Employee Explosion Transformed Washington

The newcomers needed housing, and quickly. Rents skyrocketed in the District, and thousands of residents rented out rooms in their homes, partly out of patriotism and partly for the extra income. People doubled or tripled up, sometimes sharing the same bed if they worked different shifts.

"Newcomers Discover Private Baths Went Out With Hitler," a Washington Post headline reported.

Ruth Reiter, then a junior at Theodore Roosevelt High School, was in a family of five living in a three-bedroom rowhouse near Seventh Place and Gallatin Street NW. With the invasion of "government girls," she recalled, the family decided to make room for four more people, renting out two of the bedrooms. They made extra sleeping places out of a hallway and converted porch.

"Somehow we managed," said Reiter, now Ruth Reiter Laubgross of Silver Spring.

But not without some frustration. The nine residents shared one bathroom, an inconvenience that inspired her at the time to write verse that began: "The guy who invented the bathroom ought to be shot; his idea ain't so hot."

Dozens of temporary office buildings, or "tempos," were strewn across the Mall, cluttering up the Reflecting Pool area, the Washington Monument grounds and Constitution Avenue.

As haphazard and provisional as the decisions made then seemed, several would have lasting effects.

The crowding led planners to send ever-larger federal agencies outside the city. As Brinkley notes, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to Philadelphia and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Richmond. That set a precedent for the decentralization of federal government offices, a trend that continued after the war.

The planning decision with the greatest impact, however, was the siting of the Pentagon.

Even before the war, the rapid buildup of U.S. forces demanded an enormous military complex. But there was simply not enough open land in the District to accommodate such a large project. Although some questioned the wisdom of creating such a large target -- or wondered what could be done with such a building after the war -- the planners pushed ahead.

The first proposed site was considered a horror by many. It was on land slated for the expansion of Arlington National Cemetery and, according to the Commission of Fine Arts, visitors to the Lincoln Memorial would have seen its 35 acres of roofs.

"We owe it to future generations of Americans not to destroy the beauty of the greatest capital city in the world by hurried, ill-considered schemes for the physical expansion of government departments," the commission wrote in a memo to reporters dated Aug. 1, 1941.

In a reflection of how easy it was to gain access to the White House, commission members arranged a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and told him that they wanted a different site and preferred a rectangular building. They won on the site, but not on the shape.

"Suggestion that a rectangular scheme be adopted was not favored by the President, who said a pentagonal building would be something different," according to the commission's minutes of Sept. 2, 1941.

John T. "Til" Hazel, who was then a youth and grew up to become one of Northern Virginia's most prominent developers, credits construction of the Pentagon with creating economic spinoffs across several generations -- from the housing developments in Fairlington and Shirlington, built almost immediately, to the growth of defense contractors in Northern Virginia several decades later.

The impact "went way beyond putting an enormous office building in a swamp," Hazel said.

The federal bureaucracy shrank some after the war, with the number of federal civilian workers in the Washington area dropping to about 205,000 in 1947. But after experiencing the excitement of wartime Washington, few newcomers wanted to leave town. The Board of Trade reported in 1945 that a poll showed about half the people who had flocked to the region during the war would stay, and about 40 percent planned to buy cars in the next two years.

Soon enough, those who left the federal workforce would find work in the private sector, and the great immigration into Washington would spill out into its suburbs.

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.

Tomorrow: The fight that African American veterans waged on two fronts.