Event Description
Kathryn Steen, PhD, associate professor of history, Drexel University
Prior to 1914, Germany dominated the worldwide production of synthetic organic dyes and pharmaceuticals like aspirin. When World War I disrupted the supply of German chemicals to the United States, Americans faced shortages and skyrocketing prices. The solution, Americans believed, lay in building a domestic industry and becoming independent of "foreign chemicals." Why and how did Americans go about trying to master this high tech industry of the era?
First, Americans became intensely anti-German during World War I, providing motivation to beat the Germans on another front; building a domestic industry became a patriotic mission. In this case, Americans explicitly rejected the decades of globalization that came before World War I.
Second, the political climate of war led to a wide range of government policies to protect and promote the fledgling domestic synthetic organic chemicals industry, whether through tariffs and production of war chemicals likes gases and explosives or through more extreme measures like confiscating German-owned chemical subsidiaries and patents in the United States.
Kathryn Steen, PhD is an associate professor in Drexel University’s Department of History. She is most recently the author of "The American Synthetic Organic Chemical Industry: War and Politics, 1910-1930" (UNC Press, 2014), which won the Business History Conference's 2015 Ralph Gomory Prize. |
