A Poisonous Past

Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xx + 408 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Federal protection of the environment, food safety, and occupational health now routinely relies on the oxymoron of "voluntary compliance." The current Administration has undertaken a broad effort to restructure federal advisory committees to both the Center for Disease Control and Health and Human Services, displacing "renowned scientists" with, as the National Resources Defense Council notes acidly, "pro-industry representatives with questionable expertise." In recent months alone, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has delayed smog abatement requirements, reversed or weakened restrictions (in violation of international agreements) on the use of the pesticides atrazine, methyl bromide, and carbofuran, and only reluctantly withdrawn a proposal to loosen the regulations that govern screening of low-income children for lead poisoning. And a proposed expansion of the Patriot Act features provisions that would both limit citizen access to information about possible risks from local chemical plants and grant companies broad immunity form civil liability. ¹

These facts, mere illustrations of a deregulatory impulse that is now three decades old, underscore (even as they ignore) the remarkable history uncovered by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz in Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. From two paradigmatic case studies—lead in the first half of the twentieth century, and plastics in the latter half—the authors draw three important ethical and political conclusions. First, the economic principle that "there is no reason to hold up production of useful products if danger has not been proven" has proven disastrous in terms of occupational health, public health, and environmental health (p. 6). Second, leading firms and trade associations have proven unable and unwilling to consider the "externalities" of modern industry (death, sickness, environmental degradation) as much more than a marketing or public relations challenge. And third, the very institutions that might be expected to broach these questions less cynically—including science, medicine, and government—have (at least in the American setting) been bought off, distracted, or captured by vested industrial interests.

The power and originality of this account rests on its extensive use of company and industry records collected as part of the "discovery" stage in recent legal proceedings in New York City (lead) and Louisiana (polyvinyl chloride). One of the ongoing dilemmas (and frustrations) faced by historians of American public policy is that business interests, whose resources and demands are so central to the political system, are often silent in the archival record. Private interests, of course, have no statutory obligation to make their historical records available and, when they do so, invariably cull collections or restrict access in such a way as to present that history in the most favorable light. The documents plumbed by Rosner and Markowitz, by contrast, open doors onto a world rarely glimpsed by historians: the cynical, anxious, and occasionally criminal deliberations of firms and trade associations on matters of industry research, corporate liability, public policy, and public relations.

The first half of the book deals with the history of lead poisoning, first as an occupational hazard for painters and workers in leaded gas refineries into the 1920s and later as broader public health concern as the toxicity of leaded paint (especially for children) became increasingly apparent. Despite a "drumbeat of articles" documenting the dangers of lead paint by the late 1920s, both National Lead and the Lead Industries Association refused to view threats to public health as anything but a marketing obstacle (p. 43). As Rosner and Markowitz demonstrate, the industry's response was both to blame the victim by attributing poisoning to "pica" (the early-twentieth-century effort to pathologize teething) and—more damningly—to bury public concern beneath a blizzard of claims that lead was actually a boon to child health and domestic hygiene. As one promotional campaign boasted, "lead helps to guard your health" (p. 82). This, as the authors...