Lobbyist for Corporate Child Poisoner up for Interior Secretary
Rich Winkel
Breaking News & Views for the
Progressive Community... Friday January 19 , 2000
Published on Thursday, January 18, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times
Norton's Lobbying Shows Her Colors
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz
As contention over President-elect George W. Bush's nominations
for Labor and Justice grabs the headlines, it is important that
Gale Norton's nomination for secretary of the Interior not fly
under the radar. Norton's role as a lobbyist for NL Industries,
previously known as National Lead Co., is a terrifying harbinger
of what may befall the nation if the Senate confirms her.
National Lead is responsible for what is perhaps the nation's most
devastating children's health crisis. For decades, National Lead
promoted and distributed millions of gallons of lead-based paint
under its "Dutch Boy" brand name. Lead paint has led to the death
and brain damage of thousands of children.
That Norton lobbied for a company that pushed for toxic lead paint
to the point where it covers the walls of a major portion of our
housing stock, particularly in urban areas and older suburbs, at
best indicates an extraordinary ignorance of the corporate
cultures within which she works. At worst, it shows a dangerous
bias for the worst polluters of the American environment.
National Lead's irresponsible corporate culture is not something
that Norton could have missed, for it extends deep into the
history of the company. By the mid-1920s, numerous cases of lead
paint intoxication among infants and toddlers, resulting in severe
brain damage and even death, were documented in the medical
literature.
Despite this, NL Industries worked hard to popularize the use of
lead paint through a direct marketing campaign aimed at young
children. Through the use of its Dutch Boy logo, the nation was,
for decades, lulled into a false sense of security about the
safety of lead paint on walls, woodwork and window sills with
which children constantly came in contact.
National Lead began a campaign that sought to, in the words of one
of its early marketing ads, "cater to the children." In thousands
of ads, brochures and visits to schools, 4-H Clubs and hospitals,
the company joined with its trade association, the Lead Industries
Assn., to counteract negative publicity. Most pernicious were the
children's paint books distributed free to children. Children were
encouraged to read the poems that accompanied the illustrations of
the Dutch Boy riding on bars of lead, playing with lead soldiers,
mixing white lead with colors, and painting children's toys,
furniture and bedroom walls.
In the 1930s and 1940s as well, the company spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars in advertising, promotion and lobbying
efforts to make sure that "pure white lead" was insulated from the
growing chorus of voices calling for its elimination from the
interior of houses. National Lead encouraged teachers and parents
to "get after the school trustees to have each room repainted"
with "flat paint made of Dutch Boy white-lead and flatting oil."
In another more poignant promotion, Dutch Boy shows a crawling
infant touching a painted wall: "There is no cause for worry when
fingerprint smudges or dirt spots appear on a wall painted with
Dutch Boy white-lead," the ad reassures parents.
The Dutch Boy Painter, a periodical published by National Lead,
carried an article during the Depression on using lead paint to
stencil "humorous designs such as cartoons, caricatures and
pictorials in recreation rooms, game rooms, bars, etc. . . . for
use in nurseries, kindergartens, play rooms and other places where
children gather."
Throughout its history, National Lead proudly bragged of the
success of its marketing campaign to children. This marketing of
the Dutch Boy image was an essential element of National Lead's
profitability and the rise of its sales from $80 million in 1939
to more than $320 million in 1948.
National Lead and its trade association, the LIA, encouraged
shifting responsibility for this tragedy from lead paint to the
parents and children themselves. They shaped the research agendas
of scientists and intimidated researchers who identified lead
paint as the source of children's learning disorders.
When medical and public opinion were so great that it could not
deny the link between lead paint and childhood lead poisoning, the
LIA promoted the idea that poisoned children suffered from a
preexisting condition called pica--a "morbid craving" for lead
paint chips. Similarly it argued that parents living in slum
dwellings were responsible for not properly supervising their
children and not maintaining clean homes.
For many decades to come, we will continue to see thousands of
children entering our emergency rooms with the symptoms of lead
poisoning. If Norton is ignorant of this company's seedy history,
then it is frightening indeed that she might be in charge of
overseeing the use of our nation's mineral resources and public
lands and protecting the public from other irresponsible
industries intent on exploiting the world we live in for their own
profit.
David Rosner Is a Professor of History and Public Health at
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Gerald
Markowitz Is a Professor of History at John Jay College and City
University of New York's Graduate Center
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
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