Industry executives framed corporate profit as essential to national civilization

Evidence

The industry relied mainly on economic justifications for the widespread use of lead. In addressing the Public Health Service regarding the public health hazards of lead, Dr. Gilman Thompson, a medical director representing Standard Oil, General Motors, and DuPont, extolled the vital role that lead played during the industrial era: “Is this a public health hazard? Unfortunately, our problem is not that simple. We cannot quite act on a remote probability. We are engaged in the General Motors Corporation in the manufacture of automobiles, and in the Standard Oil Co. in the manufacture and refining of oil. On these things our present industrial civilization is supposed to depend” (U.S. Public Health Service, 1925). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1751

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the rhetorical move of equating a company’s product with the survival of a civilization — tracing from 1920s lead to modern fossil-fuel ‘the economy will collapse’ arguments.
• XREF: Mirrors the ADDENDUM on sacrifice — the utilitarian demand that individuals bear lethal costs for the ‘life of the Nation.’