JESSICA VAN HORSSEN
For much of the twentieth century, the cities and industries of the world relied on fireproof materials made from asbestos. As the use of asbestos became increasingly pervasive, its harmful effects on human health became apparent to medical researchers. Industry leaders, however, hid the dangers surrounding the mineral for decades until the industry collapsed in the 1980s. In Quebec, the source of most of the asbestos mined in the twentieth century, the industry’s cycles of boom and bust, and certain social and cultural features pushed asbestos-mining communities to accept extraordinary environmental risks.
This chapter examines the global asbestos industry from a local perspective, showing how the miners of the aptly named community of Asbestos, Quebec, negotiated changes in the environment and their own health through the work they did and the industry they fed. It focuses on how asbestos was mined and processed, how it impacted human health, and how community members interpreted the massive environmental and cultural changes that took place between 1879 and 1983. People and place collided in Asbestos, creating an intensely local understanding of environmental risk.
The town of Asbestos is located midway between Montreal and Quebec City, roughly a two-hour drive from each. Asbestos, a name the Royal Mail gave the mining camp in 1884, is the site of the Jeffrey mine, the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world, which was founded in 1879 and owned by the American company Johns-Manville (JM) from 1918 to 1983. JM was the largest asbestos producer in the world during the twentieth century and connected the Jeffrey mine and its workers to a vast global industrial network. The residents of Asbestos were unilingual francophone and Catholic. They were part of a growing trend in Quebec of young men and women leaving family farms and entering new industries that exploited the rich and diverse natural resources of the province.1 The opencast Jeffrey mine is located in the center of the community and is the source of the local population’s pride and sorrow, success and collapse.
The fact that asbestos causes cancer led to the industry’s collapse. For most of the twentieth century, however, the mineral was considered indispensable to modern life because of its fireproof qualities, and it is important to remember this fact when considering the history of Asbestos and the global asbestos trade. The mineral was added to an exponential number of goods that would not burn, rust, or decay with age. Quebec chrysotile at one point made up 95 percent of the global trade in the fireproof mineral, and the Jeffrey mine produced the majority of this supply.2 Asbestos promised safety for those who used it and profits for those who sold it.
Foreign—especially American—ownership of Canada’s natural resources is not unusual. The fact that the majority of people in Asbestos were French Canadian was a benefit to JM when it came to shielding workers from information concerning the specific occupational health risks present throughout the community. Medical reports and pamphlets on asbestos-related disease were rarely written in French, and for much of their history, townspeople were isolated from the communication of risk due to the language they spoke and their relatively rural location. This isolation allowed JM to do things in Asbestos it could not do elsewhere.
Between 1879 and 1983, the people of Asbestos experienced both triumph and tragedy as the mineral moved from being synonymous with safety to something that invoked widespread fears of cancer. Throughout these experiences, the local population remained committed to the Jeffrey mine and organized their lives around the massive opencast pit located in the center of town. The town of Asbestos complicates the history of mining communities by demonstrating an agency within the local working-class population that reveals an awareness of disease and a sacrifice of health for long-term community survival.
The Jeffrey mine is the largest of its kind thanks to a local geological quirk. Most asbestos deposits in the world form along a linear plane, which results in a number of open-pit mines along the vein to access an entire deposit. Historically, multiple pits have been dug to reach a single vein, many of them because of competing land ownership claims, and also to help prevent landslides that are prevalent in especially large opencast mines. Contrary to the norm, the deposit at Asbestos runs in a circular pattern and forms a rounded mineral-based knoll. The Jeffrey mine was the only pit needed to access the deposit in Asbestos. Unaware of the dimensions or shape of the deposit, early community members constructed the town right on top of it. From the beginning, the land in and around Asbestos was unique.
Gentleman farmer William H. Jeffrey founded the Jeffrey mine in 1879. The circular deposit at Asbestos meant that the majority of fibers at the surface were shorter than those found in linear deposits. These short fibers could, among other things, be added to lead paint to fireproof walls, applied to roofing shingles to retard fires, and added to cement to make it more durable. Once clear of surface rock, 90 percent of the deposit contained both long and short asbestos fibers.3 The pit contained very little waste.
Lacking the skills needed to realize this potential wealth, Jeffrey went bankrupt in 1892, and the town went bust. Johns-Manville purchased the mine from local owners in 1916. World War I demonstrated the importance of fireproof buildings and materials, and the market boomed. As the war increased demand for both long and short fibers, the potential of the land transformed Asbestos into a place of extraordinary value. JM was primarily an asbestos-manufacturing company that specialized in building supplies. From 1916, the growing war and construction industries in the United States more than made up for the wartime loss of European markets, and Jeffrey mine employees worked night and day to keep up with demand.4
JM changed both land and people in Asbestos. The mine and the community suddenly became connected to an immense industrial network. JM began an American revolution at the Jeffrey mine, assembling a far more technologically advanced, economically connected, and managerially cutthroat operation than anything the region had seen before. Each person in Asbestos was in some way dependent on the industry, and this gave JM power. The company introduced multiple shifts to operations, and townspeople lived according to the rhythms of work. Everyone came to a halt each day at noon and again at 5:30 P.M., when blasting in the mine marked the turnover of each shift.5
JM initially relied on horses to transport large loads of rock and fiber. The company quickly replaced them with a steam-powered railroad that ran from the bottom of the pit to the nearby Grand Trunk Railway station. After workers extracted raw asbestos from the mine, they sent it to the mill, also located in Asbestos. Workers then crushed the ore and sifted it through screens so the surrounding rock was removed. Inspectors next classified the fiber according to length, and it was either packaged and shipped elsewhere or sent to the Textile Department. In the Textile Department, local women would card, spin, and weave the mineral into fabric much like textile workers wove cotton or wool.6
Everything and everyone in the community was becoming more and more involved in mine operations as the company continued to expand production in the 1920s. This focus on a single industry was not an experience unique to Asbestos, but rather one shared across many mining towns. As Thomas G. Andrews describes in Killing for Coal, similar community involvement and dependency took shape in Colorado’s coal-mining industry in the early twentieth century.7 North America in the early twentieth century featured many so-called company towns, of which Asbestos was most decidedly one.
The Jeffrey mine was a dominant part of life and labor in Asbestos. With money and new technology, JM brought the town and the mine exponential growth. By 1928, industry insiders knew the region as “the most important asbestos producing territory in the world.”8 However, the Great Depression put this growth on hold. JM controlled almost half of the Canadian asbestos industry, and it significantly reduced operations at the Jeffrey mine because of the economic crisis, closing it entirely between May 1932 and April 1933.9 For the first time since 1916, the Jeffrey mine went silent.
The closure of the mine significantly impacted local workers and community members. Without money to pay bills or feed their families, laid-off Jeffrey mine workers applied to the town council for financial aid. At the end of 1933, the council applied to the provincially managed Secours-Direct for $800 to help feed thirty local families and clothe and shelter forty-one others.10 That seventy-one families were in need of aid even after JM resumed operations demonstrates the extent to which a year’s worth of lost wages affected the people of Asbestos. Council requests for provincial money continued throughout the Depression, even after JM reopened the Jeffrey mine, with town officials asking for $950 on 9 May 1934 and for an additional $900 one week later.11
Despite the suffering experienced at the local level, JM became focused on developing new markets and products during the Depression. By the end of 1933, after the company had reopened the Jeffrey mine, these innovations had helped bring a 29 percent increase in production in the North American industry and a 71 percent increase in the price of asbestos on international markets.12 The majority of the Jeffrey mine’s fiber went to the several hundred factories JM ran in the United States, the world’s leading exporter of finished asbestos products.13
The people of Asbestos were shaken by the Depression. However, while other Canadians continued to suffer high unemployment as businesses failed left and right, JM steadily increased production—and shifts—at the Jeffrey mine after it reopened in 1933. With the global economy slowly recovering in the late 1930s, Canada’s asbestos production increased.14 The company also introduced new technologies to speed production, and the community increasingly heard, saw, and breathed the sounds and dust of progress. Other asbestos operations in the region struggled to step up production, because there was no available space in which to expand operations. This was not the case in Asbestos, where industry trumped community: JM sought the town council’s permission to enlarge the mine in 1938. Without hesitation, the Asbestos town council approved the company’s request for land on which to expand the mine.15 The pit had reached its physical limits and resembled a steep inverted cone. Due to the threat of landslides, workers could not dig deeper without first expanding laterally.16 To maintain the land’s structural stability and the town’s financial stability, the Jeffrey mine had to grow.
