was constructed in a frantic rush in 1941–43; its physical history is as bland as poured concrete but as significant as the symbolism the building has acquired. Washington Post reporterVogel narrates the backroom handshakes that initiated the project—no environmental impact statements needed in 1941—and centers it on the army general in charge. Brehon Somervell sited it first on a pentagonal parcel adjacent to Arlington Cemetery, but FDR ordered it moved down the Potomac. Vogel introduces the architects, contractors, and workers involved; relates labor and social (i.e., segregation) incidents during the construction; and pauses for ideas proposed for postwar disposition of the Pentagon. It never became an archive center as FDR imagined, but instead was retrofitted, restored, and after 2001, partially rebuilt to maintain it as the American military"s central command post. Covering quotidian events such as broken pipes, eccentric ones su ch as Abbie Hoffman"s 1967 "levitation" of the building, and the devastating terrorist attack of 9/11, Vogel produces a comprehensive biography of the Pentagon. Taylor, Gilbert
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Steve Vogel is a veteran military reporter for The Washington Post. His coverage of the war in Afghanistan was part of a package of Washington Post stories selected as a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He covered the September 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon and subsequently reported in-depth on the victims of the attack and the building's reconstruction. The winner of several journalism awards, Vogel covered the war in Iraq and the first Gulf War, as well as U.S. military operations in Rwanda, Somalia, and the Balkans. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he received a master's degree in international public policy from the Paul H. Nitze Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by James MannThe Pentagon was built upon a foundation of lies, secrecy and cost overruns. When the gargantuan five-sided structure was being constructed with miraculous speed at the start of World War II, the officials responsible for the new War Department headquarters told a series of untruths about what was in the works.
At the time, Congress and the press were asking too many questions. Harry Truman, the junior senator from Missouri, had skillfully homed in on excesses in military spending. When the plans for a new office building for the U.S. military were brought before the Senate on Aug. 14, 1941, Sen.
Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. "Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size?" he asked. "Or is the war to be permanent?" And so, as Steve Vogel recounts in The Pentagon, the military officials in charge of constructing the new War Department headquarters dissembled. They claimed that the building would be much smaller than it was and that it would have considerably fewer people working there than it did. They repeatedly lied about money, at first claiming the building would cost less than $35 million, then later raising the figure to $49 million, when in fact they were hiding expenses of over $75 million.
Amazingly, they even told whoppers about how many floors the building would have. War Department officials had originally promised Congress the building would have only three stories -- but the "basement" turned out to be a fourth floor above ground, with a "sub-basement" beneath and a "sub-sub-basement" under that. Then, before the building was completed and after they had fessed up to four floors, War Department officials secretly added a fifth floor on top of the whole thing, burying the plan in congressional documents as merely "fourth floor intermediate."
The result was an edifice so overwhelming that no one could quite get a handle on it. By mid-1942, a joke was already making the rounds (still told in various forms today) about a messenger who got lost in the Pentagon and came out a lieutenant colonel. When Dwight Eisenhower moved to the Pentagon after commanding allied forces in World War II, he went astray on the way back to his office from the general officers" mess. "I walked and walked, encountering neither landmarks nor people who looked familiar," he recalled. Giving up, he asked a stenographer where he could find the office of the army chief of staff. "You just passedional Cemetery. In 1941, the War Department was supposed to move into a new building in Foggy Bottom, where the State Department is now located, until President Franklin Roosevelt decided that with war appdaily, requiring about 5,500 tons of sand and gravel, 937 tons of cement and 115,000 gallons of water every day," writes Vogel at one point. If you like senten ces such as that one, you"ll love The Pentagon. If not, you"ll wish that its sometimes-ponderous 500-page narrative had been edited down to perhaps 350 pages.
Vogel"s other problem, not necessarily of his own making, is that the book"s leading character, Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, isn"t all that interesting. As the Army official in charge of supply and logistics, Somervell supervised the construction of the Pentagon. From his vantage point in the Senate, Truman considered Somervell a martinet who "cared absolutely nothing about money." But Somervell was mostly a bureaucrat"s bureaucrat, which doesn"t make for great reading.
