3THE PATH OF SELF-CORRECTION

Speaking of danger emblems, there seems to be a growing sentiment towards the elimination of the negative and the substitution of the positive, and for that reason I believe that the term “caution emblem” will eventually meet with more general approval than “danger emblem.”

—W. L. Chandler, 1916

An effort has been made to avoid the term “Poison.” … It has been suggested rather that the wording “Caution” be used[,] followed by the most obvious reason for caution.

—A. G. Granch, 1944

As A. G. Granch, a physician with Union Carbide, made clear, the prediction of W. L. Chandler, an executive at the automaker Dodge Manufacturing, proved to be an accurate one. Employers’ abiding interest in only limited, often euphemistic disclosure of unpleasant facts about occupational health hazards dominated the discourse of information dissemination in the quarter century after World War II. Protection of self-interest often required warning messages in order to curb liability in the judicial and legislative arenas. At the center of a regime of self-regulation were the warning labels generated by the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association (MCA). The readiness of public health officials to authorize and to defer to such a private plan helped to elevate the MCA apparatus to hegemonic status. Private capture of public authority stood out as the hallmark of policy development throughout this interval.

The placid, corporate-dominated midcentury period did, however, witness some counterhegemonic stirrings. With countless workplaces awash in a flood of novel toxic synthetic chemicals, the drive to ignore, deny, or minimize risks encountered the skepticism and even hostility of a small cohort of critics. These dissenters wanted messages that were more readily comprehended by workers and that warned of the full range of adverse effects of exposures. To a significant extent, these critics began to cast their concerns and demands in terms of a right to know about hazards.

Even before the middle of the twentieth century, employers who exposed their subordinates to health risks faced mounting hazards themselves, but these hazards were in the political realm—from judicial decisions, legislative enactments, and administrative regulations carrying the force of law. David Egilman and Susanna Bohme observed incisively that “most warnings have not been instituted because of abstract ethical duty, but because of the constraints of statutory and common law.” Since the turn of the twentieth century, established doctrine in the field then known as the law of master-servant relations imposed a duty to warn endangered subordinates of the less-than-obvious risks surrounding them on the job. As one overview of tort law put it in 1895, “The master may be bound to give to his employee all the information he may possess with regard to the danger of the employment, whether arising from the nature of the occupation or from extraneous causes.” In the era before workers’ compensation, advising workers of hazards, especially upon hiring, served to absolve the employer of responsibility for subsequent injury or illness. Indeed, the principle of assumption of known risk stood as a sturdy common-law defense for businesses sued for damages. In addition, beginning in the Progressive Era, some farsighted capitalists encouraged disclosure of workplace problems in the interest not only of escaping liability but also of promoting harmony across class lines.¹

Producers and users of dangerous substances also had to deal with government labeling and other warning requirements. In almost all cases, the early statutes aimed primarily at protecting consumers outside the workplace or at reassuring consumers that the product they were purchasing actually contained the ingredients needed while appending a bit of warning information, albeit incidentally. Nonetheless, some legislation also served to alert at-risk workers. In 1910, Congress passed legislation to protect purchasers against misbranded or adulterated insecticides. This law provided only that all products containing arsenic be labeled as such, without any insistence on either characterizing that element as a dangerous toxin or offering any precautionary guidance on its proper handling. Throughout the early twentieth century, the states were the main arena of reform. In 1905, the legislatures in Minnesota and Massachusetts enacted measures that mandated the labeling of the industrial solvent methyl alcohol. Both these precedent-setting laws prescribed that the containers carry the word “poison” in sizable letters. A number of other states followed these examples. One proponent of workplace reform seized on the well-established, widely prevalent, state-level policy on drugs. In 1912, the Cornell medical professor W. Gilman Thompson offered this suggestion to the American Chemical Society: “I see no reason why there should not be warning labels attached to the containers of paints, varnish and volatile chemical irritants of all kinds, just as we now have compulsory labeling of the contents of all containers of dangerous drugs.” The American Chemical Society took this message to heart, at least up to a point. Charles Baskerville, the organization's representative in the deliberations of the New York Factory Investigating Commission, recommended that the state impose a duty to label methyl alcohol. The legislature, failed, however, to put through any such requirement, which left the state's Division of Industrial Hygiene frustrated as it viewed the crusade to protect consumers outside the work setting. The industrial hygienists complained in 1917 that “little information has been given in popular form to those who are obliged to work with material containing wood alcohol of the dangers from inhaling its vapors or when the liquid comes in contact with the skin.” The division proposed that all containers bear a label that described the substance as a poison and that bore the traditional warning symbol of the skull and crossbones. This recommendation went unheeded by decision makers. Despite this setback and other shortcomings, the Progressive Era did witness a significant start toward creating a duty to warn about workplace health hazards with the use of labels.²

The threat of federal intervention precipitated a thorough privatization campaign. In 1927, Congress passed the Federal Caustic Poison Act, which required that containers of acids and other caustic substances sold for household use carry a label featuring the word “poison.” Because that law exempted industrial containers, the Workers’ Health Bureau called for federal legislation requiring placement of similar warning messages on dangerous chemicals present in workplaces. Although that agitation bore no fruit, five years later Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut revived the issue with the introduction of a bill to expand labeling requirements, albeit still for household chemicals only. Despite its circumscribed nature, this proposal triggered a strong preemptive move by concerned industrialists. The MCA advised Bingham and his colleagues that it was engaged in discussions with the Surgeon General on a voluntarist label plan. Bingham obligingly indicated that he would prefer this method of solving the problem and ended his legislative effort. But the resumption of reform at the state level added to anxiety in business circles on this matter. In 1933, Massachusetts made mandatory the labeling of benzene receptacles with the message “Beware of Poisonous Fumes.”³

In 1934, the US Public Health Service (PHS) and the MCA formed the Chemical Products Agreements Committee. In short order, this joint body produced warning messages for containers, available through the MCA, for eight types of substances, including benzene and carbon tetrachloride. The label for carbon disulfide advised that this was a highly volatile material and that it was a poison. The trade association also published manuals to guide the dissemination of information among producers, shippers, and users of hazardous chemicals. With the threat of congressional action gone, however, the Chemical Products Agreements Committee became passive after its initial burst of activity. In 1941, Surgeon General Thomas Parran moved to appoint a replacement member after determining that the committee was “not functioning at the present time.” Parran's attempt to revitalize the group accomplished nothing. As of early 1944, the PHS-MCA operation still had reached only a total of eight agreements, covering nearly the same list of chemicals for which it had set requirements a decade earlier. Nonetheless, at that time, Warren Watson, an MCA committee member, told the committee chair, “There is no question … that adequate labeling plays a vital and important part as a safety device and that the use of precautionary labels and literature should be extended for hazardous products.”⁴

For the chemical industries, the extension of labeling work became a matter to be taken into their own hands, not advanced through a partnership with federal officials. The lawsuits that involved substances not under the workers’ compensation system catalyzed a determination to institutionalize more systematically the industrialists’ own method of warning. In introducing a plan to collect data on member companies’ experience with chemical “accidents” in 1939, the secretary of the MCA stated that “the marked upward trend of liability suits since 1930 needs no emphasis.” The association later frankly explained the impetus for taking the initiative: “There was always the shadow of litigation that faces any producer as the result of real or fancied injury by a product. Chemical manufacturers had already seen the possible alternative of federal and state legislation which might or might not be wisely framed. MCA chose the path of self-correction.” A system dominated by private parties had been the aim of the association since at least 1936. Shortly after its Conference on Liability Suits in April 1944, the association created the Committee on Labels and Precautionary Information. This small committee of corporate medical experts and other staff professionals would play a critical role in determining the extent and nature of hazard information dissemination for the subsequent quarter century.⁵