Sacrificing community land for mine growth is not a story unique to Asbestos. In Mass Destruction, Timothy J. LeCain examines the history of the large-scale opencast copper-mining industry in the American West.17 LeCain highlights mining’s destruction of the natural environment. The history of Asbestos shows that this pattern was not confined to the West. JM’s expansion of the Jeffrey mine did destroy the local environment, but the community was built on the premise that its land was not meant for parks or swimming pools or homes. It was meant for mining, and everything else was of secondary importance.
The land in Asbestos tells a story of large-scale progress and environmental change. The original hill on which Jeffrey had established the mine had almost disappeared by 1939. The pit was 510 feet deep and 300 feet wide with spiraling benches 35 feet high and 75 feet wide to accommodate the trains emerging with loads of fiber.18 Locomotives pulled cars carrying supplies around the pit, and three 4-yard electric shovels worked in tandem with one 8-yard shovel to load the fiber into empty cars heading back up to the surface. The increased use of large machinery took Asbestos to a new level of industrialization. Writing for the Canadian Mining Journal in April 1939, R.C. Rowe described the Jeffrey mine as both a natural and a technological phenomenon,19 unique in its geology but now conventional for North American mining enterprises of the time in its reliance on gargantuan machinery.
Canada’s asbestos production increased as the world economy pulled out of depression. In 1916, Canada had produced 139,751 short tons in 1916, worth $5,211,157.20 By 1937, that number rose to 337,443 metric tons of asbestos worth $14,505,541.21 The Jeffrey mine had become the largest pit in the region, with shifts operating twenty-four hours a day as 1,000-watt floodlights shone on the mine at night. JM’s increased production in and industrialization of the pit changed the connection between the people of Asbestos and the mine, but it remained strong. The sounds, smells, and dust emerging from the pit were a constant reminder that the small town depended on a global industry, which also depended on it.
The market for asbestos increased exponentially after the outbreak of World War II. A thirty-year boom began in the community as a publication from the U.S. Department of the Interior termed the mineral “indispensable to modern life.”22 Wartime production increased sharply by 1941, and the American industrial surge more than compensated for the loss of overseas sales. Jeffrey mine workers struggled to meet demand. Burgeoning production and the departure of men to the war meant a labor shortage for JM’s operations, addressed by recruiting women. By 1943, 25 percent of the workers at the manufacturing plant were female.23
It was an exciting era for Asbestos. American manufacturers developed several new technologies and products containing the mineral during the war and quickly adapted them for postwar society. These innovations included brake pad linings, and whole communities of prefabricated houses that relied on asbestos for insulation, wall plaster, paint, shingles, and floor tiles, as well as cement. These new applications made asbestos pervasive in Western society and led many contemporaries to believe that the “Asbestos Age” was just beginning.24
The Jeffrey mine was at the center of the Asbestos Age. By 1942 it covered 115 acres of surface land, and workers extracted 6,000 tons of rock and mineral daily. JM operated three shifts round the clock every day, seven days a week. In 1947 the industry in Quebec exported 10,785,189 tons of fiber worth $438,356,805.25 Despite the end of World War II, demand continued to grow thanks to the new civilian uses of asbestos, as well as continued military production for the Cold War.
As the mine’s footprint grew, so did the town’s. The community of Asbestos underwent a period of immense physical growth in the postwar era. The town council purchased land from the county, local property owners, and even JM in order to create space for new housing to be constructed. The combination of open-pit mining with a new block-caving system that the company introduced led to extraction levels at the Jeffrey mine far surpassing those of its competitors. Block-caving is a form of underground mining particularly suited to land that already has an opencast pit. The benches that spiraled up the Jeffrey mine were hollowed out and mined from underneath. Block-caving was an efficient way to extract fiber, especially because the mine had reached the limits of JM’s property by 1948. This new method allowed the company to continue operations without purchasing more land from the town. In addition to block-caving, JM constructed new roads and new housing for the growing community in the postwar era.
JM continued to introduce new machinery into its operations in Asbestos. In 1951 the company stopped using trains to carry fiber from the bottom of the pit and adapted the Jeffrey mine to accommodate giant 35-ton trucks.26 These trucks grew in size over the years, eventually reaching a capacity of 200 tons in the 1970s. JM also changed how shifts were run at the mine, with no pause in operations as one group of workers replaced another.27 The Jeffrey mine had become an efficient open-air factory: its workers were the tiny gears that kept it running, and because of them, the land was constantly changing as well.
By 1952 Canada produced 70 percent of the world’s asbestos supply.28 The global market price for the mineral continued to rise, further boosting the value of the Jeffrey mine.29 Part of this exponential growth and production can be attributed to global market changes during the Cold War, as Western nations and corporations pulled away from business transactions with the USSR, another major producer of raw asbestos. Canada had an advantage in the Cold War, as industry leaders in the United States perceived it as the “friendlier” asbestos-extracting nation. By 1967, the Canadian Mining Journal had termed the Jeffrey mine “The Free World’s Largest Asbestos Producer.” The magazine attributed this reputation to JM, which had transformed the community into an industrial complex that by 1967 produced over 600,000 tons of asbestos annually.30 This reputation had long-term implications that outlasted the Cold War. Industry heads and government officials used it to cast Canadian asbestos in a positive light even while the general public increasingly became aware of the mineral’s negative health effects.31
Locally, JM dominated the land and the community. Globally, JM reaped the commercial benefits of being the company in control of the Jeffrey mine.32 By 1954 the giant trucks that hauled the fiber out of the Jeffrey mine via 15-foot-high spiraling benches were large diesel trucks that made twenty-two trips to the surface during each of the three daily shifts, five days a week.33 JM developed a new form of blasting that used dynamite without wires so the mineral would remain free from foreign materials. These and other technologies replaced employees who gathered asbestos by hand at the bottom of the pit and picked out blasting debris. The relationship the workers had with the land, rock, and mineral was changing.
JM’s industrialization of community land dramatically increased Quebec’s asbestos production, and for a while it seemed no end was in sight. In 1955 the Canadian Mining Journal declared that JM had ensured “asbestos mining as a principal industry in Quebec for at least another century.”34 Wealth and stability came from the land at Asbestos. It seemed unfathomable that anything could change this state of affairs. The unfathomable came in the 1970s and 1980s. As the Western world became aware of the dangers asbestos posed to human health, the industry was threatened with collapse. This new development promised to be devastating for the town of Asbestos. Without employment at the Jeffrey mine, the community was doomed.35
JM management knew what was coming, and the company began to extract as much asbestos from the Jeffrey mine as it could before the industry financially collapsed. This caused the Jeffrey mine to literally collapse. Landslides occurred throughout 1975 and destroyed large portions of the pit’s southeast spiral benches. Asbestos had become an increasingly dangerous place to live as rocks were blasted into neighborhoods at all hours as the company spent $77 million not on the community, but on a new factory and new equipment that would increase production levels by enabling more blasting each day.36 Nothing would get in JM’s way as the company frantically extracted as much fiber as it could while the industry was still viable.
