With jury selection soon starting in the latest Roundup cancer trial, Monsanto’s lawyers have been arguing that the company should be “entitled to put forth mitigating evidence supporting its good character”. But if the Court allows the company now owned by Bayer to introduce such testimony, we’d suggest the plaintiffs counter by calling to the stand Bartow J. Elmore.
Elmore teaches environmental and business history at Ohio State University and his deep dive into the history of Monsanto was published towards the end of last year. Given that Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future packs a hefty 80 plus pages of notes, you might fear it’s some turgid academic tome, but it’s anything but. Despite being deeply researched, the book provides a lively and lucid account of the massive toxic impact Monsanto has had on our world, as well as the company’s unsuccessful attempt to escape its toxic legacy by shapeshifting into the world’s largest seed company and a pioneer in genetic engineering in agriculture.
Those flagging up the book’s merits include Edmund Russell, President of the American Society for Environmental History, who says Seed Money is likely to “become the book on Monsanto”, adding, “Anyone interested in biotechnology, or the relationship between corporations and the environment in general, cannot afford to ignore this important book.” Long-time Monsanto watcher Tom Philpott is equally enthusiastic in reviewing what he calls this “wonderful new book” and, like Russell, he sees it as the “definitive historical account”.
Despite such praise, and Bart Elmore discussing the book on the Joe Rogan Experience and elsewhere, Seed Money still hasn’t created as big a buzz as it deserves. That may be because people feel they already know so much about the company, thanks to the innumerable articles about it over the years, never mind more substantial publications like The Monsanto Files, The Monsanto Papers, and The World According to Monsanto (a much watched film among activists, as well as a book). But Elmore hasn’t just turned the gaze of a professional historian onto the company, he has uncovered “a motherlode” of valuable material, in the words of veteran journalist Sam Fromartz. He has also laid out the results of his research with a skill that makes it almost impossible to believe that as a child he was thought to have “severe learning disabilities”.
Radioactive slag piles
Bart Elmore first caught our attention as someone with journalistic flair as well as notable research skills in 2017, when Dissent Magazine published his article, Monsanto’s Superfund Secret. At a time when everyone’s attention was firmly fixed on the toxic impacts of Roundup’s application, Elmore had returned from camping out with a photographer friend near the radioactive slag piles produced by Monsanto’s elemental phosphorous plant in Idaho to shine a bright light on the “disturbing environmental and human health concerns at the beginning, not just at the end, of Roundup’s lifecycle”. It would be another four years before Elmore published the book that placed his riveting account of the pollution-plagued production of the key ingredient in Monsanto’s leading herbicide in its full historical context.
Elmore originally got hooked on the history of Monsanto while researching his previous book – Citizen Coke. Exploring Monsanto’s contracts with Coke (founded 1886) was Elmore’s entrée to Monsanto’s corporate records. And after his first trip into the St Louis archives, he says he came away convinced he’d stumbled on a “gold mine”. As a result, he spent a good part of the next decade further exploring them, as well as looking into the company’s activities in different parts of the US and around the world, most notably in Brazil and Vietnam.
Scrappy start-up
Something Elmore does particularly well in Seed Money is relate the emerging character of the company he’s investigating to the dispositions and backgrounds of some of the key figures in its development. And early on in Seed Money, he flags up how much of Monsanto’s notoriously relentless character may have been shaped by its early years as a scrappy start-up fighting for survival against almost impossible odds. John Queeny, its founder, had to get the firm off the ground incredibly fast in 1901 because there was so little money behind it – mainly because his first attempt to set up a chemical company in East St Louis in the late 19th century had almost immediately gone up in flames, taking all Queeny’s life savings with it.
This lack of capital meant Queeny had to initially moonlight at Monsanto while keeping his day job as a drug salesman, just to survive financially. It also meant he needed to put everything together for his new firm on the fly. Adding to its vulnerability, Queeny’s start-up wasn’t just up against local competition but against the European goliaths that then dominated the US chemicals market, particularly German powerhouses like BASF and Bayer.
Scavenger capitalism and Coca-Cola
This unpropitious start may help account for why the company engaged from the get-go in what Elmore calls “scavenger capitalism”, living off the refuse and cheap by-products generated by other industries. Its caffeine for Coca-Cola, for instance, was initially extracted from tea sweepings discarded by tea producers. And Monsanto extracted the saccharin it made for Coca-Cola from coal tar, a black sticky by-product of turning coal into coke. Later on, it also developed a synthetic caffeine from coal tar. In fact, for many decades the vast majority of Monsanto’s products would be based on the waste products of the fossil fuel industries, with first coal and then oil companies providing Monsanto with the feedstocks it needed, mostly at very low cost.
It was its saccharin contract with Coke that ensured Monsanto’s initial survival. As Elmore told Joe Rogan, “If not for Coke, there would be no Monsanto. In the early 1900s, Monsanto was nothing. They were on the verge of going out of business. One giant contract saved them, and eventually allowed them to grow into the giant they are today.”
Buoyed up by their Coke lifeline, it was war that then catalysed the company’s growth. With the coming of World War 1, the trade lines of the European big boys were disrupted, so all of a sudden there was no competition. This disappearance of European suppliers from the American market also meant that the US government was keen to invest in home grown companies like Monsanto.
Feverish growth
Monsanto now raced from a low knowledge base to produce the critical chemical building blocks for its existing products that it had previously relied on European companies to supply. And as it simultaneously sought to produce completely new products from coal tar, it was Monsanto’s low-wage Black and immigrant workers doing its grunt work that bore the harsh consequences of all the crude experimental tinkering now going on at the company.
There was neither the time, or the knowledge, to guard against chemical contamination, which Elmore says was rife at Monsanto, as it rushed to redeem the debts it built up in its quest to diversify and expand. And Elmore gives telling examples of workers left dead and injured by the dirty and dangerous work they did at Monsanto.
This feverish growth allowed Monsanto not just to diversify into different products, but to expand beyond St Louis. In 1920, Monsanto even made its first capital investment abroad, when it bought a chemical firm in Wales that sat adjacent to rich coalfields. But it was under John Queeny’s successor that the firm really started to grow.
John Queeny’s son, Edgar Monsanto Queeny, took over the running of the firm in 1928 and he would stay at its helm until 1960. During those 30 plus years he helped to cement the company’s character while turning it into an industrial giant.
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