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all inside decoration in the household and in the environment of young children . . . is not done voluntarily by a wise industry concerned to handle its own business properly, it will be accomplished ineffectually and with irrelevant difficulties and disadvantages through legislation.”³³

      By the mid-1950s, newspapers and public health departments in other cities had begun to report more systematically on cases of lead poisoning. The LIA responded by trying to divert attention from the lead industry’s role in distributing a known poison, sometimes in the process even mocking the children who were poisoned. In a private letter to the editor of the American Journal of Public Health, Bowditch suggested that the high rates of lead poisoning in Baltimore indicated that there was “all too much ‘gnaw-ledge’ among Baltimore babies.”³⁴ When he was being serious he was even more dismissive of the victims: the problem was not lead in the paint, it was the housing and the parents. In 1956 Bowditch wrote to a former head of the LIA, Felix Wormser, then assistant secretary of the interior—the federal agency responsible for regulating lead and other mining and metal industries—criticizing an article on childhood lead poisoning that had appeared in Parade, the nationally distributed Sunday newspaper supplement. “Aside from the kids that are poisoned,” Bowditch complained, “it’s a serious problem from the viewpoint of adverse publicity.” The basic problem was “slums,” he argued, and to deal with that issue it was necessary “to educate the parents.” “But most of the cases are in Negro and Puerto Rican families, and how,” Bowditch wondered, “does one tackle that job?”³⁵

      Bowditch was a bit more discreet in his statements to the LIA’s general membership. At the association’s 1957 annual meeting, he argued that “the major source of trouble is the flaking of lead paint in the ancient slum dwellings of our older cities”—though in saying this he obscured the fact that lead had been the main component of interior paint as recently as the early 1950s (and still constituted 1 percent of many wall paints for the next twenty years). “The problem of lead poisoning in children will be with us for as long as there are slums,” he said. But then he absolved the LIA of responsibility, again arguing that the real problem lay with the ignorant children and parents. “Because of the high death rate, the frequency of permanent brain damage in the survivors and the intelligence level of the slum parents, it [the issue of lead-poisoned children] seems destined to remain as important and as difficult [a problem] as any with which we have to deal.”³⁶

      But how could the problem be addressed? Bowditch was not optimistic: “until we can find means to (a) get rid of our slums and (b) educate the relatively ineducable parent, the problem will continue to plague us.”³⁷ This argument, that it was inevitable that black and Puerto Rican children would be damaged by lead for the foreseeable future, set the stage for the next half century of lead-poisoning policy. With the lead industry unwilling to accept its responsibility for this epidemic or remove all lead from paint, and with only sporadic moves to restrict use of lead products and enforce the housing codes that did exist, doctors were forced to treat more and more children suffering from lead-induced acute symptoms of severe brain damage with powerful drugs, the “chelating agents” that when introduced into the blood stream could bind with lead, allowing it to be passed from the body through urination. The more sophisticated and progressive public health departments would sometimes visit children’s homes and remove the lead from the walls. At best, this helped to prevent further injury, but such remedial actions did little to forestall the housing, pediatric, and public health crises that were emerging. The industry’s proposition that lead poisoning was largely a problem of “flaking of lead paint in the ancient slum dwellings of our older cities” rendered it a disease of poverty and the socioeconomically deprived. As lead poisoning became increasingly defined as a problem of poor African American and Latino children in urban slums, in this pre–civil rights era there was no active political constituency capable of making it a pressing concern.³⁸

      From the very first, then, lead poisoning and housing were inextricably linked. For housing officials, removing lead paint was (and still is) an expensive procedure that landlords were often unwilling to undertake. And housing officials in the few cities that passed regulations to control lead often ignored these housing codes, fearing that the expense of abatement would prompt landlords to abandon their properties.³⁹ Further, effective enforcement required a huge army of inspectors, personnel that were unavailable to local departments of health with limited budgets. Finally, identifying dilapidated interiors was itself difficult because most poor tenants were unaware of their rights to a safe home even under the existing housing codes, or they were afraid they might be evicted if they filed a complaint. Even when buildings with peeling lead paint were identified, it might take months, even years for a landlord to be hauled into court, and even then the fines were generally minimal, leading landlords to forego expensive repairs and pay the eventual fine instead.⁴⁰

      Children suffered enormously as a result of this inaction. Until the 1950s, when BAL (British anti-Lewisite, or Dimercaprol) and CaEDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) were introduced as chelating agents,⁴¹ two-thirds of children who suffered convulsions and swelling of the brain due to lead ingestion died. With the use of chelating agents, the death rate was cut in half, but it was still almost one in three,⁴² and those who did survive were often deeply damaged.

      

      IT’S IN THE AIR: LEADED GASOLINE AND OTHER SOURCES OF LEAD DANGER

      Increased attention to paint as a source of lead in the environment was complemented in the early and mid-1960s by a growing body of evidence suggesting that significant amounts of lead were also entering the human environment through other means: contamination of the soil and air from insecticides; and fallout from lead-bearing compounds during smelting, mining, and fabricating processes and automobile exhausts. Pots and pans, water pipes made of lead or joined by lead solders, and cans sealed with lead solder—once hailed by the industry as symbols of lead’s role in creating the modern environment—were now suspected as contaminants of the human food chain, as was beef, from the lead cattle absorbed in grazing. To explore these issues, the U.S. Public Health Service sponsored a conference in 1965 on environmental lead contamination, where it soon became clear that lead from gasoline was the most pressing concern because of its magnitude and dispersal throughout the country.

      As early as the 1920s, public health leaders had worried that the introduction of lead into gasoline would, as the auto industry expanded, ultimately prove to be a serious source of environmental pollution.⁴³ A 1966 study of lead in the soot of New York City streets, for example, revealed the startling fact that its lead concentration was 2,650 parts per million (ppm).⁴⁴ Of particular worry at the time was the rapid expansion of the interstate highway system through the heart of most American cities: studies had found that much more lead was deposited from exhaust pipes when cars were moving at high speeds, thereby increasing the threat to urban populations.⁴⁵

      Yet since the 1920s the lead industry had sponsored research by Robert Kehoe that claimed that introducing more lead, even much more lead, into the environment presented no danger to people because, he argued, lead was a natural part of the human environment and people had developed mechanisms over the millennia to excrete lead as rapidly as they inhaled or ingested it. This rationale, that lead was a “natural” constituent of the human environment, became a mainstay of the industry argument from the 1920s forward. At the 1965 conference, Kehoe laid out the industry view of lead’s dangers: the intake of lead “is balanced for all practical purposes by an equivalent output,” so there was “an equilibrium with the environment.” Did the lead that people absorbed in the course of their daily lives constitute a risk? “The answer,” said Kehoe, “is in the negative.”⁴⁶

      This fanciful model of lead’s ecology was dismantled piece by piece as speaker after speaker at the conference, for the most part in a businesslike and respectful manner, questioned Kehoe’s underlying assumptions. While the world of lead toxicology was still relatively small and dominated by a few recognized experts, new voices, influenced by the emerging environmental movement following publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, were beginning to be heard. Criticisms of virtually every element of Kehoe’s model were made throughout the conference, but only on the last day did they coalesce as a

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