The Company Town (32 page)

All of this was facilitated by organized labor's haughty abstention from such concerns. In the 1940s, Kaiser never made a move without a union contract—perhaps because of labor's clout within the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Earlier, during his dam-building years, Kaiser had not been a particular friend to unions, and at one point his supervisors had brought in goons to break a strike at Boulder Dam. But at Richmond, organized labor was a key player—and there, organized labor
was
the conservative Boilermakers union, by agreement with the federal War Labor Board. The Boilermakers opposed prefabrication but went along in exchange for a “closed shop,” meaning employees were required to join up. Yet the Boilermakers made it quite clear that they had no interest in representing the newly arrived low-skill workers or in tending to their very evident needs. (“The bottom of the barrel was being scraped,” the union said of the new workers, in one publication.) The newcomers were not like the native-born older union members: They were Okies, Arkies, and Texies. They were African American—numbering 10,000 in a town where there once had been only about 400 blacks. Perhaps worse in the eyes of the union, they were women, a group that constituted over a quarter of Kaiser's workers by 1944. The Boilermakers made special arrangements for blacks and women, establishing special “auxiliary locals” for the African Americans—they got to pay dues but had no business agent and no grievance procedure. The union amended its men-only constitution to allow women to join. And to make sure these newcomers had no ability to make trouble, the Boilermakers provided for direct control of certain locals by the national union.

Racial segregation was the rule for shipyard work. Although Henry Kaiser insisted on fair treatment for African Americans, management justified separating the races on the grounds that there would be fewer clashes that way. Whether such segregation helped or only made things worse, racial strife was certainly an issue, particularly if novelist Chester Himes's nightmarish treatment of life in the Los Angeles shipyards,
If He Hollers, Let Him Go
, is to be believed. Although Himes's gangs are segregated by race, his novel features ceaseless racial and sexual banter that occasionally bursts forth in violence. In Richmond, management concentrated African Americans in the difficult outdoor work. Women, on the other hand, worked alongside men and made up 40 percent of the welders. For the most part, supervisors were older white males.
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As of V-J Day, when Japan surrendered, Kaiser's shipyards had turned out $1.8 billion worth of ships. But war work had begun winding down a year earlier, and in 1945 employment fell to fewer than 35,000 workers from a high of nearly 100,000. Recruiters back in the early 1940s had not been altogether honest about postwar prospects—or much of anything else. They said workers would learn a trade, get high wages in a sunshiny area, and have employment for the duration of the war and likely thereafter, when the United States would turn to rebuilding its merchant marine fleet. (They also promised workers “pleasant homes at moderate rentals.”) Instead, shipbuilding activities all but ceased by 1946. Kaiser closed its health-care facilities and child-care centers. What would happen to the migrant workers now?
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In a company survey conducted just before the end of the war, more than 60 percent of the immigrant workers said they wanted to stay in California when peace arrived—and 34 percent said they wanted to remain in Richmond. If that came true, postwar Richmond's population would be about double that of its prewar years. Assuming that the federal government would demolish the temporary blocks of row houses and that only one shipyard would remain open, city officialdom promised to build a community of worker homes in the former industrial areas. Rehabilitation would cost $6 million to $7 million, they said in an appeal to the federal government, and should include a new civic center, a library, firehouses, a hospital, and a police station.

Five years later, half of the town's population was still living in the temporary war housing, including three-fourths of the town's African-American population. The war workers, many unemployed now, had in fact stayed on—and, moreover, more immigrants had arrived, a quarter of whom were nonwhite and half of whom were veterans. Within the next few years, the town evicted thousands of these renters, particularly minorities and those with low income. It also razed hundreds of acres of the war housing, which was seen as crime- and poverty-infested. The area would not in fact become the site of new worker housing. Instead, the demolition opened up the lowlands for commercial development: In 1953, Harbor Gate, which had housed white workers, was among the last to fall, making way for a huge warehouse for the Safeway supermarket chain.

