Deceit and Denial
The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution
Introduction
Industry's Child
In the depths of the Depression, with millions of workers unemployed,
Annie Lou Emmers, a mother of eleven children, wrote to President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt because of his "interest and sympathy for cripples." Mrs.
Emmers's husband, Frank, was an employee of a pesticide subsidiary of the
DuPont Company in Gary, Indiana, and had been lead poisoned on the job and
laid off by the company. While Mrs. Emmers accepted this terrible fate for
her husband, she could not abide the fact that one of her children, Mary
Jane, had been born with extensive physical disabilities and severe mental
retardation. Mrs. Emmers suspected that her husband had inadvertently
brought the lead into their house on his clothing and that the child's
development had been affected in utero. Her little girl, now three years
old, was unable to raise her head, feed herself, or speak.
Mrs. Emmers called her daughter "industry's child" and was willing to take
her before th ... read full excerpt from Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution ebook
