The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  19. “Mars in White Smock.”

  20. For an exception, see Rudyard Kipling, “Ground Torn by Shells, Grass Yellow from Shells,” LAT, September 6, 1915.

  21. Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 41. For a detailed study of the health effects of poison gas experimentation on sixty thousand U.S. soldiers in World War II, see Constance M. Pechura and David P. Rall, eds., Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, March 1993).

  22. Quoted in J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925), p. 75. Haldane, a Communist and friend of Aldous Huxley, later became famous for his work in population genetics. Gas chamber experiments on sarin and other gases continued to be conducted at Porton Down well into the 1960s.

  23. Cyanogen chloride was first prepared in 1787 by the action of chlorine upon hydrocyanic acid. Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac established its correct formula in 1815. It was not as poisonous as some chemical warfare agents used in World War I. The term “cyanogen” denotes a colorless toxic gas with an almondlike odor and is used to describe any substance that will form cyanide in the body (P. Kikilo and Andrew L. Ternay Jr., “Cyanogen Chloride—An Overview,” www.du.edu/rmchd/documents/CYANOGENCHLORIDEforweb.doc, accessed September 16, 2006). Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a colorless or pale blue liquid or gas with a faint bitter almondlike odor that was used in capital punishment, first by several states in the United States and later by Germany.

  24. Gertrud Woker, The Next War, A War of Poison Gas (Washington, DC: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1927).

  25. James B. Conant, “A Skeptical Chemist Looks into the Crystal Ball,” September 5, 1951, JBC Speech file, JBC Presidential Papers, Harvard University Archives.

  26. Bernhard C. Hesse, “Our Responsibilities,” JIEC 8 (August 1916): 672.

  27. Kathryn Steen, “Patents, Patriotism, and ‘Skilled in the Art’: USA v. the Chemical Foundation, Inc., 1923–1926,” Isis 92 (2001): 95. See also Ludwig F. Haber, The Chemical Industry, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

  28. Daniel Patrick Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases.”

  29. See Records of the Chemical Warfare Service, Record Group 175, National Archives and Records Administration; Edward S. Farrow, Gas Warfare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920); Fries and West, Chemical Warfare; Benedict Crowell and Robert Forrest Wilson, How America Went to War: An Account from Official Sources of the Nation’s War Activities, 1917–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921); Victor Lefebure, The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War (New York: The Chemical Foundation, 1923); Leo P. Brophy and George J. B. Fisher, The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1959); Charles E. Heller, Chemical Warfare in World War I: The American Experience, 1917–1918 (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, September 1984); Haber, The Poisonous Cloud; Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing.

  30. These efforts are described in Charles L. Parsons, “The American Chemist in Warfare,” Science 48 (1242) (October 18, 1918): 377–86.

  31. Haber, The Chemical Industry, p. 224.

  32. Brophy and Fisher, The Chemical Warfare Service, pp. 5–9. See also Gilbert F. Whittemore Jr., “World War I, Poison Gas Research, and the Ideals of American Chemists,” SSS 5 (1975): 135–63.

  33. Founded in 1910 to investigate poisonous and asphyxiating gases in mines, the Bureau of Mines offered its services to the Military Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) on February 8, 1917, shortly before war was declared on April 2.

  34. Blase R. Dixon, “The Catholic University of America, 1909–1928: The Rectorship of Thomas Joseph Shahan,” Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1972, p. 151.

  35. Quoted in Joel A. Vilensky, Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America’s World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 17.

  36. “Yandell Henderson,” in National Cyclopedia of American Biography 36 (New York: J. T. White, 1950), p. 25.

  37. George A. Burrell and Frank M. Siebert, “Experiments with Small Animals and Carbon Monoxide,” JIEC 6 (March 1914): 241; W. Lee Lewis, “Some Features of Swimming Pool Control,” JIEC 8 (October 1916): 914; Whittemore Jr., “World War I, Poison Gas Research,” pp. 151–52.

  38. “Christian Conscience and Poison-Gas,” LD, January 8, 1921, p. 38.

  39. Charles L. Parsons, “The American Chemist in Warfare,” JIEC 10 (October 1918): 780.

  40. Charles E. Roth, quoted in “American Chemical Industry Leaps Forward under the Spur of War,” Current Opinion, November 1917, p. 349.