The most interesting character in The Pentagon is Roosevelt. In the midst of impending war, he took the time to oversee the details of the Pentagon"s construction. He made the choice for the site. (When Somervell tried to lobby for a different tract of land in Arlington, Roosevelt told him, "My dear general, I"m still commander-in-chief of the Army.") The president was also closely involved in the building"s design -- as he had earlier been for National Airport, Bethesda Naval Hospital and even the Jefferson Memorial. How many presidents, in the modern era, would get involved in the architecture and the construction of federal buildings? (Not too many, one
hopes.)
Indeed, the Pentagon"s quick recovery from the Sept. 11 attack is due in part to an accident of Roosevelt"s design. He had at first envisioned that after World War II, the War Department would be cut back in size and moved out of the Pentagon building, which would then be used as a repository for government records. So Roosevelt ordered Somervell to build the Pentagon with floors of unusual strength to hold lots of heavy file cabinets. "Sixty years later, Roosevelt"s tinkering paid off," Vogel writes. When American Airlines Flight 77 rammed into the building, its core withstood the blow.
The Pentagon endured; the damage was repaired within a year, well before the beginning of the war in Iraq. Roosevelt"s dream of turning the Pentagon into just an ordinary file repository remains unfulfilled.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
At the time, Congress and the press were asking too many questions. Harry Truman, the junior senator from Missouri, had skillfully homed in on excesses in military spending. When the plans for a new office building for the U.S. military were brought before the Senate on Aug. 14, 1941, Sen.
Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. "Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size?" he asked. "Or is the war to be permanent?" And so, as Steve Vogel recounts in The Pentagon, the military officials in charge of constructing the new War Department headquarters dissembled. They claimed that the building would be much smaller than it was and that it would have considerably fewer people working there than it did. They repeatedly lied about money, at first claiming the building would cost less than $35 million, then later raising the figure to $49 million, when in fact they were hiding expenses of over $75 million.
Amazingly, they even told whoppers about how many floors the building would have. War Department officials had originally promised Congress the building would have only three stories -- but the "basement" turned out to be a fourth floor above ground, with a "sub-basement" beneath and a "sub-sub-basement" under that. Then, before the building was completed and after they had fessed up to four floors, War Department officials secretly added a fifth floor on top of the whole thing, burying the plan in congressional documents as merely "fourth floor intermediate."
The result was an edifice so overwhelming that no one could quite get a handle on it. By mid-1942, a joke was already making the rounds (still told in various forms today) about a messenger who got lost in the Pentagon and came out a lieutenant colonel. When Dwight Eisenhower moved to the Pentagon after commanding allied forces in World War II, he went astray on the way back to his office from the general officers" mess. "I walked and walked, encountering neither landmarks nor people who looked familiar," he recalled. Giving up, he asked a stenographer where he could find the office of the army chief of staff. "You just passedional Cemetery. In 1941, the War Department was supposed to move into a new building in Foggy Bottom, where the State Department is now located, until President Franklin Roosevelt decided that with war appdaily, requiring about 5,500 tons of sand and gravel, 937 tons of cement and 115,000 gallons of water every day," writes Vogel at one point. If you like senten ces such as that one, you"ll love The Pentagon. If not, you"ll wish that its sometimes-ponderous 500-page narrative had been edited down to perhaps 350 pages.
Vogel"s other problem, not necessarily of his own making, is that the book"s leading character, Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, isn"t all that interesting. As the Army official in charge of supply and logistics, Somervell supervised the construction of the Pentagon. From his vantage point in the Senate, Truman considered Somervell a martinet who "cared absolutely nothing about money." But Somervell was mostly a bureaucrat"s bureaucrat, which doesn"t make for great reading.
The most interesting character in The Pentagon is Roosevelt. In the midst of impending war, he took the time to oversee the details of the Pentagon"s construction. He made the choice for the site. (When Somervell tried to lobby for a different tract of land in Arlington, Roosevelt told him, "My dear general, I"m still commander-in-chief of the Army.") The president was also closely involved in the building"s design -- as he had earlier been for National Airport, Bethesda Naval Hospital and even the Jefferson Memorial. How many presidents, in the modern era, would get involved in the architecture and the construction of federal buildings? (Not too many, one
hopes.)