The MCA immediately expanded its preexisting program. In mid-1945, the MCA published a manual, Product Caution Labels (Manual L-2), comprised of sixty-seven entries for its affiliates and others in the field. The entries followed a format delineated in a companion publication, “A Guide for the Preparation of Warning Labels for Hazardous Chemicals” (Manual L-1), which was made public in Chemical and Engineering News. Implying the need to forestall government intervention, these manuals set forth a broad managerial obligation: “The education of employees regarding chemical hazards is, and must remain, the direct responsibility of their employers.” The guidance in Manual L-1 spelled out a label's necessary components—the chemical (not trade) name, a signal word, a statement of the hazard, appropriate precautionary measures, and instructions for dealing with incidents. The three signal words expressed the degree of severity of the hazard—“danger” for the most severe, “warning” for the less severe, and “caution” for the least severe.⁶

The guide's treatment of general principles set out to frame issues in the most innocuous terms possible. The MCA criticized what it perceived as “indiscriminate use” of the problematic word “poison.” The association proffered a narrow definition: “The commonly accepted meaning of ‘Poison’ refers to single dose oral toxicity.” The section of the MCA guide devoted to defining terms offered the concession that “there is no definition adequate for all cases” but then referred readers to the aforementioned general principle. Under this definition, when the route of entry was either inhalation or percutaneous absorption, there was no poisoning. Similarly, when numerous doses of the intoxicant experienced over time caused a delayed response, there was no poisoning. This analysis offered no citations to the scientific literature or even passing reference to one toxicologist's acceptance of that interpretation of the concept. The readily available scholarship by Alice Hamilton, which synthesized a wealth of substantial findings, was premised on a wider sense of the legitimate types of chemical toxins and their range of actions in the human body. The opening sentence of the first chapter of Hamilton's 1925 overview, Industrial Poisons in the United States, makes this plain: “Industrial poisoning is typically chronic, the acute forms are relatively rare.” Her subsequent work and that of other experts who used various methods of investigation proceeded from the same assumption regarding the scope of the field of industrial toxicology. Instead of validation by scientific authority, the trade association invoked the notion of a “commonly accepted meaning,” without any substantiation of how widely shared this understanding of the concept was in the United States at the time. The association considered the word “poison” to be toxic.⁷

Much the same constricted perspective governed the designation of carcinogens. The inaugural edition of Product Caution Labels acknowledged the existence of one carcinogenic substance, beta naphthylamine, well known to attack the bladder. For chromates and bichromates of sodium and potassium, the recommended signal word was “warning,” followed by the hazard description “harmful dust,” advice to “avoid prolonged and repeated breathing or skin contact,” and first aid procedures. This weak warning came eight years after two reviews of the literature appearing in the highly regarded Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology recognized chromates as a cause of lung cancer. It came three years after Wilhelm Hueper, a pioneering researcher who specialized in occupational and environmental carcinogenesis and who later directed the environmental cancer program at the National Cancer Institute, dismissed attempts to continue to deny carcinogenicity: “This optimistic outlook was destroyed definitely in recent years by the demonstration of an excessive incidence of pulmonary malignancy among workers of several German chromate factories.” Hueper hastened to add, “The workers should be informed of the dangers to which they are exposed and of the significance of the prophylactic measures taken.” In a follow-up article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1946, Hueper published a list of fourteen recommendations for the control of occupational cancer. This item stood at the top of his list: “Plant management officials, industrial workers and members of the medical profession must be made increasingly aware of the fact that numerous agents of our new industrial environment possess carcinogenic properties.” This was guidance for which the chemical manufacturers had little use. The MCA's reticence on this score fit within a prevailing pattern across US culture of treating cancer as unmentionably terrifying.⁸

Notwithstanding its limitations, from its inception the MCA venture into the daunting, largely uncharted territory of chemical labeling did mark an important advance in the dissemination of hazard information. Manufacturers, shippers, and end-use handlers of dangerous substances received warnings where previously none had appeared. Widespread availability of labels that gave chemical names rather than meaningless or misleading trade names represented significant progress in sharing knowledge. With the implementation of the manufacturers’ system, fewer containers carried unhelpful identities such as “LT-54F” or “Electric Motor Cleaner.” At minimum, the MCA apparatus of a compendium of recommended labels and the concomitant guidance material, combined into Manual L-1 that originally held only the latter, served to orient employers of at-risk workers to the existence and importance of underappreciated risks, if only from the perspective of potential legal liability.⁹

The Manufacturing Chemists’ Association strove to establish its labeling system as the national authority on the subject. As of 1946, it gained additional credibility by loosening its poison definition to cover doses taken by inhalation. Three years later, the association's interpretation of this term also encompassed toxins absorbed through the skin. By that time, the MCA's ambitions were reflected in a declaration of interest in expanding the distribution of facts about hazards: “Precautionary information should, so far as practicable, reach every person using, handling, or storing chemicals.” The implicit commitment was that the MCA labeling program, supplemented by its catalog of Chemical Safety Data Sheets for managers and staff, would be the vehicle for reaching this lofty goal.¹⁰

The association's campaign to attain and maintain authoritative status involved regularly updating its Manual L-1, which reached a seventh edition in 1970. But even this final version of the publication perpetuated the corporate author's reluctance to acknowledge cancer threats. Beyond the concession it had made more than two decades earlier for beta naphthylamine, the Labels and Precautionary Information Committee was only prepared to identify the carcinogenic nature of one more substance, benzidine. The chromates still did not receive such recognition in this important reference work. Nor did bischloromethyl ether, another chemical known to chemical management to cause cancer. The precautionary principle was thus only cautiously applied in this regard.¹¹

The MCA program marginalized further the cooperative arrangement devised with the Surgeon General in 1934. The role of the PHS became that of placing its stamp of approval on labels devised by its trade association partner and otherwise promoting the manufacturers’ warnings. In 1949, the Labels and Precautionary Information Committee learned that the PHS wanted to discontinue their joint program and to formally endorse the chemical manufacturers’ system. This was, of course, welcome news to industrial interests. However, the PHS feared that such a move would show an embarrassing lack of interest in a significant public health problem. In 1952, the PHS leadership finessed this potential difficulty by replacing the old joint Chemical Products Agreements Committee with a its own Chemical Products Labeling Committee. The purpose of this new entity was merely to advise the MCA, particularly in promoting uniform practices for household products. Such a transfer of authority served to confer additional legitimacy on the self-regulatory regime. The accommodating deference of federal authorities marked perhaps the greatest triumph of the midcentury drive for private control.¹²

The PHS retreat left the privatizers with ongoing challenges. Government action at the state level posed a constant menace to the chemical producers. In spelling out its future plans regarding the shape of public policy in 1949, the MCA Labels and Precautionary Information Committee made clear that its action would be “limited primarily to promoting labeling that will limit the need for legislative regulation on the subject, or that will serve to encourage revision of outmoded legislation.” One of the first chores undertaken by the Labels and Precautionary Information Committee was the drafting of a model state bill. The association's Legal Advisory Committee tracked state judicial and legislative developments and refined their model proposal. As of 1952, that is, at a time when most states still had no labeling laws, the organization's stance was defensive in refusing to initiate legislative action. Only when other parties introduced legislation not in accord with its guidelines did the MCA enter the political arena to advocate for its prescription, in pursuit of uniformity across state lines and other principles.¹³

As the administrative capacity of states grew, the promulgation of regulations received more attention. When California regulators issued labeling orders for 114 substances in 1946, the Labels and Precautionary Information Committee reviewed them with care. To their relief, they found that the state had followed MCA recommendations “practically word for word.” Nonetheless, within two years, the committee felt the need to propose a public relations campaign “to combat unreasonable demands” from state regulatory bodies. Another preemptive gambit was to influence the drafting of regulations. In 1950, an MCA representative met with the Illinois Industrial Commission on its pending rules and won their acceptance of the principles in the association's Manual L-1. That regulations in California, Illinois, and elsewhere were being designed by the respective state's labor officials placed them in need of closer scrutiny. Tracking the impending revision of the California rules in 1953, the Labels and Precautionary Information Committee found that state prepared to follow its prescriptions without deviation. Among other things, this meant dropping the requirement for benzene containers to display the unpleasant skull-and-crossbones image. The proliferation of varying rules, like that of varying statutory requirements, intensified the interest of the chemical producers in standardization. In 1950, the MCA decided to write a model label regulation “to avoid confusion of conflicting regulations.” This was plainly the same reactive approach as the association adopted regarding legislative affairs.¹⁴

The quest for statutory and regulatory uniformity and minimal intervention necessitated the recruitment of a network of supporters in critical positions. Chemical industry agents pressed their case with a number of organizations in the hope of gaining support or at least neutralizing opposition. After the International Association of Governmental Labor Officials created a labeling subcommittee, Sanford Hill of du Pont appeared at its 1953 annual meeting to offer insights from the MCA's decade of experience. Hill described the association's system and noted that California's Department of Industrial Relations had used it in its regulatory scheme, as had Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island. “Uniformity is of major importance when regulations of this type are drafted,” he contended, leaving no doubt that adherence to the manufacturers’ model was the best means to that end. Hill gave the labor officials copies of the manufacturers’ label manual and assured them, “You will find that it covers your needs.” The labor group responded by resolving to rely on the MCA-influenced Illinois regulations, supplemented by the guidance of Manual L-1 itself, in constructing their codes. Hill became a member of the labeling subcommittee of this association and delivered its report at the 1955 convention. He singled out for praise the recent law enacted in Massachusetts, which forced the Department of Labor and Industries to share regulatory control with the Department of Public Health. Hill also took the opportunity to reiterate the priority of attaining uniform requirements. A more enlightened perspective regarding the growth of public policy for a new, complex phenomenon developing under uncertain circumstances would have been to promote varied state innovations in order to find by experimentation an optimal approach or a number of better approaches. Under that alternative route, a uniform pattern might eventually coalesce as experience demonstrated the superiority of one state's method. That an employee of a private corporation became directly involved in making policy for a group of state officials indicates unmistakably the extent to which public sector leadership was prepared to acquiesce to outside interests during this period.¹⁵

Industrial hygienists working for state and, to a lesser extent, local and federal agencies were another constituency that the MCA sought to influence. The 1952 meeting of the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) declared its support for labels on harmful substances and pledged to work with the MCA. When the ACGIH attempted to determine how many substances should be subject to warnings, however, it found itself divided between those willing to accept the MCA list and those seeking a longer one. A division of opinion also existed over whether to follow without deviation the guidance in the MCA manual. Because several states had already taken action based on the industry's plan, its preemptive role exerted a shaping force. Sanford Hill defended his association's well-established system at the industrial hygienists’ 1955 conference. Hill attacked deployment of any wider poison definition and reiterated the imperative for uniformity. He also offered the blithe prediction that “precautionary statements listing do's and don’ts should gradually become unnecessary” on labels. When the ACGIH leaned away from the MCA's pinched notion of a poison and otherwise proceeded with devising recommendations at variance with the wishes of industry, the association complained repeatedly. In that regard, the MCA represented only the tip of the spear among industry critics. When the ACGIH sent a draft of its own proposed label guide to a number of trade associations in 1957, they received a torrent of criticism. The following year, Hervey Elkins, a member of the hygienists’ labeling committee, told his colleagues, “The protests varied from specific criticisms of various portions of the Guide to the blunt suggestion that we retire from the area and leave the handling of labeling to people who knew something about it.” Elkins, a veteran administrator with the Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, objected to the MCA's preoccupation with acute toxicity and concomitant refusal to identify toxic substances yielding chronic effects as poisons. He also insisted on the need to provide labeling for more chemical mixtures, unintimidated by assertions about possible violations of trade secrets. Thomas Nale, medical director at Union Carbide, followed Elkins's presentation with a full-throated defense of the MCA principles. Nale criticized the ACGIH label committee for failing to have any members from industry, oblivious to the fact that this was an organization composed of government professionals. At their next gathering, the industrial hygienists were undeterred and approved a “Guide to Rules and Regulations for the Labeling of Hazardous Materials” that defined poisons as including “any substance or mixture of substances with cumulative toxic effects that may prove slowly fatal on [sic—or] permanently disabling.” The proposed code provided no exemptions or special treatment for trade secrets. The hegemony of the privatizers was less than absolute. Nonetheless, publishing this guide and having it adopted by state lawmakers were two different matters. The ACGIH functioned as a repository of technical expertise, not as a political advocacy group, and retreated from the labeling battlefield after 1959. The organization disbanded its label committee in 1966.¹⁶

Warding off deep federal intervention represented another front in the contest between public and private forces. The fact that the 1949 edition of Manual L-1 incorporated a sizable section devoted to agricultural chemicals—then commonly known as economic poisons—offered another indicator of the manufacturing chemists’ determination to oversee the distribution of hazard information across the spectrum of chemical industries. The timing of this extension of the MCA's scope of attention was telling. Two years earlier, Congress had passed the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), superseding a 1910 federal statute designed to prevent consumer fraud, not worker illness. The earlier law had required only that containers of insecticides with arsenic as an ingredient bear a label attesting to its presence, with no obligation either to declare the poisonous nature of that element or to provide any precautionary message. In contrast, FIFRA covered a wide range of pesticides and prescribed several standard label provisions. The act required that highly toxic substances have a label that included the word “poison” in red letters, the skull-and-crossbones symbol, and antidote information. It required that a label be “in such terms as to render it likely to be read and understood by the ordinary individual” but set forth no circumstances under which a label had to be understandable to those who did not read English. FIFRA also outlawed false or misleading claims about the safety of products. In their endeavors to meet these new obligations and to contain the impact of the 1947 statute, industry interest groups had the advantage of dealing with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA epitomized the captive public agency, dominated by those it was supposed to regulate. Labor activist Marion Moses viewed the midcentury USDA as “the federal agency most hostile toward farmworkers and most resistant to any changes in policy that would ameliorate their harsh working conditions.”¹⁷

For the MCA, the market segment devoted to agricultural products presented both promise and peril in the quarter century after World War II. With food and fiber production increasing on ever-larger farms as Americans consumed more food and clothing throughout a prolonged phase of prosperity, demand soared for synthetic chemicals that killed unwanted fauna and flora. Newly formulated organophosphate and organochlorine pesticides and other inventions to eradicate pests and weeds were generally greeted as wonders of progress. But even amid the chorus of acclaim, some apprehension and criticism of health hazards arose, especially for risks to livestock downwind from poisons and homeowners who might misuse products in their yards or gardens. Little early dissent focused on the precarious plight of farmworkers, who were subject to far greater exposure. In this context, framing the issues and manipulating the policy and practice of the USDA regarding warning labels took on great importance.¹⁸

The chemical producers wasted no time in pursuing their interests with the FIFRA administrators. Both the implementation of this law and the possibility that it could function as an entering wedge for further federal intervention mobilized both the MCA and the National Agricultural Chemicals Association (NACA), a trade group whose membership overlapped with that of the MCA. The MCA's Labels and Precautionary Information Committee had formed a pesticide subcommittee in 1945. The regulations generated to implement the law offered no significant challenges to industry's conception of proper labeling. The USDA granted the trade association's request for an exemption from labeling rules for its inventory of products that did not meet the new federal standards. The USDA's Pesticide Registration Division readily approved both manufacturers’ preexisting warning labels, with little or no modification, and their newly drafted ones. In the view of the historian Pete Daniel, the lax approval procedures during the 1950s and 1960s amounted to “government-industry collusion” at the expense of the public welfare.¹⁹

With a national regulatory mandate, the USDA held the power to do a great deal to advance the manufacturers’ objective of standardization. Both the USDA and the agrichemical industry reached out to state regulators to support their drive for uniformity. The plan to create a single nationwide labeling system could obviously be undermined if states exercised their right to impose different requirements. Here again, the demand for simplicity overrode any consideration that encouragement of varied state-level initiatives might lead to discovery of beneficial innovations in communicating hazard information and thereby preventing additional disease, disability, and death. In 1948, Albert Heagy, the secretary of the Association of Economic Poison Control Officials (AEPCO), the national organization of state regulators, reported that the USDA was soliciting the opinions of state officials on the proper labeling of insecticides. Heagy signaled a readiness to assist the incipient federal campaign to surmount the prevailing lack of standardization. “Collaborative study and effort are necessary,” he told his assembled colleagues, “to attain our objective of uniformity in legislation, regulation and enforcement of laws controlling economic poisons.” The published volumes of the association's proceedings for 1948 and for many subsequent years carried both its Proposed Uniform State Economic Poisons Bill and its Proposed Regulatory Principles. The bill encouraged state agricultural administrators to adhere to the standards set by the USDA, which in turn was following the MCA principles. One principle was to require the conspicuous use of the word “poison” accompanied by the skull and crossbones for materials deemed highly toxic to humans. In enumerating criteria for what constituted a high level of toxicity, however, the guidelines opened a loophole by allowing exemptions for substances deemed “not in fact highly toxic to man,” without indicating how officials were to determine such innocuity.²⁰

Standard practices of the AEPCO and its successor after 1954, the Association of American Pesticide Control Officials (AAPCO), facilitated close correspondence between their positions and those of the pesticide makers. The state officials’ group always invited representatives of agrichemical firms to participate in their deliberations. At the 1949 AEPCO sessions, thirty-five industry men joined fifty-two state officials and twenty USDA staff members. At that meeting, the association's Executive Committee formally invited industrialists to take part in the discussions of its State Relations Committee. The Executive Committee also thanked du Pont's Sanford Hill for his presentation on the MCA guide. The roster of speakers at annual conferences regularly included experts from both the chemical associations and individual firms. When the MCA attorney John Conner addressed the 1951 meeting, he reinforced the familiar central theme. “I know,” Conner declared, “that I speak for the entire chemical industry when I state that the activities of this Association in support of the development of uniform legislative and enforcement policies have our enthusiastic and wholehearted support.” Conner also advised against hasty, unnecessary legislative action. (The attorney's presentation gave no glimpse of his current project of coauthoring a Manual of Chemical Products Liability, which compiled scores of recent pesticide liability cases.) The government agents ingesting a steady diet of self-interested messages gave no evidence of any qualms about possible undue influence from outside parties legally subject to their oversight.²¹

The success of the tight partnership of private and public pesticide parties was immediate and obvious. In 1953, Walter Murphy, editor of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, praised recent accomplishments: “The LAPI [Labels and Precautionary Information] Committee worked in cooperation with state authorities and has been quite effective in encouraging the development of regulations which correspond closely with its system. Special attention has been given to encouragement of uniformity among the laws of our states.” Recognizing which partner drove this process, Murphy singled out the MCA for congratulations for its contributions. Two years later, the AAPCO president Floyd Roberts reiterated the priority of invariability in legislation and regulation. Roberts noted, somewhat euphemistically, that reaching this goal involved having “due regard for the voice of industry” and called attention to his Executive Committee's recent meeting with industry representatives. “The informal manner and the fact that that meeting is strictly off the record are conducive to a free discussion of any disturbing matters,” he maintained. That this committee would be holding similar conversations with farmworkers or other workers endangered by toxic agricultural chemicals was unimaginable. Roberts announced that most of his association's members currently accepted the proposed basic principles and definitions, that is, the ideas of the MCA. In the agricultural regulatory arena, private forces enjoyed hegemony.²²

Poisonings in the household setting, especially those victimizing children, drew the medical profession into the political realm in ways that were more challenging to those producing pesticides and other chemical products. The campaign of the American Medical Association (AMA) for federal legislation to further control a range of toxic substances presented the MCA, the NACA, and their colleagues with an advocacy group not so tractable as state and federal agricultural officials. (Unlike civil servants, physicians were not looking for better-paying jobs with chemical firms.) The AMA initially supported only a voluntary system of hazard controls. Bernard Conley, secretary of its Committee on Pesticides, promoted voluntarism, with additional educational work by manufacturers, at the 1950 AEPCO conference. But by 1958, the medical association saw the necessity of a more potent remedy and drafted a bill that would grant wide federal authority over labeling rules. In announcing the rationale for this move, Conley characterized the current state and federal regulations as “sketchy, nonuniform, and generally inadequate.” He also pointed out, “There are no federal laws for the precautionary labeling of industrial chemicals.” At a conference of the National Association of Sanitarians in July 1958, Conley pointed out that “ninety percent of the states have no laws for industrial chemicals and both morbidity and mortality statistics provide ample evidence of the harm from overexposure to work chemicals.” On this occasion, having noted the fatal poisonings of preschool children, he also argued for the value of warning images, such as the traditional skull and crossbones. In his view, these devices surmounted any “language barrier by reason of age, education or foreign birth.” Thus, the AMA's plan sought to extend regulations beyond household products to those used in the nonagricultural workplace and called for the use of easily comprehended symbols.²³

