David Brinkley's well known dry wit here mixes with his delight in all things human to produce one of the finest books on wartime life 'back home'. Moreover, with the possible exception of Gore Vidal, few writers have given us a sharper look in any age at the doings within and around our nation's capital.
Brinkley was there when Washington left behind forever its previous role as a quiet government town living at a Southern pace, and morphed suddenly into a bustling wartime metropolis. Washington suddenly was engulfed in hundreds of thousands of new workers, all desperately seeking housing that simply didn't exist. This population explosion ceated a crazy shortage, where tens of thousands of newly hired government workers slept in different shifts in the same constantly used beds, inside row upon row of uncomfortable temporary thrown-up quarters.
Here is Brinkley on the fundamental changes air conditioning wrought;
"...by the late 1930's some members (of Congress) had discovered the comforts of the air conditioning in the Fox, the Capitol, the Earle and the RKO Keith movie theaters downtown. They asked to have cool air pumped into the House and Senate chambers and into their office buildings across the street. And so, in 1938, the United States Congress made a fateful decision that a few of the more canterkerous members said foretold the collapse of the Republic. It installed air conditioning. With its chambers and offices cool and pleasant, some predicted, Congress would stay in session all year and pass the additional time making even longer and more tiresome speeches, enacting more laws, spending more money and running the national debt still higher. Longer sessions, they said, would mean more government and more taxes, more forms for the people to fill out and more bureaucrats hired to read and file them...(the Senate) was a gentleman's club with but one woman senator, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, who sat in the chamber every day, knitting, listening and saying nothing."
Or this line, presaging today's, "A Crisis is a terrible thing to waste."
Quotes Brinkley of Senator Vandenberg in his diary, "The worst of it (The usurption of Congressional authority by FDR's endless wartime agencies) is that there is still a substantial New Deal sector in high places which will constantly think of the war in terms of new opportunites for further New Deal experiments."
Brinkley writes with a fine journalist's sharp eye for concrete details - names, places and dates all mix together the anecdotal and the factual in a swirling tempo of good writing and delightfully engaging story-telling. He manages the remarkable feat of making something interesting out of the drab universe of Washington's Alphabet agencies, endless bureaus, and engulfing confusion of regulations and petty political interests.
Most impressive of all is Brinkley's unflinching writing on the conditions faced by Washington's largest citizen group - the thousands of poor blacks struggling to survive in ghettos all but under the shadow of the Capitol dome.
One of the best American memoirs I've ever read.
Highest recommendation!
For a humorous take on the Washington wartime housing shortage, consider watching George Stevens film, "The More the Merrier" with Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea and an Oscar-winning supporting performance by Charles Coburn as industrialist matchmaker "Mr. Dingle".
The More the Merrier
There is also a hilarious play from the period on the housing shortage, "The Doughgirls", made into an farcical film (1944) starring Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith and featuring a wildly zanic performance by Eve Arden as a Russian woman sniper who takes midnight strolls back and forth with rifle between Washington and Baltimore!
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