Longing for the Bomb

Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia

Lindsey A. Freeman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781469622378
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469622385
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Longing for the Bomb traces the unusual story of the first atomic city and the emergence of American nuclear culture. Tucked into the folds of Appalachia and kept off all commercial maps, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created for the Manhattan Project by the U.S. government in the 1940s. Its workers labored at a breakneck pace, most aware only that their jobs were helping “the war effort.” The city has experienced the entire lifespan of the Atomic Age, from the fevered wartime enrichment of the uranium that fueled Little Boy, through a brief period of atomic utopianism after World War II when it began to brand itself as “The Atomic City,” to the anxieties of the Cold War, to the contradictory contemporary period of nuclear unease and atomic nostalgia. Oak Ridge’s story deepens our understanding of the complex relationship between America and its bombs.

Blending historiography and ethnography, Lindsey Freeman shows how a once-secret city is visibly caught in an uncertain present, no longer what it was historically yet still clinging to the hope of a nuclear future. It is a place where history, memory, and myth compete and conspire to tell the story of America’s atomic past and to explain the nuclear present.

Chapter One: The Atomic Prophecy

I’ve seen it. It’s coming.

—John Hendrix, atomic prophet

When we receive this text, an operation has already been performed: it has eliminated otherness and its dangers in order to retain only those fragments of the past which are locked into the puzzle of a present time, integrated into the stories that an entire society tells during evenings at the fireside.

—Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

All we really know is that John Hendrix lived and died and that eight dollars was paid for his coffin, but the myth of the atomic prophet states that at the turn of the twentieth century in a rural section of East Tennessee at a fog-prone edge of the Smoky Mountains, Hendrix, a local logger with no formal education, began hearing voices and having visions that the valley where he lived would be transformed into a bustling city that would provide the key to winning a horrible war in the future. Just prior to his experience of these visions, Hendrix suffered extreme loss. Ethel, his youngest child, died of diphtheria, and following her death Hendrix’s wife left him and set off for Arkansas with their three remaining children in tow. In a state of unbearable grief over the loss of his family, Hendrix began hearing voices telling him to head into the woods for forty days and forty nights to pray for guidance. He did as the voices suggested, persevering through near starvation and extreme cold; it is said that one morning he woke to find his hair frozen to the ground, stiffly braided into the frosty undergrowth of the forest. When the forty days were up and he emerged from his Mosaic journey, the voices and the visions continued. Hendrix believed he could see the future and felt that it was his duty to tell everyone who would listen (or at least everyone within earshot) what would transpire along the Black Oak Ridge. Around the year 1900 he is thought to have said, “Bear Creek Valley some day will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that will ever be. There will be a city on Black Oak Ridge, and the center of authority will be on a point midway between Sevier Tadlock’s farm and Joe Pyatt’s Place. A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville and then branch off and turn toward Scarboro. Big engines will dig big ditches and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake. I’ve seen it. It’s coming.”¹

Hendrix would repeat his proclamations to locals and those passing through while holding court at a crossroads market called Key’s store, which was conveniently located right across the road from Bill Locketts’s store. At the time of his prophecies most people in his community thought he was mad. He was even institutionalized for a time.² Yet in the early 1940s Hendrix’s visions seemed to come to life. During World War II, the area surrounding the Bear Creek Valley was chosen by the federal government as a top-secret site for the Manhattan Project. When the five small hillside communities were evacuated and replaced with several gigantic atomic factories and the city of Oak Ridge, the chief administrative building or “center of authority” for the site was placed at the point described in Hendrix’s proclamation, as was the railroad spur. The sudden appearance of the instant city of Oak Ridge with its busy populace, massive factories, and new railroad branch lines closely resembled the precise description of the “great city” of Hendrix’s visions. Of course this is no coincidence; it’s the reason why the myth of the atomic prophet is ever present in the narratives of the city. The story of Oak Ridge is told in a way that cites the place itself as the ultimate proof of the myth’s truth.

