I Am a Bureaucrat

by JONATHAN DANIELS

1

IN THESE last two years all the trains coming into Washington have seemed to pour out contractors, industrialists, consultants, and above all — vastly above all — bureaucrats. I know. I’m one.

But one day there is going to be another train. Indeed, it already exists in the often wistful private post-war planning of for-war-only bureaucrats. N. R. Howard, Republican editor of the Cleveland News who came to help run the Office of Censorship, first described it. Perhaps he first dreamed it. It is going to be the first home-going train after the war, on which he said he expected to be. I want a seat, or a strap to hang on, or even standing space on the platform.

It will be bulging with such bureaucrats as bankers and editors and industrialists, with scientists and experts, strong people and strange ones, patriots, professors, and those who came merely as passengers to the war in Washington and go merely as passengers from it. Even by the stand-up standards of war transportation, that train is going to be crowded if anything like the number who talk about it get on it. Toot! Toot! We’re already blowing for the crossing back home, and that doesn’t mean we expect to get back home soon.

Not many of us were brought to Washington by force. I can testify for myself. The executive telephoned and I was in town on the next train. He was — and is — a little man with a mouth like a hardware store mousetrap. He sat across the desk in the half-furnished office of the apartment house which had been taken over for the duration, and talked about the war like a man biting it. He had a tough job to do. The war agency was in trouble. He was reorganizing it. Would I come to Washington and go to work?

I looked out across Dupont Circle with its trees dark bare in the sunshine of February, 1942. Back home in North Carolina, spring in a fewr weeks would be pushing up the jonquils in my garden. I had a lovely house. From my point of view I had the best job in the world. At forty a man doesn’t move easily from content.

“When did you want me to come?”

“Now.”

I tried to look doubtful. I had never had a government job before. I had never wanted one. But secretly I knew that ever since December 7 I had been hell-bent for bureaucracy.

The first four nights in Washington, I slept in four different beds. I discovered in a personal hurry all the crowding that has been so much written about since. I discovered also that the agency of my new allegiance was not only having difficulties but that some of the newspapers had apparently mistaken it for an enemy force. I took off my hat and began ducking editorial missiles at the same time. It was good practice for an editor and writer who had always been on the throwing end.

I looked for a house after work and after dark, often long after dark, and when my wife saw it she said she could well believe that was what I had done. Later, when the Rent Commission cut the rent, the landlord acted as if I had stolen it in the dark.

The important fact from the standpoint of both law and shelter was that we were in. Whatever my wife’s architectural and other prejudices against it might be, it was a house. We stayed gratefully in it while the number of fellow government employees and house-hunters in Washington rose to its peak of 287,244 in February, 1943. There were 161,392 of us then who had added our names to the public payroll in the Washington area since Hitler with the help of his bureaucracy marched into Poland.

Of course bureaucracy bulged. Yet strangely (and I don’t expect my wife to believe it), in the period of Washington’s greatest and fastest growth in bureaucracy, during the two years before the summer of 1943, the Washington percentage of the national bureaucracy declined. New York and Chicago had almost as many civilian government employees as Washington. Employment in Washington had more than doubled, but the total national bureaucracy had been multiplied by three since 1939, to a war top in 1943 of 3,252,598.

Bureaucracy, I regret to report, is not simple, even in terms of the simplest impressions about it. Take, for instance, the picture of the bureaucrat as a man or a woman at a desk in Washington. More than 90 per cent of the bureaucrats aren’t in Washington, and over 60 per cent of them work in establishments that build, repair, and service battleships, torpedoes, guns, and other munitions of war.

Washington is big enough, nevertheless. Who took our tires and weaned our cars, limited our coffee? The answer goes from the questions like an arrow. The bureaucrats. I raise no shield against these darts. I can report, however, that while the country (with some political assistance in the aiming) has concentrated on bureaucracy in Washington as the target of all its complaints in a continent being converted with speed to war, my wife has acquired a strong personal feeling about bureaucracy, too. She packed and came. As a bureaucrat’s wife in Washington, which not only upsets her sinus but her soul also, she has stood in all the lines bureaucrats require of all Americans.

