Medical Knowledge of the Dangers of Lead-Based Paint
Historians have shown that knowledge of the dangers of lead poisoning to workers and children can be traced back into the 19th century, and that in the first third of the 20th century a broad scientific literature on the subject accumulated in Australia, England, and the United States.
Alice Hamilton and others documented lead hazards among American workers in the pigment manufacturing, battery, painting, plumbing, ceramics, pottery, and other industries. In 1921 the president of the National Lead Company, Edward J. Cornish, wrote to David Edsall, the dean of Harvard Medical School, saying that lead manufacturers, as a result of "fifty to sixty years" experience, agreed that "lead is a poison when it enters the stomach of man--whether it comes directly from the ores and mines and smelting works" or from the ordinary forms of carbonate of lead, lead oxides, and sulfate and sulfide of lead.
At the same time, others began to systematically document the dangers of lead to children. In 1904, J. Lockhart Gibson, an Australian, was among the first English-language authors to directly link lead-based paint to childhood lead poisoning, specifically noting the dangers to children from painted walls and verandas of houses. A year later, he urged, "The use of lead paint within the reach of children should be prohibited by law."
In 1908 another Australian, Jefferis Turner, delivered a presidential address to the Section of Diseases of Children of the Australasian Medical Congress in which he noted that lead poisoning was due to paint powder that stuck to children's fingers, which they then bit or sucked. In 1914, Americans Henry Thomas and Kenneth Blackfan, the latter a physician at Johns Hopkins Department of Pediatrics in Baltimore, detailed the case of a boy from Baltimore who died of lead poisoning after ingesting white lead paint from the railing of his crib. In 1917, Blackfan reviewed the English language literature on lead poisoning in children, noting specifically cases of children who chewed the white paint from their cribs. By the mid-1920s, there was strong and ample evidence of the toxicity of lead paint to children, to painters, and to others who worked with lead as studies detailed the harm caused by lead dust, the dangers of cumulative doses of lead, the special vulnerability of children, and the lead caused to the nervous system in particular. "
Outside the United States, the dangers represented by lead paint manufacturing and application led to many countries' enacting bans or restrictions on the use of white lead for interior paint: France, Belgium, and Austria in 1909; Tunisia and Greece in 1922; Czechoslovakia in 1924; Great Britain, Sweden, and Belgium in 1926; Poland in 1927; Spain and Yugoslavia in 1931; and Cuba in 1934.
In 1922, the Third International Labor Conference of the League of Nations recommended the banning of white lead for interior use. In the United States and Canada, there were calls for the use of non-lead-based paints in interiors. As early as 1913, Alice Hamilton wrote that "the total prohibition for lead paint for use in interior work would do more than anything else to improve conditions in the painting trade. By the early 1930s, a consensus developed among specialists that lead paint posed a hazard to children.
Robert Kehoe, medical director for the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation and director of the Kettering Laboratories of the University of Cincinnati, perhaps the nation's leading expert on lead poisoning, concluded that "strenuous efforts must be devoted to eliminating lead from [children's] environment", especially since safer alternatives to lead, specifically titanium and zinc based paints, existed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1914, the director of the scientific section of the Paint Manufacturers' Association noted with approval the development of "sanitary leadless" paints and predicted that "lead poisoning will be done away with almost entirely."
Despite the accumulating evidence of lead paint's dangers to young children, the industry did nothing to discourage the use of lead paint on walls and woodwork or to warn the general public or public health authorities of the dangers inherent in the product. In fact, it did the opposite: it engaged in an energetic promotion of lead paint for both exterior and interior uses from the 1920s through the Second World War. For a portion of that period, white lead in paint was "the most important outlet for pig lead metal", according to the LIA, which was organized in 1928 to promote the use of lead. A can of pure white lead paint was composed of huge amounts of lead creating a large market for mining companies and pigment manufacturers.
