In 1966, a recruiting visit to Harvard University turned into a confrontation. Students, increasingly aware of Dow Chemical’s role as a primary manufacturer of napalm, blockaded the interview room where a company representative was scheduled to meet candidates. The slogan “Dow makes napalm” became a rallying cry, and the tactic spread. By 1967, a protest at the University of Wisconsin against Dow recruiters escalated into violence when police were called in, using tear gas and clubs on students.

The clashes were broadcast nationally, turning a routine corporate recruiting cycle into a flashpoint of the anti-war movement. The target of these protests was one of America’s most powerful industrial empires. Dow Chemical had been built from scratch by Herbert Henry Dow, who in 1897 began extracting chemicals from brine. In 1910, he fought the bromine war against a German cartel that held a global monopoly.

When the Germans dumped cheap bromine on the US market to bankrupt him, Dow secretly bought their product and sold it back to Europe at a profit. He won. That aggressive, brilliant, combative approach defined the company’s culture. When World War I began, Dow became a key supplier of chlorine and phosgene gas to the US military, establishing an early and profitable relationship with the War Department.

That relationship deepened under his son, Willard H. Dow. During World War II, the younger Dow managed a $100 million government contract to produce magnesium for aircraft, a project plagued by allegations of corruption and cost overruns. The company also produced styrene for synthetic rubber while dumping PCBs into Michigan’s Tittabawassee River, contaminating it for decades.

Willard Dow worked closely with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor, to develop chemical weapons. After the war, Dow pivoted its industrial might from the military to the American household. In 1949, a scientist in a Dow lab struggled with a clingy material called polyvinylidene chloride. It was useless for its intended purpose but almost perfect as a barrier to air and moisture.

The company rebranded it, and Saran Wrap was born. By 1970, it captured 40% of the American food wrap market. The company’s true postwar dominance, however, came from the farm. Dow mass-produced DDT in the 1940s, selling millions of pounds of the miracle compound before its catastrophic environmental consequences were understood.

By 1970, its Freeport, Texas plant had become the largest ethylene production site in the world, churning out over a billion pounds a year. The company’s strategy was a three-pronged assault: vertical integration, owning every step of the production chain from salt brine wells to finished chemicals; political integration, embedding itself within the Pentagon’s procurement process through lobbying and advisory roles; and weaponization. In 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated, the US military faced a strategic problem: the Viet Cong were hidden beneath dense jungle canopy. The military needed a way to burn the jungle down and a way to kill the plants that provided cover.

Dow’s sales team had answers for both. The first was napalm. Dow had perfected Napalm B, a new, more stable mixture that was cheaper to produce, stuck to targets more effectively, and burned longer and hotter. In 1965, Dow won an initial $5 million contract from the Department of Defense.

As the war exploded, so did demand. By 1967, Dow was the primary and soon the only producer of Napalm B for the US military, eventually capturing 65% of the market. By 1973, Dow had produced 388,000 tons of the weapon. Napalm B burned at over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, could not be extinguished, and stuck to human skin.

Water only made it burn harder. From 1965 to 1973, American bombers dropped 388,000 tons of the weapon on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Survivor accounts collected by the United Nations in 1972 described a rain of fire falling from the sky, liquid flame that stuck to children, homes, and livestock. People leapt into rivers only to find the napalm floating on the surface, still burning.

The second product would define Dow’s legacy. The military wanted a defoliant of unprecedented power. Since the 1940s, Dow and other companies had produced an herbicide called 2,4,5-T. They knew from internal testing that a byproduct of its high-temperature manufacturing process was one of the most toxic substances known to science: dioxin.

The military’s defoliation program, Operation Ranch Hand, used a 50/50 mixture of two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, shipped in barrels with orange stripes and called Agent Orange. Dow became the largest and most significant contractor, producing 11 million gallons of Agent Orange, 42% of the total supply. The company’s own internal scientists sent memos to management in 1965 warning that dioxin levels in the product were dangerously high, perhaps the most toxic molecule ever synthesized. Dow had two choices: implement a new low-temperature manufacturing process that would reduce contamination but cost money and slow production, or do nothing.

