A HISTORY OF SCIENCE NEWS

Sketches by Bill Kovarik wkovarik@radford.edu

(Drawn from The Ethyl Controversy, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993).

( Also see E.W. Scripps and Introduction)

Walter Lippmann, Carr Van Anda and the Ethyl Controversy of the 1920s

   The two largest newspapers at the turn of the 20th century were William Randolph Hearst's New York  Journal  and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.  Both played up the sensational and emotional aspects of science, usually with disregard for facts but sometimes on behalf of the public interest. Journal editors,  for example, paid a new bacteriology  laboratory in 1904 to run fecal coliform tests on oysters, ice and milk sold throughout New York City; not surprisingly, the lab found extensive contamination. [16]   Pulitzer's World ran a column called "Wonders of Science" that  presented science news as "exciting" and "miraculous." [17]   The formula for a good science story was often to play up the exciting aspects as much as possible.  The news about the 1910 return of Halley’s Comet, for example, might involve a picture of a pretty girl, a “good nightmare idea like the inhabitants of Mars watching (the comet) pass,” pictures of scientists and “a two-column boxed ‘freak’ containing a scientific opinion that nobody will understand, just to give it class.” [18]   

Carr Van Anda - New York Times and Science News

            Yellow journalism was never the style of the New York Times, but when Carr Van Anda became managing editor in 1901, he attempted to refocus the profession's attitude toward the news in general and science in particular. He believed that journalists, like scientists, had to be disinterested observers ready to accept the facts as they were rather than see them through pre-existing prejudices.   He is sometimes described as a "scientist as well as a journalist." He lionized scientific expeditions and research with as much enthusiasm as his meticulous and  cold-blooded personality would allow. While Pulitzer and his executive editor Frank Cobb were still dressing up news about Halley's Comet with pretty girls and Martians, Van Anda was directing serious science coverage of polar expeditions, archaeological excavations, medical and astronomical discoveries and new technologies. These signalled a new era of science, and Van Anda believed it was important to understand science and not see it as merely a source of entertainment. 

            Taking science seriously paid off more than once.  With his interest in the new wireless radio-telegraph, Van Anda had a reporter listening when the Titanic sent out a distress call. The Times scored a major coup with a wireless interview of the Titanic radio operator who had been rescued by another ship.  Van Anda was himself  famous for his scientific acumen. He once corrected an interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics from King Tut's tomb shown in a news photo. On another occasion, he noticed something amiss in a photo of a blackboard behind Albert Einstein, who was visiting Princeton University for a lecture. The equation on the blackboard was wrong, he claimed.  When Einstein was shown a photo of the blackboard, he studied  it a few moments, confirmed the error and said the equation must have been mistakenly transcribed by an assistant. [19]  

            Because of Van Anda, the New York Times employed an exacting standard that  excluded all but the most scientific and respected points of view.  Cures for cancer and other sensational stories with little authoritative backing were rare in the Times. Other newspapers, notably the Herald, the Tribune and Sun,  frequently followed the Times' lead, while Hearst's Journal (and its twin, the morning American) preferred sensationalism.

Walter Lippmann and the World

            Pulitzer's  World  was both a "yellow" journal and a champion of progressive causes at the turn of the century, but  as the years went by, Pulitzer became determined to make his newspaper respectable without losing its soul.  Unlike the Journal, the World  by 1910 began to be influenced by the widespread movement toward scientific positivism that had been taken up a decade earlier by Van Anda at the Times. This movement, which coincided with the Progressive reform movement, promoted professionalism and objectivity, not only in the field of journalism but also in art,  history, social science and engineering. [20]

            From the gold-domed 14-story office building on Park Avenue in lower Manhattan,  Pulitzer and his successors at the World labored over a "drastically independent"  newspaper that  championed "progress and reform" and that  would never tolerate "injustice or corruption" and "never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." [21]   With a dedicated following, the World was the second largest circulation news operation in New York, somewhat  behind Hearsts' evening Journal and morning American and ahead of the Times, the Sun, the newly merged Herald Tribune and others, as seen in Table Two, above. Yet the empire under the World's gold dome was not as secure as it might have seemed from the outside.  Just before his death in 1911, Pulitizer had chosen Frank Cobb, a brilliant editor, to lead his paper. Cobb was remembered as a great editor, but his death  in 1923 left a vacuum at the top. The new executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope, and the relatively young editorial page director, Walter Lippmann, were both newcomers in their positions in 1924.  They sensed that the World's progressive constituency was changing in the "Jazz Age," and worked to improve the paper's news and editorial content.  According to historian Edwin Emery, the World  “failed to keep pace with its orthodox rivals in complete coverage of the news, even though it sometimes performed brilliantly.” On the other hand, many of the World’s “subway-riding readers” began succumbing to the “lure of the tabloids.” [22] Thus, at the time of the Ethyl controversy, the World was losing subscribers from both the high and low ends of the spectrum of readers.

