Hanford History Project documents the legacy of the Manhattan Project and Cold War

The history of Hanford nuclear reservation is often centered on the enormity of its original mission of refining plutonium to power the atomic bombs that would bring WWII to an end - and the clean up of the waste left behind.

Robert Franklin is an assistant professor of history with Washington State University Tri-Cities and the assistant director at the Hanford History Project. He’s made it his mission to highlight the lesser-known stories of the Hanford site’s impact. He sits down with us to share more about the larger history of the site and the lesser known stories, including the Black and low-income families who worked at Hanford.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are coming to you today and all this week from the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities in Richland. We are about three miles from the edge of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I’m joined now by Robert Redder Franklin. He is an assistant professor of history at Washington State University and the assistant director of the Hanford History Project. It’s great to have you here.

Robert Franklin: Thank you very much for having me.

Miller: Before the break we heard a little about the federal government’s takeover of this area in 1943. Why did General Leslie Groves, the manager of the Manhattan Project, choose Hanford as the place to make plutonium?

Franklin: Well, the choice to make plutonium was a realization that the Manhattan Project did not want to just trust the process that was done at Oak Ridge, which was uranium separations. And that ended up being fortunate for the goal of the Manhattan Project, which was to build atomic weapons, because plutonium production uses chemistry to isolate plutonium, which was much more effective than what happened at Oak Ridge.

They also knew they did not want to locate that process near Oak Ridge. They wanted to spread that out, for security reasons, safety reasons. So Groves tasked Colonel Franklin Matthias with surveying sites on the West Coast, broadly. Matthias went to a number of sites – I believe it was eight, maybe nine – and the last one was Hanford.

It was December 2, 1942. He takes off from the Pasco airport and flies over the mid-Columbia here, kind of the Hanford plateau, and he sees everything he’s looking for. It’s relatively remote. There’s about 1,400 settlers that live here in the towns of Hanford, White Bluffs, Richland, and the surrounding environment, and a number of Indigenous groups, too. They often aren’t counted in the official number because of their seasonal use and the ways they use the land did not lead them, of course, to be counted as “residents” of the land.

The river ran through the land, and the river is so central to stories of Hanford today, and it’s a major reason why Hanford was selected. The reactors, like B and D and F, the first three that would be built, needed massive amounts of cooling water. And water would be needed for construction, but the reactors needed a constant supply of clear water, cold, clean running water. There was electricity from Bonneville and Grand Coulee. The soil is pretty well drained. Sandy soil is great for construction of these incredibly large concrete buildings.

But it also, logistically, was a good place. Pasco, which is 25 miles or so from the site, was the largest rail hub west of the Mississippi. So, logistically you could get tons of goods and people in. But also Richland, the town that’s chosen as the bedroom community, is far enough away where you could build an entire kind of atomic utopian community. So it had everything that, from their minds, that they were looking for.

Miller: So in a sense, even though there were some small towns here, it was a basically instant set of cities, 40,000 people or so pretty quickly came to live here. What was life like here during the war?

Franklin: You’re talking about the Hanford construction camp. And that was this construction camp that was built over the old town of Hanford that housed all of the construction workers, close to 45,000, including 6,900 trailer units, making it the largest trailer camp in the world, at that time. The largest general delivery post office.

Life was rough and tumble for folks. It was a construction site. Hanford lacked a lot of amenities that make for a nice, healthy working and living environment. I mean, it’s remote. It’s incredibly hot in the summer, cold in the winter. And because of all the construction, you would have these massive dust storms that they called termination winds, and these dust storms would blow through. And I mean, real scenes similar to the dust bowl type of storms that would blow through, scrub the paint off cars. The dust would seep into these hastily constructed buildings. And they called them “termination winds” because after one of these would blow through, the line to terminate would be just as long as the line of people coming in.

Miller: Meaning, “I’ve had enough. I can’ handle this dust. I’m done.”

