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By the 1920s, lead was an essential part of the middle-class American home. It was in telephones, ice boxes, vacuums, irons, and washing machines; dolls, painted toys, bean bags, baseballs, and fishing lures. Perhaps most perniciously, it was in gasoline, pipes, and paint, the building blocks of urbanization and a growing housing stock.

That was precisely how the lead industry wanted their product to be seen. Despite the fact that lead was known to be toxic as early as the late 19th century, manufacturers and trade groups fiercely marketed it as essential to America’s economic growth and consumer ideals, especially when it came to their walls. Latching onto the nation’s post-Depression affection for clean, bright colors, they were successful.

But pressures on the industry began to mount by the 1950s, by which time millions of children had been chronically or acutely exposed. Federal public-health officials had documented lead’s irreversible effects for young people who ingested even trace amounts. Newspapers and public-health departments began regularly reporting new cases linked to water and wall paint.

If the lead industry had stepped up then (or if it had been forced to by government), maybe lead poisoning would have been treated like any other major childhood disease—polio, for example. In the 1950s, “[F]ewer than sixty thousand new cases of polio per year created a near-panic among American parents and a national mobilization that led to vaccination campaigns that virtually wiped out the disease within a decade,” write Rosner and Markowitz. With lead poisoning, the industry and federal government could have mobilized together to systemically detoxify the nation’s lead-infested housing stock, and end the epidemic right there.

Instead, the industry’s powerful leaders diverted the attention of health officials away from their products, and toward class and race.

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“The major source of trouble is the flaking of lead paint in the ancient slum dwellings of our older cities,” Manfred Bowditch, the director of Health and Safety for the Lead Industries Association, argued at the organization’s 1957 annual meeting. “The problem of lead poisoning in children will be with us for as long as there are slums.”

The fault, then, lay not with the industry that had knowingly included poison in its product (a product that had been used to paint new homes just a few years earlier), but with “ignorant” parents living in “slums.” It was necessary “to educate the parents” about the risk of lead paint, Bowditch complained to a colleague in 1956. “But most of the cases are in Negro and Puerto Rican families, and how does one tackle that job?”

This idea, combined with the lead industry’s powerful lobbying and marketing forces, set the stage for the lead debate for decades to come. With the industry unwilling to accept responsibility for a toxic product, and with the “problem” of lead reduced to a certain type of neighborhood, Rosner and Markowitz argue that public-health officials failed to address the lead epidemic beyond reducing known damage. Caseworkers could enter children’s homes and remove lead from the walls after a child had been identified as lead poisoned. But the money and will to do major preventive public-health work—systematically removing lead from wherever children lived, before children got sick—never came.