            Science coverage in the World also failed to keep pace or to entertain. The trend in coverage was an improvement over the days of pretty girls and Martians, but its science writers and editors were inexperienced and undiscriminating. In the era of the Ethyl controversy, the World’s science news offerings included "cheap gold" from sea water, oranges “curing” baldness, and healing by cosmic forces. [23] Stories about cancer cures abounded. Yet there were also stories about the ethical problems of genetic control, Thomas Edison’s ideas about education through film, and even a highly speculative story about a scientist named Robert Goddard who thought he could send a rocket around the moon. [24] The approach, then, was somewhat democratic -- the sensational, the speculative and the scientific received more or less equal treatment, if for no other reason than it was impossible to determine which was which.

            Standards for science writing were not a major preoccupation for the World's 1920s editor Herbert Bayard Swope, a man described as a "flamboyant, self-publicizing, high living promoter.”  Swope said that "the giants" in his era of journalism were focused on the problem of bringing facts to light:      

We had men who made journalistic history. No poll parrots they -- no mere echoes of the songs sung by hired hands. They always insisted on seeing the central figure... They refused to take 'no' for an answer... That was the best method of obtaining accuracy -- the prize element good journalism... [25]

            Clearly, Swope's reliance on authority to produce "accuracy" represents the older "objective" model of reporting.  Swope's formula for setting the news agenda, on the other hand, was simply to “take one story each day and bang the hell out of it." [26]   This was the apparent strategy behind the World coverage of the Ethyl controversy. While the story was developing, the World wrote about it frequently, quoting authorities freely and occasionally "banging" it in a self-promoting manner reminiscent of Pulitzer and Cobb’s era. However, once the pace of developments slackened the story was forgotten. 

            Swope's counterpart on the editorial page could not have been more opposite. Walter Lippmann was cool-tempered, intellectual and inclined to write editorials that  closely weighed many sides of political arguments. A graduate of Harvard who had first served as editor with Herbert Croley’s New Republic and had worked with Woodrow Wilson’s post-World War I diplomatic efforts, Lippmann’s Progressive and Socialist views had evolved, in the crucible of the war’s disappointments,  into a liberal democratic theory that was to have profound influence on the thinking of New Deal politicians in the 1930s.  From the 1930s to the 1960s, Lippmann’s name became a household word as one of the nation’s most pre-eminent columnists and pundits, and his views on objectivity and the role of the press have been well characterized elsewhere. [27] Around the time of the Ethyl controversy, Lippmann was skeptical that the press could help inform public opinion to the extent that it supported the “original dogma of democracy,” which was the ideal of an informed electorate making wise choices in the public interest. Science, for Lippmann, exemplified the difficulties of an informed electorate, but it also represented a powerful institution that could stem the tide of totalitarianism and an approach to life that could potentially replace religion.

            Although most Americans were not ready to accept science as a religion, they did see science as a mysterious and highly competent new force in their lives.  After World War I, people "were ready to believe that science could accomplish almost anything, and they were being deluged with scientific information and theory," wrote historian Frederick Lewis Allen. [28]    Images of scientists in the news media were  "omniscient, powerful, well-meaning and heroic," according to a  survey of popular magazines between 1910 and 1955. The survey also found that public interest in scientific topics peaked in 1926. [29]

             The effects of World War I and the commercialization of new technologies had much to do with the new appreciation for science. In a single generation, a handful of inventors had completely transformed American life.  Edison, Ford, Bell and the Wright Brothers had become the American equivalent of a pantheon of saints. Although none of these  inventors began as scientists per se, the prestige of their accomplishments spilled over onto all scientific and technological enterprises of the age.  Historian Marcelle La Follette provides dozens of examples of the supremacy of scientific authority and of the public perception of a close link between science and technology in this period.  “Automobiles, radios, pocket cameras, electric appliances, synthetic materials ... each new product improved or changed American life and all carried at least the aura of being based on scientific achievement,”  La Follette said. [30]  

            The controversy over Einstein's theory of relativity, settled by the Michaelson-Morley experiment demonstrating that gravity could bend light, had been heavily covered by the New York Times in 1919. It showed that scientists were not always in accord and that the public could be interested in even the most arcane topics if they were controversial. [31] Other more down to earth controversies were highlighted in the press in the 1920s, and no one could look at the state of science and technology and imagine that they had delivered unalloyed blessings.   Somber accounts  about scientists dying from a modern "leprosy" known as radiation poisoning were featured on front pages. [32] Oil pollution had become serious enough to alarm beach resort owners, the Corps of Engineers and harbor insurance companies in the early 1920s. [33]   There were also thousands of routine traffic fatalities, carbon monoxide poisonings, electrical fires, train and subway wrecks, steamship sinkings, and other disasters every year -- the entire host of side effects of science and technology.  