Indeed, the Pentagon"s quick recovery from the Sept. 11 attack is due in part to an accident of Roosevelt"s design. He had at first envisioned that after World War II, the War Department would be cut back in size and moved out of the Pentagon building, which would then be used as a repository for government records. So Roosevelt ordered Somervell to build the Pentagon with floors of unusual strength to hold lots of heavy file cabinets. "Sixty years later, Roosevelt"s tinkering paid off," Vogel writes. When American Airlines Flight 77 rammed into the building, its core withstood the blow.
The Pentagon endured; the damage was repaired within a year, well before the beginning of the war in Iraq. Roosevelt"s dream of turning the Pentagon into just an ordinary file repository remains unfulfilled.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
DYNAMITE IN A TIFFANY BOX
Stimson looks for the right man
Henry Stimson was agitated. At age seventy-three, the secretary of war was the elder statesman of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet in both age and demeanor, known for his dignity, wisdom, and Yankee reserve. To his staff at the War Department, Stimson seemed "like the Rock of Ages." But he also was imbued with a deep streak of Old Testament temper, and an agitated Stimson was a fearsome thing. "Everybody always seemed to think of Stimson as a wonderful old gentleman," one officer later said. "He was old all right, but he was a tough guy. If he had to, he knew how and when to use profanity."
Stimson was swearing regularly in the fall of 1940. The largest peacetime military mobilization in American history had begun that spring, and it was bogged down. France had fallen in May, the Low Countries were overrun, and Britain was in grave danger. Roosevelt r esponded with a call to dramatically build the armed forces, and Congress answered with legislation raising the authorized strength of the Army eightfold, from 174,000 to 1.4 million. But before this great Army could be raised, it needed a roof.
Dozens of military camps had to be built immediately around the country to house and train hundreds of thousands of draftees. Work was flowing into the Army Quartermaster Corps's once-sleepy Construction Division at unprecedented levels; the division's monthly budget of less than $10 million soared to a figure eventually seventy times that amount. Orders to construct camps, munitions plants, housing projects, airfields, and ports were piling up. Construction headquarters took on the air of a Middle East bazaar, with some offices so crowded that workers had to hop over desks to move around. "The halls teemed with visitors, as contractors, materialmen, equipment dealers and a good many others beat a path to the men with a bill ion dollars to spend," the Army's official account of World War II construction in the United States notes.
The men with a billion dollars struggled and spent mightily, but soon fell on their faces. "They had gotten into desperate confusion," in Stimson's view. The mobilization of the entire Army was dangerously delayed by the construction mess. Almost nothing could be done until the facilities were built. General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, had set ninety-day deadlines to build the camps, an order that proved hopelessly unrealistic. By November 1940, good weather for construction was vanishing, and the pressure was increasing. With few camps finished, Marshall's ambitious schedule had to be drastically revised, and only token numbers of draftees called up. Guardsmen had quit jobs, vacated apartments, and left families to find they had no place to report. The Army was being portrayed by the press as an organization of dunces. "Even sadder th an the delays were some of Mr. Stimson's excuses," scolded Time magazine, which laid the blame on "the bumbling quartermasters."
Stimson was on his second stint as secretary of war, having served in the same job almost three decades earlier for President William Taft during the years leading up to World War I. Back then, he had seemingly endless time to get the Army ready for war, but no money. Now, Congress had appropriated fantastic streams of money, but there was no time.
"I am not satisfied [the Construction Division] is doing as rapid work as I think should be done," Stimson noted in his diary. As the delays stretched on, the secretary grew "more and more agitated," observed John J. McCloy, the "gnomelike" assistant secretary of war often at the old man's side. McCloy, an astute Wall Street lawyer, had been recruited by Stimson earlier that year and quickly earned a reputation as the secretary's top troubleshooter.
