Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Hardcover)

~ Gerald Markowitz (Author), David Rosner (Author) "Throughout world history, industry managers and laborers alike understood that work was dangerous..." (more)
Key Phrases: chloride research, flatting oil, chloride manufacture, Dutch Boy, National Lead, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is a historical account of corporate control of the lead, plastics, and petroleum industries and the campaign of denial regarding the toxic effects on workers, consumers, and the general public of chemicals used in the manufacture of paint, toys, furniture, plastics, and other products. Coauthors of Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America, Markowitz (history, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice, CUNY) and Rosner (history and public health, Columbia Univ.) conducted interviews, examined documents, and pursued additional investigations to expose corporate greed and deception and governmental foot dragging that disregarded public-health risks through much of the 20th century. They allege that industry officials lied about the dangers, failed to protect workers, fooled the public, and kept regulators at bay. Corporate control over scientific research also undermined efforts to inform the public about the relationships between toxic chemicals and disease. However, this is not another diatribe about industrial pollution. Instead, it is a well-researched work that analyzes the conflict between industry's need to provide products that make life easier for consumers and the public's demand for legislation and standards to protect them from toxic pollution caused by the manufacture of these products. Recommended for health, environment, and law collections.
Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

Deceit and Denial chronicles the history of poisoning by environmental lead and vinyl chloride. Parts of the stories have been told before, but recent litigation has forced thousands of once-secret industry documents into the open, revealing long-standing conspiracies to conceal evidence of the hazards of these two agents from the American public. Lead is an old but continuing industrial hazard. Italy's Bernardino Ramazzini, in his book Diseases of Workers, published in 1713, lamented the poisoning of potters and painters by lead-glazing fumes and lead paints, respectively. Markowitz and Rosner show that new forms of lead poisoning emerged in the 20th century primarily as a result of the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, which was introduced as an antiknock compound for gasoline, and the increasing affordability of lead-based paint, valued for its durability and whiteness. Neuropathologies were common in the 1920s in plants that manufactured leaded gasoline, which prompted workers in one New Jersey factory to christen it the "loony-bin building" and the "house of butterflies" (because of employees' hallucinations of winged insects). Lead paints were widely used on interior walls, furniture, and children's toys, causing poisoning through the ingestion or inhalation of cretinizing dusts. Efforts to ban leaded gasoline began in the 1920s and succeeded in some countries, but the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation managed to convince short-sighted politicians in the United States that smooth-running cars were worth the costs to health. Automobiles were a relative rarity in the 1920s, but by 1964 more than 200,000 tons of lead were being spewed into the air by cars and trucks. By this time, lead had found its way into everything from toy soldiers and toothpaste tubes to synthetic pearls and the pipes used for indoor plumbing. Markowitz and Rosner explain that many of the most injurious products were kept on the market long after they had been identified as harmful. Coordinated by the Lead Industries Association (founded in 1928), manufacturers mounted advertising campaigns to put a positive face on lead. Lead was deliberately marketed as child-friendly -- by means of comic books and the pervasive Dutch Boy logo, which the authors suggest was a kind of metallic Joe Camel. In a remarkable advertisement reproduced in the book, the National Lead Company depicts a happy infant reaching for a can of evaporated or condensed milk, which is kept "pure" by the drop of lead solder used to seal the can. Markowitz and Rosner write as medical historians, but their book could prove to be of legal interest, given that the industry, now facing lawsuits, has claimed that nothing was known about the chronic hazards associated with lead until 1943, when Randolph Byers and Elizabeth Lord documented such effects in an article in the American Journal of Diseases of Children. Using internal industry documents, Markowitz and Rosner show that the lead industry in the United States was well aware of the hazard decades before the publication of the article by Byers and Lord but chose to respond to it primarily as a public-relations problem. Several countries, including France, Belgium, Austria, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, and Cuba, either banned or restricted the use of lead paint for interior surfaces even before the First World War. But the U.S. lead industry campaigned effectively against such regulations, promoting lead not just as safe and patriotic but also as "an apparent gift of God," in the words of the first vice-president of Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. Even after the possibility of harm was admitted, industry officials blamed parents for allowing their children to chew on the bars of their cribs or to suck on their fingers. A medical condition known as "pica" was invoked, as the industry attributed lead poisoning to an unnatural tendency of infants to put things in their mouths. The evidence of hazards to workers in vinyl chloride plants, such as angiosarcoma of the liver, was treated as a trade secret by manufacturers wanting to avoid "a public relations and legal nightmare," write the authors. The authors also explain that in the late 1990s, the residents of Convent, Louisiana, who were overwhelmingly poor and black, organized to stop Shintech Corporation from building a $700 million vinyl chloride plant by convincing the Environmental Protection Agency that the decision to build in Convent constituted environmental racism. I learned a few surprising things. For example, computer monitors, on average, contain four pounds of lead. Lead was never an additive in paint (added as a tint, for instance) but rather was the pigment itself. (Lead paint is simply lead carbonate or lead oxide to which a flatting agent such as linseed oil has been added.) Lead chromate was once used to give a yellow color to bread and cakes. For more than 30 years, the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors monopolized the study of lead poisoning and provided overly optimistic estimates of how much of the metal the human body can safely withstand. Markowitz and Rosner describe their own surprise at learning that such historical diseases as silicosis, which they thought was long dead, still exist today. Moreover, one should not forget that these are global maladies. Leaded gasoline is still used in many parts of the world, "sugar of lead" (lead acetate) is still used in Mexico as a medicine for stomach disorders, and food is still cooked in lead vessels in parts of India to give it a distinctive flavor. It may not be true, as some scholars once postulated, that lead consumption caused the fall of Rome, but it is true that poisonings are going to continue to occur throughout the world for decades, as peeling paint turns to dust, as leaded gas fuels cars, and as years of ignorance and industrial neglect take their toll. Robert N. Proctor, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520217497
• ISBN-13: 978-0520217492
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,078,395 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Goodbye Whiggish View of History, May 18, 2003

