Lewis H. Brown

Lewis H. Brown (1894–1951) ran Johns-Manville for more than twenty years, as president from 1929 and as chairman from 1946 until his death. His years at the top are the years in which the company, the country's largest asbestos maker, learned that asbestos was disabling and killing its workers and chose not to tell them.

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Origin

Lewis Herold Brown was born in Creston, Iowa, in 1894 and served as an infantry captain in France in the First World War. He rose at Montgomery Ward under its president, Theodore F. Merseles, and followed Merseles to Johns-Manville in 1928. When Merseles died in March 1929, the board elected Brown, then 35, to succeed him as president; the April 1929 issue of Asbestos magazine reported it. In October 1946 he became chairman of the board and chief executive. He died suddenly in Delray Beach, Florida, in February 1951, at 57.

He was the industry's leading public figure. In 1933 he became president of the new Asbestos Institute and chairman of the Code Authority that ran the asbestos industry under the National Recovery Administration. Time put him on its cover in April 1939. During the Second World War he advised the Army's Chief of Ordnance, and in 1947 he wrote A Report on Germany for General Lucius D. Clay, a plan for reviving German industry that helped lay the ground for the Marshall Plan. He founded the American Enterprise Association, later the American Enterprise Institute. In 1949, when 2,100 workers struck Canadian Johns-Manville's mine and mill at Asbestos, Quebec, he signed the company's public account of the strike.

Significance in Asbestos Context

Brown was the company's chief executive when Johns-Manville's lawyer, Vandiver Brown (no relation), and Raybestos-Manhattan's Sumner Simpson exchanged the 1935 letters in the Sumner Simpson Papers, agreeing that the less said in public about asbestosis the better. He was still in charge in the 1940s, when the company's own doctors were finding asbestosis on the chest X-rays of its workers and the workers were not told.

The most direct evidence about him is the Roemer Deposition. In 1984 Charles H. Roemer, a former officer of Unarco, testified about a meeting in the early 1940s with Lewis Brown and Vandiver Brown at Johns-Manville's offices. He said that one of the Browns called Unarco's managers fools for telling their workers they had asbestosis, and that Vandiver Brown agreed it saved the company money to let workers keep working until they dropped dead. Evidence like this is part of why juries awarded punitive damages against Johns-Manville, and part of the history that led to its 1982 bankruptcy and the Manville Trust.

The pages of Asbestos magazine follow his career closely: his speeches, his honors, his work for the National Association of Manufacturers and the Red Cross, his statements on the 1949 strike. Manville's own 1986 review of the magazine, the Asbestos Magazine Summary, notes some three dozen of them, linked on each year's page of the magazine archive.

Related Terms

Johns-Manville, Vandiver Brown, Sumner Simpson Papers, Roemer Deposition, Raybestos-Manhattan, Unarco, Canadian Johns-Manville, Asbestos Strike of 1949, Manville Trust

Notes

• If you worked with Johns-Manville products, or at a Johns-Manville plant or mine, before the 1970s, the company's knowledge under Brown's leadership is part of the evidence your legal team may rely on.
• Claims against Johns-Manville are now paid by the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust. Ask your attorney whether you qualify to file one.

Titles in the documents

How documents describe Lewis H. Brown, each as the documents state it, with how many say so and the years they span. We record what the documents say and don't choose between them.

• started, 8/17/27, from Johns-Manville's witness index unreviewed
• Chief Executive Officer, 1929-51, from Johns-Manville's witness index unreviewed

In our library

5 documents in our library name Lewis H. Brown, by collection.

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Lewis H. Brown, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves.