Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia
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Longing for the Bomb This page intentionally left blank Longing for the Bomb oak ridge and atomic nostalgia lindsey a. freeman The University of North Carolina Press chapel hill This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. © 2015 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Set in Utopia and Aller by codeMantra Manufactured in the United States of America An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared as “Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud: Utopia and Memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Adam Brown, and Amy Sodaro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 158–76. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as “Manhattan Project Time Machine,” in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, ed. Brigitte Sion (Seagull Books, 2014). Each is reprinted with permission of the publisher. “Atomic City Boogie,” by Willie “Little Red” Honeycutt, © 2014 Phyllis Honeycutt Simpson and The Honeycutt Family. Reprinted with permission. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Cover illustration: Postcard of Jackson Square, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, published by Werner News Agency, Knoxville, and seal of the city of Oak Ridge Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Longing for the bomb : Oak Ridge and atomic nostalgia / Lindsey A. Freeman. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4696-2237-8 (paperback : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-1-4696-2238-5 (e-book) 1. Oak Ridge (Tenn.)—History—20th century. 2. Oak Ridge (Tenn.)— Social life and customs—20th century. 3. Oak Ridge National Laboratory— History—20th century. 4. Official secrets—United States—History—20th century. 5. Atomic bomb—Social aspects—United States—History. 6. Manhattan Project (U.S.)— History. 7. World War, 1939–1945—Tennessee—Oak Ridge. 8. Popular culture— United States—History—20th century. I. Title. f444.o3f74 2015 355.8’25119097309044—dc23 2014038124 For Nan This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments, xi Prologue, xiii Introduction, 1 1 / The Atomic Prophecy, 14 2 / Brahms and Bombs on the Atomic Frontier, 37 3 / At Work in the Atomic Beehive, 61 4 / We Didn’t Exactly Live in a Democracy, 80 5 / From Hiroshima to Normalization, 93 6 / Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud, 120 7 / Manhattan Project Time Machine, 138 8 / Atomic Snapshots, 156 9 / Longing for the Bomb, 171 Notes, 179 References, 199 Index, 215 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations Joe and Dorathy Moneymaker, 29 Seal of the City of Oak Ridge, 42 Lie-detector test, 81 Billboard in Oak Ridge, 1943, 82 Santa going through security at Elza Gate, 1944, 88 “The Beginning or the End,” Grove Theater, Oak Ridge, 1947, 103 Gate-opening celebration, Elza Gate, 1949, 115 Opening-day float, 1949, 116 Rod Cameron, Marie McDonald, and Adele Jergens with mechanical hands, 1949, 123 The Secret, 2004, 128 Calutron Girls, 132 Greetings from the Atomic City, 1960s, 139 J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Oak Ridge Guest House, 1946, 157 Oak Ridge High School science class, 1950s, 158 Author’s grandfather in uniform, 159 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments One of the most beautiful gifts I have ever received was a vigorously annotated early draft that became this book. I remember when Vera Zol- berg handed it over to me, full of seemingly endless, multi-colored post-it notes sticking out from every angle. The mass of text resembled a stego- saurus with a rare disease. Slowly and methodically I worked from these notes to try to cure the ills of my creaturely text. I cannot thank my profes- sors at the New School for Social Research enough—Vera, Jeff Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia, and Oz Frankel. Without their close reading, support, and wrangling, this book would not have been possible. I’m also grateful to Oz for pointing out that doing academic work is not the same thing as joining the Navy. I’m thankful for the intellectual community in and around the NSSR, where the ideas for this book emerged and gradually came to take shape. Special thanks to Monica Brannon, Linsey Ly, Aysel Madra, Ritchie Savage, Dan Sherwood, Sam Tobin, and Hector Vera for the years of camarade- rie and support, intellectual and otherwise. Work on this project was also encouraged and enriched by the New School Memory Group, especially Naomi Angel (who left too soon), Adam Brown, Rachel Daniell, Yifat Gut- man, Laliv Melamed, Benjamin Nienass, and Amy Sodaro. Long live the octopus of memory! Throughout the years of work on this book, in between pushing around my own paragraphs, I taught in the sociology and social