How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

10: Wars and Rumors of War

169| It was five after eight when we pulled into the parking lot at Atlas Ship. . . . The gatekeeper said, “Jesus Christ, all you colored boys are late this morning.” . . . At the entrance to the dock the guard said, “Put out that cigarette, boy. What’s the matter you colored boys can’t never obey no rules?” I tossed it over the wooden craneway, still burning. He muttered something as he went over to step on it. The white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning. —Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) Palo Alto is half bedroom suburb, half futuristic 1970s science fiction movies. . . . The big thing about Palo Alto is that, as a city, it designs tons of incredibly powerful and scarry shit inside its science parks, which are EVERYWHERE. —Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (1995) Laura and enrico Fermi arrived in the United States in 1939 as refugees from Fascist italy. in 1938, enrico had earned a nobel Prize in physics. By 1942, he was leading the efforts to develop an atomic bomb and presiding overthefirstcontrollednuclearreactionattheUniversityofChicago.thenext CHAPter ten Wars and Rumors of War | CHAPter ten 170 year, the Fermis came together with other atomic scientists, engineers, and their families at Los Alamos, a science city built hurriedly on a high plateau in northern new Mexico, where isolation was supposed to ensure secrecy. Los Alamos sits on a mesa that faces the sunrise over the valley of the Rio Grande, forty miles from the old adobes and new tourist traps of Santa Fe. Built in a hurry in 1943, Los Alamos housed the nuclear physicists and engineers who designed the first nuclear bombs. one hundred sixty miles from the coal deposits of Black Mesa—across plateaus and dry washes still faintly traced with the roads of the Chaco Culture people—Los Alamos has been devoted to the possibilities of a very different kind of energy. the instant city was a three-way cross between a cheap subdivision, an army camp, and a depression-era federal construction town like Boulder City, nevada, or Coulee Dam, Washington. to get there you traveled a single washboarded access road that crossed the Rio Grande, clawed its way up the steep face of the Parajito Plateau, passed through a fence and checkpoint, and continued for three more dusty miles before reaching the laboratories and their supporting community.1 the top scientists lived on “bathtub row,” the few houses with full plumbing that were left over from a former boarding school. Most families lived in apartments awash in summer dust and winter mud. Scientists spent their days designing a bomb that would change world politics and returned to dinners cooked on wood-burning stoves. General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of getting atomic bombs produced, commented that the scientists “will like anything you build for them. Put up some barracks . they will think they are pioneers out here in the Far West.” He was right. Despite the hardships, Laura Fermi and other residents remembered the sense of community. “i was in Los Alamos only a year and a half,” she later wrote, “and still it seems such a big portion of my life . . . it was such intense living.” Many articulate residents understood and later represented their experiences in the hectic years of 1943 and 1944 as recapitulations of life on the western frontier, a choice between “adventure or disaster, depending on how you wanted to look at it.”2 But this very peculiar frontier town had more in common with cosmopolitan San Francisco and Los Angeles than with rural new Mexico. Los Alamos scientists worked in tandem with physicists at the University of Chicago and University of California. Many of them were recent refugees from european fascism and German aggression: enrico Fermi from italy, edward teller from Hungary, Hans Bethe from Germany, niels Bohr from Denmark, and Stanislaus Ulam, the only member of his family to survive the nazi invasion of Poland. their specific interests and fields were different, but they were a scientific counterpart to the distinguished artists of central europe who found themselves beached in Los Angeles—thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, and Bertolt Brecht struggling to stay focused on class conflict in the California sunshine. WArs AnD rUMors of WAr | 171 BoththeLosAngelescolonyofeuropeanintellectualsandtheLosAlamos science city were participants in the reshaping of western north America by World War ii. the federal government in 1939 was the...