Johns-Manville

GREEK GEOGRAPHER Strabo and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder both noted that slaves weaving asbestos into cloth often developed a fatal sickness in the lungs. They were among the first to identify asbestosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling the fine fibers and particles of asbestos.

Johns-Manville, one of the modern companies using asbestos, began in 1858 as the H. W. Johns Manufacturing Company, founded on the principal use of asbestos as a fire-resistant roofing material. In 1901, the company added new asbestos products, including asbestos cement.

By the early 1930s, asbestos workers stricken with asbestosis were bringing damage suits against Johns-Manville, now the largest asbestos manufacturer in the country, and against other leading asbestos manufacturers. These manufacturers created a cover-up of the asbestos hazard that continued for more than 40 years. In 1933, Lewis Herold Brown, president of Johns-Manville, informed the company's board of directors of 11 pending lawsuits brought by employees who had developed asbestosis while working at the company's plant in Manville, New Jersey. He said that the cases could be settled out of court, provided that the attorney for the plaintiffs could be persuaded not to bring any more cases against the company.

Over the next two decades, the cover-up continued. Memos and other written evidence revealed that Johns-Manville did not inform its employees when their chest X-rays showed they had developed asbestosis. In a 1952 symposium, the seventh one held at Saranac Laboratory, doctors informed the participants, including asbestos manufacturers, that medical evidence implicated asbestos as a powerful producer of lung cancer. The proceedings of the six other meetings had been published, but the proceedings of the seventh were not. Very little information about asbestos causing cancer found its way into the press for another decade.

The asbestos cover-up might have continued indefinitely, but in the 1960s, two developments in law and medicine exposed the asbestos manufacturers. In 1962 and 1963, Dr. Irving J. Selikoff, director of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Environmental Sciences Laboratory in New York City and two of his colleagues definitively linked industrial exposure to asbestos to extreme health hazards like cancer. And in 1965, the American Law Foundation defined tort law to make sellers of dangerous products liable to users and consumers unless they put adequate warning labels on their products.

In 1971, Ward Stephenson, a Texas trial lawyer, brought the first asbestos product liability lawsuit, and this case opened the way for other asbestos lawsuits. During the next decade, people filed about 15,000 lawsuits against Johns-Manville, Raybestos-Manhattan, and a dozen other asbestos insulation manufacturers. During these suits, hundreds of documents furnished overwhelming proof that these companies had covered up their knowledge of the hazards of asbestos. Juries all over the country awarded large compensatory damages to diseased [Page 462]asbestos workers and the survivors of workers who had died of asbestos disease. During 1981 and the first half of 1982, juries in 10 different cases found Manville liable for punitive damages worth more than $6 million. The company and its insurance carriers had already settled some 2,000 asbestos-disease cases out of court for tens of millions of dollars.

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