The Company Town (34 page)

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.”
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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.”

The general public learned of the bomb and its production facilities in news reports that combined wonderment at the project's secrecy with a pride that the United States could produce such a device. One of the first mentions of Oak Ridge came in an August 7
New York Times
article titled “Atom Bombs Made in 3 ‘Hidden' Cities.” Adding to the gee-whiz factor were accompanying photos of the vast and mysterious K-25 and Hanford works.

Informed by Groves that the bomb drop “went with a tremendous bang,” Oppenheimer reported feeling “reasonably good” about the effort, while Szilard wrote a friend that the use of the A-bomb was “one of the greatest blunders of history.” Of course, the extent of the horrible destruction in Hiroshima was not appreciated by either Manhattan Project participants or the general American public—and really wouldn't be understood for several years, particularly given the reassuring picture painted by a U.S. commission sent in 1947 to take stock of the damage. To this day, the effects of the atomic explosions remain a subject of debate and denial.

The second bomb drop, at Nagasaki, prompted a less-celebratory reaction in Oak Ridge. One minister observed that attitudes shifted from “We did it!” to “What have we done?”
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Perhaps that spreading anxiety and guilt helps explain why so many Oak Ridge residents picked up and left shortly after the Japanese surrender. Within a few months, the town's population dropped by almost 10,000 and in less than a year, it was down by nearly 30,000. “Nobody knows what lies ahead for Oak Ridge,” reported the
New Yorker
. “Some people, confident that the project will be made permanent, have started small flower gardens in front of their homes. Others, more dubious, have let the weeds grow tall.”

The first official word that Oak Ridge operations would continue after the war came in September 1945. Some workers began for the first time to see themselves as long-term residents of the area. Trailer-park residents in particular began demanding better housing, and some of the worst structures were demolished.

Unionization became an issue. By request of the War Department, the National Labor Relations Board had declared a moratorium on union elections at Manhattan Project locations for the duration of the war. Groves in particular had wanted nothing to do with organized labor, which he saw as a threat to security and a source of hassles over jurisdiction and hiring. In 1946, though, the National Labor Relations Board oversaw elections that resulted in union representation at K-25 and X-10.

The military surrendered control of the project in 1947, to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission. Although employment fell and the population of Oak Ridge was down to 30,000 by 1950, the gaseous-diffusion plant continued operations until 1985, and the electromagnetic facility is still up and running.

It took until 1949 for the fences to come down and for Oak Ridge to be officially opened, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, parades, and speeches. Roane-Anderson divested itself of town-management responsibilities over a period ending in 1952. And in 1959, the town was incorporated and adopted a city-manager/city-council form of government. X-10, the former plutonium pilot plant, became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1948, serving as a source of radioactive isotopes used in medicine and biological research. Gradually opened to the public, the lab and the town's museum of science became tourist attractions, drawing more than 60,000 visitors a year during the 1950s and thousands more today. There are even little Oak Ridge souvenirs, some embossed with a cute version of the scary three-oval nuclear symbol.

Significant nuclear contamination took place at all of the Manhattan Project sites. Courts have ordered cleanups of toxic waste in both Oak Ridge and Hanford, but untold amounts of radiation were buried deep in the soil, discharged in local waterways, and released into the air. In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences declared that the Manhattan Project sites would pose risks to humans and the environment for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to come. The previous year the government admitted that thousands of war workers had contracted cancer and other maladies as a result of exposure to radiation.
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For this and many other reasons, it seems safe to say that Oak Ridge can never be a normal American town. Six years after Hiroshima, a writer for the
New York Times Magazine
found that Oak Ridge citizens had
divergent opinions about their heritage. One “veteran physicist” seemed to revel in the town's accomplishment, asserting that a gold rush-like “spirit of adventure” still prevailed. Meanwhile, the wife of Union Carbide's industrial relations manager reflected “a massive placidity,” in the words of the writer. “We don't seem to mind the fact that we're sitting on an atomic bomb,” she said. “During the war, we . . . couldn't have been more nervous. Now, we go from day to day and live with it.”
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Oak Ridge exhibited few signs that it was a unique place—its shopping district, for instance, reminded the writer of Levittown. Yet most citizens seemed unconcerned that the town might gradually lose its special identity.

