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Toxic Purity: The Progressive Era Origins of America' s Lead Paint Poisoning Epidemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2017

Christian Warren
Christian Warren
Affiliation:
CHRISTIAN WARREN is a social historian of the modern United States. This article is based on a chapter in his forthcoming book, Brush With Death: A Social History of Lead Posioning, to be published byThe Johns Hopkins University Pressin 2000.
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Abstract

This paper examines a pivotal moment in the history of the built environment in America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, factions within the American paint industry fought in state and federal legislatures over the definition of paint: What was pure paint? Were new paint formulations to be encouraged, or labeled “adulterated”? Was the known toxicity of lead to be a consideration? Despite some opponents' recourse to a rhetoric of toxicity and public health, all sides agreed that the best paints contained a significant quantity of lead, and that government should stay out of setting industry standards. This accord all but assured that Americans would apply tons of lead paint on the walls of their homes.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 73 , Special Issue 4: Business and the Environment , Winter 1999 , pp. 705 - 736
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1999

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References

1 Congress, House, Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, Hearings on H.R. 21901, Manufacture, Sales, etc., of Adulterated or Mislabeled White Lead and Mixed Paint, 61st Cong., 2d sess., 31 May 1910, 14.

2 Actually, Rhodes's emphasis on dust as a possible source of lead poisoning would have been remarkable in the early 1970s. Most of the initial concern over lead paint poisoning focused on preventing children from eating lead paint chips, not from breathing paint dust.

3 For example, see Rosenberg, Charles, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866, with a New Afterword (Chicago, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5 See, for instance, Crunden, Robert Morse, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Buenker, John D., Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Friedman, Estelle, “Separatism as a Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 512–529.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7 A growing body of scholarship in the history of environmental thinking and activism in the years long before Earth Day raises some of these new questions. Many of these studies focus on the history of occupational hygiene and the foundations of modern toxicology. Their occupational setting alone makes them—implicitly if not explicitly—works of business history that should have wide appeal among this journal's readers. Clark, Claudia, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997)Google Scholar exemplifies the well-contextualized case study. Gottlieb's, Robert Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C., 1993)Google Scholar links the modern environmental movement's outlook to Progressive-Era occupational researchers such as Alice Hamilton, while Sellers's, Christopher Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997)Google Scholar makes explicit the scientific and epistemological links between Hamilton's generation and Rachel Carson's.

8 Advertisement for National Lead Company in Painter and Decorator 24 (1910), no page given.

9 Value of paint and varnish produced in 1899 was about $69,560,000. By 1909 America produced $124,889,000, for an increase of about 79.5 percent; paint industries values from U. S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1915 (Washington, 1916), 196Google Scholar; all values were converted to constant 1958 dollars. The value of goods and services in paints rose from $299.8M in 1899 to $436.67M in 1909, an increase of 45.7 percent. As impressive as this rate of growth was, it was well short of the growth rate in the nation's GNP, which was 56.1 percent: U. S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial edition, Part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 224.Google Scholar

10 U.S. Commerce Department, U. S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial edition, Part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 224.Google Scholar

11 The Commerce Department reported 600 establishments manufacturing paint and varnish in 1899, and 830 in 1919, for an increase of 38.3 percent, United States Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1915 (Washington, 1916), 196Google Scholar; for example, see Painters Magazine 37, 4, 321 on Glidden Varnish Company buying out a Canadian varnish manufacturer.

12 The value of ready-mixed paints rose from $14,864,126 in 1899 (21.4 percent of that year's total value for paints and varnishes) to $119,342,219 in 1919 (31.2 percent). U.S. Census Office, Census Reports Vol. 10, Manufacturers: Reports for Principal Industries (1910 and 1920). Census reports do not disaggregate end-users of paints and pigments, but this 10 percent increase in market share is particularly significant because it represents a near takeover of the house paint market. Most ready-mixed paints were sold for house painting, which was the third-ranked application for paints throughout most of the century, behind the automotive and railroad industries, which were more likely to purchase raw pigments and oils and mix them themselves.

