December 1941 (12 page)

Progress in civil rights was slow at best in the North and had gone into reverse in the South. At Washington's National Airport, “The Southern Airs, a well-known National Broadcasting Co. colored quartet . . . were refused table service at the coffee shop . . . because of a Virginia segregation law.” The singers had driven to National from Williamsburg to catch a flight to Cincinnati, but it was canceled due to weather. The airport manager, John Groves, hid behind his little bureaucracy, claiming he did not know who had jurisdiction over the airport: the private owners of the coffee shop and restaurant, the Commonwealth of Virginia, or the District of Columbia. Waitresses had refused to serve the foursome. Representatives of the NAACP came to the airport to confer with the musicians and finally, accommodations were offered in the cafeteria “which has permanent facilities for serving colored guests” but not in main dining room of the airport or the coffee shop.
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Refusing, the Southern Airs departed, their dignity intact.

Yet contrary to what many people in the North thought, not everybody in the South was a racist. In Georgia, a prison camp warden, C. A. Jacobson, a white man, was sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary for the involuntary manslaughter of a black inmate, Louis Gordon, whom Jacobsen had placed in a “sweat box.” The jury deliberated for only forty minutes before convicting Jacobson.
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And yet, lynching was prevalent in the South—a tragic fact about American society that Adolf Hitler delighted in pointing out to the world.

In Florida, in a war game exercise, a group of “Negro troops” successfully “captured” MacDill Field. “Shortly before 10 o'clock the invaders ‘landed' from the bay, pushed through a gas barrage and smoke screen in utter darkness and had infiltrated the field before they were discovered.”
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Military leaders in Japan were naturally calling for the United States to stop aiding Gen. Chiang Kai-shek's forces in China, to give up any presence or designs in the Far East, and to “retire, strategically and politically, to the Western Hemisphere.” And in Washington, attention was fixed on the upcoming conference between President Roosevelt with Japanese ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and special envoy Saburo Kurusu.
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References to an old “Nine-Power Treaty,” were thrown around diplomatic circles, but the Japanese said recent events had rendered it null and void.

Halfway around the world at another conference, five Nazi operatives in the Far East met in Shanghai, “anxious to patch up an understanding so that Japan's resources in men and weapons may be turned elsewhere against Germany's enemies.”
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CHAPTER 4
THE FOURTH OF DECEMBER

“Defense Units Study Means to Protect Girls Hired by U.S.”

Washington Evening Star

“Jap Evacuation Ship Sails after Mail Is Ordered Taken Off”

Tucson Daily Citizen

“America-Firsters Japan's Ace in Hole”

Atlanta Constitution

“Jap Press Hurls Bolts at Allied Powers in Crisis”

Birmingham News

A
n explosive twenty-six-page memo marked “CONFIDENTIAL” arrived at the White House from the Office of Naval Intelligence, analyzing “JAPANESE INTELLIGENCE AND PROPAGANDA IN THE UNITED STATES” and under the heading marked, “Methods of Operation and Points of Attack,” it read, “The focal point of the Japanese Espionage effort is the determination of the total strength of the United States. In anticipation of possible open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii.”
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It also went into great detail about the subversive Japanese elements in the Hawaiian Islands. All the Japanese consulates on the West Coast were busily gathering information on the U.S. Navy, especially in the Pacific. One passage was underlined—perhaps by Roosevelt himself: “Recently it was brought to the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence that out of a total of 198 postal employees in Honolulu, 51 have dual citizenship and that the foreman in the registry section, Ernest Hirokawa, is an alien Japanese. As a result of this discovery that registered mail for the fleet stationed in Hawaiian waters is not routed directly to the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard as a security measure.” Chillingly, “. . . the [Japanese] Naval Inspector's Office . . . was primarily interested in obtaining detailed technical information which could be used to advantage by the Japanese Navy.”
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Washington, D.C., was experiencing growing pains. The nation's capital was filling up so quickly with new bureaucrats and new bureaucracies that Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, no stranger to political opportunism, proposed moving all agencies out of Washington that were not directly related to national defense. Naturally, he had in mind moving large chunks of the government to his home state and produced the mayor of Elkins, West Virginia, John C. Freeland, to attest to how his town was ready to handle thousands of new residents. “The delegation traveled 200 miles, mostly over fogbound mountains, this morning to attend [Randolph's] hearing,” as one report informed.
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The word
decentralization
was introduced into the political lexicon. Suddenly, members of Congress had all sorts of ideas about moving around the bureaucracy and coincidentally, all these suggestions were in their home states.

A great big new part of that bureaucracy was the massive building being assembled just across the Potomac to house the War Department. Five-sided, many storied, many ringed, and with roads going everywhere, it was already named the War Department Building. The site was a giant mess, but it was envisioned to become the largest building in the world when completed. The traffic in the area had already been chaotic at best, and the gigantic construction endeavor only added to drivers' and commuters' headaches. To ameliorate the complaints of local residents, the military announced it would hold a briefing for the public on the building, its construction, and the new road system being built “at a meeting . . . at 12:30 p.m. at the Harrington Hotel.” There, representatives of the Public Roads Administration, the Office of the Quartermaster General, architects, planning engineers, and top military brass explained the building, its workings, and answered all questions.
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No one was satisfied.

The army also announced with great fanfare the purchase of almost thirty-nine thousand acres in rural Virginia to add to the existing Ft. A.P. Hill facility. The cost was $1,206,000.
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Additional housing for nurses at Ft. Belvoir post, also in the Commonwealth, was announced, as well as expansion plans in other parts of the state.

