1960s–late 1970s environmental-health turn

The 1960s–late 1970s environmental-health turn is the shift in attention from industrial chemicals as routine features of production to their effects on workers, air, and surrounding communities. Its decisive significance in the novel lies in the gap between recognition and repair: research and regulation eventually addressed Xerxine vapors, but workers had already been exposed, and the resulting illnesses remained difficult to connect to their jobs in court.

An industrial landscape and its costs

The change unfolds against a South Chicago shaped by factories and their decline. Traveling south on Route 41, V. I. Warshawski passes Lake Michigan, then sees the land give way to the weed-choked yards and industrial structures of USX South Works. She recalls when 18,000 men left nearby homes each day for the South Works, Wisconsin Steel, Ford’s assembly plant, or the Xerxes plant. By the time of her return, some plants are closed or in decline, but the chemical odor remains. The contrast links industrial pollution to a community already confronting the loss of industrial work.

The environmental question is also a question of who gets to shape local decisions. Caroline Djiak describes SCRAP’s proposal for a solvent-recycling plant: the group had funding, a site, plans that had passed the environmental tests it had considered, and prospective customers including Xerxes and Glow-Rite. Caroline presented the proposal as a source of about a hundred jobs and a way to reduce waste going into the ground. Yet the zoning board refused to hear it, citing legal problems and a lack of unanimous community support. Nancy Cleghorn says the group had brought petitions and believed the community supported the plan; the board’s chair, Martin O’Gara, claimed to have heard from opponents. The scene shows environmental aims and economic hopes meeting a political process in which community backing is disputed rather than simply counted.

From chemical exposure to regulation

A retrospective account of Xerxine explains the scientific change. The solvent, a chlorinated hydrocarbon made by adding chlorine to ethylene gas, was used to clean materials such as sheet metal. When Humboldt Chemical began making it in the 1950s, the hazards were not well understood, and controls did not adequately limit the vapors workers breathed. The account does not suggest that the company set out to injure employees; it describes production proceeding without sufficient control of exposure.

During the 1960s and 1970s, researchers including Irving Selikoff gave greater attention to the relationship between industrial pollution and worker health. As evidence accumulated that chemicals such as Xerxine could be toxic even at low concentrations, Xerxes installed air scrubbers and sealed pipes more effectively. By the late 1970s, its airborne concentrations had been reduced to federal standards. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for Xerxine was 50 parts per million. This marks a real regulatory response, but it applies to controls adopted after years of earlier production: a later limit could reduce exposure without undoing what workers had already absorbed.

What the records reveal—and what the lawsuit could prove

The difference between recognizing a hazard and securing legal redress is clearest in the workers’ compensation case brought by Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro. They had worked at Humboldt Chemical for decades—Ferraro since 1959 and Pankowski since 1961—and approached their lawyer in early 1983 after illness had left them unable to work. The company resisted a settlement, so their lawyer filed suit. Their claim faced two connected difficulties: their illnesses might be attributed to smoking, drinking, or South Chicago’s polluted air, and their exposure had begun before Xerxine’s toxicity was known. The court accepted the company’s defenses, and the claim failed.

Later medical evidence made the exposure history much harder to dismiss. Records in Dr. Chigwell’s notebooks covered about 500 employees at Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant from 1955 to 1982. A specialist’s review found blood-chemistry changes consistent with kidney, liver, and bone-marrow dysfunction. Louisa Djiak’s records showed noticeable kidney damage by 1967 and severe damage by 1969; she began experiencing diffuse symptoms around 1979 but did not then seek medical care. Her diagnosis of chronic renal failure came in 1984, after her daughter urged her to see a physician, and the condition had progressed to an acute stage. Steve Ferraro’s records extended from 1957 to 1982; he died of aplastic anemia in 1983. The evidence supports a pattern of serious illness consistent with Xerxine exposure, while the earlier lawsuit demonstrates how alternative causes and the timing of scientific knowledge had limited what the workers could prove.

Delayed consequences and renewed action

The records also change the meaning of an insurance report. Victoria Warshawski connects the earlier lawsuit’s successful defenses to Jurshak’s report to Mariners Rest: concealing high rates of illness and death at Xerxes could help Humboldt Chemical obtain favorable insurance terms. In this account, missing recognition is not merely a scientific delay. The consequences of exposure can also be obscured when illness is divided into disputed individual claims and relevant information is withheld from those who need it.

The period’s environmental-health turn therefore remains incomplete. The factory’s later controls, the federal limit, the medical records, and the failed compensation case represent different stages in a struggle to make long-term harm visible and actionable. When Warshawski approaches Frederick Manheim about organizing claims for hundreds of former—and possibly current—Xerxes employees, she presents the work as a major undertaking requiring a team. Manheim agrees to take it on despite an earlier threatening call connected to his attempt to appeal the workers’ case. The proposed campaign does not erase the earlier defeat; it shows how a fuller record can reopen a question that regulation alone could not settle: what remedy is owed to people harmed before the danger was adequately controlled?