13 L. D. Howe to Representative Charles Fuller, April 25, 1908; Congress, House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, “Naval Stores and Paint,” File HR60A-H16.12, RG 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

14 For 1900–1910, I have found white lead consumption figures only for 1907, 1908 and 1909: in 1907, the United States white lead manufacturers consumed 115 thousand short tons—29.72 percent of total; in 1908, 118 thousand tons—35.12 percent; and in 1909, 134 thousand tons of white lead were consumed, 36.31 percent of the total, U. S. Geological Survey, Mineral Resources of the United States 1909: pt. 1 “Metals.” (Washington, D.C., 1911)Google Scholar; later figures for lead in batteries from U. S. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Mines, “Lead,” Minerals Yearbook, Series: 1920–1988 (Washington, D.C, 1922–1990).

15 Pulsifer, Notes for a History of Lead, 314–316; McCord, Carey P., “Lead and Lead Poisoning in Early America: Lead Compounds,” Industrial Medicine and Surgery 23 (Feb. 1954): 75–80.Google ScholarPubMed

16 Heckel, George R., The Paint Industry: Reminiscences and Comments (St. Louis, 1928), 257–58.Google Scholar

17 The only major corroders who retained independent ownership at the time of the trust's formation were Eagle, of Cincinnati, and Wetherill, of Philadelphia; Heckel, Paint Industry, 257–65; according to Heckel, who was Harn's counterpart at the New Jersey Zinc Company, and longtime friend, Harn did not invent the Heinz 57 varieties slogan, Heinz himself did, National Lead Company, “The Story of the National Lead Company” (n.p., 1952), 2.

18 H.V. Kent, president of Kent and Purdy Paint Company, to James R. Mann, 18 June 18, 1910; House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, “Papers Accompanying Specific Bills and Resolutions,” File HR61A-D6, HR 21832–25825, RG 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

19 Heckel, Paint Industry, 280–81, 291; Heckel was in the paint business from his youth. His father, a farmer, like William Dean Howell's Silas Lapham, got caught up in a “mineral paint craze” raging through western Pennsylvania after the Civil War. He hired a man to dig holes about the farm. In one of these was found iron oxide on a base of aluminum silicate, so he built a paint factory on the farm. The roasted iron oxide pigment was mixed with linseed oil and pure white lead was the base; Ibid., 4.

20 From 1900 to 1910 The value (in millions of dollars) of annual zinc production in the United States increased from 11 to 27, while lead increased from 23 to 33. Zinc production, by weight, increased 435 percent, while lead production increased only 147 percent, U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 583–84; 603–604.

21 McCord, Carey P., “Lead and Lead Poisoning in Early America: Lead Compounds,” Industrial Medicine and Surgery 23 (Feb. 1954): 79–80Google ScholarPubMed; Hamilton, Alice, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D., illustrations by Hamilton, Norah (Boston, 1943), 131.Google Scholar

22 This description draws upon case studies reported by Pratt, Edward E., Occupational Diseases: A Preliminary Report on Lead Poisoning in the City of New York, with an Appendix on Arsenical Poisoning (Albany, N.Y., 1912), 454–55, and 478–80.Google Scholar

23 In the plants Pratt investigated, the same workers who built the “blue” beds also stripped the white beds, Occupational Diseases, 451. Excellent descriptions of the stack process appear in Gordon Thayer, “The Lead Menace,” Everybody's Magazine, 1 Mar. 1913, 327.

24 In 1919, Alice Hamilton declared that because of the exclusion of women from most hazardous lead manufacturing jobs, “lead poisoning in women is still a rarity in the United States.” Hamilton, , “Lead Poisoning in American Industry,” The Journal of Industrial Hygiene 1 (May 1919): 8–22.Google Scholar The 1910 Census of Manufacturers reported that of 13,618 paint factory employees, only 1,946 were women. Three fifths (1197) of these women worked in the front office. On the factory floor, the most hazardous jobs were highly sex-segregated: only 4 percent were women. Judging by the nearly total exclusion of women from work in American lead smelting and fabrication factories, their numbers in lead paint plants were probably lower than the aggregate data. The great exception to the rule among lead-using industries was the pottery industry; on this subject see Stern, Marc, The Pottery Industry of Trenton: A Skilled Trade in Transition, 1850–1929 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994).Google Scholar

25 Harrison Brothers and Company, “The Chemistry of Paints” (1890), 10.

26 Pratt, Occupational Diseases, 397.

27 Pratt reported the cases of two young Russian Poles at work in the packing rooms who contracted serious lead colic only months after starting work. Pratt, Occupational Diseases, 489; 450.

