Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians

The Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians was a CIO-sponsored labor union whose organizing efforts brought workplace representation, left-wing politics, and wartime security into direct conflict at Berkeley. Its campaign began among professional employees at Shell Development Company and reached scientists at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. Though some laboratory members joined from concern about their lack of a voice in the use of their work, the union was soon treated by military authorities as evidence of subversive activity, with consequences for the people associated with it.

Organization and the Shell campaign

The Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, commonly referred to as FAECT, was sponsored by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Its organizing drive at Shell Development Company in Emeryville focused on white-collar employees, including engineers and chemists, many of them Ph.D.s from Berkeley. Shell management encouraged employees to join a company union in response to the FAECT-CIO campaign, setting up a contest over who would represent the plant’s professional workforce.

David Adelson, a Shell chemist and member of a professional unit of the Alameda County Communist Party, asked J. Robert Oppenheimer to lend his public standing to the union drive. Oppenheimer agreed. At the Berkeley home of former graduate student Herve Voge, then employed by Shell, he addressed a union-sponsored gathering of more than fifteen people. He spoke about the possibility that the United States would enter the war, and his presence gave the organizing effort an audience attentive to his views. This participation reflected Oppenheimer’s belief that scientists had obligations beyond their laboratories, including a responsibility to people he regarded as society’s underdogs.

Organizing at the Radiation Laboratory

In autumn 1941, Oppenheimer offered his Eagle Hill home for an organizing meeting and invited Martin Kamen, a chemist working at the Radiation Laboratory. Fifteen people attended, among them Oppenheimer’s friend Ernest Hilgard, Berkeley chemist Joel Hildebrand, and Shell employee George C. Eltenton. Kamen was uneasy about recruiting laboratory employees into FAECT: they were effectively working for the U.S. Army and had signed security pledges. He attended nonetheless, and objected that the organizers had not sought Ernest Lawrence’s permission before attempting to organize the laboratory’s staff.

The meeting ended without the unanimous support Oppenheimer had expected. Lawrence, who led the Radiation Laboratory, was furious when Oppenheimer later raised the union with him. He opposed his physicists and chemists joining a union backed by Communists and was also angered that Oppenheimer continued to devote time to left-wing politics. Oppenheimer maintained that scientists had a social responsibility to assist the disadvantaged. The disagreement exposed a central tension in the campaign: the union offered a means of collective action, but the laboratory’s work and employees were already subject to military authority and security rules.

A little over a year later, in early 1943, five of Oppenheimer’s students—Rossi Lomanitz, Irving David Fox, David Bohm, Bernard Peters, and Max Friedman—joined FAECT Local 25. Their reasons did not center on pay or working conditions. Lomanitz earned $150 a month, more than twice his previous salary, and described joining as a youthful, dramatic gesture rather than a response to workplace grievances. Friedman, persuaded by Lomanitz and Joseph Weinberg to serve as the laboratory organizer, later characterized the role as largely a title. He nevertheless supported unionization in principle: some members feared what might be done with the atomic bomb, and believed scientists should have a say in the fate of their work.

Security response and personal consequences

Army intelligence officers were already monitoring the Radiation Laboratory. The union’s presence drew their attention, and an August 1943 warning to the War Department identified several people in the laboratory as active Communists, including Joseph Weinberg. An accompanying report described Local 25 as dominated and controlled by Communist Party members or sympathizers. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told the president that the situation was alarming unless it could be stopped. Soon afterward, the Roosevelt administration formally asked the CIO to end its organizing drive at the Berkeley laboratory.

The security response was not limited to ending the campaign. Max Friedman was called in and fired from his Radiation Laboratory job. He later taught at the University of Wyoming, then obtained a position at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory through Phil Morrison; after six months, security officers caught up with him there and he was dismissed. When his name surfaced in postwar investigations into atomic spying, the only job he could obtain was at the University of Puerto Rico. Lomanitz was drafted after being appointed liaison between the Radiation Laboratory and the Manhattan Project plant at Oak Ridge, despite interventions by Lawrence and Oppenheimer. Weinberg, placed under close surveillance, was drafted and sent to an Army post in Alaska after investigators found no further evidence connecting him to espionage. These distinct outcomes show how association with Local 25 could expose laboratory workers to suspicion and professional disruption even without established evidence of espionage.

Oppenheimer’s withdrawal and the union’s significance

Oppenheimer backed away from organizing in autumn 1941, before the later formation of Local 25. His retreat followed Lawrence’s warning that continued political activity could prevent him from joining the bomb project. Lawrence had also told him that James B. Conant had rebuked him for discussing fission calculations with a scientist not officially included in the project. Yet Oppenheimer’s scientific work was already contributing to the effort: at a secret meeting in Schenectady on October 21, 1941, his calculation that one hundred kilograms of uranium-235 would suffice for an explosive chain reaction became an essential part of the meeting’s report to Washington. A month after the union dispute, he assured Lawrence that he would cause no further difficulties over organizing.

This change of course did not mean that Oppenheimer had abandoned his political beliefs. The account attributes it instead to his growing conviction that participation in the bomb effort might be necessary to defeat Nazi Germany, and to his recognition that he would have to follow Lawrence’s advice to gain access to the project. The union campaign therefore marks a consequential boundary between political action and professional opportunity: organizing at the laboratory could be framed as a security danger, while participation in weapons research depended on acceptance by military and scientific authorities. FAECT Local 25’s short-lived effort became entangled with that boundary, and its members bore consequences that extended well beyond the question of workplace representation.