David Brinkley - Washington Goes to War

Much of what I recount in this book is based on my own memories of wartime Washington. But I have relied as well on interviews with others; on various archives and manuscript collections; and on a range of published sources.

Particularly helpful were the reminiscences of a number of men and women who lived in Washington during the war and were kind enough to agree to share their thoughts about those years with me. They include: Ellen Beckman, one of the first Waves; Herbert Blunck, the manager of the new Statler Hotel; Sherman Briscoe, one of the few black employees of the Department of Agriculture; Mrs. Richard Coe, a writer for the Washington Post and various womens magazines; the Reverend Clarence Crawford, pastor of a Baptist church; Olivia Davis, who owned the Merryland Night Club; Alan Dickey, an architect on the Pentagon project; Ymelda Dixon, who (with her husband George Dixon, the newspaper columnist) chronicled and participated in the wartime party frenzy; William Donohoe, a Pentagon public information officer at the time of Pearl Harbor; Mrs. Henry Grattan Doyle, a personnel officer in the Treasury Department who helped the frightened and bewildered girls who came to Washington to work; John Kenneth Galbraith, who was director of price controls in OPA during the war; Mrs. Mibray German, a public school teacher; David Ginsburg, general counsel to the OPA and a friend of Leon Henderson; Gilbert Hahn, of an old Washington merchant family, whose stores sold rationed shoes; Colonel West Hamilton, one of the few high-ranking black officers in the World War II army; Loraine Inman, a government girl manning an army typewriter; Professor Elmer Kaiser of George Washington University, an adviser to the navy on maritime history; Sam Jack Kaufman, conductor of the pit band for the Capitol Theater stage shows; Pat King, a member of the staff of the British embassy; William Lind, a G.I. stationed in Washington during the war, later a member of the staff of the National Archives; C. J. Mack, manager of the Mayflower Hotel; Harry McAlpin, a black journalist and government official; Leila McKnight, who worked on the Board of Economic Warfare; Hope Ridings Miller, society columnist for the Washington Post; Clarence Mitchell, of the NAACP; James Nabrit, of the Howard University Law School; Dr. Harold Pinkett, an archivist and an expert on the history of the Washington black community; James Powell, a member of the District of Columbia police force; Paul Scott Rankin, a member of the staff of the British embassy; Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a New Deal lawyer who wrote the presidential order establishing the FEPC; Reginald Redmond, a bellman at the Mayflower Hotel; Edward Reese, an employee of the Pentagon during the war; Vivian Ronca, who lived in the Wave barracks on Nebraska Avenue; Thomas Saltz, of Lewis & Thomas Saltz, mens clothiers; Alfred Edgar Smith, Harry Hopkinss Negro adviser and a columnist for the Chicago Defender; William Traxler, a bellman at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel; Frank Waldrop, editorial page editor of the Washington Times-Herald; Mary Warfield, a Washington housewife left alone in the city with her children while her husband served in the army; Paul Young, owner of the Connecticut Avenue restaurant that once bore his name.

Records in the National Archives of the following agencies and organizations were also useful: the Office of Price Administration (Record Group 188), the Office of Civilian Defense (171), the Office for Emergency Management (214), the War Production Board (179), the National Capital Planning Commission (328), the Alley Dwelling Authority (302), the Department of State (59), the National War College Library (334), the Fair Employment Practices Commission (228), the District of Columbia Government (351), the Army Services Decimal Files (328), the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds (42).

A great variety of collections at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park contain material relating to the impact of the war on life in bureaucratic Washington as well as to the social climate of the city. I have made use of material from the presidential papers themselves as well as from the collections of Adolph A. Berle, Frederic A. Delano, the Democratic National Committee, Stephen T. Early, Leon Henderson, Harry Hopkins, and Samuel I. Rosenman. Also of value are the following collections in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress: Raymond Clapper, Tom Connally, Joseph E. Davies, Elmer Davis, Felix Frankfurter, William Hassett, Harold Ickes, James Landis, Evalyn Walsh McLean, Eugene Meyer. Important material on the Washington black community is available in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection at Howard University; among the relevant collections are those of Marian Anderson, Charles Burch, Jeannette Carter, Thomas Clark, Charles Drew, Edwin Henderson, Howard University, Charlotte Hubbard, Campbell Johnson, Pauli Murray, the Promethean Collection, the Civil Rights Documentation Oral History Project. An extensive and valuable collection of newspaper clippings is available in the Washingtoniana Room of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library.