For much of the twentieth century, asbestos was synonymous with safety. With increasing urbanization and industrialization following World War I, corporations, marketing firms, and government agencies taught consumers that asbestos was the remarkable mineral needed to keep them safe from fire. By and large, this was true: asbestos did help contain the spread of fire and, therefore, helped reduce the number fire-related casualties. From oven mitts to fire-fighting equipment to bed sheets, asbestos-based goods quickly became a part of everyday Western life. Asbestos’s ability to prevent the spread of fire, however, did not negate the harmful effects it had on human health.
There are three main diseases associated with asbestos: asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. Asbestosis develops when microscopic asbestos fibers are inhaled over an extended period of time and build up in the lining of the lungs, ultimately leading to death by suffocation. Inhaling asbestos dust and microfibers can also cause lung cancer. Mesothelioma is another asbestos-related cancer that manifests in the linings of major organs and is highly aggressive. These three diseases can occur individually or together. Asbestos also causes skin, breast, ovarian, colon, and intestinal cancer. These diseases can take up to thirty years to develop and depend on an uncertain dose-to-longevity exposure ratio.
The first asbestos-related death to be widely reported in medical journals and court records was that of Nellie Kershaw in 1924. Kershaw was a weaver of asbestos fabric in Rochdale, England, and died of asbestosis after seven years of working in the industry.37 JM may not have been aware of the dangers the mineral posed to human health, or of Kershaw’s death, in 1924 when it built a new fiber-processing factory in Asbestos. This factory offered employment opportunities to local women in the Textile Department and was similar to the plant Kershaw had worked in.
Along with the new factory, JM brought to Asbestos its own medical professionals. These doctors reported the health conditions of workers to company officials, not to the patients. Company-run medical care was common in mining communities,38 and it contributed to paternalistic corporate control over all aspects of local life. The health of workers at the Jeffrey mine was of great interest to JM because of the large number of employees exposed to the raw mineral. Company medical professionals monitored the health of laborers in Asbestos as though they were mice in an experimental laboratory. As long as Jeffrey mine employees were shown to be healthy, the industry and the town would be safe.
JM subtly addressed the risks posed by asbestos, in part, by introducing a policy in 1930 mandating the transfer of every male Jeffrey mine worker to a new department every ten years to limit his exposure to the dangerous mineral dust.39 Workers were not told why they were transferred, and female employees remained in the Textile Department. For decades, this was as close as the company came to acknowledging workplace risk.
In addition, in 1930, JM invited Dr. Frank G. Pedley to examine Jeffrey mine workers. At that time, Pedley was one of the only medical professionals researching asbestos-related disease in Canada. The resulting study—thoroughly edited by JM before it was published—claimed that, “If work with asbestos presented a hazard to the worker it would be reasonable to suppose that cases of disease would be reported from time to time, but so far as can be determined no cases of specific disease have been reported among asbestos workers in the Province of Quebec.”40 In his unpublished work, submitted only to industry leaders, Pedley highlighted this fact by describing four cases of asbestosis among Jeffrey mine workers, and among almost half of the workers at a neighboring mining community, Thetford Mines.41 Disease was present among the region’s asbestos workers, but a lack of education and information concerning the risks the mineral posed to them, combined with company-funded doctors withholding the results of medical examinations from patients, left Jeffrey mine employees ill-equipped for self-diagnosis or to push for better dust control measures in the early 1930s. Because those afflicted were not coughing and did not complain of ill health, Pedley concluded that the disease was not severe.42
Although Pedley was not alarmed by asbestosis, JM was. Not only did the company remove from his published report any mention of the cases he had discovered,43 but it also launched a media campaign to promote confidence in the safety of the mineral throughout the 1930s. Furthermore, in a 1931 letter from Metropolitan Life to JM attorneys, a Dr. McConnell wrote that Pedley’s unpublished report “will be given no publicity by us except with the consent of the firms concerned.”44 This corporate suppression of medical evidence allowed JM to market asbestos as safe and to combat the rising number of occupational health lawsuits the company was facing from its manufacturing employees in the United States.
The first civil case JM employees filed against the company for occupational health compensation was in 1929 by asbestos textile workers in New Jersey.45 Initially passed over to industry insurers, legal action continued to grow in the United States in terms of the number of lawsuits and the amount in damages they sought. In a letter from one JM vice president to another in 1931, E.M. Voorhees wrote S.A. Williams that “ever since dust suits have been brought against us at Manville [New Jersey] we have considered, first, the possibility of installing the most modern and improved dust collecting systems.”46 Manville was not the only American asbestos textile factory conscious of the potential threat of employees filing lawsuits against the company. In 1932, the manager at JM’s Waukegan, Illinois, factory wrote to Williams concerning his plant’s initiatives to reduce worker exposure to asbestos dust “in case suits develop.”47
Although Jeffrey mine workers were not complaining of ill health, they were becoming increasingly vulnerable to asbestos-related disease. The enormous escalations in production during the war years ratcheted up the risks to residents. In 1943, JM researchers discovered that asbestos caused cancer in lab mice 81.8 percent of the time.48 This discovery had severe implications for the health of workers and the general public, but again, the company remained silent. Although JM did not inform Jeffrey mine workers of the increased risk the industry posed, the people of Asbestos were aware something was wrong.
The female workforce at the Jeffrey mine increased significantly as wartime production rose. The Textile Department was the dustiest—and therefore the deadliest—place to work in Asbestos, and the women who worked there had alarmingly high absentee rates, widely discussed in the community. JM official Joan Ross went to Asbestos in 1944 to investigate the problem and acknowledged in her report that the “situation has become a topic of conversation throughout the entire community and is a serious detriment to the reputation of the company.”49 Despite local complaints, Ross concluded that although the department was excessively dusty, the fact that female employees missed work frequently was based on the “higher absentee rate among women in general,”50 not asbestos-related disease. The hypermasculinity of the mining industry overshadowed female employment and risk. The fact that the issue of female absenteeism was a concern to townspeople is significant, but they did not raise the issue again following Ross’s visit. Few, if any, medical researchers examined the effects of asbestos on female industry workers until the 1960s.51
In the meantime, JM officials remained concerned over the effects of asbestos dust on male Jeffrey mine workers. Company doctors in Asbestos rarely performed official autopsies on deceased workers. This was partly due to the staunch Roman Catholicism of the local population, and partly due to the apparent lack of need for such postmortem investigation: miners died, and families believed company doctors when they said the death was related to lifestyle choices such as smoking. Despite the lack of official autopsies, JM instigated a policy of secret dissections during the war and postwar period in Asbestos. Company doctors removed the lungs from deceased Jeffrey mine employees without family members’ consent. JM lawyer Yvan Sabourin smuggled these lungs across the U.S. border to a company-funded laboratory in Saranac Lake, New York.52 This lab had much more sophisticated equipment and specialist researchers who could trace the cause and progression of disease more efficiently than those in Asbestos.