By	Aldo Matteucci (hikurangi) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

Whether we know it or not, we all cherish a Whiggish view of history - mankind emerging from dank darkness and ignorance of the past into the sunny destiny of modern civilisation. Such is the stuff of fairy tales, and the child within us will not let us accept any other.

Basing themselves on historical documentation unearthed in litigation to which the US chemical industry has been submitted over the recent decades, the authors - historians both - have portrayed two grim tales of deceit and denial. The first involves lead, whose poisonous character was known since time immemorial, and yet was used indiscriminately in paint, and then in gasoline. The second is the history of vinyl chloride, the mainstay of the petrochemical industry, whose cancer-causing character was long denied.

Lead was defeated by technology. Other minerals made better paint bases, and lead in gasoline was banned when catalytic converters were added to the petrol engine. The current gasoline additives are just as cancerous - but that's a story still to be written.

Caught out in lies and deceit in the `70s about the cancerous effects of vinyl chloride, the petrochemical industry reeled, und knuckled under. It did not even cost them that much. As indicated at pg. 223, the industry paid $ 270 million dollars for doing a job that it had estimated would cost $90 billion - and the government thought it might cost $ 1 billion.

But the industry learned its lesson. It would not submit again to the checks and balances of a democratic society. Politicians were bought, courts intimidated - and heck, science needs research money. A successful campaign against `big government' was launched, and `deregulation' mania swept the land - self-regulation is to solve all problems. Now the governor from the dirtiest state of the Union - and proud of it - is in the White House.

The end of the book is a distressing description of the rearguard battles fought by the citizens of Louisiana to avoid that `cancer lane' - as the region between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is dubbed - become upgraded to `cancer super-highway'.
The list of the participants in this story of denial and deceit are not the `dirty back-yard tinkerers', the scum of the chemical earth. The best of the finest of the sector are involved, individually, and in Associations. Past errors or malfeasance is no object.

We do not learn from past mistakes. Except better to cover up our misdeeds.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WE NEED MORE LIKE THIS!, October 26, 2002

By	Michael Meuser (Santa Cruz, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a well written, well documented and absolutely amazing account of pollution politics in the U.S. From the authors' case studies of lead and PVC we can learn how to interpret the "facts," and what to look for, in similar pollution issues of today. We need more "gutsy" accounts like this from academics and their publishers.

Michael Meuser,
Editor and Publisher

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensible for those who want the whole truth, October 20, 2003

By	"polemical506" (Hurtsboro, AL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public) (Paperback)

I really enjoyed -- if that is a word you can use when describing the satanic greed of corporations -- this work. The two authors present an exhausting history behind the lead and vinyl chloride industries and their penchant for trying to buy science and keep the public and government misinformed, decade after decade, about the toxicity of their products.

One aspect of the ongoing struggle with corporate giants that the authors point out is that these industries often enjoy immense tax relief, especially in states like Louisiana, as the following excerpt indicates:

". . . "For example, IMC-Agrico, which received $15 million in property tax relief between 1988 and 1997, was a major polluter in Louisiana, releasing 12.8 million pounds of toxic chemicals in the manufacturer of fertilizers and other chemical products; Rubicon, Inc., a chemical company in Geismar, released 8.4 million pounds of chemicals and was exempted from $9 million in property taxes; Monsanto released 7.7 million pounds of toxic chemicals, but Lousiana 'excused Monsanto from payment of $45 million in property taxes over the past decade.'" [page 275]

One can easily see the inversion of the idea of corporate responsiblity in the above excerpt. Rather than government(s) charging more to companies that spew their toxins everywhere, they charge less! It is as if the national policy could thus be expressed as "Help and show compassion to those who hate you and lie to you, and whose chemical waste products may kill you. This is the established and true way!"

Yet, as the book points out, so called "libertarian" organizations like the Cato Institute usually argue on the side of the corporations. This holds true not only in terms of human rights in general, but also in simple economics. It is the corporations who violate most egregiously the principle of a flat, equitable, and level tax (or equitable anything). I've also seen this penchant for defending corporations repeatedly in the Reason Foundation's writings. This is depressing for me, as I not only favor a libertarian philosophy, but for years voted libertarian and was a member of both the state and national parties. One is suckered into the libertarian culture by the rationality and commonsense against such atrocious policies as the drug war, and then one is confronted with the opposite of intelligence in other matters, much as democrats have suckered folks into the idea that they don't aid foreign despots (they do!), or that Republicans are for limited government (ha!).

(Fortunately, I voted for Ralph Nader in the last election).

But regardless of ones politcal sympathies and/or affiliation, this book is a masterpiece, and should be consumed by we "consumers" like the way marathon runners guzzle liquids to prevent dehydration. Enjoy!