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
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