28 For conditions in the Pullman plant, see Hamilton, Alice, “What One Stockholder Did,” The Survey 28 (June 1912): 387–89Google Scholar; and in Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, 145–48 and 156–59.

29 Pratt. Occupational Diseases, 505–506. Painters largely missed out on the Progressive Era occupational reforms of the lead-using industries; for statistics on painters' health, see Warren, Brush With Death.

30 Which is not to say that the lead companies did not experiment. They seemed always on the lookout for newer, faster methods of producing their ancient product. But some variant of the “Old Dutch” process remained the standard for most white-lead production well into the twentieth centry.

31 By 1911, Kansas, Minnesota, Nevada and Texas passed labeling laws. On the Nebraska law, see Heckel, Paint Industry, 322; for the other state laws, see Paint, Oil and Drug Review 12 (1911): on USDA enforcement against turpentine manufacturers, see 12 July, p. 21; on Kansas laws, see 5 July, p. 10; on Minnesota laws, see 19 July, p. 12; on Nevada and Texas, see Sept. 6, 16; Heath and Milligan Manufacturing Company v. Worst 207 U.S. 338; 52 L. Ed. 236; 28 S.Ct. 114(1907).

32 The Association paid $10.00 per year to an informant in each state whose sole duty wasto report the introduction of labeling laws. “What it cost the proponents of these measures tocarry on the fight I do not know,” recalled Heckel, “but we all had our unkind suspicions atthe time—probably entirely unjustified.” Heckel, Paint Industry, 324.

33 Edwin F. Ladd, trained as a chemist in Maine, moved to North Dakota in 1890 to run the state's new Agricultural Colleges experiment station. From 1899 on, he published the North Dakota Farmer and Sanitary Home, and pushed for the states food and drugs act, passed in 1901. When he was sued by food processors in 1904, he gained a national forum for exposing blatant frauds in food. In 1920, North Dakota elected him to the national Senate, where he sponsored yet another paint labeling law; see Robinson, Elwyn B., History of North Dakota (Lincoln, Nebr., 1966), 261–62.Google Scholar James Harvey Young sees Ladd as representative of a reform force in the Midwest, “neither Populists nor Progressives” but who wer convinced that the Midwest was the “colonial territory” of eastern manufacturers, James Harvey Young, Pure Food, 281–82.

34 George Heckel met Ladd in Fargo “on a bleak fall day” in 1906 to try to convince him of the meaninglessness of “pure” paint, and to dissuade him from publishing damning evidence of mislabeling, but to no avail, Heckel, Paint Industry, 326.

35 Heath v Milligan.

36 E.F. Ladd, “Paints and Their Composition,” Bulletin no. 70, North Dakota Agricultural College, Government Agricultural Experiment Station of North Dakota; repr. in Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Mislabeled Paint, 15.

37 Allen W. Clark, a St. Louis paint manufacturer reminisced that these were the years “when a dealer who also sold anything else besides paint was insulted if you addressed him as a paint dealer,” quoted in Heckel, Paint Industry, 343.

38 The draft legislation was known as the “Joint Conference Bill,” after the conference held by the National Paint Manufacturers Association, the Paint Oil and Varnish Association and the International Association of Master House Painters and Decorators; John Dewar to John Esch, 2 May 1908. The alliance of manufacturers and painters was short-lived, because opposition ran deep among the ranks of the mixed-paint manufacturers. When the bill was introduced to the Senate, the National Paint Manufacturers Association officially opposed the bill it had helped frame. The bill was first presented in the House by Representative Marshall, then combined to form Heyburn's bill; see also Heckel, Paint Industry, 331–40.

39 Weldon Heyburn had co-sponsored, with Porter McCumber of North Dakota, the penultimate bill that became the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, and pushed it through the Senate, see James Harvey Young, Pure Food, 204–210.

