14. See Ludwig Fritz Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
15. Michael Pattison, “Scientists, Inventors and the Military in Britain, 1915–19,” SSS 13(4) (November 1983): 526–27.
16. Gerhard Baader, Susan E. Lederer, Morris Low, Florian Schmaltz, and Alexander V. Schwerin, “Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933–1945; Germany, Japan and the United States,” Osiris, 2nd series, vol. 20, Politics and Science in Wartime: Comparative International Perspectives in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (2005), p. 212.
17. See Charles Howard Foulkes, Gas! The Story of the Special Brigade (London: William B. Blackwood & Sons, 1936); Donald Richter, Chemical Soldiers: British Gas Warfare in World War I (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).
18. Daniel Patrick Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in the United States During World War I,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1969, pp. 68–73, quoted in Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 44.
19. “Mars in White Smock.”
20. For an exception, see Rudyard Kipling, “Ground Torn by Shells, Grass Yellow from Shells,” LAT, September 6, 1915.
21. Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 41. For a detailed study of the health effects of poison gas experimentation on sixty thousand U.S. soldiers in World War II, see Constance M. Pechura and David P. Rall, eds., Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, March 1993).
22. Quoted in J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925), p. 75. Haldane, a Communist and friend of Aldous Huxley, later became famous for his work in population genetics. Gas chamber experiments on sarin and other gases continued to be conducted at Porton Down well into the 1960s.
23. Cyanogen chloride was first prepared in 1787 by the action of chlorine upon hydrocyanic acid. Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac established its correct formula in 1815. It was not as poisonous as some chemical warfare agents used in World War I. The term “cyanogen” denotes a colorless toxic gas with an almondlike odor and is used to describe any substance that will form cyanide in the body (P. Kikilo and Andrew L. Ternay Jr., “Cyanogen Chloride—An Overview,” www.du.edu/rmchd/documents/CYANOGENCHLORIDEforweb.doc, accessed September 16, 2006). Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a colorless or pale blue liquid or gas with a faint bitter almondlike odor that was used in capital punishment, first by several states in the United States and later by Germany.
24. Gertrud Woker, The Next War, A War of Poison Gas (Washington, DC: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1927).
25. James B. Conant, “A Skeptical Chemist Looks into the Crystal Ball,” September 5, 1951, JBC Speech file, JBC Presidential Papers, Harvard University Archives.
26. Bernhard C. Hesse, “Our Responsibilities,” JIEC 8 (August 1916): 672.
27. Kathryn Steen, “Patents, Patriotism, and ‘Skilled in the Art’: USA v. the Chemical Foundation, Inc., 1923–1926,” Isis 92 (2001): 95. See also Ludwig F. Haber, The Chemical Industry, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).
28. Daniel Patrick Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases.”
29. See Records of the Chemical Warfare Service, Record Group 175, National Archives and Records Administration; Edward S. Farrow, Gas Warfare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920); Fries and West, Chemical Warfare; Benedict Crowell and Robert Forrest Wilson, How America Went to War: An Account from Official Sources of the Nation’s War Activities, 1917–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921); Victor Lefebure, The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War (New York: The Chemical Foundation, 1923); Leo P. Brophy and George J. B. Fisher, The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1959); Charles E. Heller, Chemical Warfare in World War I: The American Experience, 1917–1918 (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, September 1984); Haber, The Poisonous Cloud; Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing.
30. These efforts are described in Charles L. Parsons, “The American Chemist in Warfare,” Science 48 (1242) (October 18, 1918): 377–86.
31. Haber, The Chemical Industry, p. 224.
32. Brophy and Fisher, The Chemical Warfare Service, pp. 5–9. See also Gilbert F. Whittemore Jr., “World War I, Poison Gas Research, and the Ideals of American Chemists,” SSS 5 (1975): 135–63.
33. Founded in 1910 to investigate poisonous and asphyxiating gases in mines, the Bureau of Mines offered its services to the Military Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) on February 8, 1917, shortly before war was declared on April 2.
34. Blase R. Dixon, “The Catholic University of America, 1909–1928: The Rectorship of Thomas Joseph Shahan,” Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1972, p. 151.
35. Quoted in Joel A. Vilensky, Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America’s World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 17.
36. “Yandell Henderson,” in National Cyclopedia of American Biography 36 (New York: J. T. White, 1950), p. 25.
37. George A. Burrell and Frank M. Siebert, “Experiments with Small Animals and Carbon Monoxide,” JIEC 6 (March 1914): 241; W. Lee Lewis, “Some Features of Swimming Pool Control,” JIEC 8 (October 1916): 914; Whittemore Jr., “World War I, Poison Gas Research,” pp. 151–52.
38. “Christian Conscience and Poison-Gas,” LD, January 8, 1921, p. 38.
39. Charles L. Parsons, “The American Chemist in Warfare,” JIEC 10 (October 1918): 780.
40. Charles E. Roth, quoted in “American Chemical Industry Leaps Forward under the Spur of War,” Current Opinion, November 1917, p. 349.
41. Amos A. Fries (1873–1963) is one of the great overlooked characters of the twentieth century. Born in a log cabin in Vernon County, Wisconsin, eight years after the end of the Civil War, Fries grew up in Missouri until the age of fifteen, when his family moved to Medford, Oregon. He graduated from West Point in 1898 and served as an engineer in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Philippines. In Puteaux, France, with the American Expeditionary Force in January 1918, Fries set up a major research laboratory and worked with several top scientific and industrial leaders to develop America’s chemical warfare program. As a result of his efforts to advance gas warfare, Fries helped to make the United States a dominant military power and probably helped to shorten World War I, because the United States had planned to resort to massive use of chemical weapons against German civilians if the war had continued. After the war Fries commanded the army arsenal and chemical warfare storage facility in Maryland. He remains famous in military circles for his refusal to go along with international efforts to dismantle the gas service after the war, and for his political ability to amass power. On July 1, 1920, he became peacetime chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, replacing General William L. Sibert (the engineer who had also built the Panama Canal). Some historians know Fries best as a key player against pacifists, Reds, and internationalists in the wake of World War I. He devised a list of peacetime projects for the Chemical Warfare Service, including rat extermination, development of insecticides, extermination of locusts, production of gases for police uses, and secret laboratory experiments in several areas. His most famous activity involved the use of his Chemical Warfare Service office to conduct a propaganda campaign against “the worldwide Communist conspiracy,” which he documented in something called the “Spider’s Web Chart,” which purported to show how all of the “leftist” groups such as the ACLU and the League of Women Voters were part of a massive Red conspiracy. Fries retired from the army in 1929. He had close ties to the American Defense Society, the American Legion, the Masons, the National Sojourners, the Military Order of the World War, and efforts to restrict immigration. He also worked with the KKK and other racist groups. In 1935, as president of the District Public School Association in Washington, D.C., Fries tried to ban the teaching of Communism in Washington schools and warned against subversive influence in education. From the mid-1930s to the mid-’50s he fought against Communist influence in education and was an original cold warrior and McCarthyite. A rabid anti-Semite, he was one of the first disseminators of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He advocated the use of poison gas at home, and coauthored a book about chemical warfare in 1921. His book Communism Unmasked defended fascist dictatorship. In the late 1930s he opposed sanctuary for Jews fleeing persecution in Europe and worked with the American Legion to fight the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. He also advocated the rearming of anti-Communist Nazi Germany. His wife, Elizabeth, was one of the leading socialites in Washington, D.C., and was also involved in many patriotic and right-wing causes. Much of this account is based on his unpublished papers and unpublished autobiography, housed at the Division of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Library, in Eugene, Oregon.