Stimso n told McCloy they needed someone with the "necessary drive" to speed up the construction program. "If only a good man could be found the problem would be solved," Stimson said. But who? The secretary's attention was directed to a dynamic Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant colonel, Brehon Somervell, who had turned around the Works Progress Administration program in New York City in four years as administrator. Stimson instructed McCloy to check with his New York connections about Somervell's temperament and ability. McCloy found Somervell had a "reputation as a driver and almost fearless energetic builder. . . . They all added up to the conviction that whatever the form of the organization, he was the man to head it."
Somervell was already slotted for a humdrum assignment with a training command in the Midwest, but Marshall intervened. "Have him assigned for temporary duty here in the office of the Chief of Staff," Marshall instructed his chief of pers onnel on November 8, 1940. ". . . Confidentially, the Secretary of War wants to get a look at him without Somervell being aware of this."
Stimson wanted to see this man for himself.
I suppose the fellow who built the Pyramids was efficient, too
None of Brehon Somervell's seven predecessors had fared well trying to tame New York City's work-relief system. "Several had resigned in despair or disgust, one had died, probably of overwork, and none had lasted a year," the New Yorker noted. There was no doubt that the New York office of the Works Progress Administration—the New Deal agency providing emergency public employment for the nation's jobless—was in dire need of assistance. The New York WPA was one of the largest employers in the nation, providing jobs for 200,000 workers, and it spent one out of every seven WPA dollars in the nation. The program was grossly inefficient, in part because of its immensity but also because the city w as home to powerful unions and left-wing parties that drew their support from the huge ranks of unemployed. WPA head Harry Hopkins had turned to the Army Corps of Engineers to bring some military discipline and engineering expertise to the agency.
Hopkins appointed Somervell Works Projects Administrator for New York City in the summer of 1936. "I consider it to be the most difficult WPA job in the nation," he said. Funding cuts that spring forced thousands off the WPA payrolls in New York, sparking almost daily picketing and sit-in strikes. Somervell's immediate predecessor, Victor Ridder, a philanthropist and liberal, had ended up foaming at the mouth about "Communist rats and vermin." He suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned. The communist newspaper Daily Worker, which had campaigned against him under the slogan "Get Rid of Ridder," crowed in victory. A similar fate was widely predicted for Somervell.
The only one not worried was Somervell. His first public comment on the fate of his predecessors was to cheekily suggest a new slogan for the Daily Worker: "Sink Somervell." Somervell found the idea of workers on relief going out on strike "just fantastic" and tried a different tack from his predecessors. Instead of sending police to forcibly eject the protesters—a step that guaranteed screaming headlines—Somervell simply locked the bathrooms. Strikers held out as long as their bladders did, then filtered off one by one.
Somervell imposed Army discipline on the WPA, threatening to fire any workers who interfered with the program. Leaving his office one day to find protesters had laid down in the pavement directly in front of his car, the colonel did not hesitate. He ordered his driver to start the car, hopped in, and slammed the door. When they realized Somervell was not stopping, the protesters leapt to their feet and fled. His war against shovel-leaners so aggrieved the Workers Alliance —the maj or WPA union—that it distributed cartoons depicting Somervell as Simon Legree, whirling a huge blacksnake whip above a terrified WPA worker. But Somervell soon made peace with labor; picket lines grew infrequent, and strikes a thing of the past. He cut administrative costs by two-thirds, bringing the WPA in line with private construction. Somervell transformed the sprawling, dysfunctional office into a quietly efficient billion-dollar business enterprise that laid sewers, built parks and playgrounds, battled child malnutrition, and constructed enough roads to reach Denver, by one estimate. "Charges of boondoggling, once the order of the day, have been rare during the Somervell administration," the New York Times reported. The local union head was obliged to admit Somervell had done an able job getting the WPA's management in hand, adding bitterly, "I suppose the fellow that built the Pyramids was efficient, too."
Somervell cut a dapper figure in his mufti and trademark bow tie, and his dry and carefree sense of humor won over the New York press. "Well, girls, what's wrong today?" he'd ask reporters, generally all men. He even chatted amiably with the Daily Worker reporter. "His manner is pleasant and shrewd, and there is a touch of Will Rogers in his public personality," the New Yorker said.
