Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  There was, and still is, only one major drawback to the production of anthraquinone vat dyes. They are, in the words of dye industry historian Robert J. Baptista, “undoubtedly the class of dyestuffs that involves more hazardous materials, and more hazardous wastes, than any other.” The durability of the finished dyes was hard won. Building those rugged, long-chained molecules required a multistep manufacturing process that was complex and very dangerous. Almost every chemical required for the various reactions was either explosive or poisonous, or both. The list of necessary raw materials included prodigious amounts of hazardous solvents (nitrobenzene, naphthalene, and benzene among them), muriatic and sulfuric acids, lye, ammonia, and heavy metals such as mercury, chromium, vanadium, copper, and the seemingly inescapable arsenic. Nitrobenzene was a special problem. It was toxic when inhaled or touched, but it was used in so many different stages of vat dye production that company memos described it as the “blood stream” of the operation.3 Performing all of the various steps of manufacture not only required huge volumes of hazardous materials, it also took up a lot of space—far more than was available at the two cramped factories in Cincinnati, where Ciba could make vat dyes only in small batches. (Those two Ohio plants continued to operate in the 1950s, though at lower production levels because of the shift to Toms River.) In the wilds of central New Jersey, however, there was enough room for buildings so cavernous that they could accommodate the entire production process under one roof. So that is what the company built in Toms River: a mini-city optimized for the manufacture of a single product.

  For all the care the Swiss lavished on its efficient design, however, the mini-city in the pinelands had one incongruous characteristic: It wasted much more than it produced. Dye manufacture had always been a waste-intensive business; that was obvious from nearly a century of dumping into the Rhine, the Ohio, and other rivers. But even by the dismal standards of dye manufacture, vat dyes were a new low. A maxim of the chemical industry is that every step added to the manufacturing process decreases efficiency and increases waste. Making anthraquinone vat dyes required more steps than any other type of dye process. Various combinations of solvents, acids, and metals were boiled in huge kettles, run through high-pressure autoclaves, squeezed through filters, stirred in tanks, and dried in ovens and vacuum chambers. At each step, the volatility of the required ingredients ensured that some of the chemicals would not react properly, creating unwanted byproducts. Some unreacted chemicals could be reused, and a few byproducts could be sold, but most were useless waste. The process was so inefficient that at Toms River, making brown vat dye, a typical example, required five and a half pounds of raw material to produce one pound of finished dye, with almost all of the remainder discarded as waste.4 In other words, the Toms River plant’s production capacity when it opened in 1952 was not really four million pounds per year. It was actually four million pounds of dye and approximately eighteen million pounds of hazardous chemical waste.5

  Shipping out the finished dye would be simple enough: Trucks and freight cars (a spur from the Central Railroad of New Jersey ran right up to the production buildings) would cart it off to textile plants in the Carolinas and New England. But Ciba was not about to give the same treatment to the much greater quantities of toxic waste it would produce at Toms River. To cart it all to an off-site landfill would be very costly, and the company’s plans to catch up to DuPont and its other competitors left no room for unnecessary expense. The dye would leave Toms River, but the waste would stay.

  Four hundred and twenty years before the dye makers of Basel came to Toms River, a cantankerous and mostly self-taught physician with unorthodox beliefs about the uses of chemistry and the nature of illness left the same Swiss city in the dead of night. He was fleeing for his life. Despised by his peers, the itinerant healer was certain that his ideas would triumph in the end, though he surely never conceived of the central role they would someday play in the defilement and belated redemption of a small town on the other side of the ocean. He was poor but carried a noble name, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, which he further embellished several times before settling on a pen name that reflected his supreme self-confidence: Paracelsus, which was Latin for “surpassing Celsus.” (An encyclopedist who lived in the first century, Celsus wrote a celebrated compendium of Roman medicine.)

  Long before Basel was the cradle of the chemical industry, it was a center of learning. Interrupting a lifetime spent wandering Central Europe, the thirty-three-year-old Paracelsus was summoned there in early 1527 to treat an eminent patient, the printer Johann Froben. At the time, Froben was sharing lodgings with the even more illustrious Erasmus, the humanist theologian, who was also ailing. Paracelsus temporarily cured them both, and in gratitude the two luminaries secured an appointment for him as city physician and lecturer at the University of Basel. He quickly wore out his welcome. Forever scowling and prone to crude insults, especially when drinking wine to excess, Paracelsus never missed an opportunity to alienate those with whom he disagreed and to prophesy their ultimate humiliation.6 At the St. John’s Day bonfire on June 24, 1527, Paracelsus told his students to burn the writings of Avicenna, a Persian healer who lived five hundred years earlier and was still revered by Renaissance physicians, including those at the University of Basel.7 Soon after, Paracelsus’s patron Froben fell ill again and died, and Paracelsus became enmeshed in a lawsuit with a sick cleric who had not paid his bill. Upon losing the suit in early 1528, Paracelsus insulted the judge and was obliged to flee to avoid imprisonment or worse. He never returned and died in 1541 while treating another church official (despite having vowed never to do so again), this time in Salzburg.