Company officials deemed this transborder lung-smuggling necessary in part because, according to Gerrit W.H. Schepers, who interned at Saranac Laboratory during this study and later became director of the lab, “such a large number of cases in such a small and well-defined group of industrial employees suggested a significant problem.”53 JM had decided to gather as much information on this “significant problem” as it could without informing its workers—or the general public—of the risk. By 1958, Saranac Laboratory researchers had discovered seventy-eight cases of unreported asbestos-caused lung cancer in the bodies of Jeffrey mine workers.54 At the same time, the company used independent medical professionals as pawns to prove the mineral was safe. In 1948, JM invited independent doctors from New York to visit Asbestos and assess a series of employee X-rays. Company doctor Kenneth Smith provided the investigators with slides taken from employees he had already deemed healthy. “We never have let anyone know that this company (JM) had anything to do with the scheme,” Smith wrote; “we are merely co-operating with [. . .] the Board to the best of our ability. [. . .] Even the head of the union here thinks that.”55 Smith’s deception was never exposed.
By 1949, however, it was clear that the head of the union in Asbestos was not convinced by Smith’s report and neither were Jeffrey mine employees. In January 1949, the major newspapers of the province printed an exposé on Quebec’s asbestos industry written by independent journalist Burton LeDoux. The exposé compared mining communities like Asbestos to concentration camps and explained that diseases like asbestosis acted like a spider spinning a web tightly around a worker’s lungs until he died.56 Unions distributed LeDoux’s text in pamphlet form. This was the first time Jeffrey mine workers saw such information written in French, the only language most of them could read. A few weeks after LeDoux’s report was released, the workers in Asbestos went on strike for five months.
For many historians of Quebec and Canada, the Asbestos Strike of 1949 sparked the province’s Quiet Revolution. This was a sociopolitical movement mainly during the 1950s and 1960s in which the French Canadian majority became increasingly secular; gained control of the province’s major industries and businesses, which had traditionally been run by a minority Anglophone upper class; and rallied their political strength and ambitions to effect major change within Quebec and the rest of Canada through waves of neonationalism and reform liberalism.57 JM president Lewis H. Brown even called the demands workers made during the strike a “revolutionary doctrine,” designed to seize control of managerial policy.58 Revolutionary or not, Jeffrey mine employees were quickly joined in the strike by the workers in every asbestos-mining community in the province except one, and the slowdown crippled the North American industry. Workers raised a number of issues during the strike, including job security, but among the most “revolutionary” elements of the conflict was environmental health.59
JM adamantly refused to acknowledge the concern that workers had over the health effects of asbestos. Instead, the company reframed the conflict as an attempt by the union to stage an anticapitalist revolution. After five months of negotiation, the union withdrew the proposed clause to reduce employee exposure to deadly asbestos dust on the condition that the company would rehire its employees once a settlement was reached. This was the last time Jeffrey mine workers went on strike over issues of asbestos and health.
Despite the growing local and international concern over the mineral’s effects on human health the strike had ignited, the Quebec government took asbestos-related disease off its list of compensable industrial diseases in the early 1950s. Industry lobbying convinced officials that the mineral was safe.60 In fact, the idea that asbestos was not only safe but helped ensure the safety of the entire population persisted as a common mantra into the 1960s in the Western world.
JM was instrumental in the spread of this mantra. To combat the growing body of medical evidence proving asbestos was harmful to human health, the company cofunded a new study on Quebec’s asbestos miners that mirrored Pedley’s 1930 report. The thoroughly edited study by Daniel C. Braun and David Truan was published in 1958 and concluded that while workers were indeed developing lung cancer, cigarettes—not the mineral—caused the disease.61 The emphasis on smoking, rather than on asbestos dust, highlights the ways in which medical professionals viewed miners: because they lived unhealthy lifestyles, they were expected to get diseases. This understanding has its roots in the Victorian era, when medical professionals and company officials began to regulate working-class culture through health reform.62
This insight is crucial to understanding how the people of Asbestos viewed their health. They knew they had respiratory problems because of their work at the Jeffrey mine, but they did not know about the risk of cancer. International medical studies increasingly showed that exposure to asbestos led to cancer of the pleura, stomach, colon, and rectum, as well as mesothelioma, suggesting that asbestos-related disease went beyond the respiratory system.63 These reports remained relatively absent in Quebec, with unions and provincial officials focused on the sociopolitical changes sweeping the province during its Quiet Revolution.
As the province experienced dramatic changes, Jeffrey mine workers did as well. No longer did they agitate on issues of asbestos and health. Instead, they increasingly refused to acknowledge the dangers the mineral posed on the job and in the community. One of the most significant ways they did this was by declining to wear respirators at the Jeffrey mine. Knowing the dangers asbestos dust posed to the health of its workers and therefore its profits, JM instigated a series of policies designed to promote the use of protective devices.64
Despite these efforts, workers continued to refuse to wear the respirators until JM made them mandatory in 1975. The company now disciplined any Jeffrey mine employee who refused to wear the mask.65 The reluctance of workers to wear respirators can be brought into a larger story of masculine bravado often seen in mining communities, as well as a working-class rejection of corporate attempts to regulate behavior, but it also highlights another issue. The respirators used in the asbestos industry were useless in environments like the Jeffrey mine’s mill. The concentration of dust was so high that the filters clogged immediately, making it even harder to breathe. It was easier to cast them aside. A company study later proved that “respirators were not as efficient as we thought they were,” with one official noting that JM had “had a dirty house and now we have to pay for it.”66
By 1968, community members began to complain about the clouds of dust emerging from the mine and mill. Children wrote their names in the small particles as asbestos dust coated cars.67 Workers took it home with them on their clothes. The local paper reported that the people of Asbestos “dine[d] on dust and noise.”68 The clouds of mineral dust hovering over the community meant that asbestos-related disease went beyond the borders of the Jeffrey mine. It was not until 1971 that JM launched an internal study of asbestos-related cancers among community members not directly involved in the industry. The study found that people living in Asbestos were at a heightened risk of developing diseases because of their proximity to the mine.69
JM knew its operations in Asbestos could not continue indefinitely. The company needed to extract as much raw asbestos as it could before widespread knowledge of the risks the mineral posed—both to workers and the general public—led to the industry’s collapse.70 If community members were adversely affected in the process, that was not the company’s concern.
Once again viewing Jeffrey mine workers as test mice, in 1972 JM cofunded a study of the people of Asbestos by McGill University’s Dr. J.C. McDonald, the result of which would “preserve the industry on which their business depends [. . . and] avoid any undesirable publicity or any precipitate action by the USA or Canadian Federal Government which might be detrimental to the industry.”71 McDonald did exactly what JM asked. He found that there was lung damage in Jeffrey mine workers, but concluded that this was not caused by the mineral. While he acknowledged that high levels of asbestos dust led directly to mesothelioma, he believed that cigarettes caused more damage than asbestos.72 McDonald also concluded that while female employees worked in extremely dusty areas, few of them exceeded ten years of employment, resulting in negligible cases of disease.
Two years later, French Canadian medical researchers released a report that contrasted with McDonald’s sharply. This study indicated that while mesothelioma occurrences were 1 in 10,000 for the general population, they were 1 in 10 for those working in Quebec’s asbestos industry.73 These numbers were alarming. In May 1975, JM’s vice president for health, safety, and environment, Paul Kotin, sent filmmaker Walter Cooper to Asbestos to make a pro-industry documentary called “Asbestos and Health.” The mill had been closed and cleaned by employees for two days, but Cooper still found it too dusty to film in. Cooper also reported to Kotin that, “the bagging operation on the main floor was shocking. There were accumulations of dust everywhere [. . . and] I noticed an ankle-high accumulation of fiber, which was being shovelled into an open cart for disposal by a worker who was not wearing a respirator.”74
Kotin was shocked by Cooper’s experience at the Jeffrey mine. He wrote to JM officials: “If the division cannot complete the environmental clean-up of this textile operation, then serious consideration should be given to shutting down the operation. The Jeffrey Textile Plant is an embarrassment.”75 JM was rapidly losing interest in preserving its operations in Asbestos as the company became increasingly smothered by occupational health lawsuits in the United States. Before filing for bankruptcy protection in 1982, JM profiled Norman Chartier, a Jeffrey mine employee, in its shareholder magazine. Chartier had worked at the mine for four decades and explained that no job was 100 percent safe, but “if a man uses common sense on the job and follows the rules set down for his protection, he’s more apt to get into trouble when he’s not working.”76 Chartier’s life and the risks he faced had been expected and accepted by townspeople in Asbestos for generations. While JM was prepared to file for bankruptcy and move on, community members were not.
