This book is about U-boats, TNT, aspirin, Salvarsan, indanthrene blue, xenophobia, tariffs, R&D, and many things more; in other words, this book is about the synthetic organic chemicals industry. Synthetic organic chemicals, particularly dyestuffs and pharmaceuticals, but also war gases and some explosives, was a branch of chemistry and industry that Germany led since the late nineteenth century. When the First World War broke out and the British blocked trade across the Atlantic, the United States found itself cut off from crucial products. Moreover, synthetic organic chemicals, and the knowledge necessary to produce them, were put to military use as well, transforming the German lead in knowledge production into an issue of national defense. Essentially, this book is about how and why industrialists, chemists, trade organizations, politicians, and others reacted and tried to build, promote, and protect an indigenous synthetic organic chemicals industry in the United States between 1910 and 1930.
This book speaks to researchers of business and technology as well as chemical industry; it makes an excellent contribution to the scholarship on an important branch of industry in an important country in an important period. But the title and subtitle of this book could also be read in reverse: this book has also much to say about “war and politics,” about the relations between business and the state in times of war, and the long-term effects of those relations. Kathryn Steen shows how synthetic organic chemicals got intertwined with autarky, national defense, and, ultimately—for some Americans at least—with nationalism. Given the nature of the chemical industry and the period under study, the book deals with technology transfer (of the involuntary sort, from the perspective of German firms), intellectual property rights (and the confiscation thereof), trade policy (tariffs), industrial policy, and the role of university research in promoting industry. Ultimately, it shows that building a knowledge-intensive industry is hard, even when protected from competition and helped by confiscated patents.
The topic of this book, as such, is not unknown and often appears in studies of an individual firm in this period, for instance, but it is rarely the focus of research. Moreover, the scope of this research is broad and impressive. It not only covers the main American manufacturing firms involved but also the smaller firms as well as the German firms. The trade organization of American businesses as well as the trade agents and subsidiaries of the main German companies in the United States are included as well, and Steen also analyzes policy and policy making. Consequently, a lot of original research has been put into this book. Many different archives have been consulted, including company records, also from some of the main German firms, government files, and court cases. In addition, Steen has used the government reports on the industry and has consulted the main trade journals.
With such a vast scope, the book still remains of reasonable length. In addition, Steen does an excellent job of introducing and explaining the inevitable technical details of these things called synthetic organic chemicals, often using an example or a specific event as a pretext. The book also makes excellent use of illustrations to enliven the story but also to reinforce and underline its argument.
Questions remain, however, and a particularly difficult one is who ultimately got what out of this nurturing of a homegrown synthetic organic chemicals industry. American industry received a lot of assistance, in various forms, and even protection, but, once German firms entered global markets again after the war, they soon restored their hegemony in the chemical industry, synthetic organic chemicals included. In the long term, however, the American chemical industry grew into the largest, most competent, and most advanced in the world. This leadership was also based on, in short, different feedstock, different technologies, and the effects of the Second World War, but Steen argues that the seeds of this development were planted between 1910 and 1930, during the First World War and its aftermath. This is an interesting and innovative argument, but as the period of research ends in 1930, the books sets the stage for the next act rather than showing and analyzing the action.
Indeed, the book would have profited from some reflection on the organic-inorganic classification of the chemical industry. Chemists traditionally subdivided their discipline into organic and inorganic chemistry, and one often-used classification of the chemical industry follows suit, and then we speak of an organic and inorganic chemical industry. By focusing on the organic branch of the chemical industry, Steen has obviously backgrounded the inorganic branch and also the knowledge fields it was based on, including chemical engineering, a type of processing knowledge and know-how Americans are said to excel in. The book emphasizes that both branches were important for the American chemical industry but misses the opportunity to analyze exactly how important. Perhaps chemical engineering was not such an advantage as typically claimed, or perhaps more “basic” organic chemistry was crucial, or perhaps the American context was such that both could be effectively combined, etc.
To some extent, Steen crosses the inorganic-organic divide; Du Pont, for instance, got heavily involved in dyestuffs but was, of course, also a major producer of explosives, a branch of the chemical industry not easily put in either the organic or the inorganic branch. Steen also refers repeatedly to that other important technology of World War I of the inorganic sort: ammonia synthesis, developed by BASF, one of the major German dyestuffs producers. Intriguingly, some of the American companies involved in the organic branch of war chemistry were also involved with ammonia in this period. Moreover, in the historical literature on ammonia synthesis, claims are made to the importance of this technology for war. It is a pity that the interaction between these two fields was not analyzed and, particularly, that the claims in relation to ammonia synthesis were not reviewed in light of the huge amount of research done for this book; perhaps those claims are simply overblown, or perhaps the organic and inorganic branches were complementary.
Even so, these issues testify to the strength and contribution of this book. It does an excellent job documenting and analyzing how an indigenous synthetic organic chemicals industry took root in the United States, eloquently makes the case that this is an important story, and, crucially, raises important questions.
