The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  On the more positive side, Oak Ridge enjoyed federally financed schools, cheap medical coverage provided by doctors from prestigious university programs, and a range of recreational activities, from movies and skating rinks to folk dancing and a community theater.15

  America’s atom-bomb project had many fathers. In 1939, scientists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner urged such an endeavor on President Roosevelt, arguing that the Nazi regime in Germany must certainly be pursuing such research and so the United States must as well. Other advocates included scientific-policy honchos Vannevar Bush, formerly of MIT, and James B. Conant, president of Harvard. Bush pushed and pushed, but governmental inertia got in the way, along with the fact that no one had yet proved that such a bomb could actually be made. Finally, in September 1942, Bush’s argument that the military should take command of the fledgling effort prompted General William Styer to appoint Leslie R. Groves head of the Manhattan Project. The endeavor had found its sparkplug—a doer, not unlike Henry J. Kaiser or, for that matter, Nathan Appleton or Charles Cannon.

  Groves was, in the words of one key subordinate, “the biggest sonovabitch I have ever worked for. He is most demanding and most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. . . . He is the most egotistical man I know. He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision.” Another friend observed: “Groves not only behaves as if he can walk on water, but as if he actually invented the substance.”16

  Another dumpling-shaped ball of fire, the forty-six-year-old Corps of Engineers brigadier general upbraided subordinates, disrespected officials, and dared to believe he understood the thinking of some of the most brilliant physicists of his day. The son of a Presbyterian army chaplain, Groves had left MIT in his junior year to enroll at West Point, where he graduated a year early at the head of his class. With his curly brown hair, 260 pounds of girth, and pencil-line moustache, he was hardly anyone’s idea of an Achilles-like warrior-hero. But it was Groves who had overseen the building of the $83 million Pentagon and $10 billion worth of military construction. It would be Groves who would make J. Robert Oppenheimer the Manhattan Project’s head of scientific research, despite that scientist’s leftish background and relative lack of professional stature. And two days after he was named to lead the Manhattan Project, it would be Groves who began acquiring the Tennessee land that others had targeted but had been slow to grab.

  It was an odd project, to say the least. To Groves, who had hoped to be assigned to a command in Europe or the Pacific, it looked like a demotion since the initial budget was a lot smaller than those of the projects he’d just supervised. Then there was the fact that the enterprise conjoined the military with a bevy of independent and unruly scientists. At first Groves wanted everyone commissioned into the Army, meaning strict security and following of orders. That notion ran up against another fundamental, the need to move quickly. Getting Army commissions for the scientists meant delay, and so the idea was abandoned. And of course the whole thing was an experiment—meaning that established scientific procedures, including collegial working conditions for the scientists, had to be observed.

  The idea that nuclear fission could produce a bomb dated from German experiments in the late 1930s. Generating a powerful chain reaction from uranium atoms required the separation of its U-235 isotope from the predominant U-238. Experiments in university laboratories suggested several ways of doing this, but none had been employed on a large scale. And since time was of the essence, the project’s scientific overlords determined to pursue several methods simultaneously.

  Four processes would be employed in vast factories built in Tennessee. A “gaseous diffusion” method circulated uranium hexafluoride gas through porous barriers that parted the isotopes. An electromagnetic approach spun uranium atoms in large arcs through a magnetic field, allowing the separation since the isotopes took different paths. A “thermal diffusion” method employed tremendous heat to divide the isotopes. Finally, a reactor would produce small quantities of plutonium, a fissionable substance that doesn’t occur in nature. This final process was pursued in Tennessee only as a pilot project: Plutonium was understood to be extremely toxic and therefore a separate facility was erected for its production in the desert wastes near Hanford, Washington.17

