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California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public
Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution
Deceit and Denial details the attempts by the chemical and lead industries to deceive Americans about the dangers that their deadly products present to workers, the public, and consumers. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner pursued evidence steadily and relentlessly, interviewed the important players, investigated untapped sources, and uncovered a bruising story of cynical and cruel disregard for health and human rights. This resulting exposé is full of startling revelations, provocative arguments, and disturbing conclusions--all based on remarkable research and information gleaned from secret industry documents.
This book reveals for the first time the public relations campaign that the lead industry undertook to convince Americans to use its deadly product to paint walls, toys, furniture, and other objects in America's homes, despite a wealth of information that children were at risk for serious brain damage and death from ingesting this poison. This book highlights the immediate dangers ordinary citizens face because of the relentless failure of industrial polluters to warn, inform, and protect their workers and neighbors. It offers a historical analysis of how corporate control over scientific research has undermined the process of proving the links between toxic chemicals and disease. The authors also describe the wisdom, courage, and determination of workers and community members who continue to voice their concerns in spite of vicious opposition. Readable, pathbreaking, and revelatory, Deceit and Denial provides crucial answers to questions of dangerous environmental degradation, escalating corporate greed, and governmental disregard for its citizens' safety and health.
This book reveals for the first time the public relations campaign that the lead industry undertook to convince Americans to use its deadly product to paint walls, toys, furniture, and other objects in America's homes, despite a wealth of information that children were at risk for serious brain damage and death from ingesting this poison. This book highlights the immediate dangers ordinary citizens face because of the relentless failure of industrial polluters to warn, inform, and protect their workers and neighbors. It offers a historical analysis of how corporate control over scientific research has undermined the process of proving the links between toxic chemicals and disease. The authors also describe the wisdom, courage, and determination of workers and community members who continue to voice their concerns in spite of vicious opposition. Readable, pathbreaking, and revelatory, Deceit and Denial provides crucial answers to questions of dangerous environmental degradation, escalating corporate greed, and governmental disregard for its citizens' safety and health.
428 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 2002
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October 6, 2016
American industrialization undeniably brought about increased economic productivity and an array of convenient products that improved people’s daily lives. Unfortunately, such advances often came at the cost of human health. Not only did conditions inside factories cause such alarming conditions as cancer, lead poisoning, and acroosteolytis, but people living their daily lives were exposed to dangerous chemicals. However, industry often retreated within factory and diverted attention away from evidence that people outside the workforce faced dangers from their products. Repeatedly, the lead and chemical industries invoked an artificial distinction between industrial and environmental health in order to obstruct regulatory oversight and hide the fact that their practices caused widespread harm.
Drawing a distinct line between the hazards posed to “workers” and “the public” by industrial pollution served several purposes for the lead and chemical industries throughout the twentieth century. The false dichotomy confined research, limited investigations strictly to the controlled interiors of factories, and diverted attention away from potentially damaging studies. Additionally, regulatory tangles between occupational and environmental health lead to safety regulations entirely lacking teeth. Finally, industry promoted its own token steps towards voluntary self-regulation in the factory setting as heroic, while ignoring or deliberately undercutting external efforts to alleviate societal harm.
The high-profile poisonings during the early 1920s that killed and debilitated hundreds of employees who manufactured tetraethyl lead for gasoline traumatized both the American public and industry leaders. As part of an effort to appear more trustworthy, lead corporations went on a public-relations blitz to convince people that “poisonings by industrial products could be solved, or at least confined behind the walls of a factory” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 22). Echoes of this refrain persisted well into the late 1960s as the Manufacturing Chemist’s Association faced its own existential crisis.
When plastic workers started manifesting the strange and debilitating systems of acroosteolytis, industry responded rapidly with almost diametrically opposite front-stage and behind-the scenes actions. As company-sponsored studies attempted to ascertain the mechanism and extent of vinyl-chloride-monomer-poisoning among their employees, the same companies mounted an aggressive public relations campaign to assure the public that consumer products posed no danger. Executives realized that “if plastic products, particularly those that wrapped or came in contact with food, were implicated, the industry would find itself besieged not just by workers and their unions, but also by the general public and federal authorites” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 175). But given the well-established 6% loss rate during PVC production, industry must have known that over 250 million pounds of poisonous vinyl chloride monomer remained within consumer products (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 209), ready to leech into plastic bottles of liquor or be liberated as toxic vapors upon heating. Any problems faced by workers within the factory necessarily could threaten ordinary citizens as well.