The town had collapsed when Jeffrey went bankrupt in 1892, but the community was well on its way to dominating the Quebec asbestos industry by the time JM took ownership of the mine in 1916.77 The people of Asbestos saw the American company’s arrival as a boon for the community, bringing the Jeffrey mine and the town that had grown around it immeasurable success. In many ways, they were correct.
JM brought Asbestos sixty years of almost uninterrupted growth and stability. The company’s international asbestos manufacturing network ensured that as long as there was a market for the mineral, there would be jobs for community members at the Jeffrey mine. Although both JM and the people of Asbestos were committed to the industry’s success, the cultural divide within the community occasionally caused friction. The large, predominantly French, Roman Catholic working class lived on the edge of the growing Jeffrey mine. Boys went to the local school run by Catholic priests until they were teenagers and old enough to work at the Jeffrey mine. Girls typically did the same, working in the Textile Department after they left school until they married. In a feature on Asbestos in JM’s monthly employee magazine in 1950, the company claimed that the average family in the community had at least ten children, capable of consuming “half a peck of potatoes at one meal and ten loaves of bread a day.”78 In fact, the average birth rate in the province of Quebec from 1926 to 1961 remained between 3.77 and 4.39 children per household.79 In Asbestos, these children were raised knowing their future success would depend on the Jeffrey mine and, to some extent, on the company that owned it.
The powerful managerial elite of the community, most of them American-born, lived on a hill much farther away from the mine. For the most part, they spoke only English, were Protestant, and were university educated. This divide led to some conflict in Asbestos, especially over linguistic rights and promotions. When JM arrived in Asbestos, Jeffrey mine dynamite workers welcomed them by going on strike in 1918.80 Although the asbestos workers in the neighboring community of Thetford Mines had unionized in 1915, those at the Jeffrey mine had yet to do so. The absence of a union in Asbestos did not mean workers were docile, however, and the short 1918 strike echoed a similar labor dispute for higher wages they had instigated in 1912.81 In 1919, Jeffrey mine workers joined l’Union ouvrière Catholique du Québec, but JM refused to recognize the union. Despite this refusal, workers remained committed to the union, which was led by Catholic Church officials, with the local priest in Asbestos heading the branch at the mine. The workers did not initially push JM to recognize the union. Instead, they focused on their work, and an excited spirit of industrial cooperation flourished in Asbestos. Record profits in the interwar period ensured the continuation of this cooperative spirit.
As asbestos production climbed and the town’s population rose, as noted earlier, the pit and the community both needed more room, which brought on another sort of conflict. In March 1927, the town council wrote to the Quebec government requesting permission to extend the boundaries of Asbestos into the surrounding countryside to make room for the future prosperity of the community, which had reached a population of 3,602. This was the first major step toward the community’s domination of the surrounding land, and JM immediately requested a portion of this new land.82
The community had been constructed on top of the mineral deposit. Because of this, JM justified its request for 55 acres of new land by explaining that the people of Asbestos were in the way of the Jeffrey mine’s necessary expansion. The global price of the mineral was increasing, and with Canada providing 85 percent of the fiber worldwide, this was the perfect opportunity for the company to increase its landholdings. To combat any negative feelings toward expansion, which would require citizens to move farther away from the mine as it grew into existing neighborhoods, JM constructed new homes and roads for its employees equipped with such modern conveniences as running water, electricity, and streetlights.83 The people of Asbestos became indebted to the company as JM reshaped the land around them.
Pit expansion changed not only the land, but also the way townspeople related to the Jeffrey mine. As company and community negotiated a balance between livable space and workable space, the Jeffrey mine divided and defined the two. The increasing cultural and economic importance of land defined the community. Under JM rule, the town did not have a durable history preserved in buildings or roads, but rather a future ensured by unrestricted environmental changes.
As JM changed the land, the Great Depression changed Jeffrey mine employees and thereby the company’s community relations. The Catholic Church also evolved in the interwar period as left-wing ideologies spread throughout the institution. This was evident in Quebec’s labor movement. In 1936, Sherbrooke’s abbé Aubert became the leader of the province’s Catholic union, and his social activist principles infiltrated the local union in Asbestos. The industry’s instability during the 1930s, and the fact that JM supplied medical care to the community and owned many of the homes Jeffrey mine workers lived in, meant that employees had a lot to lose in pressuring the company to recognize the union. Despite this fact, the crisis of the Depression and the urging of Catholic union leaders that workers demand JM recognize the collective convinced Jeffrey mine employees to go on strike in 1937.
The strike lasted eight days. In total, 1,100 male and 50 female Jeffrey mine employees participated in the dispute, demanding a wage increase of 33 percent and recognition of their union.84 The Toronto Clarion described the conflict as “one of the most important strikes in the province” because of the financial value of the asbestos industry.85 Greater still, however, was the importance of the dispute to the community of Asbestos, which provided the labor and the land that JM relied on to pull itself—and perhaps the industry—out of the Depression. Over the strike’s eight days, Jeffrey mine workers received the wage increase they demanded and recognition of their union, now called the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC). In addition to these labor advances, a committee of workers and company officials banished the head of JM’s employment office in Asbestos and the vice president of JM’s Canadian operations.86 The head of the employment office did not speak French, which made industrial relations difficult. And, despite his honorary seat and voting privileges in the Asbestos town council, the vice president was too often in the United States on business and thus had failed to fulfill his duties at the Jeffrey mine.
JM employees in Asbestos went on strike four more times between 1937 and 1949. Workers demanded greater control over how JM operated the Jeffrey mine and the community land surrounding it. Employees urged the company to slow down production and to decrease its reliance on new technologies that made their labor redundant. Furthermore, employees routinely submitted suggestions for reform at the Jeffrey mine, some ninety-two of them between January and April 1948 alone.87 The people of Asbestos enjoyed the economic gains the industry brought them, but were growing increasingly frustrated with the company’s dominance over every aspect of community land and life.
Each time JM expanded the boundaries of the pit to prevent landslides and ensure the quantity and quality of the extracted mineral, a portion of the community had to move away from the heart of Asbestos. Following the mine’s 1928 expansion, JM further enlarged the pit in 1933 and in 1938.88 Then, in the late 1940s, at the height of postwar production, the company again announced it would extend the limits of the Jeffrey mine. It also introduced new mechanized shovels, which replaced 40 percent of the workforce.89 In the post-Depression, postwar Asbestos of 1948, these were unacceptable changes to the community. Quebec Minister of Labour Antonio Barrette sensed “a problem brewing” in Asbestos.90 After the CTCC distributed Burton LeDoux’s exposé on asbestosis to its union members, and after contract negotiations with JM broke down in February 1949, the workers at the Jeffrey mine voted to strike. Along with wage increases, prime among the workers’ demands were mandatory union dues of 3 percent of the wages of all employees (even nonunionized ones), job security, and the aforementioned dust clause, which would mandate the elimination of the dangerous asbestos dust.91 After five months without wages, and with JM compromising very little, Jeffrey mine workers voted to end the strike and agreed to a settlement lacking provisions for job security and better health and safety measures.