  What made Paracelsus so despised during his single year in Basel, besides his irascible demeanor and unlimited self-regard, was the contempt he showed for conventional medical practice. He had no patience for the Greek, Roman, and Islamic texts that comprised the canon of Renaissance medicine. “Let me tell you this, the stubble on my chin knows more than you and all your scribes, my shoe buckles are more learned than your Galen and your Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges,” he wrote.8 He reserved his most cutting scorn for the classical assertion that disease was caused by an imbalance of four bodily fluids, or “humors”: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, corresponding to the earthly elements of air, fire, earth, and water. In a brief manifesto he distributed in Basel in the summer of 1527, Paracelsus declared that his mission was to correct the mistakes of his fellow physicians through the promotion of new treatments of his own devising: “I did not compile them from excerpts of Hippocrates and Galen. In ceaseless toil I created them anew upon the foundation of experience, the supreme teacher of all things. If I want to prove anything I shall do so not by quoting authorities, but by experiment and by reasoning thereupon.”9

  In those few sentences, printed on a one-page handbill passed out on the streets of Basel on June 5, 1527, Paracelsus articulated a new kind of science, based not on received doctrine but on observation and experimentation. In truth, Paracelsus did not always live up to his words. His evidence-based medicine also included liberal doses of mysticism and alchemy, and some of its key tenets—including the humor-esque notion that all things are composed of mercury, salt, and sulfur (terms he did not use in their modern context)—were as wrong as the classical concepts they sought to replace. But it is also true that by rejecting dogma, by closely observing patients and taking detailed case histories from them and by experimenting with various treatments and keeping track of the results, Paracelsus became the most famous physician in Europe, shunned by peers but legendary for his cures. The spread of his ideas, especially after his death, helped to spur the scientific revolution of the late Renaissance. More than three centuries after his abortive attempt in Basel, his ideas even helped to reform mainstream medicine.

  By questioning the presumed wisdom of the ancients, Paracelsus also helped set into motion a centuries-long intellectual discourse tha
t would give rise to the chemical industry and also to the new branches of medicine—toxicology and epidemiology—that would eventually come to grips with the industry’s lethal consequences in places like Toms River. These other legacies of Paracelsus stemmed from his belief that illness was chemical in nature and therefore so were its cures. In his manuscripts he referred to “alchemy,” not “chemistry,” but he meant it in a different way than the medieval alchemists who sought to transmute lead into gold, and his remedies were different than the bloodlettings and herbal concoctions of ancient humoristic medicine. To Paracelsus, the process of chemistry, the separation of the pure from the impure, was both a sacred act and a practical one, found in both the divine creation of the world (a separation from chaos) and the medicines Paracelsus distilled in his glass vessels. William Henry Perkin was working squarely within the Paracelsian tradition in 1856 when he separated the components of coal tar and accidentally launched the synthetic chemical industry. So was Perkin’s antipode, the Basel chemist Friedrich Goppelsröder, who seven years later was the first person to investigate, and document, the terrible toll the industry was taking.

  Paracelsus’s ideas about pollution and disease are known because he wrote a book generally considered to be the first full-length text on occupational health: Von der Bergsucht und anderen Bergkrankheiten, or On the Miners’ Sickness and Other Miners’ Diseases.10 As a boy, Paracelsus apprenticed to a smelter and thus grew up hearing the miners tell tales of the mountain gnomes who guarded their ore with poisonous vapors. Later, he returned to the mines as a physician keenly interested in learning the secrets of metallurgy and in treating workers who inhaled the noxious fumes generated by the mining and processing of ore. As with all of Paracelsus’s books, long passages of Von der Bergsucht are indecipherable to modern readers, and his explanations for many diseases are far off the mark, including his confident assurance that the positions of the stars and moon are responsible for the shivering and teeth-chattering symptoms of mercury poisoning. Despite these errors, he capably described the symptoms of arsenic and mercury poisoning in the book and was the first to observe that pollutants can lodge in lung tissue and cause long-term disease. The “wasting disease” Paracelsus described was almost certainly lung cancer, and he even noticed that bystanders, not just industrial workers, were at risk if they spent enough time near smelters and mines.11

  After Paracelsus’s unhappy life ended in 1541, a succession of unconventional scientists, many of them fellow outsiders, would refine his ideas and contribute their own to the new science of environmental medicine. The most influential was the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini. Unlike his colleagues, who thought that such undignified excursions were beneath them, Ramazzini insisted on inspecting work sites himself and compiling elaborate occupational histories of his patients. Published in 1700, his De Morbis Artificum Diatriba, or Diseases of Workers, included startlingly accurate descriptions of diseases associated with fifty-two occupations, from lead poisoning of potters and mercury poisoning of mirror makers to the hunched spines and overtaxed minds of sedentary “learned men.” Ramazzini’s penetrating observations set the agenda for all the industrial hygienists who followed. The prescient solutions he proposed—including bathing, exercise, ventilation, gloves, masks, and the isolation of hazardous materials—eventually formed the basis of the public health regulations that would so annoy Ciba in Basel, Cincinnati, and finally Toms River.

  As they forged the first solid links between illness and chemical contaminants, Paracelsus and Ramazzini began to build a new kind of medical science, one that rejected inherited dogma and instead focused on the specific experiences of individual patients—what they breathed, touched, and consumed. Freed from orthodoxy, they detected patterns that others missed, including lung damage in miners and memory loss in mirror makers. Precisely what was causing those maladies was something at which they could only guess, and many of their guesses turned out to be wrong. But what mattered was this: Disease could no longer be explained away as the uncontrollable consequence of capricious deities, jealous mountain gnomes, or humoral imbalances. And the modern equivalents of those excuses—“it’s just bad luck,” or “you must have bad genes” (the people of Toms River would hear both)—would not hold water, either, at least for the vast majority of diseases that were not wholly hereditary. After Paracelsus and Ramazzini, it was clear that many afflictions were a consequence of human action. Risk could be reduced by precaution, or it could be promoted by recklessness in pursuit of treasure. After the rise of the synthetic chemical industry, those choices would become starker, but they were present even in the quarries and workshops of the preindustrialized world. Paracelsus understood this, writing, “We must also have gold and silver, also other metals, iron, tin, copper, lead and mercury. If we wish to have these, we must risk both life and body in a struggle with many enemies that oppose us.”12

  By the time the huge new plant in Toms River opened for business in 1952, both Paracelsian traditions—robust chemical experimentation and careful attention to the health consequences of those experiments—were firmly established in the industrialized world. Only one of them, however, turned a consistent profit.

  If the people of Toms River had any concerns about the chemical industry’s arrival in their town in 1952, there is no record of it. No Paracelsus of the pinelands passed out angry handbills on Washington Street or tossed Ciba’s promotional brochures into a bonfire on the beach. Instead, the general attitude, according to people who remember, was euphoric. “It was a very big deal when Ciba came to Toms River. It was the place to work in Ocean County,” recalled Roden Lightbody, a future mayor whose brother worked at the plant. Ocean County had not thrived in the years immediately after World War II; the only big change was an influx of Jewish refugees recognizable by the concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms. The newcomers were liberals, often socialists, which created tension with the town’s conservative establishment. (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s two young sons, ages ten and six, were living with family friends in Toms River in 1953 when their parents were executed as Soviet spies, but the boys had to move back to New York six months later when the school superintendent acceded to complaints from parents and expelled them because they were not legal residents of New Jersey.)13 The immigrants were not wealthy. Many took up egg farming because land was cheap and markets in New York and Philadelphia were near. The closest big newspaper, the Asbury Park Press, began carrying two full pages of “poultry news” on Saturday, as well as meeting announcements for B’nai B’rith, the Jewish service organization. So many egg farms lined the old stagecoach road, now Route 9, that the thoroughfare looked like it was permanently dusted in snow. It was actually a coating of white feathers.

  Ciba’s arrival meant that poultry was no longer the only growth industry in Ocean County. The initial 200 employees included 120 transferees from Cincinnati, but there would be hundreds of additional openings as dye production expanded. The annual payroll by 1954 would be $1.5 million. Perhaps just as importantly, the opening of the plant meant that, for the first time since the American Revolution, Toms River would matter to the outside world. Its dyes would ship all over the globe. The dedication ceremony on June 4, 1953, after the plant had been operating for more than six months, was one of the biggest spectacles Ocean County had seen in years—certainly the biggest since the 1937 explosion of the airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, just five miles to the west. More than five hundred people attended. As another blimp from Lakehurst flew overhead, a brass band played and a member of the Board of Chosen Freeholders (as the county legislature was called) presented a scroll to Ciba president Robert Kaeppeli. The main speaker was New Jersey governor Alfred E. Driscoll, a Republican who later ran a pharmaceutical company. Driscoll told the crowd that Ciba was taking a risk in building a huge factory and thus should be allowed to “reap the rewards” without excessive taxation or government interference—a message that no doubt resonated in conserv
ative Toms River.14

  The Ciba executive who spoke that day was Harry B. Marshall, the head of Ciba’s United States subsidiary. (Kaeppeli, who was Swiss, was relegated to scroll-receiving.) Marshall told the crowd that the plant would improve the water quality of the Toms River, not pollute it. “One of the most important aspects of this plant has been the care taken to make it an asset to the community,” he said, according to an admiring account of his speech in a local newspaper.15 “When effluent water is released into the Toms River it will be clear and pure and in no way contaminate the stream or harbors which provide livelihood and pleasure to residents and guests of the area.” By all accounts, the assembled crowd responded warmly. A booklet Ciba produced in 1953 included glossy pictures of the new waste-handling system with a caption explaining that “the purified effluent, clear, neutral and harmless to fish life, is discharged into the Toms River.”16