Perhaps they understood that Oak Ridge would remain special given that weaponry will always be in demand. In 2003, Y-12 reopened after a period of suspension, with a mandate to produce warhead parts for MX missiles and to store weapons-grade uranium.
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THE ATOMIC CITY WELCOMES YOU, reads a sign at the city's outskirts. DRIVE CAREFULLY.

—From the sound track for General Motors' 1939 World's Fair exhibit, Futurama
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T
he 1939-1940 New York World's Fair purposely focused on the future—the grim present was better left unacknowledged. Key to making the event a reality were a group of New York businessmen including distillery executive Grover Whalen, who imagined that such an extravaganza might inspire the city and lift its people out of the Depression doldrums. Political leaders including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses accepted the concept and helped bring the fair into being.

In the fair's first year, 26 million people attended, and 50 million would go through the gates before the two-year run ended. Many corporations jumped at the exhibition as a means of pushing their products and their big ideas. RCA and General Electric showed off that new phenomenon, television. Inside the Heinz Dome, which was adorned with a giant “57” sign, staffers gave out free food and little pickle-shaped souvenir pins. Westinghouse put together a time capsule that would be buried at the Flushing Meadows site of the fair, not to be exhumed until 6939. Among the contents were copies of
Life
magazine, a pack of Camel cigarettes, and a message to the future from Albert Einstein.

At the Transportation Zone pavilion, a General Motors exhibit showed off the latest GM cars and Frigidaire appliances. But the real draw was GM's Futurama—a large diorama of an imagined United States of 1960, complete with miniature roads, towns, homes, and cities.

Futurama was by far the fair's most popular exhibit. After waiting in lines for up to two hours, visitors were seated in high-sided, upholstered chairs and treated to a simulated airplane ride over the three-dimensional display; an accompanying sound track described what they were seeing. The diorama offered glimpses of an ideal farm, an amusement park, a small village, a “thriving and prosperous steel town” with “hundreds of comfortable homes for workers” (U.S. Steel take note), a resort, a religious retreat, and a vast, futuristic metropolis. Conspicuously lacking: the sprawling suburbs that would meander across the real-life countryside beginning in the 1950s. But Futurama got one thing right: the important role highways would play in America's future.

Futurama's “great motorways” featured multiple lanes, exit loops, unvarying illumination, and radio controls for maintaining a proper distance between cars. The watchword of this “spectacular” traffic system: “safety, safety with increased speed,” the sound track's languorous and godlike male voice intoned. Some of these features were never realized, but less high-tech highways became an ever more important and influential feature of American life as the twentieth century progressed.

The roads and motorcars meant an end to some residential company towns, as auto ownership freed workers from having to live within walking distance of their workplaces. Taking their place as corporate Edens alongside the company towns that did survive: corporate campuses accessible only by automobile. And Americans' increasing fondness for travel pointed the way to a new economic orientation to which many company towns adapted: tourism. Finally, by the final decades of the twentieth century, the automobile would make possible new corporate outposts that required few workers and were far away from population centers.

In the 1930s, the Bell Labs division of American Telephone & Telegraph began planning for a new Manhattan headquarters. The high-rise would
cover four acres of prime New York real estate and house 5,600 of the research-and-development division's scientists and staffers. But by 1939, the plan had been discarded: Manhattan, it seems, was already plagued by “high living costs” and “urban noise and dirt.” Staffers were said to be repelled by the hassles and costs associated with commuting. So instead, in 1944, Bell Labs relocated to a parklike campus on 250 acres near Summit, New Jersey, twenty-five miles from the city. Apparently, Bell Labs Chairman Dr. Frank B. Jewett had for years longed for more leafy surroundings.

Images of the New Jersey site show a complex of unthreatening, modern structures amid landscaped countryside. Indoors, a cafeteria, solarium, and employee lounge celebrate modernist aesthetics with “butternut woodwork,” recessed lighting, and unfussy, upholstered furniture. Modular construction allows reconfiguration of laboratory spaces according to the needs of the moment.

Bell Labs was in the vanguard of the industrial-park and office-park movement that would not truly pick up speed until the 1960s, by which point the U.S. economy had begun an inexorable shift away from manufacturing and toward services and knowledge work. The first such parks—around New York, Chicago, and Kansas City—dated back to the turn of the century, but in 1940 there were fewer than thirty-five such developments. By the early 1970s, however, there were more than three hundred such industrial/office parks in California alone, and a large number in Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin.