America's Corporal by Marten James;

Author:Marten, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A section of the bas relief sculpture portraying marching Union soldiers that extends around the Pension Building’s exterior. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The Pension Building’s grand hall. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The fireproof building more fully met the requirements of the bureau and was a spectacular monument to veterans, but the builders were not quite done when it opened for business. Even a few years after the bureau moved in, the ceiling was still unfinished, and pieces of tile regularly fell off, endangering the clerks working in the large open space below. The building had major entrances on all four sides, but Meigs’s ventilation scheme mandated only one door per entrance, as opposed to the two or three doors separated by foyers that prevent drafts in modern office buildings. As a result, although the building may have remained relatively cool in the summer, in winter the coming and going of applicants and workers caused drafts to whip through the building, resulting in colds and rheumatism among the poor clerks freezing at their desks. Because there was no freight elevator, literally tons of records had to be moved by hand from the fourth-floor storage areas—where sweating workers toiled under the lead roof during steamy Washington summers—to offices scattered around the building. Finally, the building lacked a coal vault in the boiler room, which resulted in coal having to be hauled to the fire room from a makeshift storage area one hundred yards away.5

Of course, the pension system was also unfinished—at least according to the men who had fought for the Union—and with Tanner in the vanguard, the pension issue became one of the most important in American politics.

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