Dietel had no answer for her. It was a meaningless question in any case. Death was a routine matter at Wismut; all who lowered themselves into the shafts had to be prepared for it. Uranium mining was the only steady work available, and the only source of income most of them had ever known. This was the Ore Mountains, the country of iron courage and glück auf, and uranium was their new silver, whether they liked it or not.
“We all had to do it,” Dietel said. “We had no food before uranium. It was a piece of bread and two potatoes to me.”
In America, the hype mounted. By 1955, Life magazine was reporting—inaccurately—that “more man-hours have been spent in the quest for uranium than were spent seeking all the other metals in history.” The following year, True West magazine announced, “The most fabulous buried treasure of all time lies scattered and unclaimed, free for the taking.”
The get-rich-quick spirit of uranium found its way onto a popular board game, Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life, in which players moved automobiles down a twisting path that represented the journey from young adulthood to old age. One coveted square read DISCOVER URANIUM! COLLECT $240,000. Another board game, Uranium Rush, included a battery-powered “Geiger counter” that buzzed whenever a player found the mineral. Bogus “Uranium Clinics” opened in cheap storefronts, promising that exposure to the raw ore could cure arthritis.
In Salt Lake City, one of the most conservative large cities in America, a fraud-laden penny stock market was thriving. A promoter named Jay Walters had purchased a few long-shot claims near Moab and sold shares of his new “Uranium Oil and Trading Company” for 1 cent over the counter of a downtown coffee shop. The stock ballooned more than 500 percent within the month. Permissive state securities laws allowed new companies to sell shares without making any filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, and any unproven company that put uranium in the title was bound to appreciate. Venture capitalists were eager to buy any claims at all, so long as they were near Moab; the ghostly moonscape had suddenly become some of the most sought-after real estate in the country. Jerry Anderson’s father, who hunted for uranium when he wasn’t ranching cattle, was besieged with telephone calls. “At one time I think he had on his desk offers from well over a hundred people who would buy anything he could stake with any count at all,” recalled Anderson. “If it just flickered the needle on the Geiger counter, that’s all.”
There was something about the metal that seemed to inspire an irrational optimism. “Who are buying? Housewives, doctors, big and little businessmen, teachers, bank officers, cab drivers, people in a wide range of economic circumstances,” wrote Jack R. Ryan of the New York Times in 1954. “Most are spurred by the same impulse that sends millions to race tracks to bet on the horses—the hope for an easy dollar. But stock promoters say there also seems to be a romantic attraction about uranium that makes its mining shares easy to sell.” Ryan went on to quote a silver-tongued promoter: “These people can picture ‘their’ miners hacking the ore of atomic fuel from the rugged mesas and feel they’re part of a conquest as colorful as any gold rush—and a lot more important.”
There was also a patriotic angle to the fervor: The buyers could justify their purchases almost like war bonds, with the thought that the United States needed to build up an arsenal to fight Communism. The number of penny stock traders in Salt Lake City went from 20 to 112 within a year, and the city became known, somewhat derisively, as the Wall Street of Uranium. But no Mi Vida-size strikes materialized to justify the inflated prices. Stocks almost invariably cratered, leaving buyers with file folders full of worthless certificates.
The boom in Utah inspired a televised episode of the cartoon Popeye, titled “Uranium on the Cranium,” in which Popeye and Olive Oyl discover radioactive treasure on a desert island. They are attacked by their greedy nemesis, Brutus, who is disguised in an ape suit. Then a real ape knocks Popeye high into a tree. The cartoon ends on a happy note: Popeye eats a can of spinach, decks both Brutus and the ape, and proceeds to mine the uranium himself, Olive Oyl at his side.
A more dubious Hollywood effort was Dig That Uranium, a 1956 vehicle for the aging Bowery Boys, who buy the deed to a uranium mine and head to Panther Pass, Nevada (actually, Iverson Movie Ranch in California’s San Fernando Valley), to get rich. The uranium craze was an excuse to place the comedians in a Western setting, where all manner of cowboy stereotypes could be goofed upon: poker games, gunfights, campfires, and stoic Indians who wrap themselves in blankets and stare into space. The film is also noteworthy for a cameo by Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, playing a huckster who sells the boys the worthless9 property.
