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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