Certainly, Scranton knows that such a document would not be a book, but a compendium of data that would have little meaning to anyone other than the lawyers representing the chemical industry, seeking to avoid any collective responsibility for its past actions.
Scranton confuses the “forest” and the “trees”: He alleges that we “accepted a single source’s account without collateral evidence or presented a single individual’s opinion or argument as that of the entire industry.” This ignores the 300 footnotes that document patterns, arguments and actions of the industry. Each data point is part of the whole and must be evaluated in relationship to the other parts. It is the collection of the footnotes, not any individual citation, which is to be evaluated for its coherence and intellectual integrity. We, and the various reviewers of the manuscript and book, feel more than comfortable with the documentation of our research effort and we are sure that any reasonable historian would agree.
Scranton argues that our “major claim” – that the vinyl chloride industry acted to keep information about the toxicity and carcinogenicity of vinyl chloride from the public, the government and the work force -- “stands as both ill-defined and unsupported.” (p.5) No one else has claimed that our “major claim” is “ill-defined.” Indeed, if this were so the attorneys for the defendants would not have needed to hire Scranton to write his defense of the industry. Writing on behalf of the industry he may want the reader to believe that our point is “unsupported.” He may disagree with it, but we base our analysis on primary documents that come from the chemical industry itself. These documents may be embarrassing to the industry but they certainly “support” the obvious argument that the industry planned and carried out a deception of the government.
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