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.https://www.blogger.com/null 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 SHOWDOWN IN THE
WEST 169 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 170 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 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, SHOWDOWN IN THE WEST 171 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 172 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 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 SHOWDOWN IN THE
WEST 173 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 174 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 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
SHOWDOWN IN THE WEST 175 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 
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