40 Heyburn's was not the only paint bill presented in 1907, but was the combination of his with Representative Marshall's bill, also known as the “Joint Conference Bill,” introduced as HR 17824; since only Heyburn reintroduced the legislation in the next session, I refer to all three bills as the Heyburn bill. Hence, some of the correspondence regarding “the Heyburn bill” is written to representatives, not senators. For example see the testimony of Massachu setts painter P. J. Imberger, Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Midabeled Paint, 123.

41 Retail Hardware Association of the Carolinas to Representative Wyatt Aiken, 6 Apr.,1908; both in Congress, House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, “Naval Stores and Paint,” File HR60A-H16.12, RG 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

42 Under state laws, turpentine and linseed oil adulterers were prosecuted more than paint manufacturers, perhaps because standards of purity were more clear-cut for these chemicals than for paints.

43 Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Midabeled Paint (Painters Magazine), 257.

44 E.F. Ladd, “Paints and Their Composition,” Bulletin no. 70, North Dakota Agricultural College, Government Agricultural Experiment Station of North Dakota; repr. in Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Midabeled Paint, 15.

45 Paint Manufacturers' Association of the United States to Representative Irving Wagner, 4 Mar. 1908, House, “Naval Stores and Paint;” Henry Wood, of Massachusetts, Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Midabeled Paint (Painters Magazine), 261.

46 A. Burdsal Company to Senate Committee of Manufactures, 18 May 1908, Congress, Senate, Committee of Manufactures, File Sen 60A J81, RG 46, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

47 Dewar named at least six paint manufacturers who had recently begun labeling their paints, including Acme Paint & Colorworks of Detroit, Sherwin Williams, and the National Lead Company. Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Midabeled Paint, 134.

48 James Patton, President of Patton Paint Company, quoted by John Dewar, in testimony before Heybum Committee, Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Midabeled Paint, 134; Wm. A. Buddecke, testimony before Mann Committee, House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 40.

49 Bade Brothers to Representative William Calder, 11 Apr. 1908, House, “Naval Stores and Paint;” D.T. Wier letter to N. Dakota, read by John Dewar, Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Mislabeled Paint, 15.

50 A. Burdsal Company to Senate Committee of Manufactures.

51 House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 3. Bartholdt, from St. Louis, served in the House from 1893 to 1915. He was born in Germany, migrating to the United States in his nineteenth year. Before entering politics he was a publisher, rising to the post of Editor in Chief of the St. Louis Tribune; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 584.

52 Hearings on the Heyburn bill were held on 17 and IS Feb., see Committee on Manufactures, Adulterated or Mislabeled Paint (Painters Magazine), 174; on 26 Feb. 1910, the Bartholdt bill was referred to the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Congressional Record, 61–2, 2480–2481; House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 24–26.

53 Painters Magazine 37, 266; L. Matem, “The Prevention of Lead Poisoning,” The Painter and Decorator 24 (May 1910); 360–61.

54 The same German laws served as the model for the American Association for Labor Legislation when drafting its model state legislation “Standard Bill for the Prevention of Occupational Diseases with Special Reference to Lead Poisoning,” American Labor Legislation Review 4 (Dec. 1914): 541–46.

55 On various European laws, see Stevenson, “A History of Lead Poisoning,” 333–90. French law of 1909: transcript of Meeting of the Chamber of Deputies, 10 July 1909, translated by M. Mandeville Jacobus, printed in House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 30; on the 1918 reinstatement, see Stevenson, “A History of Lead Poisoning,” 382.

56 House, Hearings on HR. 21901, 26–28. Rhodes was a Member of the House of Representatives in the 59th Congress, former mayor of Potosi, Missouri, and from 1919 to 1923 would serve again in the House, and chair the Committee on Mining; Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, 1774–1989, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C., 1989), 1710.

57 House, Hearings on H.R 21901, 14–15.

58 Ibid., 4, 18.

59 No painters' unions testified at the hearings, although a few local offices sent written declarations of support. The St. Louis Painters' District Council and the Los Angeles District Council of Painters sent resolutions, as did the Indianapolis District Council of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers of America, Ibid., 8. But the voices of these small groups carried little weight compared with Dewar's national association.

60 H.V. Kent, president of Kent and Purdy Paint Company, to Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 7; H.V. Kent to James R. Mann, 18 June 1910, House, “Papers Accompanying Specific Bills and Resolutions.”

