Monsanto, Dow, Union Carbide, Goodrich, Goodyear, Uniroyal and many other companies and their lawyers have gone even further than subpoenaing records and deposing reviewers: Philip Scranton, a fellow historian, has written a 41 page single-spaced report for the attorneys defending the chemical industry. Among his many accusations, he argues that the review process for our book was “subverted” (Scranton, p. 41) because we knew a number of the reviewers of the manuscript and two were colleagues at Columbia and CUNY. We maintain, in fact, that the review process for our book was more rigorous than the usual academic review process. Eight respected scholars wrote reports on the manuscript and then gathered for a two day meeting with us, the editor (now Director) of the University of California Press and the President of the Milbank Foundation, to critique the manuscript before publication, raise questions and ask for clarification. This process resulted in Deceit and Denial being one of the most thoroughly peer-reviewed scholarly books by an academic press. [5]
The documents we uncovered and based these chapters on have been thoroughly reviewed. Bill Moyers and the producers of Trade Secrets, an Emmy award-winning documentary reviewed the materials carefully when preparing their film. Also, the producers of Blue Vinyl, an award-winning documentary, also checked the accuracy of these documents. HBO, which funded and aired this show, also fact-checked our documents, asking us to provide many of them as part of their legal vetting process. Again, we encourage readers to look at the selection of the documents themselves at the URL noted on page 2. Despite this thorough review, Scranton never acknowledges that Deceit and Denial got anything right. Nor does he argue that industry bore any responsibility for any harm to workers’ health. That we got nothing “right” in a book as widely (and positively) reviewed in more than 25 professional and popular journals should alert the reader to the fact that his critique has less to do with scholarly appraisal and more to do with the court cases. [6]
We usually benefit from and even enjoy responding to another historian’s commentary on our work and engaging in a dialogue about the issues that our work raise. Exchanges of scholarly points of view and even disagreement are one of the great luxuries encouraged by the academy and by our profession. In this case, however, it is distasteful to respond.
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