Saving Dow's History

E. N. Brandt in the reading room of the Post Street Archives, 1989. From the Dow Historical Collection, CHF Archives.

By Megan Lindsay

E. N. Brandt witnessed The Dow Chemical Company’s rise from a moderately sized family firm to the world’s second largest chemical company firsthand. But “Ned” Brandt played an unusual role at Dow. He did not merely participate in the company’s historic growth; he also preserved its records for future generations.

Brandt joined Dow in 1953 as a member of the public relations staff. At the time Dow, founded in 1897 as a bleach producer, was a fairly obscure Midwestern chemical company with annual sales of about $400 million. A major supplier to the U.S. Army during World War II, the company was just starting to expand its foreign business and begin overseas production.

Brandt himself had just returned from overseas. He had paid his way through journalism school at Michigan State University by writing for the college radio station, working for the local office of United Press International (UPI), and enlisting in the army ROTC. After graduating Brandt was sent to Normandy just after D-day. He was assigned as press officer to Le Havre, a recently liberated town, where he faced the challenge of winning the hearts and minds of the local French population. After the war Brandt worked briefly for UPI in Detroit before returning to France as an English-language scriptwriter for the French broadcast service. He later took a position as a press attaché for the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In 1953 Brandt left the State Department and returned to Michigan with his new French wife, Jeannette, and began to look for work. When Dow hired Brandt, he hadn’t heard much about the company, and he did not plan on staying at the headquarters in Midland, Michigan, for long. “Since Dow was just getting involved in the foreign field,” Brandt recalls, “I thought they would probably send me to some French part of the world.” Five decades later he still lives in Midland.

The public relations department that Brandt joined at Dow was one of the first in the chemical industry. As Brandt describes it, “public relations was a very new thing,” filled with “former newspapermen who were not sure what to do.” Brandt’s experience with the army and State Department made him invaluable to the company. From his first day at Dow, Brandt worked alongside the company’s highest executives to streamline internal communications, write speeches, and handle questions from the press. Brandt saw the company embark on a period of tremendous growth, introducing many useful chemicals and such household products as Saran Wrap and Ziploc bags. In 1965, when Brandt was named director of public relations, the company had annual sales of over $1 billion; 15 years later this figure was $10 billion, with over 50% coming from outside the United States. As a press officer Brandt also saw the company through protests against its production of napalm, its labor practices in Latin America, and presence in apartheid-era South Africa.

Brandt first became aware of the need to preserve Dow’s history in 1973. At the time Dow was engaged in a massive effort to track down documents for a discovery order related to Dow and 10 other companies’ production of Agent Orange for the U.S. military. A year and a half and over $7 million later, the search for all necessary materials was still incomplete, and the collected documents were accumulating faster than the lawyers could review them. In response to this situation Dow’s board of directors instituted aggressive records management and document disposal policies. All paper records not currently in use were to be discarded. Brandt says of the ruling, “I was protesting, jumping up and down and saying, ‘That’s awful. We’re throwing out our history. We’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.’” With the help of Herbert Dow, grandson of the company’s founder, Brandt began an underground system for rescuing the corporate historical records, storing boxes of papers in the basement of the Garden House, the headquarters of the Dow Gardens and the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation.

Ten years later the Garden House basement was almost full, and Dow finally sanctioned Brandt’s clandestine preservation program. To comply with the 1973 policy, the rescued documents were officially discarded by The Dow Chemical Company and became the property of the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation. The archives moved to the vacant Post Street School, which was owned by the foundation. In 1986 Brandt retired from Dow and moved into an office at the new Post Street Archives, where he continued to research Dow’s history. He conducted numerous oral histories of Dow executives, employees, scientists, and engineers, and wrote several books on the history of the company he helped shape. James J. Bohning, a former CHF oral historian and friend of Brandt’s, says “[his] knowledge of the history of The Dow Chemical Company is unsurpassed, in part because he lived so much of it as a Dow employee.”

In 2001 the Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation endowed CHF’s E. N. Brandt Oral History Program in honor of Brandt’s contributions to corporate history.

On 16 May 2007 CHF hosted the E. N. Brandt Oral History Symposium on the use of oral history as a method for capturing and interpreting the heritage, philosophy, and values of a company. Participants explored how oral histories can be used in corporate communications, in management training, to promote public understanding of science and business, and to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.