  Shortly after his appointment, Groves and two subordinates traveled to Tennessee to inspect the site. They found little to complain about. The remote, seventeen-mile-by-seven-mile area was composed of a series of valleys extending from the lower reaches of the Cumberland Mountains and defined on the south by the Clinch River. The few roads that existed were all unpaved. Soon appraisers were sent out to each of the area’s farms, where they catalogued and photographed crops and buildings and estimated worth. Thus began a process of intimidation: The appraisers sometimes referred to the overall area as the Kingston Demolition Range and even told occupants that they would have to get out, as bombs would shortly be falling on the area. Next came a second group of officials carrying take-it-or-leave-it offers and wielding orders of condemnation and eviction as bludgeons. By March 1943, the area had been cleared. 18

  Workers bulldozed and graded the location, employing methods that would have pleased the Wehrmacht: They eradicated trees and shrubs and turned rolling hillsides into a tabletop-like veld. That this may not have been the best approach quickly occurred to Groves’s officers, who turned the town’s design over to the innovative Boston architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. By July, the first 1,000 houses were standing, constructed of a material called Cemesto, made of low-cost fiberboard bonded with cement and asbestos. The government had previously used the cheap but presentable materials in various buildings, including a bomber plant in Baltimore.

  The first structures included an administration building, fourteen dorms, three apartment buildings, and 3,000 Cemesto single-family homes. Three vast factories located some distance from the residential areas also appeared suddenly: Y-12, the electromagnetic works, consisted of 268 buildings including the electromagnetic “racetracks,” chemistry labs, a foundry, and nineteen water-cooling towers. K-25, the gaseous diffusion plant, covered more than forty-two acres and was at the time the largest building on Earth. X-10, the plutonium-making “pile” plant, was relatively small by comparison.

  America’s foremost scientific corporations operated the plants. Kodak subsidiary Tennessee Eastman ran Y-12, Union Carbide operated K-25, and ultimately Monsanto ran X-10. General Electric, Allis-Chalmers, Bell Labs, and Chrysler also contributed. But actually getting the factories to produce proved tricky: Y-12 seemed ready to go in the fall of 1943, but numerous problems led to a shutdown and months of inactivity. Finally operative by the late spring of 1944, Y-12 generated enriched uranium very, very slowly. At K-25, the porous barriers didn’t work well, and it was January 1945 before that plant produced anything. In despair, Grove and his officers turned to the thermal-diffusion method, which the Navy had been developing elsewhere. They began building the Oak Ridge thermal-diffusion plant, S-50, in the summer of 1944 and had it operating by September. The fissionable material that was ultimately used passed through all three facilities: Y-12 was fed somewhat enriched uranium that had already been processed at K-25 and S-50.19

  Meanwhile, echoing the experience at Richmond, there was never enough housing for the growing workforce. A second phase of building beginning in the fall of 1943 anticipated a total population of 42,000, and a third phase begun in the spring of 1945 anticipated a total of 66,000. In fact, the peak population exceeded 75,000. As many as 20,000 commuted each day from housing outside the reservation.

  As at, say, Sparrows Point, a hierarchical test was applied. High-ranking and skilled workers with families got the best single-family homes—of which there were 10,000. Other families found lodging in thousands of trailers. Unmarried workers might be stuck in dorms, barracks, or, at worst, in one of the 16,000 spaces in sixteen-by-sixteen “hutments,” plywood cubes with hinged, unscreened wind
ows that contained up to six beds and one stove for heat. The bathrooms and showers were in separate buildings. These hutments were segregated by race and sex, serving as lodging for, among others, 1,500 African-American construction workers. Embodying the project’s racial segregation, a separate “Negro village” was planned but never constructed, leaving many black workers to fend for themselves.

  The Skidmore, Owings and Merrill professionals had envisioned Oak Ridge as a model, picturesque community where design echoed American folk traditions, as at the nearby Tennessee Valley Authority town of Norris, Tennessee. However, in the end, Oak Ridge became another boomtown hodgepodge that ran from ranch houses to trailer parks and even hundreds of dilapidated farmhouses. A collection of slum villages included plywood houses on stilts with canvas roofs.

