from the 1930s through the 1950s the LIA assumed a central role in funding research on lead-related illness and framing national policy regarding childhood lead paint poisoning. The trade group resisted efforts by cities and states to regulate lead pigments in paint. Instead, in the 1950s it called for the establishment of limited, voluntary agreements among paint manufacturers to cap the amount of lead used in paints intended for indoor use. These recommendations the LIA misleadingly called “standards,” and both the lead and paint industries hoped they would thereby inoculate pigment and paint manufacturers from state and local regulatory action. The lead industry, through the LIA, in effect set the agenda that public health officials and lead researchers would live by for the foreseeable future: and the LIA of course did not advocate the removal of lead paint from the walls of homes. Rather, from the 1950s onward it promoted the view that lead poisoning was a virtually insoluble problem, largely limited to black and Puerto Rican children living in slum dwellings, and that the elimination of childhood lead poisoning was a utopian dream.
Before the mid-1950s, the one exception to general ignorance about the extent of lead poisoning was in Baltimore, where in the 1930s the Department of Health had begun to track and even treat lead-poisoned children who appeared in its clinics. Baltimore was the first and only American municipality before the 1950s to develop, according to the pioneering research of historian Elizabeth Fee, “an extensive public health program on childhood lead paint poisoning.”3 The City organized health education campaigns, housing inspections, and lead-abatement programs, and it passed some of the nation’s first paint-labeling laws. Baltimore’s visionary commissioner of health, Huntington Williams, appointed in 1931, was instrumental in bringing the city’s lead problem to the forefront of public health knowledge. Baltimore’s early recognition of the issue’s seriousness may also be traced to the identification of fifty-nine cases of lead poisoning among poor African Americans who had burned battery casings to keep warm in the early years of the Depression.4 According to Fee, “Several patients developed acute encephalitis while others experienced headaches, vomiting, and dizziness.”5 The Baltimore American, too, described cases of lead poisoning and its dangers and communicated Health Department warnings about ingesting lead paint. “Parents should be on the lookout and remember that paints often contain large quantities of lead compounds and that the eating of considerable amount from paint materials may result in lead poisoning,” read one such alert from the 1930s.6
By 1935, the Health Department had begun to offer free laboratory diagnostic tests to doctors who suspected that their patients were suffering from lead poisoning.7 Department inspectors visited homes, took samples of loose paint, and tested them for lead. When lead was found, the agency ordered the paint removed.8 During the first three years of the program, fifty-seven cases of acute lead paint poisoning in children were confirmed. Throughout the 1930s, the department documented paint as a prime source of childhood lead poisoning and used the new medium of radio to warn local residents of the often dire, even fatal effects of lead poisoning.9
The dedication of Williams and the Baltimore Department of Health to uncovering lead-poisoned children was quite remarkable, given the enormous effort such an undertaking required. It was nearly impossible to get children tested for suspected lead poisoning for several reasons: legal restrictions limited testing to occupational, not environmental, exposures; the tests themselves were difficult to carry out; and only a limited number of laboratories were capable of performing the extraordinarily time-consuming analysis needed.10 As late as the 1950s, one technician could typically analyze only eight tests per day.11
By the early 1940s, it was abundantly clear to Baltimore’s health officials that children were the prime victims of lead poisoning: according to Fee, in 1942 “86 per cent of the recorded deaths [from lead] were those of children, with an average age of death of two and one half years.”12 Recognizing that the problem was related to lead paint in the dilapidated slum housing of the city, Williams convinced the mayor to promote a city ordinance that would enable Baltimore to take action when harm seemed imminent. The Hygiene of Housing Ordinance was signed into law in 1941, authorizing the commissioner of health to order the removal or abatement of anything in a building or structure found to be “dangerous or detrimental to life or health.”13
Baltimore’s efforts were only successful in removing lead from a small number of buildings, but those efforts demonstrated that if you looked for lead poisoning among America’s urban children, you generally found it.14 Because of Huntington Williams’s efforts, Baltimore provided the nation’s most startling evidence on childhood lead poisoning. This in turn prompted Maryland to pass a Toxic Finishes Law in 1949, which, one LIA spokesman noted, “made it unlawful to sell toys and playthings, including children’s furniture, finished with any material containing ‘lead or other substance of a poisonous nature from contact with which children may be injuriously affected’ unless such articles are so labeled as to show that the finish contains lead or other poisonous substance.”15 The LIA subsequently lobbied state officials to repeal the law and soon claimed success in 1950 when the governor signed the repeal: “The campaign to remove this 1949 enactment from the statute books of the state was brought to a successful conclusion,” the association trumpeted to its members.16 The law imposed a burden on its affiliates, the organization said,17 while its health and safety director, Manfred Bowditch, complained privately that “these young Baltimore paint eaters were a real headache.”18 Not surprisingly, the lead industry favored placing the burden for preventing lead poisoning directly on the family. “The only seemingly feasible means of coping with the childhood plumbism problem is that of parental education,” the LIA argued.19 This ran counter to some of the oldest observations about childhood lead poisoning, dating at least to the first decade of the twentieth century when A.J. Turner, one of the first researchers to document childhood lead poisoning due to paint, argued that public health could not rely on parental education; legislation was needed to stem the epidemic.20
By the 1950s Baltimore institutions were dramatically affected by the ongoing lead crisis. Indicative is the experience at one hospital in Baltimore, as summarized by Mark Farfel: “Ninety per cent of the children between the age of seven months and five years seen at the hospital’s outpatient clinics in a one year period in the early 1950s had blood lead levels greater than 30 µg/dl [micrograms per deciliter].”21 In an attempt to curb the further spread of lead paint, Baltimore’s health commissioner issued a regulation in 1951 that it would take other communities at least a decade to replicate: “No paint shall be used for interior painting of any dwelling or dwelling unit or any part thereof unless the paint is free from any lead pigment.”22
Huntington Williams meanwhile had begun looking beyond the seizures and deaths of children to speculate that “unrecognized plumbism, lead poisoning, in children may explain many obscure nervous conditions and convulsions of undetermined etiology.” His (correct) conclusion was that “lead poisoning is cumulative.”23 Even the LIA, in 1950, recognized that new problems were on the horizon: “As our hygiene activities have expanded, the magnitude of our industry’s health problems become more and more evident.”24 In 1953, the LIA said it collected during the previous year “nearly 500 newspaper clippings featuring lead poisoning, often in sizable headlines,” indicative of the greater role the press was playing in bringing the severity of lead poisoning to the attention of the general public. Internally, the LIA admitted that “childhood lead poisoning continued to be a major problem and source of much adverse publicity,”25 yet it still opposed warning consumers of the danger its product posed to children.
The continual refrain from the lead industry—that childhood plumbism could only be addressed through the voluntary action of parents—quickly grew stale for anyone who routinely saw the effects of acute lead poisoning. J. Julian Chisolm, then a young physician associated with Johns Hopkins Hospital, had much firsthand experience with the group of children that by the mid-1950s were unfortunately labeled “lead heads” by the young residents at the hospital. Chisolm took issue with the industry’s casual attitude toward what was obviously