But even if the shipyards closed, continued military spending after the war helped to keep the Bay Area economy humming. New retail outlets offered employment—not equivalent employment, but jobs all the same—to the women who had once operated cranes or wielded welding torches. Many male shipyard workers turned to the docks and other industrial jobs. GI Bill financing helped many locate replacement housing in the burgeoning working-class suburbs.
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Kaiser Industries had a hand in constructing some of these postwar suburbs, notably Panorama City in Southern California's San Fernando Valley. The prefabrication techniques perfected in the shipyards were now turned to home-building, allowing two-bedroom, single-family structures to sell for as little as $9,100. The corporation included eighteen to twenty enterprises, including a steel mill at Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. But Kaiser's empire, it turned out, much depended on applying the man's personal magic. When Henry Kaiser died in 1967, most of his company's properties were sold off.
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Today, what most people remember when Henry Kaiser's name arises is the health-care plan, which in 1945 began enrolling thousands of members of the public at large. The value of that legacy is debatable in 2010, a year when the proper avenue to national health care is being much discussed. Immediately after the war, Kaiser Permanente was denounced by the American Medical Association as noxious socialized medicine. At roughly the same time, Kaiser himself was arguing against New
York Senator Robert Wagner's proposal for federal health insurance, asserting that his private-sector approach was preferable.
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Over sixty years, it seems, the debate has hardly advanced at all.

Site X, the government called it at first. The advantages: a rural, middle-of-the-country location that allowed few prying eyes. Lots of hydroelectric power, plentiful water, a sizable labor pool, and loads of land available for under $50 an acre. Only 1,000 families would have to be evicted, according to preliminary studies.

In October 1942, the U.S. government went into federal court and filed a “declaration of takings” for 56,000 acres. Five months later, six architects from the New York firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were handed train tickets in sealed envelopes and dispatched to the unknown destination, where they would scout out the turf. By mid-February, they had an initial plan for a town. Residents—small farmers, some of whose families had lived there for generations, and tenants—got as little as two weeks' notice that they were being ousted. Many came home to find eviction notices posted on their doors or nailed to a tree in the yard. As they moved out, often before the government purchase was completed, some crossed paths with the thousands of construction workers who were on their way to make the area into a city.

Site X, later known as Clinton Engineer District and ultimately as Oak Ridge, would be one of three supersecret locations central to the Manhattan Project, which produced America's first atomic bombs. (The name Oak Ridge, strictly speaking, applied only to the fourteen-square-mile residential area within the larger Clinton reservation.) The other locations were Hanford, Washington (also known as Site W), and Los Alamos, New Mexico (Site Y).

It was the U-235, produced in Tennessee, that in 1945 reduced Hiroshima, Japan, to a cinder, killing 140,000 people. Located twenty miles from Knoxville and only sixteen miles from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Norris Dam, the Clinton Engineer District was the largest of the three primary Manhattan Project facilities. Hanford, the second-largest, was the major source for plutonium, which was used in the somewhat
different bomb that fell on Nagasaki. Los Alamos, even though it was the smallest facility, became the most well-known since it was where the renowned scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer worked at the best-equipped physics lab in the world.

In almost every sense, Oak Ridge was a company town. It was, of course, a community planned and owned by management—the U.S. government.

Among the great number of workers at Oak Ridge was a large pool of unskilled young women, many of whom were housed in dormitories—and so Oak Ridge harkened back to the model established at Lowell.

The labor needs of the Clinton works were massive, prompting massive residential construction. In 1943, the government estimated that 13,000 people would be required, but the project's demands kept growing. By 1945, around 75,000 worked in what had become the fifth-largest city in Tennessee. The federal government and its subcontractors built thousands of housing units, much as at Richmond, California. During one period, single-family houses were being erected in Oak Ridge at the rate of one every half-hour.

Oak Ridge was a closed community. The 59,000-acre reservation was surrounded by fences, with signs reading MILITARY RESERVATION, NO TRESPASSING posted every six hundred feet. Five lookout towers loomed above the perimeter, and guards carefully screened would-be entrants at each of seven gates. Even more elaborate fencing topped with a foot of barbed wire surrounded each of the plants within the reservation. A system of coded badges regulated entry, and there were a great many armed cops: 4,900 members of the Safety Forces, 740 military police, and 400 civilian police. Such precautions were elaborate, yes—but also reminiscent of the closed-community approach at mining towns in Colorado and Appalachia.

Also like mining towns, loss of employment meant immediate expulsion from Oak Ridge. This time the offense that might have you deposited outside the gates with all of your belongings was not mere union activity—it was a breach of Manhattan District security, perhaps only loose talk or a wrong word in a letter written to a relative. Spies and informants infiltrated every part of the culture at all Manhattan Project locations. Agents from an Intelligence and Security Division tracked
rumors out of Oak Ridge across the globe, examined the press for any sign of leaks, and fingerprinted more than 300,000 people.

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.
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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.”
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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.