Companies didn’t need to falsify data in order to mislead people about the dangers of their products. For three decades, the lead industry funded toxicologists at Harvard to investigate how lead harmed adult males, which diverted attention from the growing body of evidence linking lead paint to neural pathology in children. These studies, though rigorous, were also problematic, inasmuch as “Aub’s research was never fraudulent nor suspect, but it focused on such a narrow range of questions that,
while important for uncovering the physiology of lead poisoning, it never touched on the pressing issues of the dangers of lead paint to children” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 47).
Other industry-sponsored studies, viewed with historical hindsight, seem not only narrow but downright barbaric. Kehoe’s 1940s-era research to establish the lead intake and output balance involved feeding adult males measured amounts of the poisonous metal (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 109). Later, Lehman “ordered his lab servant to spend an hour inhaling a variety of volatile fluids” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 171). Throughout the 20th century, industry investigated a limited scope of questions about the effects of toxic compounds on adult males to promulgate the position that “there were levels below which danger from exposure to chemicals and other toxic substances did not exist and that industry observed these strictures” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 171).
Yet evidence indicates that these narrowly-focused studies were not simply the result of naïve oversight, but rather deliberate ignorance. As Markowitz and Rosner reveal, “In 1949, Manfred Bowditch complained in a letter that ‘these young Baltimore paint eaters are a real headache’” (2003, pp. 97). To alleviate that headache, industry doubled-down on its position that only factory workers faced real risk from lead, and even then, the risk could be attributed to personal failings on the part of employees rather than unsafe conditions at the facility.
By blaming negligent workplace practices or casting doubt on the moral character of their employees, industry maintained the masquerade that dangerous materials posed no danger. Lead company doctors blamed high levels of lead in their workers’ blood on the blue-collar men’s preference for Budweiser beer in cans (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 121). Similarly, the MCA attempted to shift attention away from VCM in causing cancer by suggesting “issues of elective personal behavior,” such as smoking, were the true culprit for their workers’ illnesses (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 259).
Victim-blaming also allowed the chemical industry to deflect attention away from high-profile accidents that released toxic compounds beyond the confines of factory walls. Such incidents typically occurred in poor, minority communities, and industry economists maintained that “the problem was not that industries chose predominantly poor and black communities to place toxic waste dumps, but that the poor themselves made a rational economic decision to seek out these communities because they wanted to benefit from low property taxes” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 290). When the waste ponds overflowed and the levees broke, however, people started to suspect that industry’s artificial delineation between the workforce and the public might not hold water.
Massive chemical spills and increasing political consciousness during the 1970s finally sparked sufficient public outrage to more closely examine industry practices from a public safety standpoint. Unfortunately, such changes were ultimately short-lived and vulnerable to the shifting winds of the prevailing political climate. Even though the vinyl chloride crisis during the 1970s “substantially blurred the lines between environmental and occupational dangers” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 210), the public learned the same harsh lesson in the subsequent decade when “in 1982 Louisiana faced an industrial disaster that demonstrated that the toxins inside the factory endangered not only workers, but also people at large.”
NIOSH’s 1978 decision to establish thresholds for acceptable lead exposure based on airborne monitoring rather than blood-lead content measurements represents a notable reversal from the typical narrative. Evidence that very low levels of exposure to airborne tetraethyl lead harmed people’s livers, kidneys, and cognitive function raised the alarming prospect that industrial workers might be subject to highly toxic conditions on a daily basis. Labor activists seized on the new data to advocate for more stringent protections because “awareness of dangers in the environment seemed to reopen the question of how safe factory conditions really were” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 118). Even though manufacturers maintained that they were more than capable of taking care of their workers within the controlled factory environment, data from the real environment revealed that most protection measures were woefully inadequate in any setting.
Establishing causality for acute industrial poisoning in factory workers is certainly easier than elucidating the complex mechanisms underlying pathologies arising from long-term, low level exposure. As the epidemiologist Tesh laments, “in the absence of extraordinarily sophisticated and extremely expensive studies there is little chance that any but the most unambiguous and obvious poisons will be uncovered” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 291). Regulating obvious poisons in a factory is relatively trivial, which is why industry trumpets every small step towards self-regulation as more than sufficient to protect people’s safety. But most people don’t encounter large amounts of poisons every single day, yet they still feel the effects of exposure.
