THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEM AND
"The principle of medical and surgical morality…consists in
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Fifteen years ago, while I was working as a researcher in St. Louis, Missouri, a respected
acquaintance and colleague shared a troubling story with me. This reserved woman
opened up about her recent diagnosis of breast cancer, and a haunting question that
pressed upon her. As a young girl living in the city of St. Louis, her neighborhood and
school had been “sprayed by the military”. My colleague was consumed by worry that
this event as a child, had triggered decades later, her breast cancer as an adult. Since my
research at that time was focused on toxic threats in communities, she asked me if I knew
about this issue. I had to admit with some embarrassment, that I had no information or
knowledge about the event. I was asked if I would be willing to look for any information
that might help her determine to what she had been exposed. Disturbed by her story, I
attempted to locate information on the event, to little avail. According to public records,
it was as if the event was the figment of a wild imagination. I informed my colleague that
there was no information in the literature, and only one brief, uninformative mention in
the news media. She graciously took the little information that I had located, and did not
mention it again. I continued to find her story troubling, however.
Approximately a week or two later, there was a knock on my front door at home. My
neighbor asked if she could have a minute of my time, and next shared a personal story
with me. Ten years prior, she had survived a brain tumor. She explained that she had
come to me for a specific reason, however…she had been sprayed as a child while on the
playground at school, by “something that the military was doing”, and she had for a
decade believed that her brain tumor was caused by that event. Mouth agape, I pointedly
asked if I was the victim of a distasteful joke. Perhaps my colleague and neighbor knew
each other, and were testing me. How otherwise could two acquaintances of mine, who
did not know each other, have lived in the same area at the same time, and experienced
the same thing? How could both women know me and coincidentally share with me
virtually identical stories, one on the heels of the other? I thought it perversely
unbelievable. Taken aback by my response, my neighbor informed me a bit tersely, that
her story was no joke, and pointed to her head where the tumor had threatened her life.
Her expression said the rest.
I shared with her the story of my colleague, told to me days
prior. My neighbor?s expression turned dark, as she surmised that something had
happened to people in the city of St. Louis, and she needed to know more…might I be
willing to help? She handed me a manila envelope, and said that then-Congressman
Richard Gephardt had made an official inquiry about the incident; inside the folder was
information related to his findings. I shut the door in an utter daze, not believing the
incredible coincidence of two acquaintances with their shared experience. The fact that a
Congressional investigation had taken place, and that there was almost no information in
the literature, turned it from mere conjecture, to a mysteriously shrouded and chilling
historical event. I again did cursory searches in the literature, and found virtually nothing
on the subject. I informed my neighbor of this. We all fell back into life?s rhythms and
demands, moving on. Their stories however, stayed in the back of my mind, filed away
for a future date when my schedule was less lean, and time was more generous.
Photocopies of the file that my neighbor had provided to me were eventually lost after
several moves (until a day not long after I had drafted this piece, when my husband
insisted that I go through some old boxes, and lo!...there was the long-lost file.)
I am indebted to both my colleague and my neighbor, for sending me down this meandering
path of discovery and despair. If I can locate them, they will get a copy of this piece and
hopefully, they will forgive me for the belated answers to questions that stumped us all.
The victims above all, have a right to know what happened, and that is something that has
never been acknowledged by those who coordinated and conducted the St. Louis aerosol
studies.
This has been a long discovery of peeling back layers of deception and secrecy to locate
historical accuracy in this complex case study. My challenge beyond uncovering how it
was that the St. Louis aerosol studies came to be, and all that they entailed, was to also
explain how over a long period of time (in this case decades), a large number of rotating
personnel- seemingly normal people (defined here as those who don?t desire to impose
harm on others in general) can knowingly come to engage in harmful or criminal actions
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towards others, or in unethical actions for the benefit of their organization. How can this
be explained through this case study as well as the existing literature? How is it that
given such a scenario, that even larger numbers of people can have no knowledge that a
long series of harmful historical events occurred, even when they themselves may have
been victimized? How can the existing literature explain the element of complex
organizational actions, which diffuse internal and external dissent by hundreds,
thousands, or tens of thousand of people involved in or directly effected by an
organization?s actions? How does it come to be that normally ethical individuals, who
may be highly educated, and ethical and moral in other spheres of their daily lives, would
carry forth the work of an organization that is harmful to others? How do we explain the
ordinary “thousand people below” (those working for the elite, decision-makers in an
organization), who seem to have no ethical sense in their sometimes substantial
contributions to harmful organizational actions?
