Civilians at Arlington Hall soon learned that conditions at the top secret facility differed from the fetching language of the recruiting posters and the honeyed promises of handsome Army officers. The place was chaos. Productive chaos, but still chaos. Many women were excited to move to Washington, the beating heart of the free world, whose population had swelled from some six hundred thousand to almost nine hundred thousand. But once they became bona fide civil servants, the women—and men—proceeded to do what civil servants have done from time immemorial: complain.
Morale might have been high among the elite code breakers whom Ann Caracristi hung out with, but among the rank and file at Arlington Hall Station, complaints included everything from whirring fans to coworkers snapping gum. Bad insulation, unpleasant bosses, tablemates who smoked and lollygagged—all these were grounds for bitter complaint. It was the first time many of the women had spent time in a bona fide workplace—apart from a classroom—and they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and underappreciated.
A report conducted in 1943 concluded that at any given point 30 to 35 percent of the staff at Arlington Hall were “more or less openly dissatisfied” with their working conditions, job, supervisor, or pay. The report noted that even a small group of unhappy workers could “kindle a flame into an uncontrollable holocaust” and that this sort of infectious discontent was what led to the rise of labor unions. A campaign was mounted to keep code breakers happy, involving things like inspirational posters and movies. In the early fall of 1943, a “morale survey” was conducted to give the workforce an opportunity to vent.
Many complaints doubtless sprang from the fact that the place was growing so fast. Others were the natural result of generally contented people being invited to name the aspects of their workday they objected to. One female worker said she thought most people liked the work, very much, but that “it was only human to complain.” And now they had their chance. The survey compiler, Rhea Smith, a professor at Rollins College, wrote an introduction laying out the factors that conspired to make 1943, with all its achievements and breakthroughs, the summer of so much worker discontent.
These included the heat, which, Smith ventured, played on the nerves of people with “high strung temperaments” and “overwrought imaginations.” (It is hard not to read these phrases as synonyms for “women.”) He faulted the rush to fill quotas, resulting in selectees “improperly advised” and “often grasping at what appeared a glamorous lark.” There was also the problem of pay. Unlike Ann Caracristi and other elite workers, many women did care about their salaries and pay grades. Some wanted to pursue careers in stenography. Typists complained about losing speed while they were stuck in training. Others worried that, competing for jobs in a postwar workplace, they would not be able to tell prospective employers what, exactly, they had spent the war doing.
There was gender-related conflict, but it was not between women and men. Rather, it was between male civilians and male military officers. The civilian men were mostly professors who weren’t of military age, and men with conditions that disqualified them from serving. These men had a legitimate reason for not being in the shooting war, but they were touchy even so. The close juxtaposition of civilian and military made for a combustible masculine rivalry. Leslie Rutledge, a Harvard graduate who had been classified 4-F, said there was resentment at the “pretentious GI bearing.”
The angriest man was one William Seaman, who felt the civilian men were treated much worse than the soldiers. It was his view that soldiers were saluted when they entered the gates, while civilian men were “bawled out because the badge is in the wrong place.” Civilian men, he claimed, were the only men who did good work. Officers enjoyed too many privileges; enlisted men were often called away for other duties; and the situation was “not going to be helped by the introduction of the WACS.”
Soldiers had their own issues. “At first, the soldiers had a bad feeling,” said Captain Javier Cerecedo. “They felt they were being run by women or civilians. This was corrected.”
Each section bred its own dissatisfactions. In the message-routing section, it was noted that “some of the college girls look down on the non-college people.” In the indexing and sorting section, a worker named Bernice Phillips complained that “some people sat around and did absolutely nothing” and “do not appear to know a war is on.” Olive Mickle ventured that chatterers and idlers wasted time visiting at tables.
In a section devoted to compiling internal reports, complaints included the fact that “many have been employed under the illusion that they would be engaged in thrilling work full of adventure” only to find that the job was “dull and routine.” The information section was run by a professor named John Coddington, who complained that he needed women of high caliber, “girls who not only graduated from college but did well in college, girls who went to a good college.” He wanted girls with a “wide background of reading and culture, some linguistic ability. Some people who know geography.”
Coddington also noted that the “girls” in his unit had to fight for typewriters—there was a typewriter shortage throughout the Washington area—and that they complained about one employee who “smokes cigars constantly.” The information section was constantly fielding requests. Kay Camp, a graduate of Swarthmore, handled the geographic unit; Alene Erlanger, a Smith graduate, was building a file on Japanese shipping; Anna Chaffin was compiling Japanese place names. Like other units, the information section worked all night. The women resented having to walk at midnight all the way to the Buckingham area, a good half mile away, to catch a bus to Eleventh and E downtown, when women living at Arlington Farms had a night bus that came right up to the gate.