Two years after the movie’s release, Charlie Steen started campaigning for a seat in the Utah senate. Although a determined atheist, he was still popular in his heavily Mormon district for his image of crusading atomic patriotism in the fight against Communism and he appeared to be on the verge of unseating the incumbent. One local radio reporter characterized the race as “George Hurst, the Mormon, versus Charlie Steen, the American.”
Shortly before the election, Steen took a short break and flew his plane down to El Paso, Texas, to accept an outstanding-alumnus award from the Ex-Student Association of his alma mater, the Texas College of Mines. He had been a profligate donor to the college ever since his lucky strike and, during his occasional visits to campus, had been in the habit of taking geology students over the Mexican border to Ciudad Juárez for rounds of tequila shots. He was irritated, however, that the school had changed its name to Texas Western College in an attempt to appeal to a broader range of students. He was also unhappy to see that his college was offering a new range of liberal arts and vocational courses, many of which had nothing to do with mining.
When he rose to say a few words at the banquet, there was applause. But this would not be typical after-dinner oatmeal. Perhaps Steen was worn down by the grind of his Senate campaign, tired of having to shake hands and say careful things in front of the voters. Perhaps he had been rankled by the constant lawsuits from his former business partners and competitors. For whatever reason, the discoverer of Mi Vida was in a vinegary mood that night and, in words documented by the journalist Raye Ringholz, he let his college friends have the brunt of it.
“I know the proper way to accept this award,” Steen began. “I am expected to say ‘thank you’ and sit down. However, inasmuch as I did not seek this award, and as Dean Thomas reminded me last night that I was the only son of a bitch he knew who had made a career at being one, and was a success as a result, you need not expect the proper response.”
Steen then began reading—contemptuously—from the school’s course catalog. He cited a list of classes he considered frivolous. They included Coaching Basketball, Real Estate Brokerage, and Baton Twirling. He suggested the list be expanded to include “Beer Guzzling, a course in how to chug-a-lug a gallon pitcher without getting a permanent crease on the bridge of your nose” and “Mexican Relations, how to go to Juárez and keep enough money to get back across the bridge.” Steen also insisted he would not accept his award unless the name engraved upon it was corrected to read TEXAS COLLEGE Of MINES and not the name of an institution he did not recognize. With the audience now coughing and squirming, he reached his peroration.
“This son of a bitch previously mentioned, at thirty-nine years of age, is a living legend of the uranium boom that he helped create, a boom that raised the U.S.A. from a ‘have-not’ nation to the number-one position of uranium reserves in the world. Whether he dies a multimillionaire or a broken down, ragged-ass prospecting tramp, his place in the mining history of our country is secure.”
When he sat down, there was embarrassed silence and a few boos. The diatribe prompted Paul H. Carleton, the president of the alumni association, to write an open letter to Texas Western’s administration the next morning. He apologized for not rising to stop Steen’s “abuse and blasphemy” and regretted that the tone of the event was not focused more upon “living in a peaceful,
understanding world.”
Charlie Steen apologized for none of his words and snapped off an angry reply to Carleton.
“As for ‘living with our fellow men in a peaceful, understanding world,’ what sandpile have you buried your head in since you got out of college?” Steen wrote. “We are living in a world in which two systems are locked in mortal conflict to determine which kind of world our kids are going to inherit. . . .”
In East Germany, the lumps of uranium had a nickname among the freight handlers. They called it Heilerde, which means “holy ground.” The name was partly ironic—they suspected the hazards of the black ore they were loading onto the railroad cars—but there was an earnest aspect to the name as well. The uranium was a reason they had a paying job and was what separated them from the lower ranks of society and those still suffering from the deprivations and hunger caused by the war.