The pivotal 1949 strike convinced workers and the community that having a job was more important than occupational health. JM did not immediately reemploy Jeffrey mine workers who had joined the strike. In the community, this led to panic; workers begged the company and the provincial government to be taken back. In an August 1949 letter to Quebec minister of labor Antonio Barrette, JM employee Bertrand McNeil voiced the uncertainty and desperation some felt in the aftermath of the strike: “I need to work. I’ve had no bad relations with the company. I would like to know if they are going to take all of us back or if we’re waiting for nothing. My father has a large family and I’m the only one who can help them.”92 The strike had taught workers and their families that nothing mattered more than employment, not even health.
In Asbestos, bitterness and animosity reigned during and after the 1949 strike. The local population began to use the Chez Nous Ideal, a local cooperative home-building group, to reduce its reliance on JM. Townspeople bought shares, pledging material and five hours of labor toward a new house for every member.93 Townspeople had become increasingly dependent on rented company-built housing and were forced to leave whenever JM took more land to expand operations. The flaws of this employer-employee, landlord-tenant relationship became clear during the 1949 strike, when the company threatened to evict strikers to house strikebreakers.94 Although residents had heretofore enjoyed the perks of living in a company town, JM’s response to the1949 strike taught the people of Asbestos their vulnerability.
As the people of Asbestos came to more fully understand that vulnerability, JM became even more aware of the industry’s power. Although the strike had frozen the global asbestos trade due to lack of raw mineral coming from the asbestos towns in the province that joined Jeffrey mine workers during the conflict, the supply shortage had actually benefited the industry. Confronted with a shortage of some quarter million tons because of the months of inactivity,95 JM attempted to purchase as much land in Asbestos as it could. Despite the company’s power at the boom’s height, the town council hesitated to satisfy its need for land. Before the strike, things had been far different; the council had acquiesced to almost everything JM requested. Policy regarding the Chez Nous Ideal also changed after the strike: when the collective asked for land at a discounted price for the construction of twenty homes and new roads and sewers, to which the council agreed.96 The strike had changed the community’s land politics.
As community members and company officials negotiated these changes, JM continued to assert its authority over the town’s land. When the Chez Nous Ideal attempted to build one hundred homes on new land, JM warned that the parcel was an unstable mix of sand and gravel, with several large, deep holes that the company had created while testing its value.97 JM proved itself the expert on land in Asbestos, and the collective suspended the project. The incident showed how industrialization had scarred the town and how residents were running out of space. The Jeffrey mine was literally devouring the community.
In 1955, almost 10,000 people lived in Asbestos. Anticipating further population growth because of the industry’s prosperity, the town council purchased more land for expansion, paying for it in part from money collected from JM construction permits.98 The Chez Nous Ideal was now the largest provider of housing in Asbestos, building 124 homes in 1956 alone. Homes built by the Chez Nous Ideal were signs that local land was meant for the community, not the industry. However, in 1958, the company again presented plans to expand the mine.
The expansion would be gradual but massive. Echoing its past reasoning, the council agreed to the extension because the development of the mine was necessary for the community’s continued prosperity, even though JM had no intention of hiring more workers in the future.99 This was a dramatic change in company-community relations. It showed JM’s conviction that the land in Asbestos was to be used for mining purposes, not community development.
The global demand for asbestos doubled between 1955 and 1965; by the end of this period, the industry was worth over $148 million in annual income to the province.100 With this boom came greater danger. Giant rocks were blasted out of the pit and into local homes in 1965, but because the company had asked people to leave at-risk areas, JM believed it was not at fault.101 The constant noise, dust, and mine expansion changed how locals saw JM, the Jeffrey mine, and themselves, and prompted the editor of the local paper to write that the community was becoming the “hellhole of Quebec.”102
By 1967, JM’s expansion of the mine had consumed 54 percent of town land and destroyed 250 buildings. Despite increased industrialization, and despite the danger of huge rocks blasting through the community, the people of Asbestos maintained their connection to the mine. During the 1967 St-Jean Baptiste Day parade, workers waved from a float while holding up a sign loaded with poignant, troubling double meanings: “Asbestos: Our Heritage.”103 While everyone in Asbestos saw the land in terms of financial security and gain, Jeffrey mine employees also looked to it for identity.
JM did not acknowledge this local identity. In the 1970s, company-community tension surrounding workable versus livable land persisted. Housing remained a major issue, and residents forced to move because of JM’s endless expansion of the Jeffrey mine had nowhere to go. Many families also lived in dangerous proximity to the mine. They lobbied for a 1,000-foot buffer zone between the town and the pit, but this was impossible to achieve without additional residential relocation. JM was turning its back on the people of Asbestos, as new technologies reduced the company’s reliance on its human workforce. Officials were also beginning to understand that because of the mineral’s negative health effects, the future of the community—and the industry—was limited.
As the 1970s wore on, community objections to JM’s practices grew more vocal. The town council described rocks flying from the Jeffrey mine in 1977 as acts of vandalism. Local officials also complained of rising clouds of dust so thick that life in Asbestos had become unacceptable and intolerable.104 Thick clouds of toxic dust, flying rocks, and the constant noise of new machines had transformed the community into an industrial horror. This was not how land and people were supposed to interact.
Despite the realities and risks involved and the town council’s complaints, townspeople were committed to keeping the industry thriving. The local population was convinced that the community’s survival depended on the industry’s survival. As the negative health effects of asbestos became widely known throughout the Western world, the people of Asbestos remained silent on the issue. JM’s American employees, thanks in part to differences in U.S. and Canadian law, reacted completely differently to this knowledge. By the early 1980s, JM was increasingly plagued by multimillion-dollar asbestos-related class-action workers’ compensation lawsuits in the United States. The industry was collapsing, and there was little the people of Asbestos could do to stop it. In August 1982, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States, and the local newspaper in Asbestos claimed that without JM, the community would collapse.105
Local investors purchased the Jeffrey mine from JM in 1983. The company left Asbestos after having been an important presence there for more than half a century. The pit had grown to 6,500 feet east to west, 6,000 feet north to south, and 1,000 feet deep. Its immense size made life in the community difficult, but not as difficult as a collapsed industry would. Despite JM’s bankruptcy and abandonment, the local population remained committed to the industry. Some citizens left town to seek more stable, healthy employment, but many remained, hoping for a revival of the asbestos industry. Municipal officials declared that 1984 would be the “year of asbestos.”106
The Quebec government has subsidized the province’s asbestos industry since 1978. After JM sold the Jeffrey mine in 1983, both provincial and federal government officials became involved in the survival of Quebec’s asbestos towns. This began a trend in which the government supported the industry by doing what JM could no longer do: denying medical evidence, overlooking the welfare of community members, refusing to adequately label shipments of asbestos to other countries, and agreeing to sell the mineral to developing nations that would not uphold strict health regulations.
Government support sustained the acceptance of risk in Asbestos until 2012, when the mine was finally closed. Generations worked at the Jeffrey mine surrounded by dust they knew to be dangerous. JM employees consistently refused to wear respirators and chose not to push the company for better workplace safety. This was a toxic environment, but neither the community nor the company could afford to admit it. JM manipulated medical evidence and the workers in Asbestos, but the community also played an active role in developing a local understanding of risk, environmental change, and collapse.