            The Ethyl controversy contributed to the contradictions in the public perception of science and technology.  The many blessings of science had clearly come at a cost, and the sobering truth was beginning to dawn that the cost had not been fully counted.  Yet at the same time, the philosophy of science that had produced such extravagant results in technology was just beginning to catch hold in various professions, including journalism. The leading journalists of the era were not about to abandon science and technology, or even look at it too skeptically, while at the same time asking science and technology to carry so much of the momentum of their own philosophical approach to life and their own profession. 

Van Anda, Lippmann  and the Ethyl Controversy

            The spirit of disinterested inquiry that  motivated science was taken up in many professions around the turn of the 20th century, [34] and it had profound importance on developments in journalism.  Carr Van Anda, managing editor  of the Times between 1901 and 1925, was one of the early proponents of scientific journalism .  Walter Lippmann, editorial page editor of the World in the 1920s, was also vitally concerned with science.

             The difference between their two approaches represents an important distinction in discussions about public understanding of science and technology and the influence of the scientific method on journalism.   Van Anda understood science and technology like no other journalist before or, possibly, since. His approach to science journalism involved constant study and personal development of expertise in (or “knowledge of”)  science and technology.

             Lippmann did not understand the facts of science and technology so much as he attempted to understand their importance in the cauldron of social change. He was more concerned  with “knowledge about” science and technology and its impact on society and public policy. [35]

            They had a great deal in common, in that both men believed that the scientific spirit  had enormous importance for civilization and had immediate implications for their own profession. Not only were both Van Anda and Lippmann very much in favor of scientific and technological progress, but they wanted the profession of journalism to internalize the methods that made this progress possible.  Journalism was “particularly amenable” to the scientific approach, they believed. [36]

            However, they also had different political philosophies.  Van Anda, like the Times itself, tended to be politically  conservative, pro-business, and suspicious of government regulation. Lippmann championed the liberal interventionist theory of government.   These approaches and philosophies reflected the institutions in which the men served and also influenced the way issues were handled in their institutions. We do not have a great deal of information about Van Anda’s personal philosophy, [37]    but as an expert in science, steeped in the ideology of scientific progress in the heroic era of invention,  he might be expected to agree with the views of Charles F. Kettering and Thomas Midgley.  As the acknowledged science expert on the Times staff, Van Anda may very likely have influenced (or written) an unsigned Times editorial that held that the "sentimental view" of the tragedy at Bayway  must not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. Although the Times provided a generous amount of space for  critics of GM, Standard and Ethyl -- even more space for Henderson’s abrasive speech of April 24, 1925  than the World --   Times  editors clearly deferred to industry, which they saw as having the greater scientific authority. They did not invest a great deal of credibility in the public health concerns of university scientists. 

            Public health authority was seen in a different light at the World.  The scientific spirit that  animated Van Anda was also prized at the World, but it might be described as having more of the liberal scientific spirit that  tends to resist authority and question dogma.   Lippmann had noted in 1914 that journalism was “particularly amenable” to the scientific approach:

             It does not matter that the news is not susceptible of mathematical statement. In fact, just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest of scientific virtues. They are the habits of ascribing no more credibility to a statement than it warrants, a nice sense of the probabilities, and a keen understanding of the quantitative importance of particular facts. [38]

            In a speech twenty years later, in 1931, Lippmann said that the scientific method was the heart of the liberal concern of “remaining free in mind and action before changing circumstances.”  That is why, Lippmann said:

             Liberalism has always been associated with a passionate interest in freedom of thought and freedom of speech, with scientific research, with experiment, with the liberty of teaching, with the ideal of an independent and unbiased press, with the right of men to differ in their opinions and be different in their conduct. That is why it is associated with resistance to tyranny, with criticism of dogma and authority, with hatred of intolerance. [39]

