An “Ever Growing Octopus”: The US Chemical Industry’s Wartime Preparations for a Postwar Chemical Age

World War II undergirded capital accumulation in the synthetic organic chemical industry, further expanding a profitable market for American industrial chemicals and chemicals for war that had been launched during World War I. The marriage of war work and chemistry contributed infrastructure, research that led to new products, and sales for a rapidly growing industry. Wartime production at government owned, contractor operated sites—many of which were turned over to industry at modest cost at the close of the war—embedded the industry in local economies near military sites around the country. War advanced industry research on an ever wider array of synthetic chemicals for domestic use in the modern American household.

During and right after World War II, newly formed corporate public relations divisions aimed to market chemicals—plastics, factory-made rubber, detergents, and synthetic fibers for clothing, carpets, and draperies—as indispensable products for the middle class home. What one industry leader termed the “unfortunate association in the public mind of chemicals and war” and emerging health concerns about possible chemical hazards both served as deterrents to wider acceptance of household chemicals. An analysis of wartime advertising campaigns explores how the industry built on the association of chemistry with the national defense to finesse these public acceptance problems. Advertisements especially targeted women consumers, naturalizing artificial products and positioning unfamiliar chemicals as not only essential to the war effort but safe for regular domestic use, indeed, necessary for the sanitary up-to-date postwar American home.