science depart- ments of FIT, Pratt, Eugene Lang College, Rutgers-Newark University, and SUNY-Buffalo State. At Rutgers, I taught evening classes in social theory, reading drafts and pounding out notes for this manuscript on the most beautiful train route from New York City to Newark: marshes and rust- ing industrial ruins provided the backdrop for new insights and turns of phrase. In the first-year writing department at Eugene Lang College, I taught classes on utopia and memory, the two poles of this work. Spe- cial thanks are due to Sherri-Ann Butterfield and Kate Eichhorn, who led those departments, and to all my sharp students who pushed my thinking. I would also like to thank Jonathan Veitch, whose interest in utopias and nuclear spaces fortuitously lined up with my own. xi The social geography department at the Université de Caen, where I presented earlier versions of this work, provided a space for thinking, spir- ited collegiality, and calvados. Thanks go to Pierre Bergel, Patrice Caro, Jean-Marc Fournier, Benoît Raoulx, and especially to Stéphane Valognes, who introduced me to nuclear Normandy. The folks at the Center for the United States and the Cold War at New York University offered valuable feedback and endured my non-linear approach to the nuclear past. I am also grateful to my new students and colleagues in the sociology depart- ment at SUNY-Buffalo State, where I was able to put the finishing touches on the manuscript. Special thanks go to Allen Shelton, who tolerated my long sentences and gave valuable advice to a greenhorn writer and professor. I am forever indebted to Sara Jo Cohen, who picked me out of the wilds of the Association of American Geographers’ program; to copyeditor Eric Schramm; and to all the hardworking and talented folks at UNC Press: Stephanie Wenzel, Alison Shay, and my wonderful and charming edi- tor Joseph Parsons, whose support, smarts, and good humor constantly exceed expectation. I would also like to thank Karen Engle, Hugh Guster- son, and Bruce Hevly, who carefully read earlier drafts of this book and provided helpful critical insight. The book is much improved for your efforts. Additional thanks to Karen and Yoke-Sum Wong for their support of the secret telephone. And much love and appreciation to Jessi Lee Jackson, who abided all the bees in my bonnet, encouraged me when I felt blue, read endless scraps of texts, and listened to so much talk about the atomic bomb, even allowing me to read pieces of the text to her at Rockaway Beach. Finally, most of all I would like to thank all the Oak Ridgers who took the time to talk with me and to share their stories. Without you, of course, none of this work would have been possible. Special recognition goes to the late Bill Wilcox, D. Ray Smith, Jay Searcy, Earline Banic, Jim Comish at the AMSE, Phyllis Simpson and the Honeycutt family, reference librarian Teresa Fortney at the Oak Ridge Library, the folks at the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History, my mother, Bobbie Freeman, my uncle Frank McLemore, and my grandmother Nan McLemore. I would also like to thank my father, Dennis Freeman, who began his career as a clinical psychologist at the Oak Ridge Mental Health Center when he was a young PhD. xii Acknowledgments Prologue “I’m from Oak Ridge. I glow in the dark.” This was the luminescent phrase that graced my favorite T-shirt when I was seven. It was the mid-1980s and all kinds of neon and day-glow attire were popular, but this was different. The shirt meant “I’m radioactive and I have a sense of humor about it.” During World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was one of the three top-secret locations created for the sole purpose of producing an atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. I didn’t quite understand the glowing then. It felt magic, like something a superhero could do. When you turned the lights out the letters actually glowed—illuminating the message—making me feel even more powerful than my Wonder Woman underoos did. Smart as I thought my T-shirt looked in all its 50 poly/50 cotton glory, it was not a good sartorial choice for hide-and-go-seek, as I learned the hard way. My connection to the city of Oak Ridge—a place involved in an advanced geopolitical game of hide-and-go-seek of its own—began in the early 1940s, when my grandparents, Nan and Frank McLemore, moved to the secret Manhattan Project city after my grandfather was injured in the war. He had been stationed in France. Where? Nobody seems to know exactly. He didn’t like to talk about it. He had “grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience,” as Walter Benjamin writes of the soldiers returning from the First World War.1 What we do know is that “over there” my grandfather was hit by an artillery shell fragment in the ankle and sent home purple-hearted, limping a bit.