Precious Bodily Fluids

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re marking the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination with a look at the history of conspiracy thinking in America.

BRIAN: In the 1940s, researchers claimed they had found an effective weapon against tooth decay, especially in children. Their solution was simple– we just needed to add a little bit of fluoride to everybody’s drinking water. Public health officials eagerly embraced the strategy. So eagerly, in fact, that some people began to worry.

Why were those public health officials rushing? What’s the rush to put this stuff in the water? Was the stuff even healthy? After all, there were plenty of people who knew that fluoride could be toxic when it was taken in larger doses. So as the Cold War gathered steam, a few Americans started to ask some other very unsettling questions.

GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: Mandrake.

GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: Yes, Jack?

GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?

GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: Well, no. I– I can’t say I have.

BRIAN: You may recognize this scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove. In the film, General Jack Ripper is certain that the Communists are behind a vast fluoride conspiracy.

GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hardcore Commie works.

BRIAN: It sounds ridiculous, but Kubrick was satirizing a very real fear. Andrew Case is a historian at Michigan State’s Lyman Briggs College. He told me that by the 1950s, anxieties about a Communist conspiracy were helping to fuel a backlash against fluoride.

ANDREW CASE: So in 1954, there is a bill that’s introduced into Congress. It never really gets out of committee. And the proposal would have banned federal, state, and municipal authorities from introducing fluoride compounds into water.

One of the women that testifies in that hearing is a woman named Golda Franzen, who is a San Francisco housewife and also a leader of anti-fluoridation movements not just in California, but in other places as well. And she really lays it out in this hearing when she says, quote, “I know that fluoridation is a Communist scheme, frankly, the master plan. But I cannot prove it, for those who have informed me cannot testify. They would be liquidated if they did.”

BRIAN: [LAUGHS] Another form of precious bodily fluid liquidation.

ANDREW CASE: Liquidation, right. Right. But inside of that quote, I mean, it captures lots of elements of conspiracy thinking. There’s a master plan, but we also can’t reveal the master plan, right? And there’s lots of forces at work, some of which you can see, and many which you cannot.

BRIAN: How did notions that Communists were putting fluoride in the water fit with larger concerns about Communism at the time?

ANDREW CASE: I think it’s really the notion of mass medication. So something applied regardless of individual choice. And a lot of times, fluoride compounds were added to public water supplies at the behest of a city council or local leadership without a popular referendum. And experts from public health, from universities, scientists would say, this is the way to go about it because they would lose, oftentimes, when it went to popular referendum.

I mean, the fact that the Public Health Service and local officials were proceeding with fluoride ahead of public acceptance of fluoride leads it into this kind of realm of the state moving against the will of its people. And I think it’s a slippery slope-type thing. If it starts with this, where does it end?

BRIAN: Yeah. So how do we get from a referenda, where at least one argument is this is a Communist plot, to Stanley Kubrick making fun of this in 1964 in Dr. Strangelove? What happens?

ANDREW CASE: Well, I think there’s a lot of things that happen. It becomes dangerous, in some ways, to have these sorts of ideas about fluoride or about communism. And literally, it becomes absurd. And that’s what Kubrick is calling out, is the absurdity of fluoride.

And look what it could lead to. I mean, Ripper is driven mad by his obsession with fluoride enough to launch the doomsday plan, right? And what could be more absurd than that? Than a man consumed by his own bodily fears and putting the world at risk as a result.

BRIAN: Or if I could just add, Joe McCarthy, the famous anti-Communist crusader, turning on the US Army kind of undermines whatever legitimacy he has. And many argued at the time, in the 1950s, actually undermined America’s ability to stand up to communism.

ANDREW CASE: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

BRIAN: So if I understand correctly, you’re saying that conspiracy theory kind of put fluoride on the map, or certainly got a lot of attention in the 1950s. And then associating fluoride with right wing kooks took it off the map.

ANDREW CASE: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say that by painting it in a corner– red painting it in a corner, perhaps– it becomes the most absurd thing. And you see a huge increase in the number of fluoride referenda. And states pass mandatory fluoridation laws. I think Connecticut is the first one in the early 1960s. And over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the percentage of American water supplies that are fluoridated gradually increases over time.

BRIAN: And yet I gather there were some concerns totally unrelated to Communist conspiracy emerging in the mid to late 1960s about fluoride. I Could you tell me about those?

ANDREW CASE: Yeah, so one of the things that I’ve tracked is what I call the naturalist anti-fluoridationists, natural antis. And these are folks that did not deny that fluoride was an important part of the body’s health. They reject fluoride when it’s artificially produced and artificially enters into our water supplies.

And one of the things that we see is people with more education and who are less isolated from American political life begin to take on the anti-fluoridation stance in the late 1960s, early 1970s. And they’re responsive to this notion of choice, that if I want fluoride in my body, I can have it. It shouldn’t be applied, broadly speaking, to the entire population.

BRIAN: Now, Andrew, you’re talking about educated people, now, who are questioning fluoride. They couldn’t possibly be susceptible to conspiracy thinking, could they?

ANDREW CASE: No, this is the thing is that conspiracies have a way of running across the political spectrum. In a lot of ways, if you swap out the Communist lingo that’s very 1954 and look at the way it’s described as a collusion of Alcoa and the US Public Health Service–

BRIAN: Now, Alcoa. I didn’t see that coming. How does Alcoa enter the picture?

ANDREW CASE: Yeah. So sodium fluoride is a byproduct of aluminum production. So Alcoa is also the one that is selling the fluoride compounds to municipal water supplies. It’s really about them finding a profitable use for what would otherwise be a waste product.

BRIAN: And it’s worth mentioning that aluminum manufacturer, almost by definition, is a monopoly or oligopoly. Right?

ANDREW CASE: Absolutely.

BRIAN: There aren’t many Alcoas out there competing with each other.

ANDREW CASE: Right, right. And I don’t remember all of the details, but there’s a former Alcoa executive who is on so and so committee. And the pieces all kind of fit together, as always, as you would suspect.

So the naturalist anti-fluoridationists see fluoride as part of a bigger organization of big businesses and big science that are trying to put this material in our water and also continue to feed us certain types of food that, if our teeth weren’t fortified, would be really bad. So refined grains, sugars–

BRIAN: I see. So it’s so we can keep eating all the junk.

ANDREW CASE: Exactly. Exactly. And one of the riddles, of course, is why would the American Dental Association want to put something in your water that, in theory, means that we would go to the dentist less. It’s one of the riddles that is never really well-answered.

And the bigger story is that fluoride really was a progressive public health idea in the ’40s and the ’50s about giving children, regardless of their socioeconomic background, the access to good dental health. And that’s what the progressive dentists of these states were really interested in in the 1950s. And I take those folks at their word, and that they weren’t part– of course, that’s part of me being a part of a conspiracy and all of that sort of stuff, of me defending– I’m at a state university, part of a big land grant system, so that’s, of course, what you would expect somebody like me to say.

BRIAN: Yes, it’s exactly what I would expect. Andrew, thank you for joining us on BackStory. And I want to remind all our listeners that under the Affordable Health Care Act, they will be able to keep their own fluoride.

ANDREW CASE: Absolutely. Absolutely. And their tinfoil hats.

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BRIAN: Andrew Case is an instructor in history at the Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University.