Within 6 months of the LIA's founding, its secretary, Felix Wormser, noted, "Of late the lead industries have been receiving much undesirable publicity regarding lead poisoning." A year later, the United States Daily, a newspaper "presenting the Official News of the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches of the Federal Government," ran a front-page story on lead poisoning and children: "Lead poisoning as a result of chewing paint from toys, cradles and woodwork is now regarded as a more frequent occurrence among children than formerly".
The reaction of the lead industry to growing negative publicity was to assure the public as well as the public health community that such fears were unfounded and that there was no reason to suspect that toys were being painted with lead pigments. In 1933, Charles F. McKahnn and Edward C. Vogt, pediatricians at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Infants' and Children's Hospitals, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which they mentioned a personal communication from Felix Wormser that led them to believe that "the lead industry and the manufacturers of cribs and toys ... have cooperated by substituting other types of pigments for the lead pigments formerly used. Two years later, a major toy company acknowledged that it had been assured that its toys were safe but had found that the toys had been painted with lead. On investigation, the company found that the paint manufacturers were willing to sign an agreement that the paint furnished would be non-poisonous, but only a few agreed that they would furnish materials that were entirely free of lead. Another company responded to an inquiry from the Children's Bureau by informing the bureau that "we found that lead in the form of Lead Chromate was being used extensively uncolored finishes [of toys].
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, continuing reports of poisoned children and workers caused heightened concern among the lead pigment manufacturers, despite the LIAs assurances to the public health community. At the annual meeting of LIA members in June 1935, Wormser noted "Hardly a day goes by but what this subject receives some attention at the headquarters of the Association." The threat of negative publicity about the health problems associated with lead was so serious that Wormser told the members, "If all other reasons for the establishment of a cooperative organization in the lead industries were to disappear, the health problem alone would be sufficient warrant for its establishment". The LIA responded to the undesirable publicity by seeking to rebut research findings and other news of lead's toxicity, whether to children or adults.
Sometimes even major corporations were intimidated. In the early 1930s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, had reported on the potential hazards to children from lead, and shortly thereafter Lows Dublin, the respected statistician at the Metropolitan, wrote to the US Children's Bureau requesting that because of the "strong remonstrance by the Lead Industries Association" about the publicity resulting from the earlier article, the Bureau refrain from mentioning "the Metropolitan, either directly or by inference, in connection with whatever releases you may make." The Metropolitan official explained that "You will readily understand that we wish to avoid any controversy with the lead people."
In 1939, the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association (NPVLA), a trade group representing pigment and paint manufacturers, among others, privately acknowledged its "responsibility to the public and the protection of the industry itself with respect to the use of toxic materials in the industry's products". In a letter marked "CONFIDENTIAL Not for Publication," the association informed its members that "the vital factor concerning toxic materials is to intelligently safeguard the public." The letter said that manufacturers should apply "every precautionary measure in manufacturing, in selling and in use where toxic materials are likely to or do enter a product" and noted that "children's toys, equipment, furniture, etc. are not the only consideration". It warned NPVLA members that toxic materials "may enter the body through the lungs ... through the skin, or through the mouth or stomach." The letter specifically pointed out that lead compounds such as white lead, red lead, litharge, and lead chromate, may be considered as toxic if they find their way into the stomach.
The NPVLA reproduced for its members a set of legal principles established by the Manufacturing Chemists' Association regarding the labeling of dangerous products. The first principle was "A manufacturer who puts out a dangerous article or substance without accompanying it with a warning as to its dangerous properties is ordinarily liable for any damage which results from such failure to warn." Even when a product was widely understood to be dangerous, the Manufacturing Chemists' Association suggested that warnings be included. Further, the legal principles stated "The manufacturer must know the qualities of his product and cannot escape liability on the ground that he did not know it to be dangerous." The NPVLA letter concluded by calling on NPVLA members to make a "sincere effort in taking advantage of every possible precaution in the use of toxic materials in manufacturing, selling and in use."
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