Franklin: I was on a plane a few years ago to the Western History Association, and I was talking with the person next to me – this was in San Antonio – and we were talking, and we both realized we’re going to the same conference. And we talked about what we did, and I told him, “Oh, I work at Hanford,” and there’s another guy, whose name was Robert. I forget his last name. He’s a professor somewhere on the East Coast. But he’s like, “Oh, Hanford. I lived in Richland for one day!” And I was like, “Well, OK, you gotta tell me about that!”

He said that he was a very small baby, and his father got a job during the Manhattan Project. Dupont, the contractor, got pretty savvy and they started bringing in people at night, because they’d bring them in at night, send them to the hotel, and then they’d wake up in Richland. When they were bringing people in during the day, some people were leaving, because this isn’t the Washington that a lot of people think of when they think of Washington. They think of evergreens and the beautiful mountains, and the Tri-Cities is not exactly that. It’s the high desert.

So anyway, he was telling me that they brought them in at night and the family woke up at the transient quarters, which is now the Richland, like Hanford House, the Holiday Inn, downtown. And he said his mother opened the window, and there was a dust storm and they were Okies. They’d left Oklahoma, had migrated to California, and were kind of moving around for war work, and he told me that his mother said to his father, “You can stay here, but I’m taking young Robert and I’m going back to California today.” And so the family left, so he was here just that one … But those termination winds are real. We still get dust storms occasionally here. But it’s nothing. Because you got to think of, you’re building this massive site. You’re moving so much earth. It’s just, it’s amazing, those storms.

Miller: This was [and] still is, in many ways, a company town. The company before was a very secretive wartime federal government. There were reasons for that. I mean, there were spies. The Soviets eventually, from what I understand, copied a lot of the reactor technology when they started making their own plutonium.

Franklin: Or at least, it’s a little alarming how similar it was to what we were doing.

Miller: What kinds of security measures did folks here have to contend with?

Franklin: Oh, well, FBI men in suits were a pretty common occurrence, investigating people who are looking for clearances. To back up for a second, the construction camp – that’s for mostly general laborers that are building the site. The operators are the people that are actually going to run the facilities, they’re living in Richland. But people that grew up then remember FBI people doing investigations for Q clearances.

Part of what I’ve been doing since 2016 is doing oral histories as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. And I interviewed a woman who grew up in Richland [and] talked about how the FBI came to investigate her father, who had applied for Q clearance. And because he had an error in his birth certificate, they went so far to go back to Arkansas to interview the priest that had signed the birth certificate and get him under oath to declare that this man was born there, because they went that far in tracking down people’s records for these Q clearances.

So, it was significant. It was a real culture of secrecy and security because of the work that was being done here. And people then, and still many now, take it very seriously. A lot of times when I was interviewing people, they would kind of offhand tell me that there were things that they had signed that they weren’t going to talk about, and sometimes that stuff had been declassified, but just that blanket of security and secrecy lives on. It’s a vibe.

Miller: After the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki with plutonium that was made here, there was a special edition of the paper, The Richland Villager, that had a headline that I’ve seen filled half the front page. It said, “Peace. Our bomb clinched it.” There’s fascinating pride in that headline. It was our bomb that ended the war. That was 79 years ago. How much of that do you still see or hear – pride in what this place made?

Franklin: Well, it’s a big question. You’re really nodding to the kind of traditional narrative that we told about the ending of the war. A narrative that was believed by a very large amount of Americans at the time, supported by the government, and then strengthened during the Cold War, as we deemed it necessary to have more nuclear weapons to protect us against what we felt was an even greater global, ideological military threat in the Soviet Union. That traditional narrative is very strong.

Obviously here, the mascot for Richland High School was changed in September. It used to be the Beaver and they were Columbia High School Beavers. It was changed. Students voted to change it to the Mushroom Cloud, and it still is the Mushroom Cloud today or the the “R,” with the mushroom cloud over it, known as the “R” Cloud.’

Miller: I mean, there has been a mushroom cloud in the gym for decades …

Franklin: … For decades, right.

Miller: But, just this month, it was officially changed … ?

Franklin: No, no, no … sorry, in September of 1945.

Miller: Oh, OK.