“A bureaucrat,” she says, with familiar bitterness and personal knowledge, “is a man with a wife and four children being cussed out for living where he doesn’t want to live, at an increasing rate of expense and a declining measure of comfort.”

That definition may not always fit with exactness, but it fits her darkest hours as a bureaucrat’s wife. I think she gets as much release from saying it in those dark hours as any bureaucrat’s wife in Minneapolis or Fort Worth.

2

THERE have been dark times. I have had my share of both frustration and satisfaction — although sometimes it has been hard to tell them apart. I think I know the joys and tribulations of the bureaucrat. Sometimes it scares me — and scares my wife worse — that I have grown more accustomed to the ways of bureaucracy now. There is less pain, but also less elation, in it. For me the best times of my personal adventure in bureaucracy will always seem the first difficult, dark times.

That early darkness was lit by a sense of urgency. The directness of personal participation had not been dulled by a recognition of elaborate processes in government. There was more confusion. The crowding of people and times was new. Washington worked harder then — and drank harder. It talked more and — if possible — louder. It slows down now, not in relaxation of effort, I believe, but in greater order in effort. Liquor is scarcer and hours are more regular.

I remember that when Byron Price, in the roaring spring of 1942, issued an order that nobody in the Office of Censorship was to be permitted to work more than six days running, somehow it seemed a little unpatriotic, even if it was also one of the signs of a beginning of wisdom. It takes order, including the order of records and papers and “official channels,” to win a war, even if the first wild patriotic frenzy was more dramatic. I betray my own past contempt for clerks and charts and red tape to say it, but it was only as we began out of our war-gathered diversity to become bureaucrats that the essential bureaucracy of war began to work. And all that I am trying to say — and I can say it with confidence — is that, with plenty of all too human faults and failures to their discredit, bureaucrats are working men.

I hasten to add that the conventional bureaucrat of the most irate cartoons is not necessarily angry fiction. The madman who is reputed to design the OPA documents in a perverted determination to outrage the American people — particularly those Americans who are eager for their share of sacrifice but prefer to wait until a perfect system of sacrifice is devised — is notoriously a well-known Washingtonian. Everybody knows him, even if nobody can find and identify him.

A good deal less well known, but a bureaucrat clearly discernible and definitely fixed in his civil service status after twenty-five years of government employment, is John C. Garand, a Professional class 7, taking $6500 a year out of the public payroll but not taking a penny of royalties on his rifle. Mr. Garand and his fellow government employees have made nearly 90 per cent of the rifles used by our troops — and made them for $14 per rifle less than the same Garand rifle costs when made in private plants.

Actually there are many more bureaucrats than the three million on the public payroll. At a time when war has become the one customer, government in effect signs all the pay checks. Henry Kaiser, for example, is “reimbursed” from the Treasury for the wages he pays. He doesn’t make a “ profit.” He gets a fee for the ships — and one big enough to be quite satisfactory to Mr. Kaiser. He does not take a risk; he provides managerial skill. His fees and his workmen’s wages both come straight out of the United States Treasury in a war in which we are nearly all bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats, including me and perhaps you, are funny people nevertheless. It might be a sad day for democracy if the bureaucrat in wartime or peacetime ceased to seem a sort of fellow with his head through the hole in a carnival game in which every citizen has a right to throw a baseball. There’s more sport in the hitting than the ducking.

There’s a special variety in the people at the ducking end now. Certainly that’s so in Washington, where we are all classified and sorted. A P-47 is a fighter plane, but a P-7 is a bureaucrat. In Washington a P-7 likes to think of himself as a fighter, too, if not quite the equal in pay or power of a CAF-15. The P, as a wartime bureaucrat learns quickly, means Professional classification and the CAE is Clerical, Administrative, and Fiscal. The numbers following the letters are the ranks similar to the more familiar ranks of those beside us in uniform.

