42. Leo P. Brophy, “The Origins of the Chemical Corps,” Military Affairs 20(4) (Winter 1956): 221.
43. Brophy and Fisher, The Chemical Warfare Service, p. 11.
44. Ibid., p. 13; Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research,” pp. 136–39; Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 46.
45. Hershberg, James B. Conant, pp. 45–46; Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 35; Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 18.
46. See James Bryant Conant, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
47. Joel A. Vilensky and Pandy R. Sinish, “The Dew of Death,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 60(2) (March–April 2004): 54–55. In 2005 an author who wrote about the site reported that “The building still houses CUA’s chemistry department, and the ceilings of the basement laboratories (above the suspended ceilings of today) continue to shed even freshly applied paint because of the vapors absorbed from the work done there in 1918” (Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 21).
48. Vilensky, Dew of Death, pp. 32–33.
49. W. Dwight Pierce to L. O. Howard, n.d., Correspondence on Body Lice, Vermin, Cooties, in Army, Tests and Recommendations, 1918, Correspondence and Reports Relating to a Study of Body Lice 1918, Records of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, RG 7 (Washington National Records Center, Suitland, MD), including “Report on Experiments Conducted on Oct. 16, 1918, Testing the Effect of Certain Toxic Gases on Body Lice and Their Eggs.”
50. See the excellent article by Edmund P. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” JAH 82 (March 1996): 1512–13.
51. Henry F. Pringle, “Profiles: Mr. President—I: James Bryant Conant,” New Yorker, September 12, 1936, p. 24.
52. Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 31.
53. Pringle, “Profiles: Mr. President,” p. 24.
54. Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 33.
55. Fries and West, Chemical Warfare, p. 49; “America Took Lead in Gas Production,” NYT, May 11, 1919.
56. Richard Barry, “Vast U.S. Poison Gas Plant Was Working at Full Blast for 1919 Campaign,” NYT, December 8, 1918; Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 35.
57. Farrow, Gas Warfare.
58. Barry, “Vast U.S. Poison Gas Plant.” I have not been able to locate any empirical study specifically on the health effects of working in U.S. poison gas factories. See G. W. Beebe, “Lung Cancer in World War I Veterans: Possible Relation to Mustard Gas Injury and 1918 Influenza Epidemic,” Journal of National Cancer Institute 10 (1958): 125–30. However, a study of 1,632 workers who manufactured mustard gas and lewisite in Japanese plants between 1927 and 1945 discovered mutagenic and carcinogenic effects with a notably high incidence of lung cancer attributed to the inhalation of mustard gas. See Michio Yamakido, Shinichi Ishioka, Keiko Hiyama, and Akhiro Maeda, “Former Poison Gas Workers and Cancer: Incidence and Inhibition of Tumor Formation by Treatment with Biological Response Modifier N-CWS,” Environmental Health Perspectives 104(3) (May 1996): 485–88.
59. Brophy, Miles, and Cochrane, The Chemical Warfare Service, p. 67.
60. Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 47.
61. “America Took Lead in Gas Production.”
62. Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 44.
63. Ty Cobb, “My Life in Basebalclass="underline" The True Record,” quoted in Richard Gurtowski, “Remembering Baseball Hall of Famers Who Served in the Chemical Corps,” Army Chemical Review (July–December 2005): 52.
64. Ibid., pp. 53–54.
65. Lieutenant Colonel Augustin M. Prentiss of the Chemical Warfare Service wrote in his book Chemicals in War (1937), considered the most thorough military treatise on chemical warfare, “Our offensive in 1919, in my opinion, would have been a walk to Berlin, due to chemical warfare. The campaign of 1919 would have been largely a chemical war.” John Van Courtland Moon, “Controlling Chemical and Biological Weapons through World War II,” in Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, vol. 2, ed. Richard Dean Burns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 662. For a laudatory review of Prentiss’s book, see “Mars in White Smock.” The New York Times reported on May 25, 1919, how two American airplanes carrying lewisite could have wiped out “every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin. A single day’s output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island.”
66. Barry, “Vast U.S. Poison Gas Plant.”
67. Ibid.
68. Frederick J. Brown, Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 47 n102.
69. For another account about the plans against Germany, see Edwin E. Slosson, “What Germany Escaped,” The Independent, June 7, 1919, pp. 355–57, 381–83.
70. John Ellis and Michael Cox, The World War I Data Book (London: Aurum Press, 1993).
71. “Our Super-Poison Gas: First Story of Compound 72 Times Deadlier Than ‘Mustard,’ Manufactured Secretly by the Thousands of Tons,” NYT, April 20, 1919; Vilensky, Dew of Death, p. 52; Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 47; Frank P. Stockbridge, “War Inventions That Came Too Late,” Harper’s 11 (September 1919): 828–35.