61 Wiley also dismissed all the bill's restrictions on manufacture and worker protection, except for the provision that “workmen shall not drink liquor in the place they work.” Text of Bartholdt bill, House, Hearings on H.R 21901, 20–21. On Wiley and the Pure Food and Drugs Act see Young, The Toadstool Millionaires; for a more cynical assessment of Wiley's role in regulation, see Peter Temin, Taking Your Medicine. For Wiley's conservative, traditional interpretations of purity and artificiality, see High, Jack and Coppin, Clayton A., “Wiley and the Whiskey Industry: Strategic Behavior in the Passage of the Pure Food Act,” Business History Review 62 (Summer 1988): 286–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 H.V. Kent to Wiley, 17 June 1910, House, “Papers Accompanying Specific Bills and Resolutions.“

63 House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 17.

64 Eugene A. Philbin, testimony before Mann Committee, House, Hearings on H.R 21901, 44–51.

65 Eugene Philbin to James Mann, 7 June 1910, House, “Papers Accompanying Specific Bills and Resolutions.”

66 In 1955, paint manufacturers voluntarily adopted a one percent limit on lead in paints for interior use. Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Lead-Based Paint Poisoning: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health, 91st. Congr., 2d sess., 23 Nov. 1970, 229.

67 Chairman James R. Mann, M.E. Rhodes, quoted in House, Hearings on H.R. 21901, 12.

68 Heckel, Paint Industry, 353.

69 Ibid., 609. Earlier lead industry attacks on “cheap substitutes” tended to paint zinc, barytes and whiting with the same brush. National Lead Company's 1900 pamphlet Uncle Sam's Experience with Paints is typical.

70 Heckel, Paint Industry, 266. Ham and Heckel's cooperative venture culminated in the “Save the Surface” campaign of the war years, 401. Lead industry advertisements continued to feature exposés of fraudulent salesmen hawking adulterated “dope lead,” (Carter Times, June 1918, 13, Warshaw Collection, “Paints”) but for the most part, they stopped castigating legitimate (and accurately labeled) competitive products.

71 William Lucas to Rep. Irving P. Wagner, 4 Mar. 1908, House, “Naval Stores and Paint.”

72 On the history of pediatric lead poisoning in the United States, see Warren, Brush With Death; Fee, Elizabeth, “Public Health in Practice: An Early Confrontation with the [Silent Epidemic] of Childhood Lead Paint Poisoning,” Journal of the History of Medicine 45 (1990): 570–606Google ScholarPubMed; and Berney, Barbara, “Round and Round it Goes: The Epidemiology of Childhood Lead Poisoning, 1950–1990,” Milbank Quarterly 71 (1993): 3–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

73 Reduced to its essence, contributory negligence, the fellow servant rule and assumption of risk allowed the employer to answer the worker who complained when a falling hammer hit him on the head: “If you can't keep your eye on what careless workers around you are doing, then vou shouldn't work here.” By 1908, these three precepts had lost their iron grip on the American litigation system, which was undergoing a crisis that would only be ended by the widespread adoption of workmen's compensation laws; see Asher, Robert, “Failure and Fulfillment: Agitation for Employers' Liability and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation in New York State, 1876–1910,” Labor History 24: 2 (Spring 1983): 198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74 Sellers, Hazards of the job, 61–67; for the development of non-poisonous matches, see Moss, David A., “Kindling a Flame under Federalism: Progressive Reformers, Corporate Elites, and the Phosphorous Match Campaign of 1909–1912,” Business History Review 68 (Summer 1994): 252–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

75 On the AALL, see Sellers, Hazards of the Job, 49–67; and Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 176–9.Google Scholar

76 Sicherman, Barbara, Alice Hamilton, A Life in Letters (Cambridge Mass., 1984), 155–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, 117–118; Editor's note, Thayer, “The Lead Menace,” 325; David Moss's analysis of the affair reveals that Diamond's motives were not entirely philanthropic. Diamond had purchased the French patent for sesquisulphide in 1898 (for $ 100,000), but found that the more costly matches would not be profitable as long as other manufacturers produced phosphorus matches. Through a relationship Moss characterizes as “complementarity of influence,” Diamond and the AALL pushed the Esch-Hughes bill against stiff federalist resistance, Moss, “Kindling a Flame under Federalism,” 244–75.