The best defense was renewed offense. The manufacturers and their supporters had long been advocates of education, but as a voluntary matter under private auspices. Based on the fallacious premise that labeling alone constituted a sufficient risk management strategy, the industry made a panacea of proper reading of labels and compliance with their guidance. From this angle, poisonings resulted almost invariably from the negligence of users. Victim blaming was a long-held tendency in economic poison circles. In 1948, the trade journal Agricultural Chemicals made this exculpatory pleading: “The manufacturing industry is helpless when it comes to careless applications. Labels mean nothing if they are not read and heeded; yet, the manufacturer is too often criticized for the misdeeds of persons who misuse his products.” Seven years later, the MCA unveiled a Read the Label program. On occasion, proponents of this strategy did venture to suggest additional obligations for education and training. In 1954, Wayland Hayes, Jr., a senior toxicologist in the PHS, offered this advice to western cotton planters: “Greater importance needs to be given to the importance of careful reading of labels. The labels, which are subject to State and Federal control, are the product of careful thought. Accidents with pesticides which do not involve a violation of the instructions and precautions on the label are extremely rare. However, the mere reading of labels is not enough. Each agricultural laborer must be made to understand the reason for precautions.” Given the prevailing inattention to such considerations during this period, Hayes went on to warn quite strikingly, “Proper training may present very real difficulty when laborers are illiterate or when there is a language barrier between them and their supervisors. However, adequate training is a moral responsibility of the employer and the foremen.” At the 1958 meeting of the state pesticide regulators, L. S. Hitchner, executive secretary of the NACA, urged greater attention to education of those exposed to chemical hazards “in order to minimize the need for legislation and regulation.” Hitchner also voiced fears of reformist legislators eager for publicity.²⁴

With the AMA's abandonment of voluntarism, the manufacturers found themselves confronting formidable opponents. The doctors entered the political arena not only organized in the prestigious and powerful AMA but also as righteous caregivers who had to rely on inadequate information as they dealt firsthand with poisoned patients. Accounts of fatal intoxications of children amounted to a public relations nightmare for the industrial chemists. Well-publicized incidents involving pesticide residues in grocery products amplified public uneasiness, adding to the industrialists’ discomfort. In these circumstances, it became necessary to accommodate the advocates of reform. The MCA and its besieged fellows set their defensive perimeter at the boundaries of the worksite. The duty to offer additional protection to the general public was undeniable. But somehow the workers whose risks were usually far greater had to be disregarded.²⁵

On being apprised of the AMA's intentions, the MCA's Labels and Precautionary Information Committee held an emergency meeting to devise a response. In ensuing discussions with organized medicine during mid-1958, industry officials stressed their objection to the inclusion of chemicals used outside the home environment. At one encounter involving about one hundred industry representatives at which “critical remarks came hot and heavy,” the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers Association told the AMA Committee on Toxicology that any federal legislation should be limited to household products and that the definition of a toxic substance should be narrower than that offered by the AMA. With support from the MCA, the specialty manufacturers promoted their own alternative bill. By January 1959, the industry proposal had gained the backing of the American Petroleum Institute and the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association. The united trade associations hastened to distribute copies of their bill to sympathetic members of Congress. If nothing else, the chemical producers’ machinations from the outset clarified that uniformity was not their paramount principle after all. Federal legislation could standardize labeling and other related informational issues on a national basis, superseding a welter of state laws and rules. But that goal disappeared under the threat that federal standards would reach into the workplace.²⁶

Despite the failure of its initial round of discussions, the chemical interests continued to try to persuade the AMA to change course. However, not one member of the AMA Committee on Toxicology accepted the invitation to attend a session of the Industrial Hygiene Foundation in October 1958 devoted to the topic of label legislation. They missed a presentation there by J. T. Fuess of the chemicals division of Eastman Kodak, a member of the MCA Labels and Precautionary Information Committee, that damned the purported excesses of the AMA formulation. Fuess contended that no regulation of workplace substances was needed because “the safety record of chemicals in industry is excellent.” He explained this by the claim that industrial chemicals were handled by “a relatively few experienced operators.” This critique received a warm reception from the corporate crowd that dominated the foundation. For the medical men who had bypassed this opportunity, Fuess's paper was published in the medical association's own industrial health journal in March 1959. Meanwhile, his Eastman colleague J. H. Sterner carried the message to his fellow members of the AMA Board of Trustees. The densely networked business interests had no shortage of ways to engage in outreach to dissuade their opponents.²⁷

The introduction of rival bills led to brief congressional hearings in 1959 and 1960. Lawmakers gave formal consideration only to the industry bill, granting one day of hearings in each chamber. At the Senate session in August 1959, the Chemical Specialty Manufacturers Association took the lead in defending its plan. The MCA's expert, Nicholas Walker, reviewed his organization's lengthy history of contributions in the field. Regarding the exemption of workplace materials from the pending proposal, Walker observed, “A fifty-five-gallon drum would generally be used by an experienced workman in a plant, while a small household product might be used by a housewife who would be quite unfamiliar with the hazards involved.” American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) witness George Brown endorsed the AMA bill. Brown disagreed with Walker on workers’ knowledge of hazards, given the lack of proper labeling. The labor federation official told the senators that treating industrial and nonindustrial substances by the same standards would achieve uniformity across many types of products, effectively turning the manufacturers’ preoccupation with that principle against them.²⁸

At the hearings in the House of Representatives seven months later, the chemical industry's perspective prevailed, notwithstanding further difficulties in maintaining a consistent stance on uniformity. MCA witness Chester French contended that federal involvement in labeling workplace substances would constitute an intrusion into an aspect of employer-employee relations traditionally left to the states. But French gave no assurance that the fifty states would all handle this problem in the same manner. The most important turn of events in this session was the AMA's formal concession of defeat. The principal sponsor of their bill, Representative Thomas Curtis, testified that the industry's proposal now satisfied him. The medical association's O. Benwood Hunter, Jr., also endorsed the manufacturers’ measure but did propose some amendments to it. These included mandating the placement of warning symbols on containers of the most dangerous substances. Hunter praised the “simple and striking” images devised by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and specifically promoted the widely recognized skull and crossbones. While conceding the exemption of the manufacturing sector from the scope of regulation, the AMA did recommend that containers in other workplaces carry labels. In contrast, the labor movement's George Brown continued to hold out for applying the label requirement to all places of employment. Brown expressed particular concern for employees in nonunion settings. In his view, the unorganized masses of US workers had a “right to know the hazards they face handling and working with dangerous substances and they need to know it promptly and simply. An effective labeling law whose coverage included America's workers would safeguard that right.” At this moment, such a somewhat precocious claim of entitlement fell on deaf ears.²⁹

After this cursory review, Congress passed the Federal Hazardous Substances Labeling Act on July 12, 1960. The range of substances put under regulation was confined to household products, leaving all but domestic service workers unprotected. The category of highly toxic substances requiring the signal word “poison” was narrowly drawn by reliance on acute effects. The legislation imposed no requirement for the display of warning symbols. The underlying premise that the attachment of labels to containers constituted a sufficient preventive strategy was further ratified in national policy. The chemical manufacturers had another victory.³⁰

A scattering of dissidents pressed against the limitations of the privatized midcentury regime. Individuals from within both the public and private sectors voiced discontent that ranged from mild unease to bitter outrage at the secrecy that prevailed. In a few cases, these people came forth from unexpected institutional locations. Dissident activity often involved inchoate attempts to articulate a worker's right to knowledge that extended beyond the opportunity to read an MCA label. Even within the mainstream institutions that comprised or acquiesced to the privately controlled system, a significant contingent of individuals in positions of responsibility took a relatively expansive stance on the distribution of health hazard information. Some even joined those asserting a right of workers to know the facts regarding their risks of occupational disease.

Individuals in corporate management occasionally espoused interest in making their subordinates aware of workplace health risks. To be sure, the main thrust of educational activity in the 1950s and 1960s remained the nonoccupational risk factors of employees’ lifestyle choices. Yet the communication programs of some companies also delivered warnings about health threats on the job. In 1956, Raymond Murray, the medical director of Sperry Gyroscope Company, told attendees at the Industrial Hygiene Foundation annual meeting that employees deserved “frank and honest answers” about hazards. “All of the unpleasantries associated with inadequate or false information, with its necessary poor personal relations, can be dissipated in an hour's lecture,” Murray assured, perhaps too optimistically. At the Union Carbide plant in Institute, West Virginia, the medical director, Richard Sexton, along with other managers, gave out written materials and led group discussions on the hazards of hydrogen cyanide and ethylene oxide; workers displayed “intense interest” in the topics. From Sexton's standpoint, “all chemical plant employees should be made aware of the injury potential of all chemicals and should be apprised of the appropriate first-aid measures.” After reviewing how little the AMA had done to promote workers’ education, he presented the case study of his program at the 1959 meeting of the American Academy of Occupational Medicine as one practical, replicable way for his colleagues to move forward. Sexton and others in the management ranks saw the plant nurse as a key figure in increasing the flow of information. Some in the business community clearly expected management to be forthright about sharing the knowledge it held.³¹

Professionals across the field shared that expectation, at least in the immediate postwar years. In 1946, the ACGIH imagined the creation of a network of “health stewards” who would warn and educate rank-and-file workers. “There should be no particular objection to such a program,” argued the conference's Committee on Industrial Hygiene Education, “since the trend in management is to inform workers of the potential hazards of their occupation and, thereby, enlist their assistance in safeguarding against these hazards.” When the government hygienists revisited the issue in 1955, its Committee on Worker Health Information retreated from the bottom-up approach, maintaining that “the most important channel for transmitting industrial health information to the worker is from plant management.” Four years later, that committee expressed disappointment regarding the ability of joint labor-management worksite health committees to foster educational activity. The industrial hygienists had found that management commonly opposed the establishment and empowerment of such bodies. They had learned that openness toward transferring information had tight limits.³²

Beyond their hopes that employers would voluntarily support or take steps to spread knowledge, the government industrial hygienists promoted transparency in public policy. The ACGIH put forth a model state industrial hygiene regulatory code in 1948. The document offered an unequivocal endorsement of the right to know: “Every employer shall inform his employees regarding the hazards to which they are exposed, the methods which have been taken for the prevention and control of such hazards, and the proper methods for utilizing such control measures.” However, the clause establishing this new right was embedded in a much larger formulation that led to its entanglement in the ongoing jurisdictional dispute between health and labor authorities. Because the hygienists’ plan called for regulatory control of occupational disease by state health departments, it incurred the wrath of the International Association of Governmental Labor Officials. Opposition from an organization predisposed to favor the enlargement of workers’ rights diminished whatever chances of realization this democratic proposal possessed. No state adopted the ACGIH proposition, another indication that the midcentury quest for uniform policies was a circumscribed one.³³

One academic scientist strove conscientiously to help demystify the composition of mysteriously named hazardous pesticides for farmworkers and other users. “I am continually being plagued with letters asking ‘What is Super-Bugoo-12?’” lamented the Penn State professor Donald Frear in 1947. Frear's discomfort with the widespread confusion caused by the proliferation of trade-name products led him to approach the Agricultural Insecticide and Fungicide Association (forerunner of the National Agricultural Chemical Association) about their interest in producing a reference work that would identify the actual chemical ingredients in products on the market. Rebuffed by that trade association, Frear took it upon himself to compile a trade-name index. In a declaration that illuminated his motivation for this project, he offered the industry this unsolicited, and unheeded, piece of advice in 1948: “I feel rather strongly about the indiscriminate use of new and untried materials by the general public. I believe that the insecticide and fungicide manufacturers should be responsible for keeping the new materials completely out of the hands of the using public until all of the factors concerning these materials are known rather completely.” Charles Smith, a pesticide trade association representative, defended the recent additions to their product lines as “not highly toxic” and told Frear that his proposal would stifle progress. Amid the ongoing flood of innovative formulations, the agricultural chemist kept up the difficult task of updating his Pesticide Handbook through numerous editions.³⁴

The industrious Frear found time to undertake other chores to promote wider understanding. Beginning in 1949, he assisted the AMA's campaign to warn the public about pesticide hazards. The following year, he published Newer Pesticides, an overview that covered dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), parathion, and other products. “It is our feeling,” he told the AMA's Bernard Conley in explaining the booklet's aim, “that the average user of the newer materials used for pest control purposes is not fully informed on the potential hazards of these materials.”³⁵

Probably the foremost midcentury advocate for a transparent approach to occupational health information was physician Herbert Abrams. In 1947, Abrams became head of the Bureau of Adult Health in the California Department of Public Health. Much to his advantage, amicable relations prevailed between that state's Department of Industrial Relations and its Department of Public Health. No law blocked state agents from providing health-related information to workers and their representatives. Abrams made the most of this hospitable environment by adopting democratically inclusive and participatory methods. An exceptional willingness to work closely with the labor movement was the most obvious manifestation of his class-bridging and race-bridging orientation.³⁶

Abrams came to California at a moment of ferment in progressive public health circles. Traditional principles of state responsibility for protecting the well-being of the citizenry had always carried an admixture of paternalism. Since the 1930s, a rights-claiming perspective had begun to challenge that attitude and its underlying premise of noblesse oblige. Ascendant concepts of human rights were reframing questions related to improving the health of Americans. Abrams introduced his bureau's mission to the California medical profession by quoting from Milton Rosenau's classic Preventive Medicine and Hygiene: “Industrial Hygiene is one of the most important topics in preventive medicine and hygiene, as it deals with the health, the welfare, and the human rights of the vast majority of the adult population.” Because this invocation of human rights came from a standard textbook by a much-respected Harvard professor, no leftist ideologue, it served to legitimate a disruptive mission of expanding workers’ rights.³⁷

The pesticides in California's enormous agricultural sector occupied much of Abrams's attention as he began his service as a state official. Because those substances were among the few workplace chemicals subject to systematic labeling regulation, that focus provided him with a fortuitous orientation toward right-to-know issues. In 1949, Abrams pressed for reform of FIFRA to the ACGIH, calling for “a labeling law by which all economic poisons are clearly labeled according to their content and amount of each ingredient.” This meant identification of the actual chemical ingredients comprising a pesticide, not merely provision of a sometimes-meaningless trade name, as mandated by the federal statute. Recognizing the limited value of placing labels on containers, Abrams also encouraged the industrial hygienists to “disseminate appropriate educational material for farmers and … the employees engaged in handling and manufacturing economic poisons.” The following year, he pointed out that the regulations issued by the California Department of Agriculture required that labels name all active ingredients and indicate protective measures. He underscored this observation by urging that “workmen in actual contact with hazardous chemicals should be made aware of the dangers of improper handling, and should be kept informed of effective control methods.” Very early in his tenure with the Department of Public Health, Abrams became a member of the AMA Committee on Pesticides. In that capacity, he was able to inform the AMA of poisoning cases in his state. In the 1950s, California was one of few jurisdictions that kept any systematic records on pesticide intoxication.³⁸