The underground brigades had their own nickname for the veins of pitchblende they were trying to intersect. They called it Speck, or “bacon.” The name was appropriate, because some fundamental changes started to take place in the German uranium fields in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953.
The Red Army stopped its direct oversight of the mines, dismissed Maltsev, and passed control to a reconstituted state agency called SDAG. East German authorities now became shareholders in the new corporation and had more direct influence in the day-to-day operations of the network of mines, mills, and railways. The population of laborers also leveled out to a steady forty-five thousand as prisoners were allowed to go free. The new directors were eager to shed their image as cruel taskmasters and reevaluated their methods of encouraging productivity. More attention was paid to worker safety, which boosted the morale of the drilling crews. But most important, Wismut started emphasizing a new principle: namely, uranium can make you rich.
Personal gain had been an inducement at Wismut from the start, albeit in a more muted fashion. Those who had volunteered for mine work in the 1940s were issued daily “Stalin parcels” of soup, coffee, bread, and cheese above the portions granted to other German citizens. They had always eaten better than their neighbors. But now a Wismut man could earn more hard currency than almost any other class in the Socialist state. With bonuses, a miner could expect to bring home 3,000 marks a month, which compared favorably with the average salary for a village mayor, who made 250 marks per month. Refrigerators and appliances and other luxuries could be acquired much more quickly here than anywhere else in East Germany. It might take only two years to acquire a car, whereas others in less exciting professions had to wait up to seventeen years.
To acquire this soft life, one had to dig out more pitchblende than the quotas required. The brigades were thus set up to compete against one another, with tantalizing payoffs for the winners and collective scorn for the losers. The uranium had been transformed into Speck—something to be pursued instead of having one’s nose forced into it.
This was an obvious departure from Communist ideology. But it represented an important psychological insight. Machiavelli once said it was better for a king to be feared than loved. But greed is an even better motivator than fear. It is more sustainable over the long run and is, in fact, potentially endless. And it cuts down on laziness.
Walter Hegenbart was one of those attracted by the high wages. He signed up as a teenager after he saw his brother open a wallet stuffed full of marks after he spent only a few weeks on a drilling brigade. This was a powerful inducement: Hegenbart and his brother and their eleven siblings had been forced out of their home in the Sudetenland in 1945 and had no other way to earn money. “We did it because we were hungry,” he explained later.
Hegenbart was assigned to a six-man brigade, and the men learned to depend on one another. Those who appeared to be slacking were subject to harassment and abuse, for it put the entire unit in danger of losing a bonus and looking incompetent in front of the other brigades. The biggest payouts were for pitchblende—the Speck—weighed by the kilogram, but additional money was offered for other good behavior, such as time worked without an accident and perfect attendance and taking good care of tools. Penalties could be assessed for following incorrect safety procedures, but pit bosses tended to look the other way as long as the uranium kept coming.
Taking a break during the twelve-hour shift was unthinkable. Many skipped lunch, preferring to drill at the walls instead. And going aboveground to use the toilet was a sure ticket to ostracism, so most defecated inside metal buckets, known as Toilettenwannen. Though the hard-rock miners were legendary for their love of brandy and beer, few drank it underground, where it could hamper efficiency and get them behind on their bonuses.
Temperance faltered, however, at week’s end when the bonuses arrived. The bars in Schlema were periodically told to close down on payday: There was bingeing and brawls, and some wives complained they never saw the money before it was spent. The pay and the generous rations were lucrative enough to attract occasional defectors from West Germany, such as a man named Herbert Kampf, who was held up as a model convert to the Socialist cause. He obligingly told a local newspaper, “I follow my brigade.”
There were financial pressures underground, but there were also bonds of loyalty. The men gave playful nicknames to one another. If a miner chafed against his name, it would be his to wear forever. One particularly slow worker was called the Master Driller. An officious pit boss with a mustache was called Fake Hitler. A party lackey was known as Lenin. The brigades were issued shoulder patches as Boy Scout troops were, and they marched in dress uniforms in military-like formation on the days when there were parades. Many asked to be buried in their Wismut uniform when they died, including even Heinz Pickert, the barber whose hands had been ruined.