Some colonels and majors and commanders are bureaucrats, too, as much men of the desk and the conference as we are. Some of them, of course, are fighting men trapped in both uniform and bureaucracy like those young officers in the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics who hung out a service flag when one of their number was lucky enough to be ordered to sea. “ Praise the Lord and pass the correspondence ” is a sad Washington war song of the young and the brave — as well as of the fat and the bald, the starry-eyed and the merely dull, to whom, in Washington as elsewhere, the war is sometimes giving a second chance.

3

I MUST honestly and sadly record that sometimes the war — or perhaps it is just bureaucracy — can do strange things to the sensible citizen in a government office building. No incurable civilian in a soldier suit can ever look and act funnier in the army than some bureaucrats after exposure to some contagious comic aspects of the capital. Along Constitution Avenue there are offices — strangely or not, built by the Republicans — which almost seem designed to scare taxpayers. These marble temples prompt the grand manner.

Rank in bureaucracy wears its badges — and sometimes wears them a little ludicrously. It may seem to make a lot of difference in the rank of a man — or the stubbornness of his secretary — who gets on the telephone first and waits for the other man. There may be a world of difference as to whether the bureaucrat has one or two pens in his desk fountain pen holder.

Has he a private water carafe? How many glasses? If he breaks the ones he has, can he get any more? Is there a car assigned to him? (I know several generals who have private planes, but only one civilian agency that has one.) How many lines has he to his telephone box?

The hideous dark leather couch, which all Congressmen get as a matter of course, may among bureaucrats be an emblem of eminence. And a rug on the floor, green or brown or crimson, has a meaning both in the grand Constitution Avenue buildings Mr. Hoover built, but did not long occupy, and the hot “temporaries” which have been run up since the war. The rug business is the more acute, I understand, because some moths got into a warehouse full of government office furnishings about the time the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

One of my best friends in bureaucracy, Wilbur Schramm of Iowa, had a rug experience as a man in government trying to bring the pen to the aid of the sword. He came into his office one day and found a corps of men taking up his red rug. The rug was a little worn, even a little raveled at the edges, but in a sense it had been his badge, all that he had as uniform in an increasingly uniformed city in which the best men will eagerly work for $2400 as a captain who would scorn $8000 as a CAF-15.

“Wait a minute,” Schramm said. “What goes on?”

The bureaucrat in charge of the other rug-moving bureaucrats eyed my friend sadly and sternly, as only a man in the administrative services can be sad and stem together.

“Now, now,” he said, “don’t you know there is a war going on? These are serious times. What do you care about a rug?”

Bureaucrat Schramm dropped his eyes in shame to the half-rolled rug of which he was already half robbed, but he lifted them again in indignation.

“Who,” he demanded, “ is this strutting so-and-so that’s got to have my rug in the middle of a war?”

I have not been able to determine to my own satisfaction when these newr bureaucrats began to be wartime bureaucrats and not just bureaucrats. There is a civil service order of March 15, 1942, which makes it clear that those who came after that date acquire no permanent civil service status — the government can be quickly rid of them when it wishes to be. But men and women, good ones and bad ones, began coming to Washington for “defense” long before they came for “war.” I remember I was asked to come to Washington in the “defense” days and was rather shocked at the idea.

Perhaps the beginning of the wartime bureaucracy can best be fixed around June 1, 1940. Among others, Donald Nelson and Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., were called to Washington the day after the King of the Belgians surrendered on May 28, 1940. Henry Lewis Stimson, who had been Taft’s Secretary of War and Hoover’s Secretary of State, and Frank Knox, who had run for Vice President on the Republican ticket in 1936, were named Secretaries of War and Navy on June 21, 1940, almost coincident with the fall of France. Republican politicians noted also an alarming coincidence with the national political conventions of that year. A matter of days later, Colonel William J. Donovan, former Republican candidate for governor of New York and Federal official under both Coolidge and Hoover, was beginning his bureaucracy as an observer in Europe.

