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Dow Chemical is a company haunted by its identities, past and present, of which there are at least three. First, there is the "traditional" Dow: the frugal, small-town chemical company founded a century ago. In this Dow, science is a calling in which one steeps oneself, as others are dedicated to art, politics or religion. It's a collegial company, close-knit and egalitarian, where chemistry PhDs stay from college until retirement, where everyone eats in the same cafeteria, and where the toxicology labs date back to the 1930s. It's the Dow whose corporate ethics says that science is responsible for quality of life, and that empirical evidence is the basis of wisdom.
But there is also the "antagonistic" Dow - the Dow of napalm and Agent Orange. This is the Dow that bitterly fought Oregon housewives and Vietnam veterans over herbicide sprays, and still denies the links between those sprays and cancer. In the 1970s and early 1980s, this Dow stonewalled information requests and pulled funding from a local university because Jane Fonda spoke there. And this is the Dow, which, even today, gets accused of backroom politics and dirty tricks.
The third Dow is admirable and a little clumsy. It's the "learning" Dow, the company with a change of heart about environmentalism. In the early 1980s, the executives of this Dow posted signs in their offices reading "Perception is Reality" --- meaning that the company's public image was as much a part of their business as the periodic table of elements, and they had better comes to terms with it. This is the Dow that funds wetlands preservation and recycling research, that consults community groups about new plants before designing them, that has lobbied for tougher regulatory standards and is working its way towards a goal of zero toxic emissions. It's the Dow that refused to take part in the hype over "Hefty" style biodegradable plastics, speaking out on the technical flaws even before the bags were popularly discredited. And, of course, this is the Dow that "lets you do great things".
You may have seen those ads. The most memorable, in my opinion, features a strawberry-blonde college student with a strong jaw, walking to the graduation stand in cap and gown for her diploma. " When I was growing up," she says in voice-over, "Mom and Dad taught me that we've only got one planet." (Cut to her beaming parents.) "And we better take care of it," she continues. "Now, I'm about to join a company that's committed itself to helping people preserve our wildlife, and to finding new ways to protect the Earth." As the theme music blares, she turns passionately to the camera and delivers her last words with fierce determination: "I can't wait." The lyrics rise in counterpoint: "You can make a difference in what tomorrow brings, 'cause Dow lets you do great things."
It's easy to poke fun at the ads, or to give them the New York decontructionist treatment, as Esquire did last October. Their writer, Mark Crispin Miller, accused Dow of trading on 1960s-style images (like a bumbling, sitcom-style father at a company softball game) to co-opt the idealism of young people who don't remember napalm. Even Miller, however, didn't notice that the spot with the graduate had aired with an anti-hunger voice-over six years earlier. Back then, she was "about to walk into a Dow laboratory, to work on new ways to grow more and better grain for those kids who so desperately need it." In other words, the environmentalist of '91 was preparing to make pesticides in '85.
OK, the ads are arrogant. ("Dow lets me do great things," snapped Diane Hebert, one of the company's prominent local opponents. "How generous.") Yet despite the cynicism the ads engender, the true weakness of the "great things" campaign is ironic: Its slickness makes the company seem worse than it actually is.
In reality, the three Dows --- the traditional, the antagonistic, and the learning Dow --- co-exist. The tension among them, coupled with the small-town atmosphere, allowed emotions to rise where they might have been held back in other companies. Dow is like every company pursuing and wrestling with environmentalism --- only more so.
In a phone interview two years ago, I lobbed a soft question of Keith McKennon, then the president of Dow United Sates: "Even if your environmentalism is just a cosmetic public-relations effort," I asked, "isn't that in itself a major change?" His normally genial voice bristled in a way that made me think he'd been struggling with the question himself. "If it's a change of rhetoric only, it's worthless," he said, "no matter how remarkable you may think it is."