Ch. 13. Showdown in the West Martin vs. Reynolds Metals: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

Showdown in the West 

Martin vs. Reynolds Metals 



PAUL MARTIN SHUDDERED. Amomentearlierhehadreached out to 
examine one of his Hereford cattle, and the animals elegant curving horn 
had broken off in his hand. Startled, the rancher looked more closely. The 
once strong animal had grown skinny and was limping; its coat was 
matted and its teeth badly mottled. Martin had recently posted a reward in 
the local newspapers after several of his cattle had gone missing. Then, 
when he had found his first dead cow, he speculated that someone was 
shooting and rustling his herd. 

Martin looked up to the horizon, past the wild flowering blackberry 
bushes that garlanded his property. His cattle had continued to die. And 
now his family was sick. His young daughter, Paula, complained of 
soreness when she walked. Her ankles clicked, she said. All three of the 
family had pains in their bones, serious digestive problems, bleeding gums, 
a fearful anxiety that kept them awake at night, and a strange asthmalike 
exhaustion. 

The tall rancher realized that the problem was not rustlers. Martin had 
been in perfect health in December 1946 when he moved into his beautiful 
new home on the Troutdale ranch. It was a spectacular property, 1500 
acres of rich pasture nestled beneath the mighty Columbia River George, 
through which the greatest of the western rivers departed the Rocky 
Mountains. Looking back, however, Martin realized that his health had 
begun to falter in the months 



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after the move to Troutdale. As he walked home to the farmhouse for 
a lunch of farm-grown fresh vegetables, he slowly nodded. He stared 
through a farmhouse window, lost in thought. 
The window had become badly etched. 

In the distance, bordering his property, lay the giant Reynolds 
Metals aluminum plant. At night, as Martin lay awake, the factory was 
bathed in electric light, pouring black smoke into the starry Oregon 
sky. Paul Martin now believed that poison from the Reynolds factory 
was, somehow, killing his cattle, scarring his property, and poisoning 
his family. 

Paul and Verla Martin's lawsuit against Reynolds Metals in August and 
September 1955 in Portland, Oregon, was one of the most exhilarating and 
significant courtroom clashes in modern American history. It was a 
David-and-Goliath battle: a solitary American farmer standing his ground 
against the combined legal and financial might of several of the nation s 
top industrial corporations. The drama in Judge East's district courtroom 
was captivating. For three weeks a jury listened as several of the world's 
top scientists, who had come from London, Chicago, and Cincinnati, 
slugged it out with conflicting medical testimonies, defending themselves 
against raking volleys of legal cross examinations. A surprise witness 
materialized, a top scientist perjured himself, and a pair of 
Harvard-trained medical experts gave devastating explanations of the 
health problems the Martin family had endured on their Troutdale Ranch. 

"This court makes history," stated the leading medical witness for 
the Martins, Dr. Donald Hunter. 

This is a case of great national importance, proclaimed the Reynolds 
Metals attorney Frederic A. Yerke Jr., adding that it was "the first case in 
the history of the country in which an aluminum company has been alleged 
to have caused injuries to a human being through the emission of fluorine 
compounds from its plant.' 

The Martin case stunned corporate America. Until then, no U. S. court 
had ever ruled that industrial fluoride emissions had caused harm to 
humans. Such a precedent would open the door to future lawsuits and even 
jeopardize the nation's war-making ability, industry claimed. Reynolds 
Metals was joined in court by six aluminum and chemical companies, 
including Monsanto and 



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Alcoa, which filed a "friends of the court brief during the appeals process, 
pleading that a victory for Martin would drive a stake through the heart of 
the modern industrial economy by rendering it unprofitable to conduct 
such enterprises near places of human habitation. ' Their expert medical 
witness was none other than Dr. Robert Kehoe, Director of the Kettering 
Laboratory. He arrived in Portland early and would spend two weeks at the 
trial, coaching the company lawyers. 

Martins attorneys played their cards masterfully. They flew in England s 
top medical specialist in industrial diseases, Dr. Donald Hunter, to be their 
expert witness, thus catching Reynolds off guard. Hunters expert 
credentials matched anything the industry men could offer. The senior 
physician of the London Hospital, Hunter had written a book on industrial 
poisons, studied fluoride pollution at an aluminum plant in Scotland, and 
researched the toxic effects of lead at Harvard Medical School.' 

When Dr. Hunter rose to testify in late August 1955, he explained to 
Judge Easts court that he had flown directly from Africa to London and 
then to Portland for the trial. Hunters testimony marked the end of an even 
longer journey for the rancher, Paul Martin. His family s mysterious 
sickness had taken them to some sixteen doctors across the United 
States — in Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and New York — where they 
were confronted with baffled medical professionals in a seemingly endless 
search to find out what was hurting them. Finally Hunter and a leading 
Chicago specialist, Dr. Richard Capps, had recognized that the Martins 
symptoms were classic symptoms of what Hunter now described to the 
jury as " subacute" fluorosis.' 