His amiability could not always mask his ferocious temper, made all the more striking by his otherwise elegant ways. "Dynamite in a Tiffany box," was how one industrialist would later describe Somervell. "He is out of the tradition of the Elizabethan Englishman, all lace and velvet and courtliness outside, fury and purposefulness within," a journalist wrote.
Somervell was one of only two men who could hold his own with New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia using the "Little Flower's" weapon of choice—a pair of lungs. The other, Robert Moses, the city's powerful redevelopment czar, would actuall y outyell La ...
DYNAMITE IN A TIFFANY BOX
Stimson looks for the right man
Henry Stimson was agitated. At age seventy-three, the secretary of war was the elder statesman of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet in both age and demeanor, known for his dignity, wisdom, and Yankee reserve. To his staff at the War Department, Stimson seemed "like the Rock of Ages." But he also was imbued with a deep streak of Old Testament temper, and an agitated Stimson was a fearsome thing. "Everybody always seemed to think of Stimson as a wonderful old gentleman," one officer later said. "He was old all right, but he was a tough guy. If he had to, he knew how and when to use profanity."
Stimson was swearing regularly in the fall of 1940. The largest peacetime military mobilization in American history had begun that spring, and it was bogged down. France had fallen in May, the Low Countries were overrun, and Britain was in grave danger. Roosevelt r esponded with a call to dramatically build the armed forces, and Congress answered with legislation raising the authorized strength of the Army eightfold, from 174,000 to 1.4 million. But before this great Army could be raised, it needed a roof.
Dozens of military camps had to be built immediately around the country to house and train hundreds of thousands of draftees. Work was flowing into the Army Quartermaster Corps's once-sleepy Construction Division at unprecedented levels; the division's monthly budget of less than $10 million soared to a figure eventually seventy times that amount. Orders to construct camps, munitions plants, housing projects, airfields, and ports were piling up. Construction headquarters took on the air of a Middle East bazaar, with some offices so crowded that workers had to hop over desks to move around. "The halls teemed with visitors, as contractors, materialmen, equipment dealers and a good many others beat a path to the men with a bill ion dollars to spend," the Army's official account of World War II construction in the United States notes.
The men with a billion dollars struggled and spent mightily, but soon fell on their faces. "They had gotten into desperate confusion," in Stimson's view. The mobilization of the entire Army was dangerously delayed by the construction mess. Almost nothing could be done until the facilities were built. General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, had set ninety-day deadlines to build the camps, an order that proved hopelessly unrealistic. By November 1940, good weather for construction was vanishing, and the pressure was increasing. With few camps finished, Marshall's ambitious schedule had to be drastically revised, and only token numbers of draftees called up. Guardsmen had quit jobs, vacated apartments, and left families to find they had no place to report. The Army was being portrayed by the press as an organization of dunces. "Even sadder th an the delays were some of Mr. Stimson's excuses," scolded Time magazine, which laid the blame on "the bumbling quartermasters."
Stimson was on his second stint as secretary of war, having served in the same job almost three decades earlier for President William Taft during the years leading up to World War I. Back then, he had seemingly endless time to get the Army ready for war, but no money. Now, Congress had appropriated fantastic streams of money, but there was no time.
"I am not satisfied [the Construction Division] is doing as rapid work as I think should be done," Stimson noted in his diary. As the delays stretched on, the secretary grew "more and more agitated," observed John J. McCloy, the "gnomelike" assistant secretary of war often at the old man's side. McCloy, an astute Wall Street lawyer, had been recruited by Stimson earlier that year and quickly earned a reputation as the secretary's top troubleshooter.
Stimso n told McCloy they needed someone with the "necessary drive" to speed up the construction program. "If only a good man could be found the problem would be solved," Stimson said. But who? The secretary's attention was directed to a dynamic Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant colonel, Brehon Somervell, who had turned around the Works Progress Administration program in New York City in four years as administrator. Stimson instructed McCloy to check with his New York connections about Somervell's temperament and ability. McCloy found Somervell had a "reputation as a driver and almost fearless energetic builder. . . . They all added up to the conviction that whatever the form of the organization, he was the man to head it."
