PROVIDENCE -- For years, spokesmen for the paint industry have said they didn't know lead paint was harmful to children and when they discovered it was, they took it off the market. But two historians speaking here yesterday say that just isn't so.
In the 1920s, medical journals around the country ran stories on lead-poisoned children, say historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. During that same period, the industry launched a decades-long marketing campaign that portrayed lead as sanitary and healthful for children.
"The attempt to sell lead, combined with the medical literature about its dangers, reported in internal company memos, starts to give you an idea of who is responsible for a huge American tragedy," Rosner said. "And this tragedy will stay with us as long as there is lead on the walls."
Markowitz, a professor of history at John Jay College, and Rosner, a professor of history and public health at Columbia University, published a book last month about pollution caused by the vinyl chloride and lead industries.
The lead section was based on internal company memos, meeting minutes and reports that were subpoenaed for a New York lawsuit against the industry. Markowitz and Rosner said lawyers invited them to study the documents and to prepare an affidavit describing what they learned. That research lead to the book.
The two historians spoke at Brown University just a day after Superior Court Judge Michael A. Silverstein declared a mistrial in Rhode Island's landmark lawsuit seeking damages from the paint industry to pay for cleaning up thousands of Rhode Island homes treated with lead paint.
The mistrial occurred when the jury reported it could not reach a unanimous verdict. It split, with four votes for the companies and two for the state.
Markowitz and Rosner have been following the trial by reading stories on The Providence Journal's Web site and have been deposed as witnesses for the state if the trial moves on to the liability phase.
"When we got the news last night about the trial, we went into a profound funk," Rosner said. "This is such a critical issue I hope the state pursues it. This is a groundbreaking principle of holding companies accountable for cleaning up the country they polluted."
Leaders of local lead-poisoning advocacy groups and Robert McConnell, one of the lawyers who helped the state try its case, attended the talk.
McConnell said the state's legal team would meet soon to decide what strategy to pursue in a new trial.
Both sides also plan to file briefs asking Silverstein to grant them a verdict from the bench.
Gregg Perry, a spokesman for the paint companies, said yesterday there were no other developments following Tuesday's mistrial.
Asked whether the companies had a response to Rosner and Markowitz's accusations, Tim Hardy, a lawyer for NL Industries, a defendant in the Rhode Island trial, said the two historians have taken information out of context in writing their history of lead paint.
Historians hired by the industry have looked at the same materials, he said, and concluded that widespread occurrences of childhood lead poisoning weren't generally known until the 1940s. Before that, he said, it was considered largely a problem for painters.
"Though it was known that painters doing a lot of sanding were at risk, that's a very different issue from whether children who were in a house were at risk," Hardy said.
Hardy said that at some point all of the historians probably will be testifying before a jury.
Markowitz said the industry has never accepted responsibility for lead poisonings. First it blamed children who had the bad habit of eating things off the floor. Then the industry blamed what its memos described as "nearly ineducable parents" who don't look after their children properly.
Now the industry blames landlords, he said.
"They see this as a public-relations problem," Markowitz said. "How do they market lead? They've never treated it as a public-health problem."
Rosner said it was known in the 1920s that a child would die if he or she consumed the amount of lead paint covering a 1 1/2-inch-square of wall.
Yet if you followed the industry's directions for mixing and applying lead paint, you would cover a large room with 200 pounds of lead, he said.
Physicians in Baltimore started writing about lead-poisoned children in 1914, Rosner said. European countries banned it because painters were getting poisoned, but Rosner said the American industry increased its marketing efforts.
An article in 1924 described children living in a "lead world."
National Lead won marketing awards for its Dutch Boy campaign which associated lead paint with a clean, healthy life for children, Rosner said.
Minutes of industry meetings in 1930 talked about how to respond to negative news stories about lead paint.
In 1938, Rosner said, other pigments started competing with lead, so the lead industry launched an intensive 14-year marketing campaign.
Rosner displayed industry memos that talked about solving the problem by getting rid of slums and educating uninformed parents.
"You read enough of these documents and it's very upsetting," Rosner said.