            Thus, Lippmann’s idea of the scientific approach to journalism has little in common with the idea of stilted objectivity as a guarded and neutral approach to facts, or to naive empiricism and the piling up of fact after fact.  It was, rather, the spirit of the unfettered search for the truth.  “Of necessity, the interpretation [of events] must be an exploration, tentative, sympathetic and without dogmatic preconception. And whoever attempts it, whether as a working newspaperman, as a scholar or as a statesman must find that he is sailing an uncharted ocean.” [40]

             Science itself had become a destroyer of the moral old order and the source of a new social order, Lippmann said.  Civilization  depends on science and technology, which depends on people who refuse to put their own desires, tastes and interests first.  This scientific code in turn rests on “an elaborate method for detecting and discounting prejudices” through peer review and controlled experiments.   “This method provides a body in which the spirit of disinterestedness can live and it might be said that modern science --  not in its crude consequences but in its inward principle, not, that is to say, as manifested in automobiles, electric refrigerators and rayon silk, but in the behavior of the men who invent and perfect these things -- is the actual realization in a practicable mode of conduct which can be learned and practiced, of the insight of high religion.” 

            Lippmann believed, then, that scientists were (or should be) completely  disinterested, and automotive inventors (even after the Ethyl controversy) were his premier exemplars of the scientific spirit.  Lippmann railed against those who would “distort the basis of public discussion by the shrewd manipulation of evidence” as having succumbed to the anti-democratic temptations of the era. The scientific spirit he promoted was so powerful, he believed, that it could (in a sense) replace religion. “It is no exaggeration to say that pure science is high religion incarnate,” he said in  A Preface to Morals.  

            Lippmann believed that scientists were more powerful than politicians, but that they must be protected from politics.  He wrote to a friend: "Science is power if you can fence off the area in which it operates long enough... but the rate at which science expands is much slower than the pace of politics.." [41] He believed that regulation of technological industry  was unquestionably needed, but unlike the previous generation of Progressives, he thought regulation  was only a makeshift solution.   In  Public Opinion,  he said the “Great Society” was, at its core, made by engineers and could be “brought under human control only by the technic which created it.” [42] This is an echo of the idea of professional responsibility that  swept through the engineering profession between the turn of the 20th century and the 1930s. [43]   A few years later, in A Preface to Morals, Lippmann said the “social history of last 75 years has in large measure been concerned with the birth pains of an industrial philosophy that will really suit the machine technology and the nature of man.”  This new philosophy would be a departure from “naive” capitalism, that  produced a “shocking” waste of natural resources and “a whole chain of social evils.” Among these were not only obvious evils, like child labor, but also the extreme reaction to the social evils, such as communism,    and the moderate necessity of government “policing” of science and technology. The trouble with government policing was that there was “no way to make sure that the policemen will themselves be civilized. .. The fundamental problem is not solved. It is merely deposited on the doorsteps of the politician.” Lippmann may have been thinking of the complexities of the Ethyl controversy when he said: “Every year as the machine technology becomes more elaborated, the legislative control for which the prewar progressives fought becomes less effective... “ [44]    In a 1931 speech he said the old progressive antagonism toward industry had been outpaced by events: 

            The Progressives of the last generation were attempting to police what seemed to them an alien intruder upon their normal existence. For us the problem is to civilize and rationalize these corporate organizations ... The simple opposition between people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business... This does not mean the economic problem is solved. It means rather that the problem has become subtler and greater... [The economic system] must somehow be made stable and yet it must expand so that the standards of life may rise; it must invite the shocks which inventions and technical improvements produce, and yet it must also learn to insure security and continuity. [45]

            Historian  Edward L. Schapsmeier notes that Lippmann’s ideas about government intervention had their origins in the Federalist doctrine championed by Alexander Hamilton and carried on in the “American System” supported by Henry Clay, Matthew Carey and Baltimore editor Hezekiah Niles. This was not, Schapsmeier notes, the individualistic, laissez faire, small-government democratic theory of Jefferson and Jackson. It was, rather, the thread of Republican / Progressive “active government” picked up from Clay by Abraham Lincoln and expanded by Theodore Roosevelt, which had taken a turn toward the left of the political spectrum in the era of big business reform and Woodrow Wilson and which, with the help of Lippmann and others, would evolve into the New Deal. [46]   

            The pure food and drug laws of the early 1900s were one turning point in this evolution.  Republicans originally backed the laws, but Democrat Woodrow Wilson promised greater enforcement as part of his 1912 campaign platform. The  laws did not cover public health threats from sources other than foods and drugs. In fact, there existed no mechanism for federal involvement in the Ethyl lead controversy, nor, in pro-business Republican climate of the 1920s of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, were such mechanisms likely to be set up.