  41. Amos A. Fries (1873–1963) is one of the great overlooked characters of the twentieth century. Born in a log cabin in Vernon County, Wisconsin, eight years after the end of the Civil War, Fries grew up in Missouri until the age of fifteen, when his family moved to Medford, Oregon. He graduated from West Point in 1898 and served as an engineer in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Philippines. In Puteaux, France, with the American Expeditionary Force in January 1918, Fries set up a major research laboratory and worked with several top scientific and industrial leaders to develop America’s chemical warfare program. As a result of his efforts to advance gas warfare, Fries helped to make the United States a dominant military power and probably helped to shorten World War I, because the United States had planned to resort to massive use of chemical weapons against German civilians if the war had continued. After the war Fries commanded the army arsenal and chemical warfare storage facility in Maryland. He remains famous in military circles for his refusal to go along with international efforts to dismantle the gas service after the war, and for his political ability to amass power. On July 1, 1920, he became peacetime chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, replacing General William L. Sibert (the engineer who had also built the Panama Canal). Some historians know Fries best as a key player against pacifists, Reds, and internationalists in the wake of World War I. He devised a list of peacetime projects for the Chemical Warfare Service, including rat extermination, development of insecticides, extermination of locusts, production of gases for police uses, and secret laboratory experiments in several areas. His most famous activity involved the use of his Chemical Warfare Service office to conduct a propaganda campaign against “the worldwide Communist conspiracy,” which he documented in something called the “Spider’s Web Chart,” which purported to show how all of the “leftist” groups such as the ACLU and the League of Women Voters were part of a massive Red conspiracy. Fries retired from the army in 1929. He had close ties to the American Defense Society, the American Legion, the Masons, the National Sojourners, the Military Order of the World War, and efforts to restrict immigration. He also worked with the KKK and other racist groups. In 1935, as president of the District Public School Association in Washington, D.C., Fries tried to ban the teaching of Communism in Washington schools and warned against subversive influence in education. From the mid-1930s to the mid-’50s he fought against Communist influence in education and was an original cold warrior and McCarthyite. A rabid anti-Semite, he was one of the first disseminators of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He advocated the use of poison gas at home, and coauthored a book about chemical warfare in 1921. His book Communism Unmasked defended fascist dictatorship. In the late 1930s he opposed sanctuary for Jews fleeing persecution in Europe and worked with the American Legion to fight the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. He also advocated the rearming of anti-Communist Nazi Germany. His wife, Elizabeth, was one of the leading socialites in Washington, D.C., and was also involved in many patriotic and right-wing causes. Much of this account is based on his unpublished papers and unpublished autobiography, housed at the Division of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Library, in Eugene, Oregon.

  42. Leo P. Brophy, “The Origins of the Chemical Corps,” Military Affairs 20(4
) (Winter 1956): 221.

  43. Brophy and Fisher, The Chemical Warfare Service, p. 11.

  44. Ibid., p. 13; Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research,” pp. 136–39; Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 46.

  45. Hershberg, James B. Conant, pp. 45–46; Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 35; Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 18.

  46. See James Bryant Conant, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

  47. Joel A. Vilensky and Pandy R. Sinish, “The Dew of Death,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 60(2) (March–April 2004): 54–55. In 2005 an author who wrote about the site reported that “The building still houses CUA’s chemistry department, and the ceilings of the basement laboratories (above the suspended ceilings of today) continue to shed even freshly applied paint because of the vapors absorbed from the work done there in 1918” (Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 21).

  48. Vilensky, Dew of Death, pp. 32–33.

  49. W. Dwight Pierce to L. O. Howard, n.d., Correspondence on Body Lice, Vermin, Cooties, in Army, Tests and Recommendations, 1918, Correspondence and Reports Relating to a Study of Body Lice 1918, Records of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, RG 7 (Washington National Records Center, Suitland, MD), including “Report on Experiments Conducted on Oct. 16, 1918, Testing the Effect of Certain Toxic Gases on Body Lice and Their Eggs.”

  50. See the excellent article by Edmund P. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” JAH 82 (March 1996): 1512–13.

  51. Henry F. Pringle, “Profiles: Mr. President—I: James Bryant Conant,” New Yorker, September 12, 1936, p. 24.

  52. Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 31.

  53. Pringle, “Profiles: Mr. President,” p. 24.

  54. Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 33.

  55. Fries and West, Chemical Warfare, p. 49; “America Took Lead in Gas Production,” NYT, May 11, 1919.

  56. Richard Barry, “Vast U.S. Poison Gas Plant Was Working at Full Blast for 1919 Campaign,” NYT, December 8, 1918; Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 35.

