Like a camera obscura, Alice Lovejoy’s recently published book, “Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War,” presents the Eastman Kodak Co. in an unfamiliar and disorienting light.
She traces Kodak’s mid-century dominance not to George Eastman’s brilliance but to German dye factories, commandeered with the help of friendly military connections, and to the coal fields of the Belgian Congo and the cotton fields of the Carolinas, where the basic ingredients for film were obtained through brutal labor practices.
In so doing, she changes the story’s main setting from Rochester to Kingsport, Tenn., where the subsidiary Tennessee Eastman played a key part in the Manhattan Project.
“As a product of the chemical industry, film is terribly ordinary,” writes Lovejoy, a film and media historian and a professor at the University of Minnesota. “It begins in wood, cotton, and oil, substances that can also end in a bomb or in fuel for a warship—like film, essential products of the 20th century. … The places where film was made were both part of a ‘dream factory’ and, simply, factories.”
“Tales of Militant Chemistry,” published in August by the University of California Press, picks up Kodak’s story in the mid-1910s, when the company was at a crossroads. The federal government had opened an antitrust investigation that changed the trajectory of the company’s expansion plans; rather than buying up rival camera and film manufacturers, it began to accelerate its strategy for vertical integration, gaining control over the sources of the raw materials it needed.
One such product was wood, which is the key ingredient in methanol, which is needed to churn out cellulose acetate, without which “safety film” —motion picture film that did not risk combustion, as its predecessor cellulose nitrate did—could not be made. And so Kodak bought a plant in the town of Kingsport.
Like Rochester, Kingsport was a company town—devoutly non-unionized and largely dependent on the vision of one man. George Eastman visited in person and noted approvingly that Kingsport had “about 10,000 inhabitants, only one of which is a foreigner.”
Through a series of market disruptions and chemists’ innovations, Kingsport would eventually become the home of Tennessee Eastman, one of the nation’s most prolific wartime chemical manufacturers. (Now known as Eastman Chemical Co., it was spun off from Kodak in 1994.)
Other raw materials had to be procured from farther afield. Kodak and other manufacturers got uranium and other elements from mines in the Belgian Congo, where miners dug them out with hand tools under forced labor conditions and with minimal safety precautions.
Lovejoy compares Kodak to Agfa, a German competitor that also turned its production capacity to military ends. At the end of World War II, Kodak and other companies raced into France and Germany to survey for raw materials, manufacturing equipment and specialized knowledge they could turn to profit.
After 1945 the story returns to Tennessee. Kingsport is about 125 miles from Oak Ridge, the administrative headquarters of the Manhattan Project.
Kodak employees served as key technical advisers in research into military uses for uranium and plutonium. When nuclear fallout fell together with lake-effect snow in Rochester in November 1951, causing black spots on film, the company helped conceal the potential health risks.
Lovejoy also recalls an incident in 1988 when a pipe burst near Kodak Park, sending 30,000 gallons of industrial solvent spilling out into the surrounding neighborhood. She quotes a Kodak spokesman at a meeting of concerned School 41 parents, giving an off-handed comment that could serve as an epigraph for the book: “We’ve never been thought of as a chemical company. We just made the yellow boxes.”
A scholarly book about international chemical manufacturing, full of proper German nouns, inevitably risks running aground in details. Lovejoy, despite her best efforts, does not always avoid this risk. Rochester readers expecting a book for their local history shelves may grow impatient with the pages Lovejoy dedicates to Tennessee, Berlin and other far-off places.
Nonetheless, the book is valuable for the very different light it shines on a part of the Kodak empire that, from the company seat, has always looked like a far-off province.
The book closes with a mention of Kodak’s venture into pharmaceutical production in 2020, to be fueled by a $765 million federal government loan that got derailed by suspicions of insider trading. At the time, the old film company seemed like a questionable fit for the loan.
As Lovejoy points out, though, Kodak was always more than a film company; its subsidiaries produced chemicals for pharmaceuticals starting in the 1930s. Her contribution is to bring that misperception into clearer focus.
Justin Murphy is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. He is the research and communications coordinator for Our Local History and a former reporter for the Democrat and Chronicle.
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