In this void, the CWS propaganda campaign cited studies concluding that there were no harmful health effects from war gas—no tuberculosis or other respiratory problems related to exposure to war gases, even though thousands of war veterans were still suffering from just such maladies.22 Notwithstanding the veterans’ complaints, Fries kept insisting that “the after effects of warfare gases are practically nothing,” and he adamantly denied there was any link between poison gases and respiratory disease or other ailments.23 Alleged environmental damage from poison gas was also denied. (Years later, a scientist revealed that the results of the government’s gas experiments were kept secret, “on account of the resultant damage to vegetation” and other effects.)24
Instead, industry spokesmen insisted how benign or even beneficial various poison gases could be, claiming that they would rid the world of dreaded diseases. Chlorine gas, they said, would eliminate the common cold and pneumonia; mustard gas would cure tuberculosis; and lewisite might be the remedy for paresis (the final stage of syphilis) and locomotor ataxia (an inability to control one’s bodily movements).25
Some claimed that their research findings were backed by human experimentation. For example, Dr. Arthur S. Lovenhart, a well-known pharmacologist at the University of Wisconsin, injected sodium cyanide into a severely disabled mental patient and was surprised that the previously catatonic subject suddenly relaxed, opened his eyes, and even answered a few questions.26 Lovenhart also conducted experiments using arsenic-based water-soluble compounds (such as lewisite) to treat patients with syphilis.27
In 1923 a prominent article planted in the press proclaimed that “poison gases invented to slay are just completing their first year’s apprenticeship to the arts of peace.” Unnamed sources reported that men who had worked in the poison gas factories during the war had become immune to influenza or other germs due to their exposure to hydrogen sulfide, chloropicrin, and chlorine. The War Department offered statistics apparently showing that soldiers who had been gassed were less susceptible to tuberculosis.28 “Inhalariums,” or gassing chambers where sick patients could breathe chlorinated air, became a new craze. Fries was photographed in one of these chambers, and even President Calvin Coolidge was convinced enough to receive chlorine treatments for a cold (he later said it had “cured” him).29 Although New York health officials later minimized chlorine’s ability to fight the common cold, Fries vociferously defended it, insisting it was a miracle cure.30
Many historians trace the beginning of cancer chemotherapy to the aftermath of World War II, crediting two pharmacologists in particular, Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman, for using mustard gas to treat lymphoma. (Goodman and Gilman had been recruited by the Department of Defense to investigate possible therapeutic applications of chemical warfare agents.) But in fact, some important preliminary work leading to such chemotherapy had occurred earlier, during and shortly after World War I. By the early 1920s, Fries was already saying that medical discoveries from chemical warfare had proved a boon to the human race, and in some respects he may have been right.31
Gas’s appeal seemed boundless, particularly in fighting crime. Fries got himself deputized to supervise a “gas battalion” for the Philadelphia police to handle disorderly crowds using tear gas.32 Tear-gas devices, which some security operatives mischievously referred to as “lewisite,” were rigged to bank vaults to deter robberies.33 Later, as the crime problem of the Roaring Twenties appeared more threatening to the social order, gas advocates such as Fries gave more thought to dramatizing other ways it might serve as a deterrent.
While this was going on, a fierce industrial and political battle ensued over one of the world’s deadliest and more useful poisons: cyanide. Hydrogen cyanide—the gas Barcroft had encountered at Porton Down—is a chemical compound with the chemical formula HCN. Discovered in 1782, hydrogen cyanide is a colorless or pale blue liquid or gas that is highly volatile, with a bitter taste and an odor like bitter almonds, although a sizable segment of the human population is not able to detect the scent due to a genetic trait. It is also extremely poisonous. A solution of hydrogen cyanide in water is known as hydrocyanic acid, Prussic acid, or “Berlin blue acid,” due to its intensely blue coloration.
If taken by mouth in salt form, such as potassium cyanide, a person’s stomach acid converts the cyanide to volatile hydrogen cyanide, often making it fatal if taken in a sufficient dose. Both the liquid and vapor are acutely poisonous if absorbed through the lungs, skin, or eyes. Massive doses can cause a sudden loss of consciousness, asphyxiation, and death from respiratory arrest. Medical studies warn that cyanide can cause salivation, nausea, vomiting, hyperpnea (hyperventilation), dyspnea (labored breathing), an irregular or weak pulse, anxiety, confusion, tachypnea (rapid breathing), vertigo, giddiness, stiffness of the jaw, neurasthenia, breathlessness, bradycardia (slow heart rate), arterial hypnotonia, polycythemia, hepatic impairment, and thyroidal hypofunction. Unconsciousness is followed by violent convulsions, protruding eyeballs, dilating pupils, foaming at the mouth, paralysis, and death.34 Whether or not it also acts as a carcinogen has not been documented; hydrogen cyanide is generally considered not to have mutagenic properties and is not considered to cause cancer, simply because there have not been any studies to test its carcinogenicity.
Despite its dangerous properties, cyanide became highly prized by modern industrial society.35 It was widely used in photographic processing, steel hardening, electroplating, pharmaceutical production, fumigation, the killing of birds and other wildlife deemed pests, and mining, in which it served to separate ores. Prior to the early twentieth century, the Germans had long controlled its production. By the eve of World War I, the world’s appetite for it had become voracious. Then the war made it even more valuable. Both of the warring sides developed and used cyanide-based chemical weapons, although not on as large a scale as they did some other poisons. Cyanides were classed as “blood agents” because they attacked the body through the blood and interfered with the metabolism of all living tissues. As weapons of war, hydrogen cyanide, cyanogen chloride, or chlorocyanogen had proved relatively ineffective on the battlefield because it was difficult to achieve a sufficient concentration of the gas in the open air to consistently kill the enemy.
For many years there was only one cyanide manufacturer and supplier in the United States. Besides importing potassium cyanide from Germany, Roessler & Hasslacher had begun to manufacture cyanide from prussiate in New Jersey in 1894.36 Although Roessler & Hasslacher was legally based in the United States and headed by Franz Roessler, it was actually a long-established German-controlled firm that had been founded by his brother, Hector Roessler, and was part of the German chemical concern DEGUSSA (Deutsche Gold und Silber Scheideanstalt) of Frankfurt am Main, which served as the selling agent for the German cyanide producers. In fact, Roessler & Hasslacher was DEGUSSA’s American subsidiary.37