Hunter was a member of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians in 
England. The Portland jurors probably smiled as he explained to Judge 
East that the Royal College had been created by King Henry VIII in the 
year of 1518. 1 think that is 330 years before the state of Oregon began . . . 
in this office one has to wear a gown which was devised by Henry VIII. ' 

Hunter told the jury that fluoride had killed Martins cows and injured 
the family Fluorine compounds are deadly poisons to mammalian tissues, 
and man is a mammal just as much as a cow or a sheep, he explained.' 
Fluoride was so dangerous, Hunter explained, 



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because it was an enzyme poison." He described research done by 
English poison gas specialists that had illustrated how fluorine could 
disrupt cell biology. So lethal were certain fluoride compounds, Dr. 
Hunter added, that Hitler had used them in World War II to poison 
generals he wanted to get rid of: He simply had a banquet, and he 
ordered men to take the paper off the champagne cork, and he injected 
fluorides [into the champagne] . ' 

This was too much for the Reynolds lawyer, Frederic Yerke, who 
interrupted Hunters testimony: Object to this, your Honor. I move to 
strike this as not being competent, relevant or material. 

Judge East agreed that it was "a bit dramatic" and urged the Eng 
lish doctor to move on. But Hunter was serious. He told the jury that 
the Martin family had been poisoned by a chemical so aggressive that 
it attacked the biological fabric of life itself. Enzymes are the 
chemical substances which help the body to work, Hunter explained. 
For example, if we go to lunch and we eat a steak, we have in the 
stomach pepsin, which is an enzyme. It digests the steak, and therefore 
we are properly nourished . . . modern chemistry shows that enzymes 
also exist in individual cells, and as everybody knows the human body 
is made up of masses of cells: cells of the liver, cells of the kidney, 
cells of the muscles. By hunting enzymes, fluorine compounds were 
the natural enemies of humanity, the doctor explained: The enzymes 
in the cells help the cell to nourish itself and to keep ticking over, 
which is the process of life. Now, fluorine compounds are such deadly 
poisons that they go directly for that property of the cell, and they 
destroy the enzyme process." ( Although Dr. Hunter had no way of 
knowing it, because Harold Hodge never published the data, in 1944 
the Manhattan Project at the University of Rochester had explored 
using a liver enzyme, esterase, as an ultrasensitive detector for fluorine 
in the workplace. Liver problems, of course, were a cardinal complaint 
of the Martin family.)' 

George Meade, Martins lead attorney, then held up Exhibit 0-1 
for the jury. It was the etched window glass from the Martin ranch. 
The lawyer told the jury that each day several thousand pounds of 
fluorides had escaped from the Reynolds plant, by the company s own 
admission. In March 1950, for example, shortly before the Mar -tins 
abandoned their farm, the plant was belching 3,988 pounds of 



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fluoride into the air every day.' Could these fluorides have etched the 
Martin window glass, Mead asked Dr. Hunter in front of the jury? And if 
they etched the glass, was that proof that Reynolds fluoride had hurt the 
family? 

Hunter testified that he had seen exactly the same thing in England after 
the war, where a window was etched with fluoride and a nearby farming 
family had been hurt. "This is precisely the etched glass window that I saw 
in Lincolnshire on an ironworks in England, when in 1946, a family like 
the Martins was overcome with the same symptoms as the Martins," said 
Hunter. "The effluent was the same thing, hydrogen fluoride and cryolite 
dust, aluminum fluoride and even silico fluoride which are probably the 
worse [sic] of the lot." 10 Dr. Hunter concluded: "It is my opinion that all 
three of the Martin family suffer from subacute fluorosis. " 

A second doctor also diagnosed the Martins with "subacute" fluo-rosis. 
Dr. Richard B. Capps of Northwestern University in Chicago was perhaps 
America's leading specialist on the liver. He too had trained at Harvard and 
had battled an epidemic of liver jaundice that had plagued U.S. soldiers in 
Italy during World War II. Dr. Capps testified that medical tests revealed 
that the livers of both Paul Martin and his daughter Paula were abnormal. 
He described the Martins' "bizarre" health symptoms — breathing 
difficulties, stomach problems, bone pain, excess urination, and 
anxiety — as having been precisely described in the medical literature by 
the Danish scientist Kaj Roholm. 

Paula had been ten years old when the family moved to the ranch. Her 
health quickly disintegrated. She told the court that when she urinated, "I 
would be scalded and burned and would have to use Noxema or cream 
medicines on myself." She was always "short of breath," she added, and 
unwilling to play sports with other children in the Troutdale High School. 
Her mother stayed awake at night massaging her painful feet. 

Dr. Capps said that the discomfort and "clicking" in Paula's ankles was 
likely to be caused by fluoride attacking her tendons and bones. The 
chemical also caused her exhaustion and enlarged thyroid, he explained to 
the jury. "Fluorine tends to substitute for iodine in such a way that a person 
who is exposed to fluorine becomes deficient in iodine, and deficiency in 
iodine causes a certain type of 



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enlargement of the thyroid which is frequently associated with a low 
metabolism, a deficiency in thyroid function.' 