The collapse of Asbestos was unlike that of other mining communities, such as Cobalt, Ontario, or St. Clair, Pennsylvania, because the local mineral deposits have not been exhausted. It was different than the bust of uranium towns in the American West, which survive by marketing their communities to tourists in search of 1950s atomic nostalgia.107 In fact, throughout their community’s history of triumph and collapse, Jeffrey mine workers were unlike other asbestos industry employees, including those who worked elsewhere for JM. They were not the industry’s only miners, and they were not its only French Canadian workers. But the community’s conduct complicates and challenges the international literature on the asbestos industry and mining communities.
Everything in Asbestos has occurred in the extreme: land exploitation, profits, disease rates, global renown, and industrial collapse. The international rejection of asbestos led to the collapse of the community and the loss of JM, a dominant presence from 1916 to 1983. The town’s different factions did not always live in harmony and often went through periods of great animosity, but through constant negotiation, and recognition that they shared common goals, a fierce identity was created that was rooted in the Jeffrey mine and its seemingly limitless circular veins of asbestos.
1. For more context on this population shift, see Jean-Pierre Kesteman, Peter Southam, and Diane Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons de l’est: Les Régions du Québec (Sainte-Foy, Québec: Les Presses de l’université Laval, 1998); and Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard, Quebec: A History, 1867–1929, trans. Robert Chodos (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1983).
2. Geoffrey Tweedale, Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner and Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.
3. Canadian Mining Review (October 1896), 218.
4. W.G. Clarke, W.G. Clarke Fonds, Eastern Townships Research Centre (hereafter cited as ETRC), Sherbrooke, Quebec.
5. W.G. Clarke, W.G. Clarke Fonds, ETRC.
6. Johns-Manville News Pictorial 1:1 (December 1938): 1; Johns-Manville News Pictorial 2:1 (January–February 1939): 3; Joan Ross, “Survey of Female Employees in Canadian Textile Department,” 1944, “Asbestos Chronology,” Asbestos Claims Research Facility (hereafter cited as ACRF), https://www.claimsres.com/about-us/services/asbestos-claims-research-facility/, 34.
7. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
8. Asbestos: Its Sources, Extraction, Preparation, Manufacture, and Uses in Industry and Engineering (Berlin: Becker and Haag, 1928), 17.
9. Elizabeth W. Gillies, “The Asbestos Industry since 1929 with Special Reference to Canada” (PhD diss., McGill University, 1941), 40.
10. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos (minutes of town council, village of Asbestos), 6 December 1933, p. 146.
11. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 9 May 1934, p. 187, and 16 May 1934, p. 190.
12. Oliver Bowles and B.H. Stoddard, “Asbestos,” in Minerals Yearbook, 1934, ed. O.E. Kiessling (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), 1014.
13. Oliver Bowles and M.A. Cornthwaite, “Asbestos,” in Minerals Yearbook, 1937, ed. Herbert H. Hughes (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937), 1363.
14. Quebec asbestos production went from 301,287 tons worth $9,958,183 in 1937 to 389,688 tons worth $14,072,000 in 1938. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1938), 65.
15. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 30 September 1938, p. 158.
16. W. Gillies Ross, “Encroachment of the Jeffrey Mine on the Town of Asbestos, Quebec,” Geographic Review 57:4 (1967): 529.
17. Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).
18. R.C. Rowe, “Mining and Milling Operations of the Canadian Johns-Manville Company Ltd. at Asbestos, PQ,” Canadian Mining Journal (April 1939), 190.
19. Ibid, 185.
20. Canadian Mining Journal (15 March 1917), 121.
21. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1938), 65.
22. Oliver Bowles and K.G. Warner, “Asbestos,” in Minerals Yearbook, 1939, ed. Herbert H. Hughes (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), 1309.
23. Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25.
24. Gillies Ross, “Encroachment of the Jeffrey Mine,” 8.
25. H.R. Rice, “The Asbestos Industry in Quebec,” Canadian Mining Journal (October 1948), 148.
26. Marc Vallières, Des Mines et des Hommes: Histoire de l’Industrie Minérale Québécois des Origines au Début des Années 1980 (Québec: Publications du Québec, 1989), 348.
27. Entre Nous (Montreal: The Canadian Johns-Manville Co., February 1951), 9.
28. This was 100,000 tons annually. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1952), 106.
29. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1953), 101.
30. Canadian Mining Journal (May 1967), 45.
31. For more on this widening divide in views of asbestos mining, see David Egilman, Corey Fehnel, and Susanna Rankin Bohme, “Exposing the ‘Myth’ of ABC: ‘Anything but Chrysotile’; A Critique of the Canadian Asbestos Mining Industry and McGill University Chrysotile Studies,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 44 (2003); McCulloch and Tweedale, Defending the Indefensible, 226.
32. L.K. Walkom, “New Shaft, Unusual New Mill: Feature Expansion at World’s Largest Asbestos-Producing Property,” Canadian Mining Journal (October 1954), 57.
33. Ibid., 58.
34. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1955), 89–90.
35. Hugh Jackson, JM, 13 March 1981, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 188–89.
36. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1977), 125.
37. W.E. Cooke, “Fibrosis of the Lungs Due to the Inhalation of Asbestos Dust,” British Medical Journal (1924): 487.
38. See, for example, Larry Lankton, Cradle to Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
39. R.H. Stevenson, CJM Asbestos, “Talk by Dr. Stevenson to Quebec Asbestos Producers,” 23 May 1938, p. 1, Turner & Newall Archives, Manchester, England.
40. Frank G. Pedley, “Asbestosis,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 22:2 (1930): 253.
41. The reason the workers at Thetford had a higher incidence of asbestosis was because significant asbestos mining had been in operation there since the early 1870s, whereas it was not until JM purchased the Jeffrey mine, in 1918, that extraction and processing levels in Asbestos increased in scale and number. As asbestos-related disease is often dose-to-longevity-specific, the early start of Thetford mine employees meant that they were among the first in Quebec to develop asbestosis.
42. Frank G. Pedley, “Report of the Physical Examination and X-Ray Examination of Asbestos Workers in Asbestos and Thetford Mines, Quebec” (Montreal: McGill/Metropolitan Life, 1930), ACRF, 10.
43. At this time, Metropolitan Life provided insurance for JM. David Egilman and Candace M. Hom, “Corruption of the Medical Literature: A Second Visit,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 34 (1998): 402.
44. Dr. McConnell, Metropolitan Life, to JM Attorneys, 9 July 1931, “Doc 7,” ACRF, 129.
45. “Asbestos Chronology,” 1929, ACRF, 1.
46. E.M. Voorhees, Johns-Manville Co., to S.A. Williams, VP, Johns-Manville Co., 28 July 1931. “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 6.
47. J.P. Kottcamp, Waukegan Plant Manager, to S.A. Williams, VP, Johns-Manville Co., 25 November 1932, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 5.
48. Leroy Gardner, Saranac Laboratory, to Hektoen, JM, 15 March 1943, “Doc. 7,” 31; Dr. Leroy Gardner, “Draft Report,” “Doc. 7,” 29, both in ACRF.
49. Joan Ross, “Survey of Female Employees in Canadian Textile Department,” 1944, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 34.
50. Ibid.
51. E.E. Keal, “Asbestosis and Abdominal Neoplasms,” Lancet (December 1960), 1211.
52. Gerrit W.H. Schepers, “Chronology of Asbestos Cancer Discoveries: Experimental Studies of the Saranac Laboratory,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 27 (1995): 593–606; “Asbestos Chronology,” 1930s–1964, ACRF, 3.