This piece reveals the emergence of a secret post-Manhattan Project group, referred to
here as the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition. Members of this elite group embraced their
roles as scientists engaged in the war effort for the United States, but their work would
take an ugly turn during the Cold War that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when they
engaged with breathtaking detachment and frequency in human subject testing of
radioactive isotopes. I examine the efforts of this group from the springboard of a series
of classified but seemingly innocuous-sounding military-sponsored studies targeting
civilians in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, beginning in 1953. What is framed as a
simple study of cloud dispersal in an urban area is in fact, a deliberate, menacing
targeting of American civilians in a long series of experimental Cold War weapons
research and development that would ultimately target Russian civilians. Furthermore
and most disturbingly, evidence indicates that the St. Louis aerosol studies may have
involved the spraying of unsuspecting vulnerable populations with pernicious radioactive
isotopes.
In this case study, we see a convergence of military and corporate interests, supported by
political elites that served as defenders and champions of the Manhattan-Rochester
Coalition. Stretching over five decades, state-sponsored human subject testing
undertaken by members of the coalition was systematic, coordinated, and involved
humans of all ages, both alive and dead. The astoundingly vast, highly-coordinated
efforts of the coalition, and the decades-long series of projects warranted a shifting in and
out of personnel, who were all required to maintain the utmost of secrecy and deception
towards those outside the organization. This piece attempts to explain 1) how large
numbers of individuals (in this case thousands were involved in the highly-coordinated
efforts of the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition) inside an organization, can maintain
sustained actions in secret that deviate greatly from society?s norms, particularly when
those actions are harmful to outsiders.
There are many threads in the literature that
advance our understanding of organizational structure, elite deviance, crime, and
bureaucracies, but none fully explain the activity of this vast network of elite scientists
and support teams of tens of thousands of individuals, who advanced the mission of the
Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, and who were involved in reprehensible acts of human
experimentation over five decades of the Cold War. This analysis examines
organizational motivations along with the inter-organizational dynamics inside the
Manhattan-Rochester Coalition. Specific mechanisms are employed that control
potential dissent, both inside and outside the organization, and allows for uninterrupted
continuance of non-normative activity by the coalition. In regard to these elements or
organizational dynamics, this piece is unique to the literature.
I look first at my original concept of ethical autism, defined here as the purposeful
reduction or blockage of information inside an organization or group, intending to 1)
distort the perceptions of insiders to ensure compliance and advancement of the
organizational goals 2) minimize the awareness of collective illegal and/or unethical
activity of the organization, 3) create a false sense of security to members within the
organization from outside threats due to illegal or unethical activity, 4) to stifle
opposition, critical analysis, and ensure conformity to the organizational goals. Ethical
autism ensures that the significance of harmful organizational actions will be
underestimated by an internal audience; the control of information in this case study was
essential to generating ethical autism.
I next propose the original concept of social autism to explain how organizations can
successfully, systematically, and purposefully impede meaningful information flow to an
external audience, in order to manipulate public opinion, impede public debate and
dialogue, and to ensure that the significance of harmful organizational actions will be
unknown to or underestimated by an external audience. Three specific mechanisms --
snipping, spinning (see NOTE), and blizzarding -- explained herein, are used towards this end.
Snipping and blizzarding are original concepts, and unique to the literature. The three
mechanisms (along with stonewalling) are used to regulate information outflow in an
effort to obfuscate, downplay, or deny damaging organizational information to various
internal and external parties. The purposeful and strategic utilization of these
mechanisms thereby create internal effects (ethical autism) and external effects (social
autism) on various audiences, whereby insiders and outsiders are deceived as to potential
dangers or harmful acts, and whereby full and open debate is strategically suppressed. In
this way, we can explain how “ethical lapses” might occur inside large organizations or
coalitions that employ hundreds or thousands of individuals who move in and out of the
organization over extended periods of time, such as during the five decades of statesponsored
human subject testing in the United States.
Through strategic use of these
mechanisms, organizational leaders can control opposition, resistance, and debate both
inside and outside the organization, in an effort to advance uninterrupted, organizational
goals. Thusly, as the control of information is essential to generating ethical autism
internally, the control of information is also essential to generating social autism in the
external community.
NOTE: “Spinning” is a public relations term originally used by various newspapers such as the UK Guardian in
the late 1970s, or early 1980s.
INTRODUCTION
THE “THOUSAND PEOPLE BELOW”
never performing on man an experiment which might be harmful to him
to any extent, even though the result might be highly advantageous
to science, i.e., to the health of others…
It is immoral, then, to make an experiment on man when it is dangerous
to him, even though the result may be useful to others."
(French physician Claude Bernard, 1865)