Dow did nothing. The company continued to produce Agent Orange using the hot method, creating a product contaminated with dioxin at levels thousands of times higher than what was safe, and shipped it to the US Air Force without disclosing the contamination to the government or the soldiers who would handle it. Between 1961 and 1971, Ranch Hand planes sprayed 20 million gallons of tactical herbicides over South Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of jungle and rice paddies. Dioxin entered the food chain and the human genome.

Miscarriages and stillbirths skyrocketed in sprayed areas. Children were born with missing limbs, cleft palates, massive tumors, and neurological disorders. Hundreds of thousands of children have been born with dioxin-related deformities, and because dioxin persists in the soil for decades, babies are still being born with the same defects more than 50 years later. The 300,000 American soldiers who served in Vietnam were also exposed.

They returned home with rare cancers, Parkinson’s disease at rates 50% higher than the general population, and watched their children being born with inexplicable birth defects. In 1972, an Associated Press photograph gave the horror a human face. A 9-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, ran down a highway after a napalm strike on her village, her clothes burned off, her arms outstretched. The image, which won the Pulitzer Prize, changed public perception of the war.

When asked about his company’s role, Dow’s CEO Carl Gerstacker stated in 1967, “Our only crime is that we have been a prime contractor. We have a contract. We are not a moral entity. ” The statement was seen as the height of corporate arrogance.

By 1969, facing constant negative press, campus boycotts, and recruiters afraid for their physical safety, Dow chose not to renew its napalm contract. It was a business decision; the contract had become more trouble than it was worth. But by then, the damage was done. In 1979, American veterans filed a class action lawsuit against Dow and other chemical companies.

The company’s response was denial and delay. Its lawyers argued there was no scientific evidence linking Agent Orange to health problems. They invoked the government contractor defense, arguing they were simply following orders. But in 1983, Judge Jack B.

Weinstein forced Dow to unseal internal documents. The memos proved the company had known about dioxin contamination since at least 1965, had known about chloracne in its own workers, and had actively concealed this information from the US government. With a jury trial looming, the companies settled on May 7, 1984, paying $180 million into a fund for 291,000 veteran plaintiffs. Dow’s share was $93 million, a fraction of its annual profits.

The settlement contained no admission of liability. The average veteran received a few thousand dollars. It was legal containment, not justice. In 2004, the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange, representing millions of Vietnamese plaintiffs, filed suit in the same New York court, arguing that the use of Agent Orange was a war crime.

Dow’s lawyers argued that the Geneva Protocol did not apply to herbicides, that Agent Orange was technically just a strong weed killer, and that since the US government had never ratified the relevant international law, their actions were legal. In 2005, Judge Weinstein dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that Agent Orange was not a poison under international law and accepting the government contractor defense. The appeal was rejected in 2008. The legal victories did not stop the reputational damage.

Students of later generations protested Dow for the Tittabawassee River dioxin plume, for its role in climate change, and for its 2001 acquisition of Union Carbide, which made Dow legally responsible for the Bhopal disaster, a responsibility it continued to deny. In 2014, activist investor Dan Loeb’s hedge fund Third Point took a massive stake in Dow, arguing the company was inefficient and should be broken apart. In 2017, Dow merged with DuPont in a $130 billion deal, creating the largest chemical company in the world. Two years later, the combined entity was split into three companies.

The new Dow Inc. , which emerged in 2019, was a shadow of the integrated colossus Herbert Dow had built. The original Dow Chemical was dead, dismantled not by protesters but by its own shareholders. The company’s final corporate response to its legacy was obfuscation.

It spent $100 million on an advertising campaign called “The Human Element,” attempting to rebrand itself as a force for solving the world’s problems. It has refused to pay a single dollar in compensation to Vietnamese victims, hiding behind the 2005 court ruling. Its official position remains that its only role was fulfilling a government contract. Dow’s production of napalm and Agent Orange directly catalyzed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention and the 2001 Stockholm Convention banning persistent organic pollutants.

Its name remains synonymous with the poison it unleashed, and on college campuses today, a new generation still protests it for the legacy of Vietnam, Bhopal, and Michigan.