Markowitz and Rosner advocate widespread adoption of the precautionary principle for any new industrial chemical, similar to the extensive clinical trials for pharmaceuticals before they can be distributed for widespread use. Although historical evidence of industry negligence supports their recommendations, questions of which federal agency should oversee such studies and who will pay for the research make such a prudent course of action seem unfortunately implausible. Regardless of what the future holds, however, the artificial distinction between health effects inside and outside the workplace should clearly be retired in favor of a more holistic approach to evaluating potential harm.
Drawing a distinct line between the hazards posed to “workers” and “the public” by industrial pollution served several purposes for the lead and chemical industries throughout the twentieth century. The false dichotomy confined research, limited investigations strictly to the controlled interiors of factories, and diverted attention away from potentially damaging studies. Additionally, regulatory tangles between occupational and environmental health lead to safety regulations entirely lacking teeth. Finally, industry promoted its own token steps towards voluntary self-regulation in the factory setting as heroic, while ignoring or deliberately undercutting external efforts to alleviate societal harm.
The high-profile poisonings during the early 1920s that killed and debilitated hundreds of employees who manufactured tetraethyl lead for gasoline traumatized both the American public and industry leaders. As part of an effort to appear more trustworthy, lead corporations went on a public-relations blitz to convince people that “poisonings by industrial products could be solved, or at least confined behind the walls of a factory” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 22). Echoes of this refrain persisted well into the late 1960s as the Manufacturing Chemist’s Association faced its own existential crisis.
When plastic workers started manifesting the strange and debilitating systems of acroosteolytis, industry responded rapidly with almost diametrically opposite front-stage and behind-the scenes actions. As company-sponsored studies attempted to ascertain the mechanism and extent of vinyl-chloride-monomer-poisoning among their employees, the same companies mounted an aggressive public relations campaign to assure the public that consumer products posed no danger. Executives realized that “if plastic products, particularly those that wrapped or came in contact with food, were implicated, the industry would find itself besieged not just by workers and their unions, but also by the general public and federal authorites” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 175). But given the well-established 6% loss rate during PVC production, industry must have known that over 250 million pounds of poisonous vinyl chloride monomer remained within consumer products (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 209), ready to leech into plastic bottles of liquor or be liberated as toxic vapors upon heating. Any problems faced by workers within the factory necessarily could threaten ordinary citizens as well.
Companies didn’t need to falsify data in order to mislead people about the dangers of their products. For three decades, the lead industry funded toxicologists at Harvard to investigate how lead harmed adult males, which diverted attention from the growing body of evidence linking lead paint to neural pathology in children. These studies, though rigorous, were also problematic, inasmuch as “Aub’s research was never fraudulent nor suspect, but it focused on such a narrow range of questions that,
while important for uncovering the physiology of lead poisoning, it never touched on the pressing issues of the dangers of lead paint to children” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 47).
Other industry-sponsored studies, viewed with historical hindsight, seem not only narrow but downright barbaric. Kehoe’s 1940s-era research to establish the lead intake and output balance involved feeding adult males measured amounts of the poisonous metal (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 109). Later, Lehman “ordered his lab servant to spend an hour inhaling a variety of volatile fluids” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 171). Throughout the 20th century, industry investigated a limited scope of questions about the effects of toxic compounds on adult males to promulgate the position that “there were levels below which danger from exposure to chemicals and other toxic substances did not exist and that industry observed these strictures” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 171).
Yet evidence indicates that these narrowly-focused studies were not simply the result of naïve oversight, but rather deliberate ignorance. As Markowitz and Rosner reveal, “In 1949, Manfred Bowditch complained in a letter that ‘these young Baltimore paint eaters are a real headache’” (2003, pp. 97). To alleviate that headache, industry doubled-down on its position that only factory workers faced real risk from lead, and even then, the risk could be attributed to personal failings on the part of employees rather than unsafe conditions at the facility.
By blaming negligent workplace practices or casting doubt on the moral character of their employees, industry maintained the masquerade that dangerous materials posed no danger. Lead company doctors blamed high levels of lead in their workers’ blood on the blue-collar men’s preference for Budweiser beer in cans (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 121). Similarly, the MCA attempted to shift attention away from VCM in causing cancer by suggesting “issues of elective personal behavior,” such as smoking, were the true culprit for their workers’ illnesses (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 259).