In attempting to prevent occupational disease in California farming, Abrams and his colleagues in the state government had to rely heavily on their own difficult-to-enforce rules. At far-flung rural worksites where no labor unions stood watch on a daily basis, this guaranteed frustration. The situation increased Abrams's appreciation of the potential value of unions as partners in enforcing rights. At the American Public Health Association meeting in 1951, Abrams described a recent experience in which an unidentified union at a lead smelter had requested state assistance to deal with lead poisoning. One issue there was the employer's refusal to divulge the results of periodic employee medical testing. Abrams reported that when state industrial hygienists conducted environmental monitoring in the smelter, there was “as full participation by the company and union as any agency could hope for.” A union representative accompanied the hygienist; the union was informed of the air-sampling results. In arranging the medical phase of the study, Abrams and his team negotiated these concessions from management: “The fundamental right of each employee to decide to what medical personnel his findings should be made available was established and safeguarded from the outset.” His Bureau of Adult Health's general policy required that “identical reports of findings are delivered both to management and to the union” in those instances in which the union had requested a study. As previously noted, the information gathered elsewhere by state inspectors and investigators very often remained inaccessible to workers and their unions, even though workers as taxpayers financed state-level labor and health agencies. In the context of widespread solicitude for the privileges of industry, the Abrams method stood out as exceptional, if not unique.³⁹

This method of sharing information soon faced a test. Since the 1920s, the Johns Manville Products Corporation had mined and processed diatomaceous earth, a substance used as a filtering medium and in other commercial applications, in Lompoc, California. In 1932, Robert Legge and Esther Rosencrantz published their discovery that the mineral extracted and refined at this site had caused silicosis among a sizable share of the largely Latinx workforce. Despite this warning of the existence of a serious risk of dust disease, Johns Manville refused to let an investigator from the state health department enter its facilities in 1940. When granted access four years later, the state found numerous poorly controlled, dust-generating operations. Subsequent attempts to mount a follow-up study in Lompoc were thwarted by the company and its allies at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, as was an attempt to publish an additional medical report on pneumoconiosis cases there. Company doctors who examined dust-exposed workers failed to inform their patients of pneumoconiosis diagnoses. Given this legacy of obstruction, the Johns Manville plant in Santa Barbara County presented a setting very unpromising for any sort of democratic intervention.⁴⁰

Creative maneuvering overcame corporate opposition. Late in 1951, Abrams encouraged Robert Goe, an editor of the state tuberculosis association's magazine, to explore the situation confronting the six hundred workers in Lompoc. Goe's investigation dug up more than one hundred workers’ compensation cases related to the dust hazard. The article he published in January 1952, entitled “Death by Dust,” offered graphic details of autopsy findings and other facts revealed in compensation proceedings. This exposé also indicted the damming up of information: “Industry has not, as far as can be determined, carried on a realistic program to educate the employee to accept effective disease prevention measures or to acquaint him with the hazards.” Goe's call for further medical research and employee education functioned as a work order for Abrams. His bureau immediately began planning a survey of the Lompoc facilities.⁴¹

Deepening controversy at the plant also served to draw Abrams and his colleagues further into this matter. On March 17, 1952, Local 146 of the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU) began a work stoppage against Johns Manville. The primary issue in contention was a performance pay system that gave workers a perverse incentive to refuse to wear respirators that diminished their productivity. The union sought the elimination of this unhealthful compensation scheme and held out for over seven months to that end. In the midst of the dispute, Abrams released the results of a study on the thirty-two workers’ compensation cases he had located and on the numerous instances in which Johns Manville workers had been hospitalized with work-related respiratory conditions. Local 146 leader John Rodrigues noted that, despite their awareness of the dust hazard and its ill effects, “the company representatives insisted that their physicians informed them that the dust in this occupation is no more hazardous than the dust raised by the farmer in the fields.” Although its eventual settlement left the speedup system in place, the dispute underscored the need for an improved flow of information to at-risk employees.⁴²

The battle in southern California prompted ICWU leaders to increase their organization's capacity to protect members’ health interests. When Abrams left California to set up a clinic for the Building Service Employees Union in Chicago later in 1952, he agreed to become a consultant for the ICWU. From this seemingly marginal position, he gave the union a wealth of guidance and made the right to know a cardinal principle of the union's position on occupational health. Reflecting on the Lompoc experience in the ICWU newspaper, Abrams drew out this lesson: “In motivating employees for health, first of all is the necessity of informing workers of the facts. Have the workers know what they are doing and know the potential hazards of the job and know how to protect themselves and fellow employees against these hazards.” He maintained that in the aftermath of the strike, Johns Manville management had adopted a better attitude and was cooperating with Local 146 in a new joint health and safety committee. This consultancy placed Abrams within a very small group of occupational health professionals employed by the labor movement. As late as 1973, the US labor movement employed only one full-time physician and three industrial hygienists.⁴³

Based on the ICWU's experience in California, Abrams advised his medical colleagues not to assume that workers had little or nothing to contribute to the systematic recognition and control of workplace hazards. “We are prone to conclude quickly that the worker is unintelligent,” he contended in the AMA Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Occupational Medicine, “and the destructive germ of cynicism begins to replace a healthy constructive approach.” The conflict in Lompoc had, in his view, brought about a transformation there. Abrams concluded his analysis of the design of a successful workplace health program with an endorsement of the inclusive, bottom-up approach: “Finally, and perhaps most important, give working people an opportunity to participate in the health program. No amount of exhortation and pontification from above about safety will do the job as well as just permitting the working man to help himself and his fellows.” Abrams closed his appeal with a concrete proposal for the creation of jointly controlled workplace committees whose functions would extend to soliciting workers’ ideas for eradicating hazards. He made this message more palatable to employers and their lieutenants in the health professions by adopting the rhetorical framing and institutional devices of the state-of-the-art human relations paradigm. Abrams's proposition seized upon growing managerial anxiety over employee motivation, a newfound preoccupation with the value of communication, and the recent introduction of modest participative initiatives like suggestion boxes.⁴⁴

In 1953, Abrams took on the work-related diseases afflicting ICWU members employed in mining and processing phosphates in central Florida. Just as the diatomaceous earth workforce had included a sizable contingent of Latinos, the miserable toil of extracting phosphorus ore and refining it into phosphates for agricultural fertilizer and other commercial uses had long been left to African American men. In the early twentieth century, this unhealthful work had often fallen to victims of the convict labor system. Abrams determined that the Florida phosphate workers underwent exposure not only to toxic phosphorus but also to the uranium interspersed with the phosphorus deposits and to fluorides in gaseous and particulate forms. In October 1954, ICWU Local 38 leader Harvey Baker told Abrams that if management denied him access to their plants on his upcoming visit, that denial would serve a useful heuristic purpose. Such a move would, in his opinion, lead to “the membership better realizing there must be something to hide if the company would not permit your entry.” When Abrams visited Florida, employers did keep him off their property. Nonetheless, his off-site conversations with members of the phosphate locals confirmed the gravity of the situation.⁴⁵