Franklin: Sorry, sorry. Let me back up. In September of that year it was changed. The students voted to change it to the mushroom cloud. And, obviously proud of the role that … and it took time for information to come out. It’s easy to understand that pride at the end of the war, right? It took time for information from Japan and the atomic bomb casualty committee and others to come out.

There were early opponents of the bomb. But the other narratives did not really start to grow until revisionist historians like Gar Alperovitz really looked at the decision. His famous book called “The Decision to [Use] the Atomic Bomb,” a pretty landmark revisionist history, and others … [Tsuyoshi] Hasegawa’s book, “Racing The Enemy,” is another great book too. If you really want to drill down into this decision or what role the bombs played in ending the war, Hasegawa does an excellent job in looking at that from the sides of the Soviets, the Japanese and the Americans. But this pride… it lives on.

I’ve interviewed over 100 folks for the Hanford History Project, and my last question was always, “what would you like future generations to know about your work at Hanford during the Cold War,” because almost everybody I was interviewing were Cold War era people. Many of them, not all, but many, would say something close to, “I want them to know how important it is, what we did here, in World War II. And that we helped to end the war.”

And it’s always interesting that it was phrased in terms of “we.” I’d asked about the Cold War, but there was this World War II identification. It was a very strong identification of part of this community, and part of Hanford, But also, it’s part of our nation’s story that these bombs ended this war.

Miller: A war that is easier to see as noble and good, even 70-plus years later…

Franklin: Absolutely.

Miller: … than the complexities of the Cold War or other hot wars that are connected to it. But that mushroom cloud is still there.

Franklin: It is. It is.

Miller: There have been conversations about removing it, right? But it has never happened.

Franklin: Yes, there are very staunch defenders of it. There are very staunch critics of it. Those conversations continue to happen, but the cloud is still there, as a symbol of that community pride, but also that event. And of course, your positionality really determines how you view that cloud. You know, I’ve been here nine years and I’m not from the community and I definitely don’t identify with the mushroom cloud and have my own … I would say it would be time to change it, personally speaking. But it’s certainly a conversation that this community will keep having to have, because it is a hard thing to understand so many years later, when we’ve learned so much about the bomb and its effects in the Cold War. It’s jarring.

Miller: It’s a visual symbol that gets at much bigger issues. And I’m wondering in a broader sense what you as a historian see as the biggest, or maybe most interesting challenges of telling the history of this place. This place that is so immense, in terms of the role it’s played in global human history, and in contested ways. So, what are the challenges as a historian?

Franklin: The challenges are in moving away from these conventional, one-sided narratives. And it’s not just the triumphalist narrative that we’ve talked about, this traditional narrative, but there’s sometimes narratives that seem to be reactionary narratives to that. And this is very common in history writing and history production. There’s often a traditional narrative and then a reactionary revisionist, and then a post-revisionist that really seeks to identify the complexity of this place.

And one of the challenges is in identifying and in embracing the complexity of the history here at Hanford. There’s a counter narrative that really focuses on downwinders, hibakusha people who have survived the environmental contamination and degradation, and that is really valuable work. It’s intention with this kind of triumphalist narrative. But then there’s other narratives within that, and I think we should embrace elements of both those stories.

There are science and technological marvels that are the result of the Manhattan Project: the birth of the nuclear industry. The situation that created this coming together to race Germany to an atomic bomb. This was done for very clearly articulated reasons, and the people that did it believed in the goodness of it …

Miller: Or the necessity of it …

Franklin: Yeah, I think that’s a better word. And the after effects, they began to feel differently, some of them, but also the rush to do this left us with such a profound problem. And so many decisions were made that we’re dealing with the consequences of those for untold generations.

But there’s even other stories. There’s stories of race, and African Americans who were brought here by the thousands, or who came to work here and faced segregation and Jim Crow-like laws and practices here in the north. There’s Tribal stories, there’s Latinx stories. There’s so many complex narratives. The challenge is really in finding space for all of those, and getting people who may ideologically be pulled to one narrative to see the utility and value in the other narratives, in all of them.