William S. Knudsen, who came from General Motors, and is now a general, is the hero of the often-told story about the list after list of appointees in war production presented by him to the President for approval. The President noted that all were consistently Republican. Knudsen explained that big businessmen just did not come as Democrats. The President approved the lists. But one day, when a new list was presented, the President called Knudsen in.

“Bill,” he said gravely, “it’s hard to believe, but you must have made a mistake.”

“Vat’s dat, Mr. President?”

“I’ve looked over this list and there’s a Democrat on it.”

“Oh, no, Mr. President. No mistake,” said the Danish-born industrialist, “no mistake. He vas a Democrat but he voted for Villkie.”

That story has not seemed so funny to some of the President’s party associates as it has seemed to him. Some of them have given currency to the wartime saying: “It is not necessary to be a Republican to get a job in Washington — but it helps.”

4

STORIES like this do not go unchallenged. The war bureaucrat has been presented as a wild-eyed New Dealer engaged in reforming the world under only the most transparent and casual pretense of trying to win the war. Or the government employee for war only is a shrewd and unemotional businessman shaping war to serve business interests. He’s a Democrat interested in advancing a fourth term, or a Republican working from within to do as much damage as he can. He’s seeking the domination of America by Communism, or he’s another fellow who wants to turn the Republic over to cartels. After nearly two years in Washington I would be the last man to deny categorically the existence of any one of them or their friends and companions in Washington.

There have been cases, of course, when the chance for the man, regardless of political or economic philosophy, was greater than the government’s chance with him. Not only have many men come to work for less; some men in Washington, as elsewhere, have worked for more than they ever saw before. Some big men have given devotion to little jobs, while there have been cases of little men being newly noisy in bigger ones.

Some funny fellows follow the flag. I remember one man who was ardently seeking a chance to serve. Soon after Leo Crowley assumed the terrific task of administering our foreign economic operations abroad this gentleman asked me to assist him in making an engagement to see Mr. Crowley.

“Mr. Crowley’s pretty busy,” I suggested. “What did you want to see him about?”

He hesitated. “Well,” he said, “confidentially, I’m in some trouble with a woman and I’d like to serve my country overseas.”

Sometimes the good idea and the bad one get mixed up in a government so big that man and memory cannot hold all the details. A man I know was called to the Navy Department for a special task. He reported that in the bureau to which he was attached he made his study and then, to test his findings against the minds of his more seasoned associates in bureaucracy, wrote and dispatched an interoffice memo to his associates with regard to it. He waited but he got no response. Then at last timidly he asked one of those to whom he had sent his memo if he had received it.

The more seasoned bureaucrat looked at him with some pity.

“You haven’t been here long,” he said.

“No,” my friend admitted.

Out of some humanity lingering in him in the dull echelons of the government service, the veteran explained the situation. In that bureau, all interoffice memoranda had to be written on blue paper. It was the rule. It could not be broken. Any other memo was no memo at all.

This struck my friend as a curious item in the folk habits of the bureau. With a zeal which would have done credit to an archaeologist, he hunted out the origin of the custom. Research revealed that shortly after World War I some responsible supply officials discovered that a large excess of blue paper had been accumulated. Therefore, in a memo which should have pleased taxpayers if the taxpayers had known about it, the circumstances were stated and all employees were instructed, as a means of consuming the surplus, to write their memos on the blue paper. All agreed it was a fine idea.

Time and people passed away. Then one day a supply clerk discovered that the blue paper for interoffice memos was exhausted. His duty was plain; he put in a big new order for the special blue paper on which office memos had to be written.

The one thing I have grown more certain of every day I have been in Washington is that it takes all kinds of people to make a war. At one time, I know, the United Mine Workers and the United Aircraft Corporation had rooms in the Carlton Hotel side ley side on the fourth floor. The rooms of Philip Murray of the CIO were just a few doors away from the rooms kept by Standard Oil, Republic Steel, and the Bankers Trust Company on the sixth floor — where Bernard M. Baruch had rooms, too.