  57. Farrow, Gas Warfare.

  58. Barry, “Vast U.S. Poison Gas Plant.” I have not been able to locate any empirical study specifically on the health effects of working in U.S. poison gas factories. See G. W. Beebe, “Lung Cancer in World War I Veterans: Possible Relation to Mustard Gas Injury and 1918 Influenza Epidemic,” Journal of National Cancer Institute 10 (1958): 125–30. However, a study of 1,632 workers who manufactured mustard gas and lewisite in Japanese plants between 1927 and 1945 discovered mutagenic and carcinogenic effects with a notably high incidence of lung cancer attributed to the inhalation of mustard gas. See Michio Yamakido, Shinichi Ishioka, Keiko Hiyama, and Akhiro Maeda, “Former Poison Gas Workers and Cancer: Incidence and Inhibition of Tumor Formation by Treatment with Biological Response Modifier N-CWS,” Environmental Health Perspectives 104(3) (May 1996): 485–88.

  59. Brophy, Miles, and Cochrane, The Chemical Warfare Service, p. 67.

  60. Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 47.

  61. “America Took Lead in Gas Production.”

  62. Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 44.

  63. Ty Cobb, “My Life in Baseball: The True Record,” quoted in Richard Gurtowski, “Remembering Baseball Hall of Famers Who Served in the Chemical Corps,” Army Chemical Review (July–December 2005): 52.

  64. Ibid., pp. 53–54.

  65. Lieutenant Colonel Augustin M. Prentiss of the Chemical Warfare Service wrote in his book Chemicals in War (1937), considered the most thorough military treatise on chemical warfare, “Our offensive in 1919, in my opinion, would have been a walk to Berlin, due to chemical warfare. The campaign of 1919 would have been largely a chemical war.” John Van Courtland Moon, “Controlling Chemical and Biological Weapons through World War II,” in Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, vol. 2, ed. Richard Dean Burns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 662. For a laudatory review of Prentiss’s book, see “Mars in White Smock.” The New York Times reported on May 25, 1919, how two American airplanes carrying lewisite could have wiped out “every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin. A single day’s output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island.”

  66. Barry, “Vast U.S. Poison Gas Plant.”

  67. Ibid.

  68. Frederick J. Brown, Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 47 n102.

  69. For another account about the plans against Germany, see Edwin E. Slosson, “What Germany Escaped,” The Independent, June 7, 1919, pp. 355–57, 381–83.

  70. John Ellis and Michael Cox, The World War I Data Book (London: Aurum Press, 1993).

  71. “Our Super-Poison Gas: First Story of Compound 72 Times Deadlier Than ‘Mustard,’ Manufactured Secretly by the Thousands of Tons,” NYT, April 20, 1919; Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 52; Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 47; Frank P. Stockbridge, “War Inventions That Came Too Late,” Harper’s 11 (September 1919): 828–35.

  72. Conant, My Several Lives, p. 49.

  3. DEVISING “CONSTRUCTIVE PEACETIME USES”

  1. Grinnell Jones, “Nitrogen: Its Fixation, Its Uses in Peace and War,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 34(3) (May 1920): 391–431.

  2. “Abandon Gas Weapon,” WP, March 19, 1919; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Reorganization of the Army, part 1, 66th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1919), pp. 352–53.

  3. Fries to J. D. Law, August 16, 1919, General Fries’s file, Records of the Chemical Warfare Service, RG 175, National Archives.

  4. Amos A. Fries to J. L. Clarkson, September 20, 1919, Clarkson Major J. L., General Fries’s file, RG 175, National Archives.

  5. Interview with Fries, cited in Leo P. Brophy, “The Origins of the Chemical Corps,” Military Affairs 20(4) (Winter 1956), p. 225.

  6. Fries and West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921). See also Fries, “The Future of Poison Gas,” Current History 15 (December 1921): 419–22; “United States Chemical Warfare Service,” part 1, Scientific American 120 (March 29, 1919).

  7. Part V, Section I, chapter I, Article 171, Versailles Treaty.

  8. “Deadly Chemicals Are Made Useful and Harmless,” News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana), March 25, 1922.

  9. “Army Chemists Turn to Peaceful Projects,” NYT, February 11, 1922; Edmund P. Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (see especially the chapter “Chemical Warfare in Peace”).

  10. “Toxic Gases to Help Industry,” NYT, January 5, 1919.

  11. Amos A. Fries, “Summary of Marine Piling Investigation,” Chemical Warfare 11 (1925): 11–15.

  12. “Army Invents Mask Against All Poisons,” NYT, April 3, 1923.

  13. Fries in 1922, quoted in Edmund P. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” JAH 82 (March 1996): 1517.

  14. Russell, War and Nature, p. 66, quoting Amos Fries, “Address before Chemical Industries Exposition, New York City,” September 12, 1922.

  15. L. O. Howard, “Entomology and the War,” quoted in Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation,’” p. 1513.

  16. L. O. Howard, “The War against Insects: The Insecticide Chemist and Biologist in the Migration of Plant Pests,” CA 30(1) (1922): 5–6.

  17. “Army to ‘Gas’ the Boll Weevil in Cotton Fields of the South,” NYT, January 29, 1921; “To Use Poison Gas on Boll-Weevil,” NYT, September 13, 1922.

  18. H. W. Walker and J. E. Mills, “Progress Report of Work of the Chemical Warfare Service on the Boll Weevil Anthonomus Grandis,” Journal of Economic Entomology 12 (1927): 233.

  19. See also “How Fumigation Methods for Fighting Scale Have Changed,” LAT, April 3, 1921.

  20. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation,’” pp. 1508–9. See also Will Allen, The War on Bugs (White River
Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008).

  21. Department of Agriculture Bulletin 1149, cited in “Hydrocyanic Acid as Fumigant for Pests,” Gazette (Bedford, PA), December 28, 1923.

  22. United States War Department, Annual Reports 1922—Report of the Secretary of War to the President (Washington, DC, 1923), p. 282.

  23. “Says War Gas Leaves No Bad After Effect,” NYT, November 12, 1923.

  24. L. O. Howard, “The Needs of the World as to Entomology,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1925 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1925), p. 370.

  25. “Army Chemists Use Poison Gases on Disease; Grip, Pneumonia, Paresis Said to Be Cured,” NYT, May 2, 1923.

  26. H. S. Gasser, “Arthur S. Lovenhart,” Science Press 70 (October 4, 1929): 317–21.

  27. Joel A. Vilensky, Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America’s World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 64–65. According to Vilensky, “This collaborative effort between the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University and the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin eventually led to the 1930s discovery of an arsenic-based drug, Mapharsen, which became a very successful antisyphilitic treatment.”

  28. John Walker Harrington, “Poison Gas Fumes Now Aid Medicine,” NYT, May 27, 1923.

  29. “Chlorine Gas, War Annihilator, Aids President’s Cold,” WP, May 21, 1924; NYT, May 22, 1924.

  30. “Gen. Fries Defends Chlorine Treatment,” NYT, January 6, 1925.

  31. “Scientific Warfare Aids Man, Teachers Are Told,” WP, November 30, 1924.

  32. NYT, October 27, 1921.

  33. “Gas Routs Burglars: Indiana Bank Vault Had Been Prepared for Attack,” NYT, July 8, 1925; Vilensky, Dew of Death, pp. 65–66.

  34. National Safety Council, from www.nsc.org/ehc/chemical/Hydrocya.htm (accessed May 8, 2008).

  35. Cyanides comprise a wide range of compounds of varying degrees of chemical complexity and toxicity. Hydrogen cyanide was used in the fumigation of ships, railroad cars, large buildings, grain silos, and flour mills, as well as in the fumigation of peas and seeds in vacuum chambers. Other cyanides, such as sodium and potassium cyanide, are solid or crystalline hygroscopic salts widely used in ore extracting processes for the recovery of gold and silver, electroplating, case-hardening of steel, base metal flotation, metal degreasing, dyeing, printing, and photography. United Nations Environment Programme, Hydrogen Cyanide and Cyanides: Human Health Aspects (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004). Hydrocyanic acid gas (HCN) was discovered as a fumigant for insect-control purposes in 1886 and first used to control insects in greenhouses in 1894; in 1898 it began to be used in some homes for insect control; in 1905 it was advocated for control of the cigarette beetle; in 1912 it began to be used for ship fumigation and was adopted by the U.S. Department of Health as a standard fumigant. Liquid hydrogen cyanide began to be tested for insect control purposes in 1915; in 1917 HCN fumigation methods were developed for control of insects affecting greenhouse ornamental plants, and liquid hydrocyanic acid gas was introduced commercially. Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Chronological History of the Development of Insecticides and Control Equipment from 1854 through 1954 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1954).