Miller: Well, I wanna hear more about one of these. This past spring you taught a course focused on the role that infrastructure in the Tri-Cities played in furthering racial disparities. What are you teaching students about this?

Franklin: This was a graduate course with the School of Design and Construction, teaching architecture MAs and a few public history MAs came to take it. Well, we wanted to look at what spurred the course … There’s the Lewis Street underpass that was being taken down by the city of Pasco and being replaced with an overpass. That specific structure had really been the only entry, the only thorough point between mostly Black, historically segregated East Pasco and the Pasco west of East Pasco, or Pasco proper.

And that underpass had come up in so many different oral histories. Back in 2017-18, the Hanford Street Project had been funded by the National Park Service to document African American migration, segregation and civil rights at Hanford.And the underpass had emerged as this point of funneling, but also as this kind of menacing, scary thing for children that experienced it. And even for generations after, some of the Latinx generations have said the same thing about the underpass. But it was this symbol of segregation, of how separate East Pasco was from the rest of Pasco.

So, what we wanted to do was use East Pasco as a case study to teach students about how we design cities, how we design buildings, how we design neighborhoods, affects who live there, how we’re going to talk about those neighborhoods; and the roles that design and race play together to really take practices of things that our university values, like publicly engaged, scholarship, diversity, equity, inclusion principles (DEI), and really apply those in the setting. And sure, teach them a lot about Hanford [inaudible] Pasco. But also, as they’re going out to be designers and architects, to be thinking about how, wherever they are, these decisions – whether it’s racial covenants on houses, whether it’s where we’ve placed streets and highways – how those shape communities. Because that’s everywhere, that’s not just Pasco. That’s everywhere, that’s every city.

One thing that Hanford does as a historian that makes this place so interesting to study is, you talked about the global impacts, this kind of immediacy, the speed at which this happens, the decisions that are made. It really brings a lot of these things, like African-American migration and Jim Crow, the kind of the speed of the Manhattan Project and the waste, the evacuation of Indigenous and Euro-American residents – all of these things happen so fast and they happen with such immediacy. And it’s such a wonderful place to study these things. They really appear in the historical record and offer excellent case studies for looking at these things elsewhere.

Miller: It also doesn’t seem like the history is over.

Franklin: No, not at all.

Miller: I mean, none of the issues that you’re talking about have been resolved.

Franklin: No, and the hope is to keep talking about them, and to teach these students in our classrooms and the visitors to the park, so they can see these stories when they go back to their own … So they can learn to think about the environment, and place, and race, and science and technology, and inspire them. Because there are things about the Manhattan Project that really are inspiring, but also encourage them to think really critically about other aspects of the history that they’re learning here.

Miller: If you go to some picnic or party where there are people who don’t know you, and you say you’re a historian, do you find that people wonder what side you’re on? I mean, the way you’ve been talking, clearly, you want to get away from that notion of sides. But I’m wondering if that’s the way people might see the act of “history making,” here?

Franklin: Well, yeah, I think about my own positionality all the time.

Miller: “Positionality,” meaning point of view?

Franklin: Yeah, where I am in regards to this history. I like to think of myself as a facilitator of stories and of viewpoints. But certainly, what I value and the stories I choose to amplify and the work I choose to do, is a reflection of my interest and in some ways my biases. And what I’ve focused on has changed over the years, and especially a lot of my work has gone into looking at Black and Latinx populations recently, because it’s a community story, it’s a personal story. I see that story in my classroom, I see it connecting with broad visitors. And I really believe in these principles that have rocked the culture wars in the last few years.

Things like diversity, equity and inclusion. I really, really, believe and take seriously the opportunity to document the history of the community, all the while still maintaining an interest in the science and technology at Hanford, because it truly is amazing what was done here. But do I have my own biases? Yeah. I bet people wonder, I bet they can get a pretty good sense, once they talk to me, of my politics. But in my history work, I want to be educating and helping people see empathy in stories they may not fully understand or even agree with.

Miller: Robert Redder Franklin, thanks very much.

Franklin: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Miller: Robert Franklin is the assistant director of the Hanford History Project and an assistant professor of history at Washington State University.

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