72. Conant, My Several Lives, p. 49.
3. DEVISING “CONSTRUCTIVE PEACETIME USES”
1. Grinnell Jones, “Nitrogen: Its Fixation, Its Uses in Peace and War,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 34(3) (May 1920): 391–431.
2. “Abandon Gas Weapon,” WP, March 19, 1919; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Reorganization of the Army, part 1, 66th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1919), pp. 352–53.
3. Fries to J. D. Law, August 16, 1919, General Fries’s file, Records of the Chemical Warfare Service, RG 175, National Archives.
4. Amos A. Fries to J. L. Clarkson, September 20, 1919, Clarkson Major J. L., General Fries’s file, RG 175, National Archives.
5. Interview with Fries, cited in Leo P. Brophy, “The Origins of the Chemical Corps,” Military Affairs 20(4) (Winter 1956), p. 225.
6. Fries and West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921). See also Fries, “The Future of Poison Gas,” Current History 15 (December 1921): 419–22; “United States Chemical Warfare Service,” part 1, Scientific American 120 (March 29, 1919).
7. Part V, Section I, chapter I, Article 171, Versailles Treaty.
8. “Deadly Chemicals Are Made Useful and Harmless,” News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana), March 25, 1922.
9. “Army Chemists Turn to Peaceful Projects,” NYT, February 11, 1922; Edmund P. Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (see especially the chapter “Chemical Warfare in Peace”).
10. “Toxic Gases to Help Industry,” NYT, January 5, 1919.
11. Amos A. Fries, “Summary of Marine Piling Investigation,” Chemical Warfare 11 (1925): 11–15.
12. “Army Invents Mask Against All Poisons,” NYT, April 3, 1923.
13. Fries in 1922, quoted in Edmund P. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” JAH 82 (March 1996): 1517.
14. Russell, War and Nature, p. 66, quoting Amos Fries, “Address before Chemical Industries Exposition, New York City,” September 12, 1922.
15. L. O. Howard, “Entomology and the War,” quoted in Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation,’” p. 1513.
16. L. O. Howard, “The War against Insects: The Insecticide Chemist and Biologist in the Migration of Plant Pests,” CA 30(1) (1922): 5–6.
17. “Army to ‘Gas’ the Boll Weevil in Cotton Fields of the South,” NYT, January 29, 1921; “To Use Poison Gas on Boll-Weevil,” NYT, September 13, 1922.
18. H. W. Walker and J. E. Mills, “Progress Report of Work of the Chemical Warfare Service on the Boll Weevil Anthonomus Grandis,” Journal of Economic Entomology 12 (1927): 233.
19. See also “How Fumigation Methods for Fighting Scale Have Changed,” LAT, April 3, 1921.
20. Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation,’” pp. 1508–9. See also Will Allen, The War on Bugs (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008).
21. Department of Agriculture Bulletin 1149, cited in “Hydrocyanic Acid as Fumigant for Pests,” Gazette (Bedford, PA), December 28, 1923.
22. United States War Department, Annual Reports 1922—Report of the Secretary of War to the President (Washington, DC, 1923), p. 282.
23. “Says War Gas Leaves No Bad After Effect,” NYT, November 12, 1923.
24. L. O. Howard, “The Needs of the World as to Entomology,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1925 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1925), p. 370.
25. “Army Chemists Use Poison Gases on Disease; Grip, Pneumonia, Paresis Said to Be Cured,” NYT, May 2, 1923.
26. H. S. Gasser, “Arthur S. Lovenhart,” Science Press 70 (October 4, 1929): 317–21.
27. Joel A. Vilensky, Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America’s World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 64–65. According to Vilensky, “This collaborative effort between the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University and the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin eventually led to the 1930s discovery of an arsenic-based drug, Mapharsen, which became a very successful antisyphilitic treatment.”
28. John Walker Harrington, “Poison Gas Fumes Now Aid Medicine,” NYT, May 27, 1923.
29. “Chlorine Gas, War Annihilator, Aids President’s Cold,” WP, May 21, 1924; NYT, May 22, 1924.
30. “Gen. Fries Defends Chlorine Treatment,” NYT, January 6, 1925.
31. “Scientific Warfare Aids Man, Teachers Are Told,” WP, November 30, 1924.
32. NYT, October 27, 1921.
33. “Gas Routs Burglars: Indiana Bank Vault Had Been Prepared for Attack,” NYT, July 8, 1925; Vilensky, Dew of Death, pp. 65–66.
34. National Safety Council, from www.nsc.org/ehc/chemical/Hydrocya.htm (accessed May 8, 2008).
35. Cyanides comprise a wide range of compounds of varying degrees of chemical complexity and toxicity. Hydrogen cyanide was used in the fumigation of ships, railroad cars, large buildings, grain silos, and flour mills, as well as in the fumigation of peas and seeds in vacuum chambers. Other cyanides, such as sodium and potassium cyanide, are solid or crystalline hygroscopic salts widely used in ore extracting processes for the recovery of gold and silver, electroplating, case-hardening of steel, base metal flotation, metal degreasing, dyeing, printing, and photography. United Nations Environment Programme, Hydrogen Cyanide and Cyanides: Human Health Aspects (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004). Hydrocyanic acid gas (HCN) was discovered as a fumigant for insect-control purposes in 1886 and first used to control insects in greenhouses in 1894; in 1898 it began to be used in some homes for insect control; in 1905 it was advocated for control of the cigarette beetle; in 1912 it began to be used for ship fumigation and was adopted by the U.S. Department of Health as a standard fumigant. Liquid hydrogen cyanide began to be tested for insect control purposes in 1915; in 1917 HCN fumigation methods were developed for control of insects affecting greenhouse ornamental plants, and liquid hydrocyanic acid gas was introduced commercially. Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Chronological History of the Development of Insecticides and Control Equipment from 1854 through 1954 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1954).
36. G. A. Roush, ed., The Mineral Industry: Its Statistics, Technology, and Trade during 1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921), p. 314; Alan Lougheed, “The Anatomy of an International Carteclass="underline" Cyanide, 1807–1927,” Prometheus 19(1) (2001): 4, 9.
37. “Head of German Society Is Held for Activities,” Syracuse Herald, July 12, 1918. Today DEGUSSA remains best known for its manufacture of Zyklon-B, the poison gas used to exterminate millions of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In 1922 DEGUSSA took over DEGESCH (Deutsche Gessellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, or the German Society for Pest Control). DEGESCH was the successor to the War Ministry’s Technical Committee for Pest Control headed by Fritz Haber, which had concentrated on methods of killing lice in trenches, barracks, and submarines, and set the safety rules and standards for use of various pesticides. In 1920 DEGESCH had been converted into a corporation owned by a consortium of chemical firms. Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 1.