Somervell was already slotted for a humdrum assignment with a training command in the Midwest, but Marshall intervened. "Have him assigned for temporary duty here in the office of the Chief of Staff," Marshall instructed his chief of pers onnel on November 8, 1940. ". . . Confidentially, the Secretary of War wants to get a look at him without Somervell being aware of this."
Stimson wanted to see this man for himself.
I suppose the fellow who built the Pyramids was efficient, too
None of Brehon Somervell's seven predecessors had fared well trying to tame New York City's work-relief system. "Several had resigned in despair or disgust, one had died, probably of overwork, and none had lasted a year," the New Yorker noted. There was no doubt that the New York office of the Works Progress Administration—the New Deal agency providing emergency public employment for the nation's jobless—was in dire need of assistance. The New York WPA was one of the largest employers in the nation, providing jobs for 200,000 workers, and it spent one out of every seven WPA dollars in the nation. The program was grossly inefficient, in part because of its immensity but also because the city w as home to powerful unions and left-wing parties that drew their support from the huge ranks of unemployed. WPA head Harry Hopkins had turned to the Army Corps of Engineers to bring some military discipline and engineering expertise to the agency.
Hopkins appointed Somervell Works Projects Administrator for New York City in the summer of 1936. "I consider it to be the most difficult WPA job in the nation," he said. Funding cuts that spring forced thousands off the WPA payrolls in New York, sparking almost daily picketing and sit-in strikes. Somervell's immediate predecessor, Victor Ridder, a philanthropist and liberal, had ended up foaming at the mouth about "Communist rats and vermin." He suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned. The communist newspaper Daily Worker, which had campaigned against him under the slogan "Get Rid of Ridder," crowed in victory. A similar fate was widely predicted for Somervell.
The only one not worried was Somervell. His first public comment on the fate of his predecessors was to cheekily suggest a new slogan for the Daily Worker: "Sink Somervell." Somervell found the idea of workers on relief going out on strike "just fantastic" and tried a different tack from his predecessors. Instead of sending police to forcibly eject the protesters—a step that guaranteed screaming headlines—Somervell simply locked the bathrooms. Strikers held out as long as their bladders did, then filtered off one by one.
Somervell imposed Army discipline on the WPA, threatening to fire any workers who interfered with the program. Leaving his office one day to find protesters had laid down in the pavement directly in front of his car, the colonel did not hesitate. He ordered his driver to start the car, hopped in, and slammed the door. When they realized Somervell was not stopping, the protesters leapt to their feet and fled. His war against shovel-leaners so aggrieved the Workers Alliance —the maj or WPA union—that it distributed cartoons depicting Somervell as Simon Legree, whirling a huge blacksnake whip above a terrified WPA worker. But Somervell soon made peace with labor; picket lines grew infrequent, and strikes a thing of the past. He cut administrative costs by two-thirds, bringing the WPA in line with private construction. Somervell transformed the sprawling, dysfunctional office into a quietly efficient billion-dollar business enterprise that laid sewers, built parks and playgrounds, battled child malnutrition, and constructed enough roads to reach Denver, by one estimate. "Charges of boondoggling, once the order of the day, have been rare during the Somervell administration," the New York Times reported. The local union head was obliged to admit Somervell had done an able job getting the WPA's management in hand, adding bitterly, "I suppose the fellow that built the Pyramids was efficient, too."
Somervell cut a dapper figure in his mufti and trademark bow tie, and his dry and carefree sense of humor won over the New York press. "Well, girls, what's wrong today?" he'd ask reporters, generally all men. He even chatted amiably with the Daily Worker reporter. "His manner is pleasant and shrewd, and there is a touch of Will Rogers in his public personality," the New Yorker said.
His amiability could not always mask his ferocious temper, made all the more striking by his otherwise elegant ways. "Dynamite in a Tiffany box," was how one industrialist would later describe Somervell. "He is out of the tradition of the Elizabethan Englishman, all lace and velvet and courtliness outside, fury and purposefulness within," a journalist wrote.
Somervell was one of only two men who could hold his own with New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia using the "Little Flower's" weapon of choice—a pair of lungs. The other, Robert Moses, the city's powerful redevelopment czar, would actuall y outyell La ...
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