The spectacle of decomposing cattle strewn across the Martins 
land, and of a glass window scarred by poisonous gases, had left an 
indelible impression on the Chicago doctor. "I think that if there is 
enough fluorine to etch a window, it should be able to etch a lung," 
Capps told the jury. 

Then Capps noted that all three of the Martins had become health 
ier when they fled the ranch in 1950 and stopped eating the farm's 
contaminated produce. Their liver tests improved. Their breathing 
grew stronger, and the fluorine levels in Paul Martin's urine declined. 
Capps concluded that there was only one medical explanation 
possible for what had happened on the Troutdale farm: You are 
forced to make the diagnosis of poisoning with fluorine, he said." 

The star defense witness, Dr. Robert Kehoe, now took the stand. 
The Reynolds lawyer lobbed a careful Softball for the Kettering 
medical director. Are you aware, attorney Frederic Yerke queried 
him, of any incident or instance based upon your own experience, 
Doctor, where a man working with fluorides has become disabled by 
reason of the fact that he has absorbed more than an ordinary amount 
of the same?" If aluminum workers in wartime factories — which 
frequently had no pollution controls — had not been sickened by 
fluoride, went the logic of Yerke's questioning, how could the Martins, 
who merely lived near a plant, possibly have been injured by smaller 
amounts of the chemical? 

In my experience, no, Kehoe told the jury. I have not. 

It was a lie worthy of Joseph Goebbels. Just seven years earlier, in 
the summer of 1948, Kehoe's investigators from the Kettering 
Laboratory had found 120 cases of bone fluorosis in aluminum 
workers at Alcoa's plant in Massena, New York. His scientists told 
Alcoa that thirty-three of the workers were "severe" cases and showed 
"evidences of disability ranging in estimated degree up to 100 
percent. (The Kettering Laboratory s Edward Largent had also found 
twisted bones and "fluorine intoxication" in workers at the 
Pennsylvania Salt Company during the late 194os — although his 
published study had claimed the men suffered no disability.)" The 
Kettering Laboratory had worked to refute Kaj Roholms research, 
arguing that even when fluoride was visible in X-rays of workers 



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bones, the men bent and hobbling, the medical effect was more likely the 
result of hard work, not fluoride. The damaging data from Alcoa and 
Pennsylvania Salt were never published by Ketter-ing or made public in 
any way. Both corporations, of course, were funding Kettering's fluoride 
science. 

Kehoe dismissed the significance of the etched glass in the Martin 
farmhouse. Human lungs were made of sterner stuff, he insisted. Although 
thousands of pounds of highly toxic fluoride gases and dust had spilled 
each day for years from the Reynolds plant, felling Martin's cattle, mostly 
the wind blew away from the farmhouse and, anyway, Kehoe argued, 
"Glass ... is much more subject to injury than the human lung. 17 Living in 
the shadow of the giant Reynolds Troutdale plant was "an entirely harmless 
situation for human beings," he concluded. 

But Hunter and Capps carried the day. On September 16, 1955, the 
Portland jury decided in favor of the Martins. They awarded the family 
$48,000 for illness and for medical expenses. 

In corporate boardrooms across America the language now grew 
apocalyptic. The Martin verdict was a precedent that could cost industry 
billions. Six weeks later, at a private gathering of top industry officials at 
the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, Alcoa's medical director, Dudley 
Irwin, told corporate air pollution experts that the Martin ruling was 
"significant ... since it is the first one where the plaintiffs allege damage to 
their health from the everyday emission of an air pollutant." 19 

Reynolds fought the verdict with the desperation of a drowning man. 
The Appeals Court risked catastrophe for the U.S. economy if it let the 
Martin ruling stand, Reynolds lawyers claimed, invoking cold-war fears. 
"Aluminum is vital to our national security, and it is a metal of rapidly 
increasing importance to the entire economy, the brief began. "A court 
should be loath to adopt principles of law which would, in effect, make 
every aluminum plant liable for the unexplained miscellaneous ailments of 
the population for miles around." And there was the warning: "There is no 
practical alternative to release of fluorides except cessation 
of production altogether." 20 

The aluminum company summarized the medical evidence that justified 
overturning the guilty verdict. Edward Largents human experiments at the 
Kettering Laboratory showed that fluoride was 



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safe in moderate doses, the company asserted. Without mentioning that 
it had helped to pay for the research, Reynolds argued that, because the 
Kettering scientist had eaten so much fluoride himself, it therefore 
proved the harmlessness of the Martins exposure. After ingesting 
some 3,000-4,000 milligrams of fluorine over four years, Mr. Largent 
had experienced none of the Martins symptoms or any other 
symptoms, claimed Reynolds' 

And, perhaps for the first time in an American courtroom, the Fluorine 
Lawyers unveiled a brand new strategy, pointing to the fed eral 
government's endorsement of the safety of water fluoridation — and the fad 
for adding fluoride to toothpaste — as evidence that industrial fluoride 
pollution could not possibly have been responsible for the alleged injury. 



Fluorine Lawyers and 
Government Dentists