             Lippmann’s insistence that a disinterested spirit ruled science and technology must have seemed almost as tenuous as the hope for disinterested capitalism. Could the shock of the introduction of Ethyl be seen as something that  inventions naturally produce?  Could he have seen a disinterested spirit among industrial authorities who claimed  Ethyl leaded gasoline had no substitute and was vital to civilization?  If he did not, as might be suspected, perhaps Ethyl was seen as an exception to the general rule;  perhaps these anomalies were not  crucial problems to Lippmann.

            Although Lippmann refers to the Ethyl controversy in some correspondence, he does not mention it in his books, nor is it addressed by his biographers. In accounting for this, it is important to recall that the broader scope of Lippmann's philosophy was concerned at the time with the very urgent fight against the rising tide of both fascism and communism. Science and industry did not need more control, he continued to insist in 1937.  “The naive interpreters of the modern world who have justified the increase of authority in order to realize the promise of science find themselves facing the awkward fact that science is being crushed in order to increase the authority of the state.” He also promoted a synergistic marriage of science and government in extraordinarily utopian terms: “Out of the union of science with government there is to issue a providential state, possessed of all knowledge and of the power to enforce it. Thus at last, the vision of Plato is to be realized: reason will be crowned and .. the philosophers are to be kings.” [47]

            Given the luxury of historical hindsight, it would seem that the grand alliance between science and government saved civilization from Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and that Lippmann’s very prominent advocacy played an inspirational role. To some extent, we might say that the price of salvation involved the continuation of “naive” capitalism and the continued uncushioned shocks from science and technology in the emerging “Great Society.”   

            Lippmann, in summary, believed that industry needed guidance but resisted widespread regulation because he was convinced that the interests of democracy and of science and technology were closely linked. He understood that the news media was often expected to play a  symbolic role in helping address imbalances in governmental power.  The imbalance, in the Ethyl case, had been created through the arguably premature application of a new technology with dangers unacknowledged by industry. Although Lippmann did not think that newspapers could “take up the slack” for public institutions, [48] he  believed that government regulation was an important interim step toward addressing “a whole chain of social evils” brought on by unrestrained “naive” capitalism. [49] Here Lippmann and colleagues from the Times differed; the liberal philosophy of government intervention was not shared by the politically conservative Van Anda or his newspaper, which abhorred government interference in private business.

Advocacy, science and the news:  Walter Lippmann and Alice Hamilton

            By the end of the 19th century, the news media had increasingly become the focus of the nation’s political life and, with it, attempts at reform. James W. Carey suggests that the increasing influence of the mass media led reform movements to tailor their messages to satisfy the demands of professional communicators, which led to the conscious staging of speeches, demonstrations and marches -- in short, to the creation of pseudo-events. [50]  Social movements increasingly depended on the press to relay their concerns to the general public and attract new members, according to Richard Kielbowicz. Citing modern sociological research, Kielbowicz notes that the news media prefers to report dramatic, visible events; relies on authoritative, centralized sources; and has limited newsgathering resources and routines. [51] With these insights, both Carey and Kielbowicz see reform organizations molding themselves to an increasingly rationalized and ubiquitous information system of the late 19th century.

            Yet there is another form of advocacy to which the press is susceptible, the kind of advocacy that offers solid expertise in exchange for the opportunity to inform from a clearly stated viewpoint. It is a symmetrical, friendly and mutually supportive exchange, which is exemplified in the relationship between Walter Lippmann and Alice Hamilton.  Lippmann was not an expert in science, as we have seen,  but he did have knowledge “about” science, and when affairs became complex he turned to experts who could guide him.  One of his  advisors Alice Hamilton, who, as we have seen, was a medical doctor,  Harvard University professor and public health expert.

             Hamilton and Lippmann had met through their friendship with New Republic publisher Herbert Croley and his wife. [52] The young Lippmann, then in his mid-20s and working at the New Republic, was a dashing Harvard graduate with a presence so impressive that he might have been on his way, as John Reed once said, to the presidency. Lippmann was obviously charmed by  Hamilton, who was then  in her mid-40s.  He described her with these glowing remarks:  “In a platonic world she will represent the idea of feminism, no amenities required. She has the most satisfying taste of all personalities I've ever met -- wine and silver and homespun." [53] Hamilton lamented Lippmann’s support of the war effort in 1916, but through mutual friends like Felix Frankfurter, Kitty Luddington and the Croleys, the two stayed in touch over the years. 

            As a Harvard professor and the national expert on lead poisoning, Hamilton  was appointed to be a fellow U.S. delegate with Surgeon General Cumming to the League of Nations health conferences.  She was keenly aware of the controversy brewing over tetraethyl lead at the Public Health Service in the 1922-24 period, probably because Cumming consulted with her about it.  She was also very concerned with a coming need for publicity. A letter from National Consumer League president Florence Kelly to a foundation member on April 18, 1924, six months before the Bayway disaster, noted that Alice Hamilton would meet with them on the 28th in New York to “present them the necessity for immeasurably more publicity than  is possible to get through all the agencies working in this field.” [54]   The exact topic and results of this meeting are not known, but clearly Hamilton was intent on a direct approach to some news media without using "agencies." A few months later Kelly  suggested a meeting with Lippmann to a Consumers League colleague working on a labor compensation issue. “Walter Lippmann as a former socialist might still have some bowels of compassion about it,” Kelly said with an insight that had probably come from Hamilton. [55] In April, 1925, Hamilton wrote Kelly, saying: “It seems to me that what we need is more publicity on the subject of occupational poisoning. Look at this situation in NJ which Miss (Katharine) Wiley (of the state Consumer’s League) has been uncovering (working women’s exposure to radium) and tetraethyl deaths which took place in New Jersey...” [56]   And in the days before the May 20, 1925 Public Health Service conference, Hamilton wrote a friend that it was a David and Goliath story, with "a few scientists and the World" standing against giants like du Pont, General Motors and Standard Oil. [57]

            Some of the correspondence between Hamilton and Lippmann during the 1924-25 Ethyl controversy may have been lost, but later correspondence refers frequently to their work together in the Ethyl case as well as in the 1927 - 28 case of the New Jersey  dial painters -- the “radium girls” -- who were dying from occupational exposure to radioactive radium. The Ethyl issue evolved somewhat differently than the radium issue,   since the Workers Health Bureau and Yandell Henderson had taken the lead while Hamilton was in Europe in the fall of 1924.  However, it is likely that major elements of the Ethyl story, such as the Harvard critique of the Bureau of Mines study and the poisoning at Columbia University -- both of which were first carried by the World  --  came to Lippmann’s attention through Hamilton.  The depth of their professional and personal friendship is evident, for example, in a letter that  insisted that Lippmann and his wife visit for a weekend sometime in the summer at Hamilton's Hadlyme, Connecticut home. The letter also noted:  “There is a situation at present which seems to me in need of the sort of help which the World gave in the tetra-ethyl affair.” [58]  

            In 1928, Hamilton wrote Lippmann: 

            When I thought of the plan to ask the Surgeon General to call a conference on radium I felt that it would be of no use unless publicity added its pressure, not because he is personally unwilling, but because Washington is so cautious and niggardly in its attitude toward the Public Health Service. We should never have got the one on tetra-ethyl lead without your help. [59]

            Lippmann responded: “We should be very glad to help on the radium investigation, but we would be able to do something effective only if we were supplied with the necessary technical information of which we have none, of course, ourselves.” [60]   

            The May 20, 1925 Public Health Service conference on leaded gasoline described in Chapter Six was the first of its kind, created in both the vacuum of political authority and the spirit of government - industry cooperation.  Alice Hamilton called it  the “conference system,”  but it was actually not  a “system.” Instead, as we have seen, the conference was a symbolic device to deal with  unprecedented public health controversy and provide the appearance of action. Hamilton called it an “informal, extra-legal method” that  was effective “given a new and striking danger which lends itself to newspaper publicity.” [61]

            Publicity was the key to the system, and sympathetic editors like Lippmann were the key to publicity.  “Under the scrutiny of the press, conference participants discussed occupational hazards in a responsible fashion,” according to a 1982 dissertation by Angela Young. “As Hamilton described them, parties to the conferences debated ideas; they did not contest for power. She described each meeting as a reasoned discussion of occupational hazards, and ignored the politics which intervened to channel debate, engender conflicts and restrict the conferences’ resolutions.” The conferences “tested the limits of academic debate and American politics in resolving such problems.” [62] However, they exemplified an attempt at a model of public relations described by James Grunig as the "two-way symmetrical" model, in which compromise, negotiation and mutual understanding from equal power positions occurs. [63]

            Hamilton believed that publicity was "a wonderful thing," as she wrote a friend a few days before the Public Health Service conference. "It may be the pebble with which David will kill Goliath." [64] This optimistic faith was shared by a generation of reformers, according to Hamilton biographer Barbara Sichermann, "and it made her somewhat complacent about the long-range impact of passing episodes such as the [PHS] conference which, while briefly focusing public attention on a new industrial poison, did nothing to regulate these substances." [65]

            On the other hand, Lippmann’s affinity for social advocacy and a symbolic conference  animated by publicity was far less optimistic. His view was that the press could not be expected to "take up the slack" for public institutions:

            The press has often mistakenly pretended that it could do just that [take up the slack].  It has at great moral cost to itself encouraged a democracy still bound to its original premises to expect newspapers to supply spontaneously for every organ of government, for every social problem, the machinery of information which these do not normally supply themselves. [66]

            Yet clearly, Lippmann felt that the responsibility to “signalize” an event that  had public importance could not be shirked, and the World did cover the Ethyl controversy in as much depth as it could.

            When Hamilton wrote to Lippmann on July 5, 1928, asking how to proceed with the publicity for the radium conference, her letter reflected some of the strategy behind the Ethyl conference.  The plan, Hamilton said, is:

             to send a letter with many signatures from interested physicians to the Surgeon General and on the day following before he has time to answer, to send it to you for publication.  Now I am ignorant as to the proper etiquette in such a matter and must trust to you for guidance. If the interval allowed is too short or if there is some proper procedure which we have not observed, I hope you will either let us know or proceed according to your judgement if you do not need anything further from us.” [67]

            A letter from Hamilton to Florence Kelly, following the 1928 radium conference, demonstrates the influence of publicity in both the radium and tetraethyl cases:

            The (radium) conference struck me as very successful and the manufacturers far meeker and readier to be good than the tetraethyl lead men were. It is often the weapon of publicity which we hold up our sleeves that impresses them and makes them ready to do what we (scientists) tell them to.  If the Surgeon General appoints as well chosen a committee as he did for the study of tetraethyl lead you need not be afraid that the matter will not be well and thoroughly handled. [68]

            In light of this correspondence, it seems clear that Alice Hamilton and Walter Lippmann worked together in publicizing what both felt was a just cause, although Hamilton was more optimistic about the chances for success than Lippmann.   For Hamilton, the problem was one of restraining those who created new public health dangers. In both the tetraethyl lead and radium cases, mutual political interests and personal friendship worked to bridge an “extra-legal” gap that  the news media could approach symbolically if it had the authority of science behind it.  Lippmann’s fellow editorial writer on the World,  Alan Nevins,  later said:  "The journalistic world is hungry ... for the solidity, exactness and special expertness of the best scholars." [69]   He might well have been talking about Alice Hamilton, who was able to provide that exactness, that  “necessary technical information,” that “knowledge of” science that the World “of course” did not itself possess.

            Hamilton did not approach the confrontation with the Ethyl Gasoline Corp. and its partners with the idea of defeating corporate interests, but clearly she was disappointed in the committee's findings in 1926. Still, she  counted the conference a victory of sorts because it brought industrial questions of public health into a negotiating process with government as advised by disinterested university experts: 

            If she expressed satisfaction with half measures, it was also because she was realistic about the difficulty of gaining absolute control over industrial diseases... For the most part, she believed that an agent would be eliminated only when a substitute was discovered or when it was so dangerous that even the best plants could not offer adequate protection to their workers. Under such circumstances, she readily accepted piecemeal change and small victories. [70]

             Hamilton's advocacy was motivated by something more than informing the public or using public opinion to pressure industry.  Hamilton envisioned a continued "conference system" that would lead to negotiation and compromise, and this was in fact the more satisfactory result of the 1928 radium conference. Thus,  the Ethyl controversy set the stage for environmental regulation through a cooperative system that provides a clear early example of the Grunig model of two way symmetrical communication. [71]  

Liberal Regulation and other Paradoxes   

            This chapter has explored some of the history of science news writing and attempted to explain some of the philosophy of news media's leading editors in their approach to science and technology. These approaches were not uniformly applied nor were they always consistent with the apparent lessons of the Ethyl controversy. One small inconsistency has to do with Walter Lippmann’s split from the Progressive movement over regulation of big business and tight regulations over monopolies and trusts. More and more people depended on big business as part of their lives; it could not be regulated from afar any more, he believed.  Yet the Ethyl controversy was settled by the appointment of a special panel of university based experts which Lippmann backed and which implied that industry was more or less negotiating over future regulations.   

