DuPont Company

DuPont Company was associated with the secret wartime project at Hanford, where a vast land acquisition and restricted access drew attention from congressional investigators. The episode placed the company’s plant at the intersection of a weapons program guarded by the War Department and a Senate committee trying to determine whether secrecy concealed waste or inefficiency.

Hanford and the secret project

By 1943, investigators working with Harry S. Truman had encountered unexplained expenditures tied to a secret enterprise known as the Manhattan Project. One concern was the sudden condemnation of nearly half a million acres along the Columbia River near Hanford, a remote railroad town, for DuPont Company. Truman learned that the land was intended for a plant to make a powerful explosion for a secret weapon. In a July 15 letter to Lewis Schwellenbach, who had asked about the land acquisitions, Truman disclosed that much of what was being built remained secret and added that he hoped the project would work.

The correspondence shows that Truman had been told the essential nature of the development, but the evidence does not establish that he knew how the weapon was to be made. The account specifically notes no indication that he knew about the separation of plutonium from uranium-238 at Hanford. The distinction matters: awareness that the plant served a secret weapons purpose did not amount to knowledge of its technical work.

Investigation and restricted access

Questions about Hanford persisted. An Oklahoma senator sought an investigation, while a Truman Committee staff member reported chronic complaints of waste and inefficiency and warned that secrecy might be covering another scandal like the Canol Project. Truman told the senator that he had sent an investigator to find out what was wrong. His committee’s oversight effort therefore continued despite his earlier assurance to the secretary of war that he would not press for sensitive details without further authorization.

A telegram sent to Truman from Walla Walla reported a barrier to that inquiry. The sender relayed that the DuPont plant’s commanding officer had said Truman and the secretary of war had agreed that no committee members would enter the plant. The telegram also described a confidential War Department instruction directing military officers and senior civilian engineers not to give senators or anyone connected with the Senate information about the project. These were claims conveyed in the telegram, rather than an independent account of the directive, but they show how tightly the project’s secrecy restricted ordinary congressional access.

The limits of oversight

After the telegram arrived, committee interest in the Manhattan Project cooled, and the earlier understanding with the secretary of war was honored again. The episode thus left a narrow public record: DuPont Company’s Hanford plant was linked to a secret weapon project, investigators suspected that secrecy could conceal mismanagement, and the committee did not obtain open access to the facility. The account does not establish that the suspected waste was proven, nor that Truman learned the plant’s specific technical process. Hanford’s significance in this episode lies as much in the limits imposed on oversight as in the scale of the undertaking.