At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (review)

The history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, like that of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington—the other atomic cities created under the Manhattan Project—continues to unfold ever so slowly as the nation's security gatekeepers go about the deliberate but often unpredictable business of declassifying documents. The first serious scholarly accounts, which appeared well after the gates to the secret city opened in 1949, were predictably written from the top down, official histories commissioned by the U.S. Army, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Atomic Energy Commission, whose researchers were given special, though far from complete, access to documents. This approach yielded one picture of Oak Ridge and its sister atomic cities—one that privileged the success stories of scientists, government planners and contractors, politicians, and military brass.

A different sort of picture began to emerge, however, with Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson's City behind a Fence (1981), which focused on the development of Oak Ridge as a community. Now, almost a quarter-century later, Russell Olwell picks up their trail, drawing on oral histories they conducted for their book and Smithsonian videohistories done by Stan Goldberg, as well as newly declassified documents. Olwell's emphasis is on health and safety issues that were peculiar to the atomic workplace. Carrying the narrative from the war to the present, his is a fuller view of how people lived and worked at the government reservation. Olwell adopts the point of view of the ordinary workers, heroes in the race for the atomic bomb, who were doing their jobs and made it all happen. They were the ones who endured the stark living conditions, the isolation, the inequities, racial and otherwise, the secrecy and security, and, above all, the routinely understated hazards of working intimately with uranium, plutonium, and the toxic soup of other radioactive materials that were the stuff of everyday life in atomic cities.

Although the conventional view of labor at Oak Ridge and other atomic sites is one of a patriotic consensus during the national emergency, Olwell portrays a more complicated situation. War-industry workers, particularly those at the atomic facilities, were indeed willing to forego some of their rights for the cause, but they did not give them up altogether. Labor disturbances erupted from time to time, primarily over working conditions, and unions attempted occasional incursions but were mostly kept at bay by appeals to national security. Wartime Oak Ridge was not run as a democracy, and Manhattan Engineer District leaders kept job actions in check by essentially militarizing civilian workers as industrial soldiers. In launching their tamped-down protests during and after the war, Olwell convincingly argues, workers appealed to the same patriotism that was used to keep them in line: their wartime sacrifice for the nation had earned them the right to better working conditions and higher wages.

The most serious problems centered on noxious health conditions in the three production plants—the enormous K-25 gaseous diffusion building, the Y-12 electromagnetic separation facility, and the X-10 plutonium plant. Olwell takes exception to previous government-sponsored studies purporting to show that there was little if any long-term harm caused by exposure to low-level radiation. Drawing on newly declassified reports, he demonstrates that the government did in fact know of potential ill effects but kept them under wraps. The policy of secrecy and public stonewalling on matters of health and safety continued after the war and even up to the present, reinforced by cold war concerns and, most recently, the war on terror.

Olwell has produced a balanced yet passionate study of how ordinary people were affected by an extraordinary enterprise whose full dimensions we are only beginning to understand. The secret history of America's atomic project needs to be opened up, and Olwell charts important new territory. It remains to be seen, however...