Not all bureaucrats, or those who buy lunches for bureaucrats, can live beside the companies and unions and lawyers in the Carlton — or the Mayflower or the Shoreham. Their dwellings are as diverse as Washington. Lesser bureaucrats in declining scale run down from Georgetown mansions (often snatched from Negro occupants by the realestate dealers and interior decorators) to the furnished room and a part of the furnished room. I know of a lady in a war agency who tried to buy an old boat in the Potomac.

All of them, wherever or however they live, except the inflexible and the impenetrable, have learned about bureaucracy. In the business detail of running a multi-billion-dollar-a-year war the details can pile with deadening weight on top of drama, imagination, and humanity. There is always the danger in immensity that both the bureaucrats and the taxpayers together may be dehumanized by the processes and procedures which separate them. Men and agencies sometimes get tangled in their own lines.

5

CONTEMPLATE the impression sometimes given that the bureaucrat is a dangerous radical. Actually, the bureaucrats are almost the only people in our population who have been carefully examined for subversiveness and given a passing grade. When I arrived — two months after Pearl Harbor — I was rather sharply questioned by a young investigator (and there was a girl behind me taking notes). It appeared that a couple of years before the war I had been on the executive committee of the American Committee Against Japanese Aggression.

Somebody had said it was a Communist organization. All the same, I haven’t been able to be sorry I was on it. Also, I am glad that I passed the examination into my loyalty — that, not being a menace, I have been allowed to remain to cont ribute my mite. Whatever my wife may say with bitterness about the state of a bureaucrat or the condition of his family, my experience in bureaucracy has been worth all the price and the pains.

The real danger to Washington as the home of the bureaucrat, it seems to me, is not that the country likes bureaucrats too little, but that it will like them too well. Beside the reports about the movements of fleets and of armies there has been little room in the papers for news about the transfer of agencies from the District of Columbia to other parts of the country: the Securities and Exchange Commission to Philadelphia, the Patent Office to Richmond, the Rural Electrification Administration to St. Louis, the Office of Indian Affairs and the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission to Chicago, the Grazing Service to Salt Lake City, the Farm Credit Administration to Kansas City, and others to other places.

In each case government agencies have ceased to be bureaucracy at a distance and have become jobs at home — jobs dear to the Congressman in the district, the local chambers of commerce, the Senators of the states, local merchants, doctors, and landlords. Bad as bureaucracy may be, I have a feeling that not willingly will those places and people who have possessed the dispersed pieces of it relinquish them to Washington again.

All this is for the future. But the future in bureaucracy, as in other things, is being made now. It is not all necessarily bad. If big government is inevitable even beside free enterprise, war may have taught more than a hundred thousand of us — including the president of General Electric, the editor of the Cleveland News, and a man down the hall from me in the Bureau of the Budget, who is by habitat and industry a china manufacturer in Pittsburgh — more about government than we ever knew before. Also — and equally important — it is possible that the war bureaucrats, who include Ralph Davies of Standard Oil, Sears Roebuck’s man Nelson, a stock-market man like James Forrestal, may have succeeded in teaching some business methods to bureaucracy.

This educational process may furnish copy for the columnists, horrendous detail for politicians, irritations to the people, a dark interruption for my wife. In the process the bureaucrats of every nature and kind have made mistakes, silly ones, big ones, little ones. They are making them still. But what they will have done at last is to help create the little pieces (some bigger than others) of the greatest military and industrial power any nation ever assembled and to win a victory over the greatest adversary any people ever faced.

Some funny people in Washington and everywhere else in America have contributed to that strength. Some people have not contributed as much as they should — and not only in Washington. Some bureaucrats are rump-sprung at the desks of fut ility. Some even look and act like the bureaucrats in the cartoons and the editorials. But a job has been done by hard-working, tough-thinking United States people on the United States payroll.

Most of them have been thinking about victory. And victory includes the right, the chance, the joyous privilege of going home on that first homebound, peace-bound train or the first possible one after it.

The woman running in front of the train will be my wife.