THE SECRET LIFE OF CAPITALISM: THE STORIES OF A.H. ROBINS AND THE MANVILLE CORPORATION
Hausknecht, Murray
In 1971 the A. H. Robins Company purchased the rights to market the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device. The doctor who developed it and conducted the original research on its effectiveness...
...Robins is not unique...
...In an attempt to avoid payment of these and anticipated future claims, Manville sued for bankruptcy, a ploy later adopted by Robins...
...The doctor who developed it and conducted the original research on its effectiveness and safety was an owner of the company that sold the rights, and he received a royalty on all Shields subsequently sold by Robins...
...Mintz supports legislation that will "stop individuals who run corporations from inflicting harm...
...He cites the work of the early twentieth-century sociologist E. A. Ross, who "saw the absurdity of condemning what a man did in the bedroom and not in the boardroom" and later reprints a speech by a federal judge in one of the Shield cases who maintained, in Mintz's words, that "the man who assaults women from an office chair is as grave a sinner as the man who assaults women in an alley...
...More is involved here than what Brodeur calls "ethical bankruptcy...
...The reforms have no chance in Congress in "the forseeable future...
...What, after all, do Reagan, Bush, and the influence of "the special interests" represent other than the power of corporate America...
...A turn-of-thecentury unthinking acceptance of capitalism does nothing at the end of the century but dull the impact of a journalism that performs the socially useful job of exposing the darker side of American institutions...
...it was merely following the normal practices of the industry...
...By the 1950s, further studies showed a strong relationship between asbestos and lung cancer, and in 1964 there was "incontrovertible evidence" that it caused cancer among asbestos insulation workers...
...At Any Cost has the virtue of reminding us that corporate acts are the result of decisions made by specific and powerful people within the corporate hierarchy...
...After the muckrakers no one could see the great American corporations and their leaders as unsullied giants in the land...
...Many women, Mintz reports, were discouraged from suing once they learned what they might face...
...374 pp...
...The finding precipitated an avalanche of lawsuits against the Manville Corporation (formerly JohnsManville), the industry's largest company...
...In the mid1950s the Industrial Hygiene Association, an organization largely financed by the industry, conducted an epidemiological study of lung cancer among asbestos miners...
...His proposed reforms would make the compartmentalization of life more difficult to achieve, and surely no one will quarrel with that objective...
...By 1974, after three million women here and abroad (mostly in Third-World countries) were fitted with it, the government forced Robins to withdraw it from the market...
...These suits and others that preceded them led to the discovery, as did the Dalkon Shield lawsuits, that the industry and its insurance companies had been aware of the hazards and had systematically kept them from their workers and the public...
...Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial, by Paul Brodeur...
...If the muckraking tradition is to be a significant political and cultural force it must adopt a self-consciously critical stance to the structure of power in America today...
...Unlike the latter, at the very outset he points to the relationship between misconduct and corporate structure...
...their subject was corruption in all spheres of American life...
...Shield wearers were also highly susceptible to "pelvic inflammatory disease," and in the years following its removal from the market "tens of thousands" of women suffered from the infection that was fatal to eighteen of them...
...Mintz is more sophisticated than Brodeur...
...If they were a subversive force, that was purely accidental...
...Is it purely fortuitous that one of the main consequences of the Manville case has been the effort to change the liability laws and to place caps on the amount of damages insurance companies and their clients must pay out...
...Earlier, in 1948, the health director of Johns-Manville in Canada surveyed 708 workers and found that only four had healthy lungs and seven showed early signs of asbestosis...
...But reports of capitalism's secret life that ignore the issue of power merely make Americans feel good by assuring us that we are still capable of experiencing so virtuous an emotion as moral indignation— even as we rededicate ourselves to the service of the bitch goddess Success...
...That the corporations were greedy is indisputable and hardly news...
...Yet Mintz's essential argument has less to do with the question of corporate power than with another point: corporate structure makes it easy for executives to avoid confronting the contradictions between business morality and the decencies of everyday life...
...Although his research on the device's effectiveness and safety was soon exposed as a technically shoddy piece of work, it continued to be cited by Robins in its advertising, books the doctor wrote, and in planted newspaper and magazine articles...
...Note 1 For a massive study of white-collar crime showing that the oil, auto, and pharmaceutical industries "violate government regulations more frequenty than others" see Marshall B. Clinard and Peter C. Yeager, Corporate Crime (New York: The Free Press, 1980...
...Not so long as the likes of George Bush may succeed him...
...If, however, the probabilities of getting the reforms are considered, the importance of the inequalities of power in the society becomes obvious...
...At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, by Morton Mintz...
...One of the intimidating tactics the company's lawyers used in defending against suits was to question women in pretrial depositions and in courtroom cross-examinations about their sexual relationships and practices...
...Women were viewed in much the same way by the executives at Robins...