It is curious that Oak Ridge, the Atomic City, a place that sees itself as a stronghold of high culture, would trace its origin to a notorious hillbilly; it is perhaps even more curious that a city devoted to science would rely so heavily on a mythic prophecy to tell the story of its beginning. In histories of Oak Ridge, a stark contrast is drawn between the earlier residents who are presented as believing in mystics and visions and the Oak Ridgers, who by contrast are supposedly steeped in a modern rational tradition of science. Yet it is the Oak Ridgers and not the pre-atomic citizens who were removed from the area who utilize the myth of John Hendrix to justify their place in the landscape. As Georges Bataille wrote in the twentieth century, perhaps the grandest myth is that there is an “absence of myth” in modern times.³

After World War II, the Hendrix myth becomes a key component in the story of Oak Ridge’s beginning. Its repetition creates a prophetic spectacle of the past by circumventing and screening out other, more complicated and ruthless histories of the area, including the forced removal of the pre-atomic residents from their land, as well as the grisly details of the World War II atomic bomb attacks. The story of John Hendrix makes what transpired in Oak Ridge and the bombed-out cities of Japan seem inevitable: an atomic manifest destiny.

This thread from Oak Ridge’s prehistory is part of a larger quilt of myths that make up the backstory of an American atomic inevitable that is characteristic of Manhattan Project storytelling. Among the Atomic Age’s most powerful myths, this notion is reflected even in Oppenheimer’s farewell address to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists. On November 2, 1945, the former scientific director of the Project said frankly, “When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing.” Oppenheimer also famously said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. This is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”⁴

Going back to the Oak Ridge story, what is at stake here is not the accuracy or inaccuracy of the script of Hendrix’s visionary rantings and ravings, which could certainly be debated; what is far more important is how this myth has been passed down through time by members of the Oak Ridge community and what use it has for those who choose to repeat it. What follows is an explanation of how a city without a past creates one, not out of thin air, but rather by plucking a story from an earlier time period and bending it to reflect a desired origin story.

Declaration of Taking

In 1942, as World War II raged overseas, General Leslie Groves, fresh from his latest project overseeing the Pentagon from an idea to a blueprint to military theory in three dimensions, was given a new stateside assignment as the U.S. government’s military taskmaster for the secret mission to create an atomic bomb. The mission was more than urgent. There was intelligence that Hitler’s scientists were also working to create atomic weapons. Rumors of heavy water, an essential component of some nuclear reactors, weighed on the minds of Allied scientists. They would need to work fast. This would be a difficult and dangerous race, made all the more harried by the fact that it was not known exactly where the opposing runners were on the track.

On September 19 of that same year, a cohort of powerful men, high-ranking officers from the Army Corps of Engineers and officials from the Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation arrived at the railroad whistle stop in Elza, Tennessee. After a brief on-site consultation, it was decided that the area, as they had thought, would be an excellent choice for a key location of the Manhattan Project. The government needed cheap land and easy access to water, but at a distance from the coast, as well as abundant electricity and transportation outlets. The neighboring Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power center of Norris Dam and the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) railroad line were key deciding factors. The chosen section of East Tennessee proved more than adequate for the Project’s needs.⁵

In Oak Ridge, there is another widely circulated story about the positioning of the site, which involves pact making between the powerful: I’ll pat your back if you pat mine. In this version, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to shuffle large amounts of funds for the atomic bomb project without Congress and the American people knowing what it would be used for. To this end, the president asked Senate Budget Committee chairman Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee if he could help to keep the expenditures for the Project as quiet as possible. McKellar, possibly motivated by the desire to bring wartime jobs to his state, is said to have responded, “Yes, Mr. President, I can do that for you. . . . Now where in Tennessee are you going to put that thang?”⁶

In 1942–43, approximately forty years after Hendrix’s predictions, the federal government of the United States evacuated the communities of Elza, Robertsville, Scarboro, Wheat, and New Hope. The land acquisition process was set in motion on October 6, 1942, when an attorney from the Real Estate Branch of the Ohio River Division of the Corps of Engineers filed a “declaration of taking” at the Federal Court in Knoxville.⁷ The result of this declaration was that nearly 4,000 residents of the area were ordered to leave their homes or be removed by force if necessary.⁸ Through the power of eminent domain the land was seized; if the owners were not home when the government officers visited their property, evacuation notices neatly typed on onionskin paper would be hammered to fence posts, front doors, or any surface that could hold a nail.⁹ Typically, residents were allowed less than three weeks to relocate.¹⁰ The most important areas to the Manhattan Project were designated “hot spots”—a term that now carries a radioactive or contaminated connotation, but at the time meant desirable. Residents of these areas were given only fourteen days to vacate their property. For many in the region, this would be their third forced removal for federal projects, after the clearing of homesteads for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1920s and for the creation of Norris Dam by the TVA in 1933. And all these removals scraped the surface of the same topography from which the Cherokee were swept in the prior century.

