Hanford Works

Hanford Works was a sprawling, secret wartime site whose importance came into view through land seizures, unexplained expenditures, and a series of uneasy encounters between Harry S. Truman’s investigating committee and the War Department. Truman learned that the site was connected to a secret weapon, but his knowledge remained fragmentary: his committee’s scrutiny cooled under a secrecy agreement, and the record gives no indication that he knew how Hanford’s work on plutonium was carried out.

A vast project behind a screen of secrecy

For some time, investigators on Truman’s committee had been encountering puzzling hints of a secret enterprise larger even than the Canol Project. Its expenditures were enormous, their purpose unexplained, and the project was identified only as the Manhattan Project. Hanford became a particular source of concern when nearly half a million acres along the Columbia River were condemned for DuPont Company operations near a desolate railroad town. Lewis Schwellenbach, by then a federal district judge in Spokane, asked Truman about the land seizures.

Truman’s answer showed that he knew more than the committee’s investigators did. In a letter dated July 15, 1943, he said he had been told that the land was for a plant to make a powerful explosion for a secret weapon. His brief hope that it would work conveyed the mixture of confidence and uncertainty surrounding the project: he understood its extraordinary purpose, but not its technical means. Hanford was already a place where the physical scale of the undertaking—the vast acreage and sudden condemnations—outstripped what even a senator privy to some information could explain.

The letter and the breach

Truman’s disclosure to Schwellenbach was striking not only for what it revealed but for how casually it was conveyed. He sent the information in an ordinary letter through the mail, rather than taking precautions to write privately. He dictated it to Mildred Dryden, making her another person aware that the government was building a plant for a secret weapon. The book characterizes this as a serious security lapse and a failure of judgment: a chairman responsible for investigating wartime spending had passed on sensitive information in an informal exchange with a former Senate colleague.

As far as the surviving account shows, the letter never became known to others. Neither Schwellenbach nor Dryden is reported to have said more about it. That silence left the episode as a private breach rather than a public disclosure, but it also reveals how porous secrecy could be even for a senior official who had promised not to press for details. Truman had accepted Secretary of War Stimson’s assurance that the project was both specific and important; he nevertheless passed along what he had learned in a form that was not protected.

Investigation meets the secrecy barrier

Hanford’s scale continued to attract questions. Senator Thomas wanted the operations investigated, and a staff member confidentially reported that complaints of waste and inefficiency had become chronic. The investigator feared that the War Department was invoking secrecy to conceal another scandal like Canol. Truman told Thomas on November 30, 1943, that he had sent an investigator to look into the matter and hoped to discover what was wrong. The stated concern was oversight of spending and administration, not a wish to expose the weapon itself.

Fred Canfil’s subsequent telegram from Walla Walla made the barrier explicit. He reported that the plant’s commanding officer, Colonel Mathias, had said Truman and Stimson had agreed that no committee member would enter the plant. Canfil also relayed that a confidential War Department letter instructed Army officers and senior civilian engineers not to give senators or anyone connected with the Senate information about the project. Canfil was carrying out his duty to Truman, who praised his persistence in other circumstances, but the message put the committee’s inquiry in direct conflict with the understanding Truman had made with Stimson.

After the telegram, committee interest cooled and Truman honored that understanding again. The surviving record does not suggest that he learned that Hanford’s work involved separating plutonium from U-238, or that he understood how the “terrific explosion” would be produced. The difference between knowing the project’s broad purpose and knowing its operation is central to Hanford’s place in the account: Truman had enough information to recognize the stakes, but not enough to inspect the process he was being asked to leave alone.

The limits of Truman’s knowledge

In February 1944, Stimson and General Marshall disclosed the bomb project to congressional leaders in a private meeting in Speaker Samuel Rayburn’s office. The legislators were told that the United States was racing to develop an atomic bomb before Germany, that manufacturing it would require another $1.6 billion, and that secrecy required funding without a trace showing how the money was spent. They agreed to provide what was needed. Truman, chairman of the investigating committee whose questions had focused on Hanford, was not told.

Stimson’s diary later records that Truman again asked for General Frank Lowe, a member of the committee staff, to be taken into confidence about Hanford Works. Stimson refused and described Truman as a nuisance and untrustworthy, insisting that the earlier agreement still governed. The refusal was consequential: it kept the chairman of a major wartime investigative committee outside the circle informed about the project, even as the site’s expenditures and secrecy had prompted his inquiries. Hanford thus stands in the account both as a crucial production facility and as a boundary around knowledge—one Truman approached, crossed briefly in his letter, and then was repeatedly required to respect.