With both the ICWU and Florida State Board of Health lacking the resources to sponsor a large-scale study, the only way to gain additional information was to turn to the PHS. The federal officials agreed to work in partnership with Florida authorities on a modest preliminary investigation. In the fall of 1956, they met with the management of the central Florida phosphate firms to plan a hazard-monitoring study of their approximately four thousand employees. In this section of the conservative South, the union was excluded from these deliberations. Abrams's attempts to connect the PHS crew with the relevant local unions also yielded no role for labor in the conduct of the measurements of air pollution beginning in October 1957. Several months later, a preliminary report of the very high levels of fluorides, silica, and so-called nuisance dusts detected went only to management. A conference held to discuss these findings also excluded labor representatives. On August 19, 1958, ICWU president Walter Mitchell complained to Henry Doyle, the acting chief of the PHS Occupational Health Program, calling it “surprising to have a preliminary survey [report] submitted to the companies without giving the union access at the same time.” Making his point more emphatically, Mitchell told Doyle that “union representatives of the workers concerned have every right to be involved in all phases of the survey, including any discussions of the preliminary report.” At this juncture, however, participation in this investigation had become a moot point. The federal and state officials’ recommendation for a larger follow-up study was never implemented, despite Abrams's persistent efforts to induce the PHS to perform a more systematic assessment. Although the specific reasons for a failure to follow through on this problem are unclear, it was not the general inclination of the federal agency during this period to pursue questions of work-related cancer aggressively. In the view of Wilhelm Hueper, the occupational cancer specialist at the National Cancer Institute, the PHS feared retaliation in the form of reduced funding if it antagonized politically potent business interests. Hueper alleged that the agency feared denial of other research opportunities. “I heard a member of the former Division of Industrial Hygiene,” he recalled, “making the statement that this organization must maintain ‘harmonious’ relations with industrial management so as to retain opportunities to work in fields other than occupational cancer, which represented a sensitive subject in public relations.”⁴⁶

Instigating this evaluation of working conditions did produce some positive outcomes for the phosphate workers. The union put on a four-day educational conference in February 1959 at its hall in Mulberry, Florida, at which state and federal public health officials discussed their findings. One session, moderated by Abrams, was open to the public and served to convey the intertwined threats to phosphate workers and to the surrounding community. This event drew a good deal of media attention and helped mobilize broader support for reduction of the pollution of both the workplace and ambient environment. The added leverage from agricultural interests whose crops and livestock were injured by the phosphate processors’ emissions significantly strengthened the ICWU's position in demanding hazard controls. In mid-1960, Local 613 struck International Minerals and Chemicals Corporation to protest managerial failure to abate hazards of fluoride dusts and mists. This pressure caused the firm to invest in hazard control technologies, as did other companies in the phosphates belt.⁴⁷

In his capacity as the ICWU's medical consultant, Herbert Abrams struggled to meet mounting demands for information, training, and guidance on a long and ever-lengthening list of hazards, mostly mysterious synthetic chemicals. Commencing in March 1953, Abrams wrote a column for the union's monthly newspaper, The International Chemical Worker. The right of workers to a fuller understanding of the manifold health risks facing them became a strong underlying theme in these journal contributions. At the union's 1953 convention, two delegates described to Abrams how their employer had recently dealt with a cluster of bladder cancer cases at a Monsanto Chemical Company plant in St. Louis. Management examined over fifty employees and sent six to a surgeon it had retained, who operated on them. Recounting this episode in his newspaper column, Abrams described himself as “shocked to learn that although the operations were performed several months ago, these men were not aware of the findings of the operation or the prognosis of their disease. In discussions with these and other workers, it was apparent that many persons are not aware of their rights to medical information.” (The Monsanto situation undoubtedly took on greater urgency for Abrams because it resonated with his experience in California. His examination of workers’ compensation claims records for Lompoc employees had found that a physician retained by Johns Manville had failed to inform at least one man of his diagnosis of diatomaceous earth pneumoconiosis.) To enlighten his readership regarding a physician's or surgeon's primary obligation, he cited the ethical code of the AMA. The code required that medical professionals ensure that patients and their families have the knowledge of the patient's condition that would serve their interests. Advancing the right to know meant creating awareness of basic moral standards, a necessary task at a time when management sometimes held extreme prerogatives over the control of even life-or-death medical knowledge. After their setbacks to the insurgent labor movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, American employers were certainly reasserting their right to manage. In this context, Herbert Abrams and the ICWU could only try to resist aggression.⁴⁸

The necessity of ready access to important facts was a recurrent message in the articles in the International Chemical Worker that discussed recognition and control of chemical hazards. Abrams saw warning labels as one potentially valuable informational resource, although they were no panacea. His endorsement of the AMA's labeling bill advised that, under the patchwork of state protections, “many thousands of hazardous chemicals today come under no regulatory laws.” Beyond advocating for labeling, Abrams pressed the point that disease prevention depended critically on systematically educating and training workers at risk. His August 1954 column contended that “unless the worker himself knows what he is doing and handling and how to protect himself, all other measures will fail.” In his view, plant-level committees should play the primary role in delivering the needed facts.⁴⁹

Abrams took on a variety of other chores related to the right to know. He helped train health and safety committees and other local union leaders. He wrote pamphlets and other educational literature for the ICWU to distribute. In at least one instance that involved the Monsanto facility in St. Louis that had hid its cancer cases, he pressed management to go along with the formation of a joint health and safety committee, in part to improve communications. He made the most of his regular participation in the organization's annual conventions. For the 1954 event, he arranged for the National Cancer Institute to set up an exhibit on occupational carcinogens and to distribute a large supply of Wilhelm Hueper's booklet surveying that problem. At the 1955 convention, the doctor assured chemical workers of their competence to intervene: “You have a store of knowledge, believe it or not, that many of the physicians don’t have.” He went on to argue that such competence entailed responsibility. This responsibility meant forcing employers to divulge information not usually made available.⁵⁰

In the following decade, the Chemical Workers found ways to shift some occupational health responsibilities off their medical consultant's shoulders. In 1960, the ICWU expanded its research operation into a Department of Research, Education, and Health and Safety. The designated functions of the department very much centered on the pursuit of right-to-know matters like dispensing of hazard information and training of workplace committees. Throughout the 1960s, Abrams continued to assist the union, contributing his regular columns and serving as a liaison with public health agencies. His 1962 guidance for rank-and-file members started with utilizing the local health and safety committee and then, if necessary, requesting a state investigation. The presumption of a right to government information came through in Abrams's advice to ask that state agents “provide the union as well as management with a copy of their findings and recommendations.”⁵¹

At the same time, in his primary assignment as medical director of the Union Health Service in Chicago from 1952 to 1966, Abrams found openings to promote a right-to-know orientation among the janitors and other building services workers he served. His frequent articles in a local Building Service Employees International Union newspaper warned of the hazards of toxic cleaning products and other chemicals. He also used that forum to urge the formation of workplace health and safety committees, rally support for stricter labeling requirements, and argue for the extension of union health education activities to encompass recognition and control of occupational health hazards. Despite resource constraints, Abrams engaged in significant outreach and advocacy to help raise awareness and mobilize collective action on occupational health matters among these low-income service workers, largely African Americans and recent Polish immigrants.⁵²

Throughout the course of his varied endeavors, Abrams maintained a perspective that envisioned rank-and-file workers as mainly responsible for their own self-protection and capable of providing it. Rooted in the progressive ideals of social medicine, his conception of a workers’ right to gain and use knowledge about workplace hazards helped to point the way to the subsequent movement for rights. He also saw workers and unions as deserving of a partnership role with employers and the state in preventing occupational disease.

The activities of Herbert Abrams and of a relatively small number of other like-minded individuals throw into relief the limitations of the predominant system in midcentury US employment relations and public policy. The Manufacturing Chemists’ Association and other employer interests managed to dominate the making of informational policy and practice over the quarter century that preceded the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970 despite their advocacy of quite limited protections in the face of increasing risks. The industrialists’ capture of their supposed regulators meant a continued dearth of critically lifesaving information for endangered workers. Despite the triumph of a system whose main goal was avoidance of legal liability, the resistance to corporate hegemony from progressive bureaucrats in state and federal agencies and from the labor movement did represent a not-insignificant countervailing force. This resistance only foreshadowed the intensifying conflict between top-down and bottom-up approaches in the years to come.