77 Although the Esch-Hughes bill eliminated phossy jaw in the match industry, the disease did not go away. In the 1920s, workers in fireworks and insecticide plants continued to be disfigured, and doctors reported mild cases in the 1960s, Felton, Jean Spencer, “Classical Syndromes in Occupational Medicine: Phosphorus Necrosis—A Classical Occupational Disease,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 3 (1982): 77–120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

78 David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz argue that silicosis, the “King of Occupational Diseases,” “represented a new kind of disease, unlike those, such as lead or phosphorous poisoning, that had posed major threats in earlier times,” Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 5. See also Chemiack, Martin, The Hawk's Nest Incident, America's Worst Industrial Disaster (New Haven, Conn., 1986).Google Scholar

79 Read, Thomas, Our Mineral Civilization, Century of Progress Series (Baltimore, 1932). 66.Google Scholar

80 For the rise of industrial hygiene within the walls of lead industry workplaces, see Warren, Brush With Death; on the intellectual and scientific underpinnings of this new subspecialty, see Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the job.

81 Alice Hamilton, “Industrial Lead Poisoning,” 224.

82 Frederick L. Hoffman, “Deaths from Lead Poisoning, 1925–1927,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin of the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics no. 488, (June 1929): 1–7; “Safety and Health: Lead Poisoning in the United States,” MLR 46 (Feb. 1938): 420–33; Hoffman, , “Lead Poisoning in 1943 and Earlier Years,” MLR 59 (Nov. 1944): pp. 976–8Google Scholar; Hamilton, , “Hygiene of the Painters' Trade,” Bulletin of the U.S. Bureaxu of Labor Statistics no. 120 (13 May 1913), 48.Google Scholar

83 Hamilton cited the 1910 census figures of 277,541 painters, glaziers, and varnishers, and claimed that about 72,500 of these were organized. Hamilton, , Alice, , “Hygiene of the Painters' Trade,” Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics no. 120 (13 May 1913), 5.Google Scholar In 1911, the Chicago District Council of the Brotherhood of Painters Decorators and Paper Hangers estimated the seasonal employment of their nearly 1400 painters at eight weeks, two days; Ibid., 6.

84 Ibid., 63; Hamilton associated these demands with a survey conducted earlier that year by J.A. Runnberg, the union's statistician. Hamilton called the survey “the first instance of a study of industrial hygiene made by the industry itself;” Ibid., 49.

85 Safety-related issues such as this reveal one aspect of the “dark side” of workers control; the ethnic and racial politics of how risk)'jobs were distributed in worker-controlled sites reveals another; on worker's control, see Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, U.K., 1979)Google Scholar; on worker's control and safety issues, see Aldrich, Mark, Safety First: Technology, Labor and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore. Md., 1997)Google Scholar. The post-World War II explosion of do-it-yourself house decoration, made possible by water-based ready-mixed paints bore out the Progressive-Era painters' fears.

86 There has been very little historical analysis of the effectiveness of the ILO's restrictions on white lead. Nonetheless, the resolution is instructive: painters in other countries were less devoted to lead and more assertive in their demands for workplace safety; foreign zinc industries were more aggressive, and less wedded to lead. The long-term health effects of the ILO resolution are also obscure, but the European trend toward non-toxic paints for interior painting may partly explain the fact that the childhood lead paint poisoning epidemic of the 1960s and 1970s—the so-called “Silent Epidemic of the Slums”—was a peculiarly American phenomenon.

87 Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, p. 254.

88 Deplores Our Absence, New York Times, 26 October 1921, 1; “Sets a White Lead Limit,” New York Times, 19 Nov. 1921; “International Labor Conference at Geneva,” MLR 14 (Jan. 1922): 51–56. The resolution gave the signatories six years to adopt their own regulations. Interior paint was to contain no measurable amount of lead; exterior paint could not exceed two percent lead, by weight. The only exceptions were for public buildings and railroads. By 1926, the MLR's pages were peppered with reports of countries in Europe “coining on line; the examples of Cuba and Czechoslovakia appeared in the ILO's “Report of the International labor Office upon the Working of the Convention Concerning the use of White Lead in Painting,” (Geneva, 1933), 8–9.