...The corporate structure itself—oriented as it is toward profit and away from liability—is a standing invitation" to immoral conduct while the "global scale of contemporary marketing" puts ever increasing numbers of people at risk...
...Finally, in 1984 Robins consented to a notice recalling all Shields still in use...
...Power brings in its train contempt for those subject to it: a contempt evident in the medical director's report and barely hidden in the behavior of Robins's executives and lawyers...
...Not only was it an ineffective contraceptive, it also caused many miscarriages, killing fifteen women...
...they were actively involved in the social reform movements of the day...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...A failure effectively to resist the use of power erodes any residual respect and reinforces contempt...
...The evidence of large-scale cover-ups led to generous jury awards as compensation for injuries and punitive damages...
...At the end Mintz asks what can be learned from the horrors he has recounted...
...63 The similarity between Robins and the asbestos industry extends to details...
...His financial interest in the success of the Shield was kept well-hidden...
...The muckrakers, who flourished in the heyday of Progressivism, did not write only about the misdeeds of businessmen and politicians...
...Not so long as Ronald Reagan is President...
...When the study was reported in a medical journal, the authors dropped a section discussing the relation between asbestosis and lung cancer...
...The health hazard of asbestos has called into question the conduct of a huge crosssection of the institutions that make up the private enterprise system, including many of its manufacturing corporations, insurance companies, investment houses, law firms, trade unions, and government regulatory agencies, as well as members of the medical and legal professions, the scientific community, and Congress...
...It took them eleven years after they stopped selling the IUD to begin a recall campaign, even though the company knew the great risks the Shield posed to the health of women still using it...
...Mintz himself has few illusions...
...Almost from the very beginning the company's executives knew the Shield was ineffective and a health hazard...
...Contempt and power feed upon one another: The exercise of power may be tempered by some respect for the subordinate, but the absence of respect loosens the constraints on power...
...Two recent books, one by Paul Brodeur on the asbestos industry, the other by Morton Mintz on Robins and the Dalkon Shield, show how pervasive these morally dubious practices are.* By the early 1930s there was good evidence that workers in the asbestos industry were contracting asbestosis, an incurable lung disease...
...He reported to the company that he had not told the seven workers of their condition, for it is felt that as long as the man feels well, is happy at home and at work, and his physical condition remains good, nothing should be said . . . as long as the man is not disabled it is felt that he should not be told of his condition so that he can live and work in peace and the Company can benefit by his many years of experience...
...For a discussion of corrupt researchers, see John Braithwaite, Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984...
...Not so long as Congress allows special interests to control election financing...
...17.95...
...Our culture encourages greediness, but most people do not have the power to consummate their greed by exploiting others...
...The closest he comes to linking his own indignation to a course of action is his endorsement of a sentiment expressed by a union official: "History shows that the lawsuit is the only adequate preventive measure against occupational and environmental cancer...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...what needs to be stressed is their power to reap the rewards of their greed...
...308 pp...
...At the same time the usual constraints on behavior— "religion, conscience, criminal codes, economic competition, press exposure, social ostracism— have been overwhelmed...
...I f the victimization of workers and women is a result of their lack of power, then the issue is not simply "corporate greed" or "outrageous misconduct"—the central focus must be on the structure of society and its institutions...
...This will not be done by weakening or eliminating existing deterrents and restraints, such as federal regulations...
...It is hard not to be outraged by Brodeur's report, but at the end we are left with nothing but our indignation...
...The combination of power and contempt paved the way for the asbestos and Dalkon Shield disasters...
...But he says nothing about the connections 64 between "the private enterprise system" and the questionable conduct of the institutions he lists, possibly because he believes there will be no efforts to "reform the private enterprise system...
...One of their lasting contributions was to establish the fact of business corruption in the cultural consciousness...
...Reliable data for foreign women are hard to come by, but since Robins continued to sell the IUD abroad after it was banned here, the number of women affected must be very high...
...But this testifies more to Mintz's optimism than to his political good sense...
...19.95...
...They consistently denied having any knowledge of its dangers, but the evidence produced in the course of lawsuits against Robins shows that the company deliberately suppressed the information...
...our hopes lie in strengthening them and adding new ones...
...Here Brodeur and Mintz fail, and the source of the failure may lie in the forms of investigatory journalism or what was once called muckraking...
...Still, if all innocence is gone, we have not lost the capacity to be titillated by what the historian Page Smith has called "the secret life of American capitalism...
...The women and the workers who were victims of these companies share a common attribute—a relative powerlessness...
...Nor were they simply critics...
...It is only within the last ten pages that a reader gets some sense of a larger social and economic context...
...On the other hand, he also believes that as the public slowly becomes more aware of the need for regulations they will be enacted on the state level...
...The 1964 study proved that asbestos was a danger not only to those in the industry but to anyone—World War II shipyard workers, for example—who came into contact with it...
...But, like most other Americans, they supported and gloried in the achievements of an expanding American capitalism...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
