American Historical Review, vol. 109 no. 2 (2004 April)

By Allison L. Hepler

Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, with the Milbank Memorial Fund, New York. 2002. Pp. xx, 408. Cloth $34.95, paper $19.95.

A book with this title is not likely to leave readers optimistic about the past or the present, yet there are hopeful signs in the text about the ability to hold corporations accountable for the health of workers and the community. At the very least, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner present us with lessons learned that can serve as a primer for future activism around workplace and environmental health. In their sweep of the twentieth century, they uncover a world painted with lead and wrapped in plastic, and they document how manufacturers of both of these materials systematically concealed evidence of risks to human health. 1
The authors' access to private industry sources, which have long escaped the scrutiny of historians, provides a rich if very disturbing picture of internal politics and decision making at the corporate level, including decisions to keep information from workers, the public, and government officials. Lawsuits prompted the uncovering of such letters and agreements, which Rosner has called "extraordinary." 2
The evolution of workplace hazards into environmental ones forms a key part of the historical landscape in this book. Markowitz and Rosner see the workplace as the initial site for danger from these materials, but follow the evidence as consumers increasingly, at least in the case of lead, put themselves and their children at risk of lead poisoning, something that had previously been seen as an industrial health problem. Reassurances from the lead industry, most prominently the Lead Industries Association, argue the authors, were misleading at best and outright false in many cases. Similar to tobacco and asbestos, manufacturers knew of the hazards of lead from their own evidence as well as years of experience in the workplace, yet they continued to promote its use in paint and, after World War II, in gasoline. In the 1970s, concerted pressure from city, state, and federal agencies, unions, feminists, and public health advocates outmaneuvered the lead industry and its own vast array of political and financial influences. Still, lead remains in the environment. 3
In many ways, the story of lead is somewhat familiar territory for historians of workplace health and safety, public health, urbanization, and medicine. Plastics, particularly vinyl, are a more recent entry into the modern industrial world. "If lead was paradigmatic of the problems of industrial pollution in the first half of the twentieth century," Markowitz and Rosner write, "plastics were emblematic of these problems in the second" (p. 138). In linking these two industries, they nevertheless acknowledge that the plastics industry faced greater challenges, as more infrastructure to counter workplace and community hazards had developed in the wake of lead's problems. At the same time, the chemical industries were producing a number of man-made materials and hazards, some of which remain unknown, and could be more far-reaching than those associated with lead. 4
Industrial and trade association documents reveal the industry's knowledge, as early as the 1960s, of links between a bone-wasting disease and vinyl in the workplace, which was not revealed to workers. Once manufacturers acquired scientific evidence of links between liver cancer and vinyl chloride (at much lower levels of exposure than existed in their factories at the time), they signed agreements with one another—American and European companies—to keep this information secret. Their overriding concern, interestingly enough, was not worker liability, limited by workers' compensation regulations, but consumer liability, which was unlimited and unknown. They also feared outside (governmental) regulation. The effects of their deception began after four workers died from liver cancer in early 1974. 5
The long-lasting significance of this history is four-fold. First, in their persuasiveness about the valuable, if somewhat problematic role of federal legislation that institutionalized civil rights and created agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the authors provide evidence that counters more recent agendas of these agencies, which have acted as little more than representatives for industry in reducing and in some cases eliminating regulations in the workplace and the environment. Also working against government advocacy, according to Markowitz and Rosner, is an American ambivalence over the role of regulation in a capitalist economy. Yet the infrastructure is there, and the authors argue strongly for a more activist government, particularly in the historical context of democratic "openness and free access to information" (p. 305). 6
Second, positioning lead and plastics together in this book allows the authors not only to compare strategies but also to illustrate the different context in which the plastics industry had to operate. The evidence clearly shows how the activism of and alliances between labor and environmental activists, including Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader, as well as well-publicized industrial disasters such as Union Carbide's Bhopal, India, explosion, influenced the decisions that industry made, although in some cases, the perception of the activists' strength played a larger role. In many ways, public (and corporate) consciousness of these hazards as environmental undoubtedly helped workers. 7
Third, the authors provide important evidence of generational change by both industry and community groups, a kind of action-reaction interplay to assert control. As the story moves into the 1990s, a new generation of community activists has emerged to counteract industrial tactics such as hiring executives who were skilled lobbyists rather than engineers or scientists. In addition, a generation of industrial disasters has persuaded the public that industry cannot be trusted. Historians have not always sufficiently documented this kind of change. 8
Finally, the history of how science has been used by various groups is critical to understanding occupational and environmental health. As this book clearly demonstrates, trade associations have not been reluctant to sponsor scientific studies, ignore unfavorable results, and pressure scientists to reach a particular conclusion. What is increasingly clear, however, is that science in the public interest might merit different standards than have been used in the past. The difficulties of epidemiological studies in isolating one particular factor as causing disease have made it easy for industry to deny a statistical relationship between a particular chemical and a specific disease. More useful, perhaps, especially given the actions of the industries displayed in this text, might be to implement what public health professionals call the "precautionary principle," where the lack of scientific certainty about a material's hazards would not place it on the market but require more understanding of its potential risks prior to any public exposure. 9
Perhaps optimism is not the most accurate word to describe this book; its narrative is depressing, distressing, and makes one believe in conspiracies. Still, if some of us practice history in order to learn lessons from the past, there are many lessons here, not the least of which is how individuals and groups can coalesce to battle forces that seem overwhelming. 10

Allison L. Hepler
University of Maine,
Farmington