Reviewed by: Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town by Ellen Griffith Spears Rebecca Bond Costa Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. By Ellen Griffith Spears. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiii, 440 pp. ISBN 978-1-4696-1171-6. In Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, Ellen Griffith Spears describes how Anniston, Alabama, transitioned from a “healthful Eden” during the nineteenth century to “Toxic Town, USA” by the early 2000s (18). The events leading to that shift took place over the course of about one hundred years and were rooted in the South’s economic boosterism, the growth of the American military, and the long-standing presence of racism. When Anniston’s residents learned about the dangerous chemical legacy left by industry and the military in their town, citizens mobilized to protect their homes and bodies from further contamination. In addition to the forces that initially brought chemicals to Anniston, a history of civil rights activism and a burgeoning environmental justice movement shaped responses to the toxic threats that came from both the past and present. Though much of the book focuses on “the Model City of the South,” Spears convincingly argues that the pollution and activism that took place at the local level in Anniston were actually manifestations of global trends (21). The impact of industrial development, war, racism, and pollution could be seen not just in Alabama, but nationally and internationally as well. Spears traces the conditions that led to the pollution of Anniston by Monsanto Chemical Company, as well as the story of how the United States military brought chemical weapons to the area. About four decades after the town’s founding, a group of Alabama entrepreneurs established several businesses that were related to munitions manufacturing and the rapidly developing field of synthetic chemicals. Influenced by events in World War I, the chemical industry looked for ways to harness the power of chemicals for both military and commercial interests. By the early 1930s, Swann Chemical Company in west Anniston was making a product called Aroclors—the brand name for a group of chemicals in the Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB) family. The compound became widely used by industries that needed lubricants which could withstand intense [End Page 259] levels of heat. When the Great Depression began to negatively impact Swann, Monsanto Chemical Company gained controlling interest in the business and assumed responsibility for manufacturing Aroclors. Monsanto continued producing PCBs through the 1970s, despite warnings from researchers that the compound was potentially hazardous to the health of wildlife and humans. Because the company did not share internal reports detailing the potential dangers of PCBs, residents remained unaware that the benefits of having an industrial neighbor also carried considerable peril. Lax pollution control measures and inadequate government regulations further elevated the risks faced by the local population. Monsanto Chemical Company was not the only major force in the area’s economy after World War I. In Anniston and throughout the South, the U.S. military employed a significant number of people and generated considerable revenues for surrounding locales. Several military facilities were located in Anniston during the mid–1900s, including the headquarters for the Army’s Chemical Corps. Residents were aware that the Army tested chemical weapons near their town, but citizens had little knowledge that the military also kept large stockpiles of sarin gas or VX nerve agent in the Anniston Army Depot. Spears argues that questioning the military seemed like an ill-advised idea, especially when residents depended on the money generated by having those federal facilities nearby. Two events galvanized environmental activism in Anniston in the waning decades of the twentieth century. The first came in the late 1980s, when citizens finally learned about the chemical weapons that were stored close to their town and that the Army planned to dispose of those stockpiles through incineration. A few years later, deformed catfish were discovered in Choccolocco Creek, prompting investigations into possible causes. Official testing revealed that unsafe levels of PCBs had been found in every sample of fish. In both instances, local residents mobilized to hold...