            A  larger inconsistency involves Lippmann’s continued belief that a disinterested and objective scientific spirit was at the heart of American science and technology, specifically in terms of inventions such as the automobile and the refrigerator.  This view was expressed after the Ethyl controversy in his 1929 book,  A Preface to Morals.   How did Lippmann reconcile this belief with the concern that GM, Standard and du Pont had chosen a dangerous technology that merely suited their interests? How could industry say there were no alternatives when public health scientists said they  were readily available?  One group of the scientists surely had non-objective interests in the outcome -- either that, or there was no scientifically  objective approach to the controversy.  Yet Lippmann’s faith in the “disinterested and mature” spirit of science and technology was apparently unshaken by the Ethyl controversy or similar  technological disfunctionalities. Historian Charles Rosenberg has noted that the more tenuous an area of scientific knowledge and the smaller its verifiable content, the more easily its data may be bent to the purposes of the scientists in the domain, [72] and that provides part of the explanation of the ease with which industry scientists were able to get their way.  Perhaps Lippmann simply regarded the Ethyl controversy as anomalous rather than symptomatic of science and technology. 

             Another inconsistency has to do with why Lippmann and the World attempted a more or less objective reporting approach and yet paid so much attention to public health authorities when Van Anda of the Times paid more attention to  industry scientists.   This is the kind of question that  might easily be distorted from the present perspective:  one might say that Lippmann got it “right” because he had more “knowledge about” science and had friends like Alice Hamilton supplying him with “knowledge of” science. With 20-20 hindsight, we now know that lead is a threat to public health. [73]   However, in the 1920s, it was difficult to be certain that this was a fact. Given the general uncertainty, other explanations for the differences in news coverage appear to be more appropriate.

             One other explanation for differences might be that the World’s support of dissident authorities was accidental. Perhaps Lippmann and his editors at the World simply didn't know enough to discriminate.   The Times’  Van Anda, with his acumen in scientific matters, was skeptical about authorities outside the mainstream of science, while the World labored under no such restriction. Cancer cures, trips to the moon -- who could know what marvel of science was right around the corner? 

            Another possible explanation is the “story / information”   dichotomy noted  by Michael Schudson in Discovering the News. Schudson described what he saw as a fundamental difference in the Times and the World models of news -- the former using an “information” model, emphasizing orderly facts and abstractions, and the latter the “story” model, emphasizing feelings. “We cannot infer fairness or accuracy from the fact that the Times held to an informational model of journalism,” Schudson said. “Information journalism is not necessarily more accurate than story journalism... The Times ... trusted to information, that body of knowledge understandable in itself without context (or within a context taken for granted).” [74] The Ethyl controversy tends to support  this idea to some extent. For example, the Times provided more concrete facts about the controversy than any other newspaper but did not initiate any critical stories about Ethyl. If public criticism was aired by an authority, the Times would cover the criticism and the rebuttal faithfully and at great  length. However, the Times did not go out of its way to get to the bottom of the controversy.  It “followed” the news and presented  information that  had already become public. The World,  on the other hand, did not present a detailed account of each minor development. Instead, it attempted to  provide insight into the controversy by quoting the incisive information from critics. It did not reprint lengthy public relations statements by industry sources but it went out of its way to print as much critical information as was available. The World’s stories, although not as frequent, also tended to be more than twice as long.

            In other respects, the information / story dichotomy does not  hold up. Aside from the basic source agenda, the tone and style of both Times and World articles (and others) are heavily information-oriented and remarkably similar. Most of the 126 articles studied in this dissertation began with some concrete development, quoted several authorities, avoided direct injection of the writer's personal opinion and had no narrative theme or story-like conclusion. There was very little story telling despite the potential for a strong emotional link to public fears about poison gas.  Also, if any “story” emerged from the controversy, it was found in the Times in a semi-fictional and heroic narrative written by the Mellon Institute about the S.S. Ethyl’s search for “the riches of the sea.”

            Most compelling is the simple political explanation.  “In the emphasis and choice of news, the Times and World were guided by their political biases,”  Schudson said. [75] This “scarcely dazzling” conclusion was one that  Lippmann had noted in 1920 in a New Republic article on the Times bias in its coverage of the Russian revolution.  “The news as a whole is dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization ... The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.” [76]   Lippmann came to work for the World precisely because of his already well-known politics. His  liberal post-Progressive belief that government had to tame corporations if they were to be accepted by the populace was close to the World’s existing liberal political agenda. 

            The World, then, was the one newspaper that had the political independence  to comfortably challenge the authority of Standard Oil Co. and General Motors over its choice of technology.  In the process, the World helped address an early environmental problem as part of the “conference system,” which as noted in Chapter Six, was a  largely symbolic attempt to reconcile conflicting scientific authorities.  Although the World could signalize the importance of events, it used the objective and interpretive models of reporting, which had their limits. The World did not penetrate the technological smoke screens around tetraethyl lead and it  could not "take up the slack," as Lippmann said, for government oversight.