  Complaints about housing assignments were common, both from individuals and from companies. Protesting the “acute” housing shortage, Tennessee Eastman’s operations officer threatened to cease recruitment of workers. “Oak Ridge remained like Topsy,” recalled Oak Ridge’s chief operating officer, District Engineer Kenneth D. Nichols. “It grew and grew throughout the war. We finished our last housing expansion three months after the Japanese surrender and a nursery school and gymnasium by Christmas, 1945.” Despite such disarray, the spartan Groves considered the Oak Ridge housing a bit too cosseting.

  Town construction ran to $101 million and included a water purification plant, two sewage-treatment plants, systems for water and utilities, and rail connections to the Southern and L&N railroads. There were two standard Army chapels, a high school and eight grammar schools, seven movie houses, and perhaps thirty stores in four retail areas, including thirteen supermarkets. There were also three hundred miles of paved roads, including a four-lane highway connecting the town with K-25.20

  Who were the employees at Oak Ridge? Construction workers totaled around 100,000, or around half that number at any given time. Turnover for all workers was high thanks to the shortage and condition of the housing, the mediocre food served in grim cafeterias, and the bedlam that attended all daily affairs. Word of these limitations hampered hiring, as did the fact that recruiters could say nothing about the kind of work being done on the project.

  Of the 40,000 employed in the nuclear plants, some number, including those operating the gaseous-diffusion operation, were scientists. There were mechanics to keep equipment running, electrical and chemical engineers, foremen, and a variety of operatives. Tennessee Eastman, which ran the electromagnetic facility, depended largely upon a group of unskilled employees, regularly referred to as “hillbilly girls.” In the words of Manhattan District public relations officer George O. Robinson, they were “East Tennessee high school girls with not the faintest idea of what their jobs were about.” Many of these young women sat in a control room, on stools spaced far enough apart to discourage communication, and for six days a week, ten hours a day, silently adjusted dials that controlled the electromagnetic “racetracks.” Others robotically recorded the readings of gauges. Purposely misinformed about the actual product and punished if they asked questions or showed initiative, in Nichols’s words they were like soldiers, trained either “to do or not to do—and not to reason why.” Regardless of the method employed, production of U-235 was very, very slow, but Y-25’s girls outdid the K-25 scientists in an early production race.

  Some of the work at Oak Ridge was frightening and, whether employees knew it or not, dangerous. Those working near the 10,000-ton magnets found tools and keys disconcertingly jerked from their pockets and bobby pins pulled from their hair. Other workers at Y-12 had the job of removing tiny bits of uranium from the machinery—meaning exposure to perilous levels of radiation. Even leaky pipes at the gaseous diffusion plant were ominous harbingers of injury, but no one was offered the opportunity to refuse a hazardous assignment. Worse, doctors at the facility injected many unwitting employees with plutonium in an effort frighteningly similar to Nazi experiments. The scientists knew that exposure to radiation was risky but didn’t know just how risky. Via the injections, they meant to find out.

  An environment that was, if anything, even more restrictive than that in early Lowell enveloped the single women at Oak Ridge. Dormitory rules barred cooking in the rooms, consuming liquor, gambling, and receiving visits from members of the opposite sex. Moreover, along with all other residents of the nuclear town, they were regularly and insistently told not to discuss their work. At hiring, every worker had to sign a Declaration of Secrecy. Posters urging silence blanketed walls everywhere. “Compartmentalization” dictated that each worker knew only his or her own job and nothing about how it fitted into an overall scheme. Access to job sites was limited, with color-coded badges worn by all indicating just where within, say, K-25 the employee was allowed to go.

  With the plants running seven days a week in three shifts around the clock, life could be a monotony of labor, sleep, and cafeteria meals. Nor was there any sense of participation in the larger win-the-war effort: Just compare Oak Ridge workers’ experience of ignorance and enforced secrecy with the sense of celebration and contribution Dos Passos observed during the launching in the Pacific Coast shipyard. And since a great many supplies seemed to come into the area and nothing seemed to go out, local newspapers helped spread the idea that the project was an immense flop—and that notion must have taken a further toll on morale. As one War Department statement later acknowledged, “an atmosphere of unreality” reigned, “in which giant plants operated feverishly day and night to produce nothing that could be seen or touched.”21

