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years, a leading Swiss medical professor wascalling bladder cancer in aniline factories “the most noticeable occupational disease that made a most terrible impression on all who came in contact with it because of its awfulness and malignancy.” 20
    The growing evidence of harm did nothing to slow the industry’s growth. Like its competitors, Ciba expanded all over Europe after the turn of the century, building factories in Poland, Russia, France, and England. By 1913, Ciba had almost three thousand employees, most of them making products for export or working overseas. The German companies grew even faster. In fact, dyes and pharmaceuticals were the two biggest sources of export revenue for Switzerland and Germany until World War I, when many of the German factories switched over to making explosives and poison gas for the Kaiser’s armies. The neutral Swiss eventually picked up the slack and thrived. In 1917, Ciba’s revenues topped fifty million Swiss francs (equivalent to about US $180 million today)—and 30 percent of it was profit. 21
    In the aftermath of the lost war, and the forced abrogation of many of their prized patents, Germany’s chemical companies embarked on a new survival strategy. The formerly fierce competitors began to work very closely with each other to try to stay ahead of newly strengthened foreign competitors, especially in the United States. Their efforts would climax in the 1925 merger of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and others into the conglomerate
Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie
(Community of Interest of the Dye Industry), or I.G. Farben, which would gain infamy during World War II as the patent holder of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based poison gas used at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. In the years after the First World War, however, the German companies were still admired for their technical prowess.
    The Germans’ new cartel strategy had a predictable impact across the border in Basel, the manufacturing hub of
der Räuber-Staat
, with its long tradition of appropriating foreign ideas. Swiss profits were falling as German companies reentered world markets, so Ciba, Geigy, and Sandoz, the three largest Swiss dye manufacturers, decided to form a “community of interest” of their own. It was a partnership, not a merger (the mergers would not come until 1971 and 1996), and it was aimed in part at breaking into the biggest market in the world.American tariffs were high. The only way around them was to buy or build a plant in the United States to make products for the American market. In 1920, the three Swiss companies did just that, buying two old factories in Cincinnati, Ohio.
    The dye makers of Basel were nothing if not consistent. If the Ohio Valley was America’s Ruhr, its industrial heartland, then the Ohio River was its Rhine and Cincinnati its Basel. The Ohio was wide and deep with a brisk current, and Cincinnati was full of factories, which meant that the newly named Cincinnati Chemical Works would not stand out. Best of all, the factories the Swiss bought were already hooked up to the city’s sewer system, which “treated” waste only in the loosest sense. As in Basel, the city pipes simply channeled it into the creeks and canals that emptied into the concealing waters of the Ohio. At the time, no one seemed bothered that the river was also the principal source of drinking water for more than seven hundred thousand people who lived in Cincinnati and in fourteen other cities farther downstream. After more than a half-century of dumping hazardous chemicals into the Rhine, the Swiss companies were not interested in changing the way they did business now that they had arrived in America.
    Subsequent events unfolded like a movie sequel. By the mid-1920s, the Cincinnati Chemical Works was generating steady profits for the Swiss, who responded by expanding into resins and specialty chemicals as well as dyes. Both factories—one in the city’s Norwood neighborhood and the