To Be Rid of the Old Place

Initially, scientists believed that atomic weapons could be created only from uranium-235, but by the middle of 1941 the future Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg and his team discovered that plutonium-239 was also fissionable.¹¹ The scientists now had two possibilities, but they did not know which would be optimal. Afraid of making the wrong choice, it was decided that the Manhattan Project would pursue both simultaneously. Originally, Groves thought he could try the two types of processes in one spot, but following Enrico Fermi’s successful plutonium pile experiment at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, it became clear that a huge area was necessary to situate the massive reactors needed to produce enough plutonium. Groves felt the Oak Ridge site was already being pushed to its limits. On top of this, plutonium production seemed highly dangerous and Groves thought that the area around Oak Ridge was too populated to risk it. Just as the Project did not want to chance blowing up Chicago, the sizeable city of Knoxville felt too close for comfort. Another site would be needed.¹² When I tell this story to Knoxvillians, they often beam with a reluctant pride. The city retains a kind of rivalry with and suspicion of its atomic neighbor, and even today it retains imaginings of mad scientists tinkering in the labs. Sometimes this attitude seems more put on, sometimes more deeply felt.

To spare Knoxville and to avoid further overtaxing Oak Ridge, the Manhattan Project looked westward for the plutonium-focused site. The higher-ups in the Project considered their methods for choosing space and obtaining the land for Oak Ridge to have been successful, so they replicated their practices for the new site. Like the five evacuated pre-atomic communities in Tennessee, the towns of White Bluffs and Hanford were effectively disappeared from the state of Washington. And like its eastern counterpart, the Hanford site was desirable because of its proximity to a large New Deal project, the Grand Coulee Dam.¹³ This was the modus operandi of the Project: kick out the people, clear the land, and bulldoze it to the point where newcomers might even suspect that they had landed in a territory that had never been settled before.

Unlike the TVA evacuations, the Manhattan Project provided little assistance to the evacuees, either with help moving their belongings or with finding new homes in other areas. Some were paid for their land prior to their relocation, but most were not. This left many of the pre-atomic citizens with no money, no land, and often no job prospects. As surgical as the government tried to make this process, it was not without its mess. Transportation shortages and the speed with which the previous residents were forced to evacuate led to the abandonment of many possessions not deemed absolutely essential. Anyone who has ever moved even under the best circumstances knows this. Things are left behind, sometimes by accident, sometimes in haste, sometimes because the damned thing won’t fit in the truck. This happened in the space that was to become Oak Ridge as well, leaving workers engaged in the grunt work of clearing out to discover photo albums, kitchen items, farming tools, canned vegetables and fruit preserves, gingham curtains, confused livestock, and other flotsam and jetsam abandoned in the rush as the Appalachian valley gave itself over, mostly unconsciously, but not without effort, to the Atomic Age.

Most of the evicted left without serious challenges to the government beyond some sass and idle threats, although a few brought legal action to dispute the sums paid for their land. In 1943, the House Military Affairs Committee launched an investigation into the land acquisition practices of the War Department. Leading the charge was Representative John Jennings Jr. of Knoxville, who argued provocatively, “The Secretary of War has assumed the guise of an invader.”¹⁴ In the end, the Manhattan Project was deemed of too great importance to be more than mildly affected by these claims,¹⁵ although in a few rare cases the land was reappraised and landowners received second offers. In the final settlements, the average cost of an acre of land was forty-five dollars, considered by most to be much less than what it was worth. As if to sum up the ease with which the pre-atomic citizens were excised from their properties, James Marshall, an official for the Corps of Engineers, described the land acquisition process as “child’s play.”¹⁶

As Dorathy Moneymaker, a local historian of the Wheat community, which became the area surrounding the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, wrote, “When a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Longing for the Bomb
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Atomic Prophecy
• Chapter Two: Brahms and Bombs on the Atomic Frontier
• Chapter Three: At Work in the Atomic Beehive
• Chapter Four: We Didn’t Exactly Live in a Democracy
• Chapter Five: From Hiroshima to Normalization
• Chapter Six: Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud
• Chapter Seven: Manhattan Project Time Machine
• Chapter Eight: Atomic Snapshots
• Chapter Nine: Longing for the Bomb
• Notes
• References
• Index