  (In fact, beginning in March 1945, a crack team of heavily armed security operatives regularly transported the finished product—the volume of which was relatively small, of course—from Oak Ridge to Los Alamos. Arriving by car, the guards were handed cases containing U-235-filled nickel containers. Unimaginable as it may now seem, the team took the stuff by regular passenger train, first to Chicago and then on to New Mexico, where they were met by other couriers who made the final delivery to the Los Alamos lab .)22

  In charge of the dorms and of town life in general was a subsidiary of Turner Construction Co. known as Roane-Anderson. Named for the two counties the Clinton Engineer District straddled, Roane-Anderson operated as landlord for all the housing, ran eight hundred public buses, handled such municipal functions as garbage collection and coal delivery, and provided police and fire departments. The company also managed the seventeen cafeterias that served 40,000 meals a day, a three hundred- bed hospital, a bank, and a post office, and it brought in two hundred private businesses including department stores, shoe shops, and grocery markets. Moreover, it was Roane-Anderson that enforced the various restrictions on residents’ behavior.

  Thus were met the basic requirements of life. But was there to be no civil society in Oak Ridge? In a town of strangers, what agency would provide for social life and group activities? A set of ersatz institutions emerged to take care of such things—citizens groups that were in fact run by the Manhattan District. A Recreation and Welfare Association, fronted by citizen-volunteers but organized and funded by Tennessee Eastman and other corporations, set up athletic teams, art classes, a dancing school, and a teen center. In addition, the association encouraged the hundred-odd organized groups including a Junior Chamber of Commerce, Boy and Girl Scouts, Kiwanis, and even a rabbit-breeders club. The association built five movie houses, four bowling alleys, snack shops, a miniature golf course, a library, and a riding academy. Oak Ridge even had a newspaper and a town council—although the former was just a work-hard-and-stay-silent propaganda sheet and the latter was a powerless “advisory” body.23

  By 1945, the Manhattan Project had consumed $2 billion. The Oak Ridge plants had operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule, only barely generating sufficient enriched uranium to produce a test bomb plus one more. Was there any way, then, that the atomic weapon would not have been used on Japan?

  A profound and surprisingly thoughtful debate took place in
Washington over whether and just how the bomb might be used—and whether and how its terrible secret might be shared among nations. The dialogue involved such policymakers as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State-designate James F. Byrnes, Oppenheimer, General George Marshall, and, in absentia, physicists Leo Szilard and Niels Bohr. That discussion has been well described elsewhere, notably in Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and need not be recapitulated here. But certainly the expenditure of time and treasure militated in favor of the bomb’s use, further motivated by the uncertainty of what if any effect a mere demonstration of the bomb at an unpopulated site would have on the unpredictable and cornered government in Japan. The project’s seeming success generated great excitement among even the most pacifistic of participants—and prompted a macabre interest in giving the thing a try. Stimson, for example, wrote in his diary after an Oak Ridge visit of having witnessed and participated in “the most wonderful and unique operation . . . the largest and most extraordinary scientific experiment in history.” Although he was among the most ambivalent and conscience-wracked of the top Washington policymakers, Stimson clinically noted that “success is 99% assured, yet only by the first actual war trial of the weapon can the actual certainty be fixed.”24

  And so following the July 1945 test explosion at Alamogordo in New Mexico, the four-ton Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6.

  What had been wrought at Oak Ridge could now be revealed, both to the project’s uninformed workers and to the public at large. As soon as they heard about Hiroshima, near hysteria seized the residents, and a New Year’s Eve atmosphere complete with horns and whistles prevailed in the town. Public relations officer Robinson reported “a strange stirring in the community” followed by “great rejoicing.” Abandoning their pledge of omertà, participants could now discuss what they had done and experience a bit of the pride known by U.S. war workers elsewhere. One Oak Ridge resident recalled that scientists “were running around town shouting, ‘Uranium!’ and ‘atomic!’ All these things they had never been able to say before, they were shouting out like dirty words.”