89 International Labor Office, “White Lead: Data Collected by the international labor office in Regard to the Use of White lead in the Painting Industry, Studies and Reports, Series F (Industrial Hygiene) no. 11 (Geneva, 1927), 30, 35.

90 The Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act of 1970 marked the beginning of decades of legislative and bureaucratic mud wrestling to eliminate lead paint from store shelves and tenement walls; in 1978, Congress finally banned the manufacture of paints with more than 06 percent lead for any residential purposes, but procuring funding for abatement and adequate screening and treatment continues to be a problem.

91 I have found no source on production of lead pigments between 1910 and 1920, so I have interpolated the values for the intervening years. In addition to white lead, another four thousand tons of red lead and other lead pigments were consumed between 1920 and 1976. Sources: U. S. Geological Survey, Mineral Resources of the United States 1909: pt. 1 “Metals.” (Washington, D.C., 1911)Google Scholar, and U. S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, “Lead,” Minerals Yearbooks 1920–1976 (Washington, D.C., 1921–1977).Google Scholar

92 Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916, (c. 1963; paperback ed. Chicago, 1967), 57–58.Google Scholar

93 For a succinct historiography of this problem, (one that conflates far less than my two-camp model) see Keller, Morton, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass. 1990), 3–5Google Scholar; see also McCraw, “Regulation in America”; and McCormick, Richard, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86 (Apr., 1981), 247–274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

94 The lead industry did learn to avoid legislation and public concern by quietly adopting policies that reduced the chances of lead poisoning. In the twenties, they promoted the use of lead-free paints and glazes for toy and crib manufacturers; and in the 1950s, worked with the American Pediatrics Society to set a voluntary 1 percent maximum lead content for interior paints. See Warren, Brush With Death.

95 One such letter-writing campaign was conducted in 1908 to the members of the House Manufactures Committee; the expression “recent sessions of Congress have been unusually fruitful of new laws…” seemed to turned up with remarkable regularity. For example, Georged. Wetherill to W.H. Graham, National Archives RG233 Box 707, file no. HR60A-H16.12“Naval Stores and Paint.“

96 On some of the ironies of these other fights over purity, see High and Coppin, “Wiley and the Whiskey Industry.“

97 McCraw, Thomas K., “Rethinking the Trust Question,” in McCraw, , ed., Reguhtion in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 1–55.Google Scholar

98 Consequently, and somewhat ironically, the science of toxicology that would give rise to consumer activism against toxins in the environment emerged from the occupational setting, as Christopher Sellers's Hazards of the Job makes clear.

99 See especially the large literature concerning Americas failure to regulate leaded gasoline. The best starting point remains David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz's “‘A Gift of God’?: The Public Health Controversy over Leaded Gasoline during the 1920s,” in Rosner, and Markowitz, , eds., Dying For Work: Workers' Safety and Health in the Twentieth Century, Interdisciplinary Studies in History, Graff, Harvey, gen. ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1989)Google Scholar; see also Warren, Brush With Death.

100 On the origins of the OSHA legislation, see Gersuny, Work Hazards and Industrial Conflict, 111–115; for a critique of OSHA, see Rosner, David and Markowitz, Gerald, “Research or Advocacy: Federal Occupational Safety and Health Policies During the New Deal,” in Rosner, and Markowitz, , eds., Dying For Work: Workers' Safety and Health in the Twentieth Century. Interdisciplinary Studies in History, Harvey Graff, ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 83–102.Google Scholar

101 Lead Industries Association, Useful Information about Lead (New York, 1934), 51.Google Scholar

102 Lead carbonates sweetness, as well as its tendency to retard fermentation made it a favorite additive for vintners, often with serious epidemiological effect. See Wedeen, Richard P., Poison in the Pot: the Legacy of Lead (Carbondale, Ill., 1984)Google Scholar; and Eisinger, Joseph, “Lead and Wine: Eberhard Gockel and the Colica Pictonum,” Medical History 26 (1982): 297–302.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed