Standard Oil came to these riches, bought up old plantations, drilled into
petroleum, and built refineries and strategic political domination of the
state. Standard also conducted revolutionary research on petrochemicals
from the refining process. Their chemists’ isolation of hydrocarbon chains
laid the foundation for the synthetic fiber industry and then much, much
else, including the production of vinyl chloride () and polyvinyl chloride
()—plastics for a myriad of consumer goods from automobiles to car-
peting, computer chips, diapers, furniture, luggage, medicines, paints, and
water pipe.^26
Over the next six decades, Standard’s refinery flares were joined by those
of other petrochemical corporations, American and foreign alike. All came
to Louisiana because of its oil and gas but also because (except for the Huey
Long era of the late s and mid-s) government was generous to
business in terms of taxation and labor law, and because the landscape on
which this ‘‘American Ruhr’’ was constructed was populated by rural black
folks eager for postagricultural work, no matter if refinery labor was at least
as dirty. So into the valley came Dow, Ethyl Corporation, and W. R. Grace,
among other U.S. firms. Japanese companies came here to escape environ-
mental and health regulations at home, as did the German petrochemical
giantand the Anglo-Dutch behemoth Shell. By the s it became ap-
parent that Yankee and foreign companies had exported much more than
capital and air pollution.andare now long-proven carcinogens, and
at least as early as the s, the American Ruhr was being transformed,
in the vernacular, to Chemical Alley and Cancer Alley. Local people, work-
ers and residents, had become sick in extraordinary numbers, and while
government and the corporations lied, obfuscated, and dodged responsi-
bility, the African American civil rights movement became engaged, joining
labor unions (notably the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International
Union) in marches, demonstrations, and antipollution publicity. Environ-
mental civil rights was thus born, and the struggle continues.
By the s the international environmental troublemakers, Green-
peace, conducted their own research using public records and published
a simple, documented observation: Following the Mississippi southward
from its source to the Gulf, entering cancerous tumor rates along the way,
Minnesota, with its very low rate, stood in shocking contrast with Louisi-
ana. Could this be mere chance? asked Greenpeace. Essentially, public
health officials and the corporations replied yes, citing Louisianians’ sup-
posedly poorer eating habits and heavier cigarette smoking. So organized