53. Schepers, “Chronology of Asbestos Cancer Discoveries,” 600.
54. Ibid., 602–3.
55. Kenneth Smith, CJM Asbestos, to Paul Cartier, Thetford, 6 July 1948, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 43.
56. Burton LeDoux, L’Amiantose à East Broughton: Un Village de Trois Mille Âmes Étouffe dans la Poussière (n.p.: privately printed, 1949), 3, 55.
57. Historical perspectives on the Quiet Revolution vary. See, for example, Michael D. Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985); Linteau et al., Quebec; Kenneth McRoberts, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988); and Pierre Vallières, White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec Terrorist, trans. Joan Pinkham (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971).
58. (Toronto) Globe and Mail, 23 April 1949, p. 7.
59. For more information on environmental health as a strike issue, see Jessica van Horssen, “‘À faire un peu de poussière’: Environmental Health and the Asbestos Strike of 1949,” Labour/LeTravail 70 (Autumn 2012).
60. Maurice Duplessis, Premier of Quebec, “Letter of Address to the Documentation catholique de Paris,” May 1950, reprinted in Esther Delisle and Pierre K. Malouf, Le Quatuor d’Asbestos: Autour de la Grève d’Amiante (Montreal: Les Éditions Varia, 2004), 11.
61. Daniel C. Braun and David Truan, “An Epidemiological Study of Lung Cancer in Asbestos Miners,” American Medical Association Archives of Industrial Health 17 (June 1958): 31–33.
62. See, for example, René Dubos and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society, introductory essay by Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz (1952; reprinted, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Nadja Durbach, “‘They Might as Well Brand Us’: Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England,” Social History of Medicine 13:1 (2000): 45–63; and Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
63. I.J. Selikoff, J. Churg, and E.C. Hammond, “Asbestos Exposure and Neoplasia,” Journal of the American Medical Association 188:1 (April 1964): 146.
64. I.H. Sloane to H.M. Jackson, 25 April 1954, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 74.
65. JM Memo, 11 August 1975, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 167.
66. Dr. Kent Wise, notes on discussion with Clifford Sheckler, Manager, JM Occupational Environmental Control, “Asbestos Chronology,” 1969, ACRF, 144.
67. CJM to T.H. Davidson, February 1970, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 138; Reitze to Paul Kotin, JM Health, Safety and Environment VP, 11 July 1978, “Asbestos Chronology,” 175.
68. “Nous en avons soupé de la poussière et du bruit,” Le Citoyen, 23 April 1968, p. 1 (English translation by author).
69. H.M. Jackson to Drs. G.W. Wright and T.H. Davidson, 17 March 1971, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 153.
70. Canadian Mining Journal (February 1972), 139.
71. John Beattie, QAMA Meeting Minutes, 15 December 1965, Quebec Asbestos Mining Association archives (privately held; hereafter cited as QAMA), 2.
72. John Corbett McDonald, McGill University, “Report,” 1972, QAMA, 4–9.
73. J. Turiaf and J.P. Battesti, “Le rôle de l’agression asbestosique dans la provocation du mésothéliome pleural,” La vie médicale au Canada français (June 1974), 653.
74. Walter Cooper to Paul Kotin, 29 July 1975, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 166.
75. Paul Kotin to JM executives, memorandum, 20 September 1977, “Asbestos Chronology,” ACRF, 173.
76. JM Today 2:3 (1980): 2.
77. Canadian Mining Review (October 1896), 218.
78. “Asbestos: Where We Live and Work,” Johns-Manville News Pictorial (October 1959), 11.
79. Linteau et al., Quebec, 155.
80. “Une Grève se Déclare dans les Mines de la Manville Asbestos Co.,” La Tribune, 29 May 1918, p. 1.
81. Sherbrooke La Tribune, 3 September 1912, p. 7.
82. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 27 April 1927, p. 137.
83. Réjean Lampron, Marc Cantin, and Élise Grimard, Asbestos: Filons d’histoire, 1899–1999 (Asbestos, Québec: Centenaire de la ville d’Asbestos, 1999), 140.
84. H.K. Sherry, Strike Report, 2 February 1937, p. 8, Department of Labour, Strikes and Lockouts, Record Group (RG) 27, Vol. 330, Reel T-2713, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter cited as LAC).
85. Toronto Clarion, 27 January 1937, Department of Labour, Strikes and Lockouts, RG 27, Vol. 330, Reel T-2713, LAC.
86. Montreal Gazette, 27 January 1937; Toronto Telegram, 29 January 1937, both in Department of Labour, Strikes and Lockouts, RG 27, Vol. 330, Reel T-2713, LAC.
87. L’Asbestos, 20 April 1948, p. 1.
88. Gillies Ross, “Encroachment of the Jeffrey Mine,” 529.
89. Léopold Rogers, Government of Quebec, “Rapport Final d’Intervention,” Arbitration Report, 21 May 1948, P659 7C 018 05–02–008B-01, 1982–11–008\1, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Quebec City, Quebec (hereafter cited as BANQ).
90. Gérard Tremblay, Quebec Deputy Minister of Labour, to Paul E. Bernier, Secretary, Commission de Relations ouvrières, 21 April 1948; and Gérard Tremblay, Quebec Deputy Minister of Labour, to Cyprien Miron, Director, Service de conciliation et d’arbitrage, 21 April 1948, P659 7C 018 05–02–008B-01, 1982–11–008\1, BANQ.
91. Le Devoir, 15 February 1949, p. 1; La Tribune, 14 February 1949, p. 1, and 15 February 1949, p. 5.
92. “J’ai 20 ans, j’avais 1 ans et demi de service et j’ai besoin de travailler. Je n’ai pas de mauvais raports avec la compagnie. Je voudrais savoir s’ils vont tous nous reprende où s’ils nous font attendre pour rien. Mon père a une grosse famille et une maison à payer et je suis seul pour l’aider. Je payais pour mon frère de 16 ans qui fait des études pour devenir religieux.” Bertrand McNeil to Antonio Barrette, Quebec Minister of Labour, 19 August 1949, P659 7C 018 05–02–008B-01; 1982–11–008\1, BANQ (English translation by author).
93. Entre Nous, 8.
94. Le Devoir, 22 April 1949, p. 3.
95. G.W. Josephson and F.M. Barsigian, “Asbestos,” Minerals Yearbook, 1949, ed. Allen F. Matthews (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), 139; Canadian Mining Journal (August 1949), 54.
96. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 9 September 1949, p. 73, and 7 June 1950, p. 138.
97. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 2 September 1953, p. 73.
98. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 21 July 1955, p. 236.
99. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 20 May 1958, p. 174, and 27 May 1958, p. 176.
100. This figure is in 1965 Canadian dollars. See Canadian Mining Journal, February 1965, p. 129.
101. Antonio Hamel to Bérubé, Government of Quebec, 10 October 1979, E78 S999, 7 A 009 03–06–004B-01, 1993–06–004\12, BANQ.
102. “Bouge au Québec,” Le Citoyen, 14 October 1964, p. 4 (author’s translation).
103. “Amiante: Notre Patrimoine,” Le Citoyen, 28 December 1974, p. 186 (author’s translation).
104. Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 18 May 1977.
105. James Kelly, “Manville’s Bold Maneuver,” Time, 6 September 1982; Le Citoyen, 10 August 1982, p. 2.
106. “L’Année de l’Amiante,” in Procès-verbal, La ville d’Asbestos, 19 December 1983, p. 143 (author’s translation).
107. For more information on these communities, see Charlie Angus and Brit Griffin, We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death, and Life of a Mining Town (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996); Anthony F.C. Wallace, St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town’s Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); and Michael A. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004).