Due to their efforts, despite overwhelming public opinion against gas warfare and strong political opposition from his own commanders, Fries and his allies somehow succeeded in gaining passage of the National Defense Act of 1920, which not only saved the Chemical Warfare Service from extinction, but also turned it into a permanent part of the army. The feat made Fries a legendary figure in military circles. Politically, he had become unusually powerful.
Fries publicly disputed notions that poison gas was any more inhumane or dishonorable than other weapons of war. “As to non-combatants,” he wrote, carefully parsing his statements, “certainly we do not contemplate using poisonous gas against them, no more at least than we propose to use high explosives in long range guns or aeroplanes against them.” As for the abandonment of poison gas, “it must be remembered that no powerful weapon of war has ever been abandoned once it proved its power unless a more powerful weapon was discovered.” Fries argued that poison gas would never be abandoned or effectively stopped by any international agreement. Some nations would continue to use it. “Let the world know,” he urged, that Americans would “use gas against all troops that may be engaged against us, and that we propose to use it to the fullest extent of our ability.” Such a stance would form a powerful deterrent, he said, and “do more to head off war than all the peace propaganda since time began.” He also rejected arguments that gas should never be used against adversaries that were not also equipped with gas. “Then why did we use repeating rifles and machine guns against Negritos and Moros armed only with bows and arrows or poor muskets and knives?” he asked. “Let us apply the same common sense to the use of gas that we apply to all other weapons of war.”6
But Fries and his allies had to face other mounting obstacles. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles forbade the “use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and all analogous liquids, materials, or devices being prohibited, their manufacture and importation… in Germany” (italics added), and President Woodrow Wilson and the International Committee of the Red Cross favored banning chemical weapons. When Republican Warren Harding swept into the White House in 1921, his administration favored a position at the Washington Arms Conference that would curtail gas warfare as well as submarine and aircraft attacks.7 A survey of the American public found 385,170 votes for the abolition of chemical weapons and only 169 for retention.
To buttress their case, Fries and the chemical lobby argued that war gases and other poisons offered countless constructive domestic benefits in peacetime. Much of this perceived value lay in expanded industrial applications. Under Fries’s leadership, the CWS publicly turned its attention to undertaking cooperative enterprises with various government departments to harness the fruits of wartime gas research in constructive, peaceful ways. Soon the Bureau of Mines was exploring means to introduce some of the benefits of its wartime knowledge into the mining industry. The Department of the Interior helped test gas masks for commercial use in refrigeration plants, firefighting, and other settings. The Treasury Department fumigated ships at port with HCN gas, and public health and agriculture officials employed deadly phosgene to kill rats and gophers.
The U.S. Public Health Service was especially supportive. President Wilson’s final appointee as surgeon general, Dr. Hugh S. Cumming of Virginia, demonstrated a knack for politics that enabled him to get along with many different interest groups. A former Marine officer who maintained excellent relations with the military, members of Congress, leaders of the eugenics movement, the medical profession, and the chemical industry, Cumming was also a staunch believer in states’ rights, white supremacy, and immigration restriction—and he proved a key ally for Fries. Their common beliefs converged. Cumming and his staff vastly expanded the use of gas to fumigate ships in all of America’s major ports. (One of the most obvious problems posed by using hydrocyanic acid in that way entailed how to determine that the highly poisonous gas had been removed from all parts of the vessel, so as not to accidentally kill longshoremen or seamen.)8 On his watch the federal government became the biggest single user of cyanide for fumigation purposes. Through the good graces of the Pan American Sanitary Code (1924), Cumming also got all republics in the Americas to require HCN fumigation in their ports. His agents carried the fumigation message throughout the world.
Although the war was over, the chemical industry was conducting additional research to devise alternate uses for its deadly war gases. Scientists were now testing them for every use, from exterminating pests to fighting fires.9 Phosgene, for example, was already known to be useful in making dye, and the war experience had enabled industry to reduce its price from $1.50 to 15 cents a pound. Now chemical industry spokesmen said housewives could also use phosgene for a variety of other tasks, such as adding color to rustling silk or polishing the family’s valuable crystal. Chlorine as well had many applications for cleaning.10 Chemical scientists hadn’t yet figured out any beneficial uses for mustard gas, but within a few years Fries would claim it was an effective tool against marine borers that were destroying docks and other waterfront structures.11 He also proclaimed that a perfected gas mask would soon protect Americans from every known type of poison gas and prove invaluable for the nation’s fire fighters.12 The mission of the Chemical Warfare Service, he said, had changed; now the agency was simply doing “peace work principally.”13
Fries especially touted the use of war gases for “insect and animal extermination.” “We have given a good deal of attention to [the elimination of insects and other pests],” he noted in 1922, “and expect to give a great deal more to it in the future.” Then he added, with obvious scorn, “The nearly four years that have elapsed since the close of the war have shown us that the human pest is the worst of all pests to handle.”14 During the war, the military had regarded the enemy as insects; now, during peacetime, it aimed to “wage warfare against insect life.”15 L. O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology, said the insect horde seemed from “another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than ours.”16
Fries tried his best to build national support for his policies. He told reporters the military had used some of its leftover poison gas to kill rats in seaport cities and wipe out locusts in the Philippines; next it would wage war against the pesky boll weevil, which ravaged cotton in the South.17 When Southern senators heard this, they rushed to insert funds for that purpose into the War Department’s budget. (In fact, the boll weevil proved more resistant to the poisons than expected, due to what some researchers later ascribed to the insects’ “apparent ability to suspend breathing more or less at will.”)18 Turning west, Fries also bolstered political support in California by pointing out that citrus growers were using liquid cyanide gas against scale and other bugs that had endangered their fruit crops.19
The science of pest control and the science of chemical warfare shared much in common. “Chemists, entomologists, and military researchers knew that chemicals toxic to one species often killed others,” one historian has observed, “so they developed similar chemicals to fight human and insect enemies. They also developed similar methods of dispensing chemicals to poison both.”20 Fries also understood how to win funding from Congress by appealing to various vested interests.
By December 1923 the United States Department of Agriculture had become so concerned about the possible health effects of using hydrocyanic acid gas as a fumigant on fruits and other foods that it released a study reporting the quantity of the fumigant that was absorbed by various foodstuffs. Aware of the power of the chemical lobby, however, the agency didn’t dare offer any conclusions about whether fumigated foods were safe for human consumption, saying only that such conclusions “lie in the domain of the pharmacologist.”21 Indeed, no government agency ever challenged the pervasive use of poisons in the nation’s food and water supply and air.