Back across the river, the District of Columbia began to mandate fingerprints for business licenses, including “operators of massage, bowling, billiard . . . establishments, solicitors, private detectives, fortune tellers, clairvoyants and mediums . . . boxing promoters and applicants for liquor licenses.”
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The Young Democrats were planning to descend on Washington December 12 and 13, but they probably would not be fingerprinted.

Along with all the bureaucrats, Washington was filling up with women, as ever-more numbers of young ladies flooded into the nation's capital in search of employment with the national government on account of the war effort. The Consumer and Welfare Committee and the District Defense Committee of the city of Washington announced plans to form groups to meet them at the train and bus stations “in an attempt to keep girls . . . away from questionable rooming houses.” Their stated goal was to call “attention to the bad character of some of the establishments encountered.”
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In simpler language, they wanted to keep these impressionable young girls—some literally just off the farm—from falling into prostitution. And the best way to promote clean living, it was thought, was by associating with decent people in decent parts of town with decent housing.

These were not “Rosie the Riveter” blue-collar laborers but instead “Tessie the Typist”—sprightly young girls in search of white-collar employment in steno pools, as clerk typists, filing clerks, secretaries, and certainly as “Girl Fridays,” though undoubtedly there were more than a few men in Washington who wanted them for “Girl Friday Nights.”

Problem was there was little good housing to speak of in Washington, which despite its status as the nation's capital was a dirty and humid backwater. Indeed, there has been little decent housing since its founding as the federal city—especially since the residents of the better neighborhoods fought the city's Zoning Commission when it planned to allow for rooming houses in their neighborhoods with zoning variances.

After a protracted fight and over objections from civic groups, the Zoning Commission shoved through the desired changes in the law and announced a new plan to allow up to four tenants to rent rooms in residential homes. It would only be “abandoned at the end of the national emergency proclaimed by President Roosevelt or by December 31, 1945, whichever date is reached first.”
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The lead editorial in the
Washington Evening Star
the next day was not about the war in Europe or the situation in the Pacific, but the decision of the Zoning Commission and the newspaper's concern about the new regulations.
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The state of affairs was worse in New York and other defense “boom towns” for young women. Though money was flowing out of Washington to defense contractors and as many as 1.5 million people had relocated to take jobs in national defense, “for the average woman and girl employee it's a story of inflated living costs and inadequate rates of pay.” A study was issued by the U.S.O. and the Y.W.C.A. saying, “No one takes responsibility for their welfare, and girls, many of them never having held jobs before and drawn by the thousands into these boom towns, have found their wages, averaging from $18 to $20 a week, almost entirely consumed by board and high rentals, with little or no money left over for clothing and recreation . . . Involved is a pay rate of 40 cents an hour, 45 cents on night shifts with . . . facilities often so poor that the ‘morale' service had put up tents with cots and equipment for doing laundry. . . . Girls are sharing not only rooms, but beds, with native commuters resenting intruders as ‘trailer trash' and refusing to house single girls because they are waitresses or munitions workers.”
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One could not help notice the change in Washington and across the country with the growing number of working women, and not just in the war effort. So many women now had jobs that department stores began having “Night Sales” to accommodate women who could not get out of the office for daytime sales. To keep the girls from being taken advantage of by renters, the city instituted rent control and appointed a “Rent Czar.”
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A number of profile stories were devoted to some of the young women who had streamed into Washington. They worked long days, socialized in the evenings, and did charity work, such as volunteering for “Bundles for Bluejackets,” where they learned to knit windbreakers and sweaters for American sailors operating in the cold north Atlantic.
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Sumner Wells, the undersecretary of state, and his wife offered to the American Women's Voluntary Service the use of their stables on Massachusetts Avenue, but they were rejected as they could only accommodate around two hundred girls, said Miss Anita Phipps, chairman of the A.W.V.S. On the morning of December 3, on the front page of the
Washington Post
, “an attractive girl . . . Miss Lila Quick, a 19-year-old Veterans Administration worker” was reported missing. Miss Quick had only arrived in the nation's capital several months earlier from Birmingham, Alabama.
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The city also announced its “first woman air raid warden, Miss Mary Mason.” She worked for the National Broadcasting Company as well as serving as a member of the Home Economics Association.
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The
Birmingham News
ran an entertaining regular feature on the front page entitled “No Man's Land in Washington; Lulu Tells Betty What's Going On.” In the guise of a letter, it opened, “Dear Betty, I have been too busy with defense work to write you lately. Let us make a New Year resolution ahead of time to write more often in the future. Speaking of the future, in some ways it looks brighter, in others more depressing. From all I hear, the ‘peace emissary' from Tokyo, Suburo Kuruso, came to Washington just to stall for time. There are few persons here who believe his intentions were ever honorable. If all negotiations fail between Tokyo and Washington, then look out for trouble P.D.Q.”
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Traffic fatalities had skyrocketed in Washington over just one year, possibly because more drivers were speeding, certainly because there were more drivers, and possibly because of the growing sense of crisis in the city. It was not unusual for a child, alighting from a school bus, to be mowed down by a car.

Perhaps some drivers had become impatient, as some most surely had when a convoy of two thousand cars “containing infantry and mechanizedtroops” rolled through Washington on a weekday “en route from the Carolina maneuvers to Camp Edwards, Mass. Washington traffic police routed the division over Key Bridge, Canal Road, Foxhall Road, Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues to the District line.” And later that afternoon, an additional 350 army vehicles were expected to make the approximate same route through Washington.
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