Bart Elmore on Investigating Large Multinational Firms

Your Fellowship project, Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future, tells the history of Monsanto from making DDT to now manipulating DNA. Could you tell us why you chose to write this history?

I really stumbled upon this story. While researching my first book about the environmental history of Coca-Cola, I received permission from Monsanto to review the chemical company’s corporate records housed at Washington University in St. Louis. At the time, I was investigating the history of Monsanto’s caffeine contracts with Coca-Cola (Monsanto produced caffeine for Coke from broken and damaged  tea leaves). It was just supposed to be a chapter’s worth of research, but I soon got hooked. I left that first trip to St. Louis knowing there was a bigger story in those archives. So I went back to unpack the history of Monsanto, a company now merged with the powerful German pharmaceutical firm Bayer, which is the largest genetically engineered seed seller in the world.

Just two years into this project, everything changed. In 2015, news broke about links between Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and cancer. And this was just the beginning of the media frenzy that enveloped the company. Soon more lawsuits followed for other Monsanto herbicides and chemicals. Though none of these issues were front and center in my mind when I started the project, I knew I had to leave the archives and embark on a global journey to understand the history that was unfolding right before my eyes. Now, six years later, I’m excited to share with the public what I’ve found.

Your previous book, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism, also took on a huge corporation. What draws you to these subjects? What is the research process like and what challenges do you face reporting on such behemoths?

If I was being honest, I’d say that after this book, I’d like to take a break from investigating large multinational firms. I’m kind of tired. It has really been a grind, in part because firms like Coca-Cola and Monsanto are information gatekeepers, carefully controlling what documents they release to the public. I’ve had to fight hard to get the records that serve as the foundation of this book, and it took roughly eight years to put all these materials together. But though I’m a bit weary, I also feel that I have an obligation to continue work in this area, in part because I have learned so much over the past 15 years from both journalists and historians about how to gain access to confidential corporate information.

I have to thank New America here because the organization put me in touch with some of the leading investigative journalists in the country, and these writers shared wisdom that helped make this book better. In graduate school, historians are rigorously trained in the art of dissecting an archive, but rarely do we learn how to talk to sensitive sources over encrypted phones or how to adequately protect vulnerable interviewees who want to speak about secrets inside big firms. In the years ahead, I plan to take lessons I learned at New America back to the classroom in hopes that the next generation of business historians can learn essential skills needed to investigate powerful corporations that wield outsized influence on our global economy.

You’re an Environmental Historian at Ohio State University. How did you find that speciality? What does it mean to be a historian of a quickly-changing environment?

When I went to graduate school I did not know the discipline of environmental history existed. Though the field dates back to the 1970s, when the modern environmental movement was taking off, scholarship in this concentration had not made it into my high school or undergraduate curriculum. But when I took a seminar on the subject in my second year of graduate school, I was immediately hooked. I’d always been someone deeply committed to environmental causes, and I was intrigued by a field that promised to use the past to help develop solutions for the future. I remember when I was applying to graduate school, one potential adviser mentioned that he thought I might have a “messianic complex” (at least that’s what I remember him saying). I felt his assessment was a bit much, but he was on to something. I was indeed passionate about writing histories that could be used by various stakeholders in our own time to better the world in which we live. I’m still driven by that conviction, precisely because the environmental challenges we face right now are so pressing. I’m not sure that drive will ever go away, especially now that I have two young boys, born during the writing of this book, who have to inherit whatever world we leave them.

Subscribe here to receive next month’s issue of The Fifth Draft.