Victim-blaming also allowed the chemical industry to deflect attention away from high-profile accidents that released toxic compounds beyond the confines of factory walls. Such incidents typically occurred in poor, minority communities, and industry economists maintained that “the problem was not that industries chose predominantly poor and black communities to place toxic waste dumps, but that the poor themselves made a rational economic decision to seek out these communities because they wanted to benefit from low property taxes” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 290). When the waste ponds overflowed and the levees broke, however, people started to suspect that industry’s artificial delineation between the workforce and the public might not hold water.
Massive chemical spills and increasing political consciousness during the 1970s finally sparked sufficient public outrage to more closely examine industry practices from a public safety standpoint. Unfortunately, such changes were ultimately short-lived and vulnerable to the shifting winds of the prevailing political climate. Even though the vinyl chloride crisis during the 1970s “substantially blurred the lines between environmental and occupational dangers” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 210), the public learned the same harsh lesson in the subsequent decade when “in 1982 Louisiana faced an industrial disaster that demonstrated that the toxins inside the factory endangered not only workers, but also people at large.”
NIOSH’s 1978 decision to establish thresholds for acceptable lead exposure based on airborne monitoring rather than blood-lead content measurements represents a notable reversal from the typical narrative. Evidence that very low levels of exposure to airborne tetraethyl lead harmed people’s livers, kidneys, and cognitive function raised the alarming prospect that industrial workers might be subject to highly toxic conditions on a daily basis. Labor activists seized on the new data to advocate for more stringent protections because “awareness of dangers in the environment seemed to reopen the question of how safe factory conditions really were” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 118). Even though manufacturers maintained that they were more than capable of taking care of their workers within the controlled factory environment, data from the real environment revealed that most protection measures were woefully inadequate in any setting.
Establishing causality for acute industrial poisoning in factory workers is certainly easier than elucidating the complex mechanisms underlying pathologies arising from long-term, low level exposure. As the epidemiologist Tesh laments, “in the absence of extraordinarily sophisticated and extremely expensive studies there is little chance that any but the most unambiguous and obvious poisons will be uncovered” (Markowitz & Rosner, 2003, pp. 291). Regulating obvious poisons in a factory is relatively trivial, which is why industry trumpets every small step towards self-regulation as more than sufficient to protect people’s safety. But most people don’t encounter large amounts of poisons every single day, yet they still feel the effects of exposure.
Markowitz and Rosner advocate widespread adoption of the precautionary principle for any new industrial chemical, similar to the extensive clinical trials for pharmaceuticals before they can be distributed for widespread use. Although historical evidence of industry negligence supports their recommendations, questions of which federal agency should oversee such studies and who will pay for the research make such a prudent course of action seem unfortunately implausible. Regardless of what the future holds, however, the artificial distinction between health effects inside and outside the workplace should clearly be retired in favor of a more holistic approach to evaluating potential harm.
May 5, 2007
the authors are much too heavy-handed in their condemnations of industry, portraying conservativism itself as a non-redeemable word. the authors should have let their facts speak for themselves, instead of steeping their arguments with a leftist slant. like I said, the material speaks for itself, and regardless, the book is still very engrossing because the neglect for the general population that industry displays is still, uh, extremely gross.
November 30, 2019
This is a brutal look at the extent two industries - lead and plastic - went to conceal the reality of their products' health problems. They lied, concealed, and bribed all in order to deceive the public (and the government) about the truths they had uncovered. Frankly, it's disgusting how far they went and should be a wake up call for Americans and the world. The incentive of corporations is money, always money, and getting more of it. Everything else is a secondary concern. Is it any wonder that big businesses do the things they do? Outcomes are going to be driven by incentives. And if a corporation feels it can make more money doing something no matter how unethical or harmful. They. Will. Do. It. More money is the ends and it justifies any means to achieve it.
January 31, 2022
Another book I read as part of my graduate studies. This is an excellent look at how corporations obfuscate research and downplay the risks of their products to workers and consumers, using lead and vinyl chloride as the primary examples. Thoroughly depressing, but illuminating.
October 13, 2014
I was happy to have read this book because it gave a good history of lead, which is relevant to my job. However, the book was dry with not enough focus on telling the story. The authors often editorialized or implied the worst of industry in a way that meant I had to stay focused on every word to separate fact from opinion.
September 20, 2009
I found the section on lead to be edifying but a little slow. But the section on plastics was actually riveting. Scary, but fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews