CHEMICAL WEAPONS, THE BANE OF MOD ern warfare, saw their first battlefield use in World War I. And as the historian Kathryn Steen writes in a recent issue of Chemical Heritage , when that war was over, chemistry played a role in the peace as well. This curious episode arose from a clause in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that allowed the victorious Allies to accept a portion of their reparations from Germany in the form of “coal and derivatives of coal, and… dyestuffs and other chemical products.”
The provision made sense, or seemed to, because Germany, though short on cash, was the unquestioned world leader in chemistry. Unfortunately, as often happens when politics, economics, and technology come together, the result was much less satisfactory than the plan.
To begin with, as in most trade issues, consumers and producers came down on opposite sides. America’s textile manufacturers were all for the idea, but our chemical industry, which wanted to expand its market for dyes, did not welcome the competition. Hoping to avoid a fight, the United States sent the distinguished chemist Charles H. Herty to Germany to see what was available. In 1915 and 1916, as president of the American Chemical Society, Herty had warned of the danger posed by a cutoff of German dyes and pharmaceuticals, and after the United States entered the war, he had energetically promoted the development of America’s organic chemical industry.
Herty found large amounts of simple dyes that American companies could make and very little of the more complicated compounds that the Germans specialized in. Much of America’s share ended up sitting in European warehouses. The other Allies, with money problems of their own, made the situation worse by dumping their portions on the world market, creating a glut. Finally, squabbles erupted in the United States over which firms would be licensed as importers.
In 1922 the Americans abandoned the remainder of their claim. Diplomatic complications then took over (for one thing, the United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles), delaying the settling of the account. Not until 1930 were America’s proceeds of $1.6 million from the German dyestuffs scheme finally disbursed to universities and textile researchers.
