Thomas Edward Murray was an American engineer, business executive, and public official.
Background
Thomas E. Murray was born on June 20, 1891, in Albany, New York, United States, the son of Thomas Edward Murray and Catherine Bradley. His father, a contemporary of Thomas A. Edison, had, like Edison, risen from humble origins to become a well-known inventor of devices used in the electric utility industry. In the early 1900's the elder Murray was sent to Brooklyn to purchase existing electrical generating facilities in the New York metropolitan area; he later organized the Brooklyn and New York Edison companies and served as an official of those companies until 1928.
Education
Thomas was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family and educated in Catholic schools in Albany, Brooklyn, and New York City. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University in 1911.
Career
Murray worked for two years as an engineer with the New York Edison Company before joining his father's firm, the Metropolitan Engineering Company, which manufactured various products invented by both father and son. During World War I, Murray was instrumental in developing welding techniques that greatly simplified the manufacture of mortar shells. After the war he applied the same skills to the manufacture of radiators for heating systems and rear-axle housings for automobiles.
Following his father's death in 1929, Murray became president of Metropolitan Engineering and the Murray Manufacturing Company.
He entered public life in 1932, when he was appointed the federal receiver of the bankrupt Interborough Rapid Transit Company and of the Manhattan Railway Company. For the next nine years he was engrossed in the complex legal and financial problems related to transforming these privately owned mass-transit companies into a single metropolitan system. Murray's unquestioned integrity, hardheaded business acumen, and financial independence made it possible for him to serve for almost a decade in a thankless position of public trust without becoming mired in the morass of local politics and labor strife that plagued the New York metropolitan area during the Great Depression. His ability to win the respect of labor leaders like John L. Lewis and Philip Murray led to his appointment to the New York study commission on the bus strike in 1941 and as trustee of the United Mine Workers' health and welfare fund in 1947.
During World War II, Murray concentrated his energies on war production contracts held by the Metropolitan Engineering and Murray companies. In March 1950 President Harry S. Truman named Murray, II a member of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The first engineer to be appointed to the AEC, Murray took up his new duties in Washington at a time of rising anti-Soviet sentiments during the cold war. He firmly supported the Truman administration's efforts to strengthen national defenses, and took the lead in advocating a rapid expansion of the AEC's facilities for producing fissionable materials and nuclear weapons. Murray helped accelerate research on the hydrogen bomb and championed the development of nuclear propulsion systems for submarines, warships, and military aircraft.
With the election of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, Murray became a lonely but strident voice of dissent on the AEC, now under the leadership of Lewis L. Strauss. Challenging Strauss and the Republican administration on many issues, he opposed the Dixon-Yates contract (1954), which he saw as a partisan and unwarranted use of the AEC's authority to attack the public power movement in the United States. He pushed through the construction of the first full-scale nuclear power plant as a federal project, over the determined opposition of the electric utility industry, and in 1956 urged Congress to authorize construction of 2 million kilowatts of nuclear power capacity in the United States and abroad by 1960. Although Murray supported the objectives of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace plan, he closely allied himself during most of the two Eisenhower administrations with the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress, which was dominated by the Democrats.
For years an outspoken opponent of Strauss and the Eisenhower administration, he was not reappointed to the AEC when his term expired in June 1957. As a consultant to the joint committee, he continued his fight for federal funds to develop both military and civilian uses of atomic energy.
Achievements
Thomas Edward Murray was an engineer, inventor and successful businessman, who was awarded more than 200 patents on electrical and welding devices.
Views
Thomas Edward Murray advocated the vigorous development of nuclear technology. His advocacy was grounded in his religious convictions and economic philosophy. In addresses at Catholic colleges and universities in the 1950's, he described the cold war as an ideological struggle against atheistic Communism. Nuclear technology was a divine gift that the nation had a moral duty to develop, not only to counter the threat of Soviet aggression but also to demonstrate the superiority of a democratic, capitalistic society.
Troubled as a practicing Christian by the inhumanity and potential horrors of nuclear warfare, he became increasingly concerned after 1954 that the unrestricted use of very large thermonuclear weapons would destroy civilization. While insisting on the need to develop, test, and produce tactical nuclear weapons, Murray became a firm advocate of a test ban on multimegaton nuclear weapons.
Connections
On January 4, 1917, Thomas E. Murray married Marie Brady. They had eleven children.
