The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  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?”25

  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. 26

  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.”27 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.28 THE ATOMIC CITY WELCOMES YOU, reads a sign at the city’s outskirts. DRIVE CAREFULLY.

  CHAPTER 8

  A World Transformed

  Come let us travel into the future. What will we see? . . . A new world is constantly opening before us at an ever accelerating rate of progress. A greater world, a better world. A world which will always grow forward.

  —From the sound track for General Motors’ 1939 World’s Fair exhibit, Futurama1

  The 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 le
ss 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.

  Railroads had been prime movers of early industrial parks, encouraging flight from costly urban centers. But the acceleration of the trend was tied to more recent developments in transportation and communication—namely, truck deliveries via highways, automobile commuting, and the rise in computer applications. An increasing number of light-assembly operations found homes near airports.

  Office-park pathbreakers included IBM and PepsiCo. In 1957, the computer company commissioned Finnish-born Eero Saarinen—an architect on his way to developing a world-class reputation in part due to his many company campuses—to design a scientific research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The three-story, 770,000-square-foot building there would house 1,500 scientists in a fieldstone-and-glass structure that set a new standard for suburban offices. IBM was so pleased with the Yorktown facility that it decided to move its corporate headquarters out of Manhattan to Armonk, New York. Architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill—the company that had arranged Oak Ridge—drew up plans for a 403,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete edifice, complete with two sculpture-filled courtyards on 420 acres. At the same time, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill created Connecticut campuses for Connecticut General Life and Emhart Manufacturing Co. Saarinen designed another complex for Bell Labs, at Holmdel, New Jersey, which opened in 1962.

  PepsiCo followed IBM’s lead, moving northward out of New York City. In 1958, the soft-drink giant bought a former polo club in Purchase, New York, and hired architect Edward Durell Stone to plan a prestigious headquarters complex that would consist of seven seemingly overlapping, three-story buildings on 112 acres. Native and exotic trees and grasses were as carefully chosen as the fifty celebrated works of sculpture by the likes of Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi.

  Outside of the New York area, the flight from urban centers was perhaps even more pronounced. In the 1960s, more than thirty industrial parks representing seven hundred high-tech companies—Digital, General Electric, RCA, and Raytheon included—emerged along Route 128 near Boston. The Great Southwest Industrial Park, opened in 1967 on the outskirts of Atlanta, seems like a paradigm of the modern corporate campus. After passing through a ninety-foot-high abstract entry arch, employees and visitors traveled along wide, divided boulevards bearing such collegiate names as Bucknell and Colgate. Trees and shrubbery shared quadrangle space with modernist sculpture. Buildings housed regional distribution centers for Coca-Cola, Goodyear, Philco-Ford, and Stanley Home Products. Not far away, the Atlanta Executive Park, which opened in 1964, housed administrative rather than industrial activity. There, a central plaza, the Pantry in the Park, supplied office workers with a snack bar, copy service, and gift shop.2

  Examining the emergence of corporate campuses and the exodus from New York City, urban sociologist William H. Whyte in 1988 noted that the new complexes had “little connection with their surroundings.” He went on: They are elements of a car culture. . . . Within the headquarters a range of services makes the outside unnecessary. These are particularly bountiful in outlying campuses. At Beneficial Management’s corporate village in Peapack, New Jersey, a pleasant grouping of low buildings is arranged around a courtyard and bell tower. There are outdoors dining areas, dining rooms within, shops, health facilities; the garage is laid out so that one drives to an underground space and takes an elevator to within a few feet of his office.

  An unabashed fan of the urban experience, Whyte concluded that corporate campuses were employee-unfriendly developments—isolated, accessible only via increasingly congested roadways, often both pharaonic and sprawling, with little functional use of vast open space and too few pathways for those who might simply like to take a walk. Some were fortresslike, as if intended to discourage visitors, he said. Most unforgivably, he found all of them inhospitable to the “unplanned, informal encounters” among people upon which both markets and spontaneous creativity depend. Ever hopeful, though, Whyte observed that the time-tested “idea of towns is gaining currency” as the campuses were found wanting. He seemed to forecast a return to sensible, small-community living and working.3

  Corporate campuses have continued to sprout, but company towns are hardly things of the past: Hershey, Corning, Scotia, auto-production towns across Middle America, midwestern meatpacking towns, and even the Atomic City of Oak Ridge are still in business. Moreover, rather than supplanting company towns, corporate campuses reproduce much of company-town life, albeit with a postindustrial, white-collar twist, in places ranging from Federal Express’s 500,000-square-foot Collierville, Tennessee, campus to the Mountain View, California, site of the Googleplex. The FedEx facility is home to 1,500 employees and features jogging trails, a library, a wellness center, and coffee bars on each floor of the four office buildings. Google famously offers its cosseted workers free gourmet meals (Indian or Latin American, if one likes), exercise facilities, and massages. Do employees need to get their pants dry cleaned or hair cut? There’s a service right there. There are even “sleep pods” where employees can take soporific-music-induced naps. All of this may sound idyllic, until you realize that workers need never go home—or stop working.4

  For a glimpse of the continuity with the past and the profound readjustments that mark the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American scene, one could hardly turn to a more appropriate place than Kohler, Wisconsin, a town of 2,000 souls fifty-five miles north of Milwaukee along the Lake Michigan shore. Search for that town on the Internet, and first thing, “Destination: Kohler” pops up, a Web page featuring dazzling photos of local fishing, golf, spas, and food-and-wine gatherings. Hotel packages are offered at the American Club and the Inn on Woodlake, with the former described as “the Midwest’s only AAA Five Diamond Resort H
otel providing unique, luxurious décor that creates a singular experience room by room.”

  There’s little on the Web site to identify the place as the hometown of plumbing-fixtures manufacturer Kohler Co.

  The site does say that the American Club once provided housing, meals, and recreation to immigrant employees who could not afford their own homes. But it doesn’t say much about the work of those immigrants. Instead, Web surfers are encouraged to book a room in the club’s Carriage House, visit the Kohler Waters Spa—where now there’s no immigrant immiseration in sight. The late-October Kohler Wine & Food Experience is touted as offering brushes with celebrity chefs and sips of vintage plonk. The Memorial Day Kohler Festival of Beer, it suggests, is an opportunity to sample Wisconsin microbrewery products, not to mention the Blackwolf Run Beer Cup Golf Tournament. Clicking on the “Kohler: At Home” link brings the first hint that, oh, all of this is connected somehow with the toilet-and-tub maker.5

  Life was not always like this in Kohler Village.

  In the 1910s, Walter J. Kohler—head of the eponymous company founded in the 1870s to sell retrofitted “hog scalders” as bathtubs to a swelling immigrant population—decided his firm had outgrown its Sheboygan home. Like many others observed in this account, Kohler and his architect, W. C. Weeks, toured industrial garden villages in Europe. Then, upon returning, he engaged landscape architects from the Olmsted firm—who had also designed Vandergrift, Pennsylvania—along with engineers and town planners. The executive acquired a tract of land at the southwest edge of Sheboygan and in 1912 began to build the new burg that would be known as Kohler Village. The result was a picturesque settlement of winding streets, parks, and brick and frame houses amid plentiful greenery. A separate outfit, the Kohler Improvement Co., sold the completed houses to employees with the understanding that the company retained rights to buy them back if they were ever put on the market. As in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, restrictive covenants limited the uses of these properties, including barring “immoral” enterprises and taverns.