Shell Development Company

Shell Development Company enters the account through two connected but distinct episodes: a labor-organizing campaign among its Emeryville employees and the later scrutiny of George C. Eltenton, a Shell chemist who had attended organizing meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer. The company is presented as an employer and a site around which these events unfolded, not as an institution shown directing an effort to share atomic secrets. Its workforce, labor relations, and employees’ social connections brought together questions of union activity, wartime security, and political trust.

The Emeryville workforce and union campaign

Shell’s Emeryville plant employed many white-collar workers, including engineers and chemists, some with Ph.D.s from Berkeley. The workforce’s professional credentials did not prevent it from becoming the focus of a labor dispute. A union sponsored by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, began organizing there. Shell management, in response, encouraged employees to join a company union. The account describes this as an election fight within the plant, placing the union drive amid competing efforts to determine who would represent its employees.

David Adelson, a Shell chemist and member of a professional unit of the Alameda County Communist Party, asked Oppenheimer to lend his prestige to the union campaign. Oppenheimer was sympathetic. His involvement was part of a broader political and social circuit: he had joined Martin Kamen at fundraising affairs for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and Russian War Relief, and he was willing to speak in support of organizing. The evidence locates the initiative in a particular labor dispute, rather than portraying Shell’s entire workforce as politically uniform.

Oppenheimer gave a union-sponsored talk at the Berkeley home of Herve Voge, a former graduate student of his who worked at Shell. More than fifteen people attended. The subject was the prospect that the United States would enter the war, and Voge later recalled that the audience listened closely. The talk linked Oppenheimer’s public standing as a physicist to the organizing campaign, while the location—a worker’s home rather than the plant—shows how the effort moved through personal and professional networks as well as formal union activity.

The Eagle Hill meeting and its limits

In autumn 1941, Oppenheimer agreed to hold an organizing meeting at his Eagle Hill home and invited Kamen. Kamen was uneasy about recruiting Radiation Laboratory employees into the controversial union: they were now effectively working for the U.S. Army and had signed security pledges. He attended nonetheless. About fifteen people gathered in Oppenheimer’s living room, among them Oppenheimer’s friend Ernest Hilgard, Berkeley chemist Joel Hildebrand, Voge, and the young British chemical engineer Eltenton, who worked for Shell.

The meeting did not produce the unanimous assent Oppenheimer had apparently expected. When the discussion reached Kamen, he raised a practical question: whether Ernest Lawrence had been consulted, since the participants worked in the Radiation Laboratory and did not have independence in the matter. His objection exposed a tension between support for union organizing and the authority governing a laboratory increasingly tied to Army work. Oppenheimer had not anticipated the issue, and Kamen thought the interruption shook him. The meeting ended without the expected consensus.

A few days later, Oppenheimer told Kamen that perhaps he had acted wrongly and explained that he had spoken with Lawrence. Lawrence was furious that a union backed by communists was trying to organize laboratory employees. When Lawrence demanded the organizers’ identities, Oppenheimer refused to name them, saying they would have to come forward themselves. The episode strained the friendship between the two physicists and demonstrated that Oppenheimer’s support for the drive had collided with Lawrence’s opposition and the laboratory’s institutional constraints. It does not establish that Shell itself arranged or controlled the meeting; the plant’s role was as the workplace whose employees the union sought to organize.

Eltenton, the car pool, and wartime suspicion

Shell’s connection to the later intelligence questions runs through Eltenton’s employment and his association with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer knew him from the union meetings and had seen him on only four or five occasions. Eltenton and Voge also shared a daily car pool to Shell for years, from 1938 to 1947. In 1943, four other men joined them: Hugh Harvey, Lee Thurston Carlton, Harold Luck, and Daniel Luten. They called their group the red-herring ride club, a name prompted by Luten’s habit of introducing red herrings into their discussions.

According to Voge, the riders knew that important work was taking place at Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory: people were arriving, and there was conspicuous secrecy. Voge recalled Eltenton expressing a wish for the Soviet Union to win against Nazi Germany and saying he wanted to help. Voge said Eltenton proposed approaching Oppenheimer or Haakon Chevalier to offer to forward information that might be useful to the Russians. He also recalled Eltenton repeatedly arguing that, because the United States and the Soviet Union were fighting on the same side, they should help the Soviets. When other car-pool members questioned whether assistance should go through official channels, Voge remembered Eltenton saying he would do what he could.

These accounts make Shell’s car pool a significant social setting in the narrative, but they do not make the company a participant in the proposed transfer. Rather, the drive to work connected employees whose political views and knowledge of Berkeley’s secretive research differed. The distinction matters: the evidence concerns what an individual Shell employee allegedly said, and how his work and acquaintances brought him into contact with Oppenheimer, not a corporate decision to obtain or transmit scientific information.

Significance in the account

The Shell episodes trace how an ordinary workplace and its surrounding networks could acquire unusual significance as war approached. The organizing campaign brought Oppenheimer into contact with Eltenton; the later recollections of the car pool recast that contact against the background of secret research and wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. Yet the two strands should not be collapsed. Oppenheimer’s union activity concerned labor representation and his support for organizing, while Voge’s account of Eltenton concerned a separate proposal to pass information. Shell Development Company anchors both strands through its Emeryville workforce and its employees, while the narrative assigns the actions and statements to particular people rather than to the company as a whole.