Every New Year’s Day, the men gathered at the miners’ union beer hall, a log-walled place called Die Aktivist, where a list of names was read: all those who had been killed in accidents the previous year. Each name was followed by a single chime of the elevator bell mounted on the wall. On other nights, the liquor and the boasting would flow until midnight. Alcohol had always been one of the perks of Wismut—the standard ration of brandy was ten bottles a month, and it was said to be an effective tonic for the mysterious coughing spells that many were experiencing. The booze received the nickname “Miner’s Death.”
In their cups, the men would sometimes sing the old songs of the Ore Mountains. Few of them had been born in the hills—most had been dragged there by force—but they saw themselves in the lineage of those proud men who tore silver from the earth and got paid for it.
Luck up! Luck up!
Here comes the pit boss
And he has his bright light
In the night
Already lit!
Wismut had become, by that point, a “state within a state,” in the words of the historian Rainer Karlsch, functioning as a semiautonomous fiefdom within East Germany. There were seventeen towns under its watch. It had its own hospitals, police, and court system. The mines had contributed up to 80 percent of the uranium for the Soviet nuclear program, and its managers were rewarded with generous allocations of equipment.
The men and women of Wismut were reminded of their duty to Communism, and how the uranium played an important role in stopping the global menace of capitalism. They were told that America had been threatening the USSR with nuclear weapons and that only a strong counterarsenal could save lives. “Everyone believed that since they had bombed Nagasaki, [the Americans] would bomb us, too,” recalled Walter Hegenbart. Signs all over proclaimed ORE FOR PEACE.
The first promotional film for Wismut was shot in 1959. Laced with strange homoerotic imagery, it depicts a team of three men stripped down to their shorts, rhythmically unloading piles of uranium ore from cars to the sound of orchestra music. Others are pushing blasting caps into walls dripping with moisture, and another crew is hosing debris off the cart tracks. Tulip-shaped buckets dump the black stones in the crushing mill. The uranium miner is portrayed
as a virile national hero.
A grittier view was presented in the movie Sunseekers, directed by the auteur Konrad Wolf, who happened to be the brother of the national spymaster Markus Wolf. The director Wolf was regarded as a creative genius in his native Germany and he had credibility with the Communist authorities. In 1957, Wolf received permission to shoot a new film in the heart of the uranium fields.
In retrospect, it is a miracle that Sunseekers was ever made. It tells the story of a young woman named Lutz who is arrested in a barroom brawl and sentenced to mine uranium in the Ore Mountains, depicted here as a grim wasteland of rock heaps and muddy roads, with a savage mix of convicts, ex-SS soldiers, and Communists forced to live there in quest of radioactive fuel. The mostly German miners are lorded over by their Russian overseers, who demand “uranium every hour” and are slow to replace fraying electric cables in the mines. Lutz at first falls in love with an alcoholic miner named Gunther, who insists, “This is the best work there is! You can hear the uranium crackling!” But she eventually winds up with a moody one-armed pit boss named Beier, who seems to embody all the sufferings of postwar Germany. He dies underground in a fire started by one of the defective cables—literally trapped in a tomb of uranium.
The film is not without some patriotic content. The opening crawl reads: “The flash over Japan was meant to illuminate the American century. To protect itself and help world peace, the USSR had to break the atomic bomb monopoly.” But taken as a whole, the movie is a strong critique of the uranium-hungry policies that refashioned this corner of Germany into a zone of despair. The mines are depicted as dangerous and dirty; the landscape itself is without cheer or hope. The title Sunseekers is also a sly piece of wordplay. The men and women who went to work for Wismut were seeking not just the mineral whose power was equivalent to the sun but also some warmth in their own lives. The miners who spent half of their day in darkness were also eager for the return of sunlight that accompanied the end of each shift when the elevator brought them aboveground again. This was a journey that, from the deepest shafts, could take up to two hours.
Tom Zoellner Page 20