Public Understanding of Science

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The 'Silent Springs' of Rachel Carson: Mass media and the origins of modern environmentalism Gary Kroll Public Understanding of Science 2001; 10; 403 DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/10/4/304 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/4/403

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INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING

PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE

Public Understand. Sci. 10 (2001) 403–420

www.iop.org/Journals/PUS

PII: S0963-6625(01)29627-1

The “Silent Springs” of Rachel Carson: mass media and the origins of modern environmentalism Gary Kroll

This essay explores the different meanings of the 1960s’ pesticide controversy as conveyed by the multiple representations of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). I argue that to understand the impact of Carson’s work on a heterogeneous audience in the early ’60s, we must move beyond an examination of the book, Silent Spring, to consider its other media manifestations, as a serialization for The New Yorker and as a television expos´e for “CBS Reports.” Each conveyed a unique message stylized for the audience of that particular media. This analysis demonstrates the problems and opportunities for scholars attempting to gauge the influence of a book on the public understanding of science. This argument also suggests that to understand the transition of environmentalism from a grass-roots movement to near universal consensus, we need to examine carefully the role of media in shaping divergent messages for different audiences—a phenomenon that assisted in transforming local environmental issues into a matter of national concern.

1. Introduction The claim that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) played a crucial role in outlining the fundamental tenets of modern environmentalism is now almost universally accepted.1 However, this assertion becomes increasingly blurred when we consider the nature of that role and the eclecticism of those tenets. This essay explores the various aspects of a book that is situated as a foundational text of a modern social movement. But instead of an exegesis on the book itself, I offer a fractured history in which “Silent Spring,” as opposed to Silent Spring, represented different meanings to different audiences. Between June 1962 and April 1963, three related but distinct “Silent Springs” circulated through popular culture. The work first appeared as a three-part serialization in The New Yorker. Next, Houghton Mifflin and the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed it in book form. Finally, it was the subject of a television expos´e on “CBS Reports.” Certainly, other historians have noted this textual history.2 But no one has thoroughly investigated the differences among the three distinctive “Silent Springs” disseminated to different audiences.3 By situating Silent Spring in its historical moment as a multi-layered text, we can come to a richer understanding of the function of a book in communicating natural and scientific information to a public audience and at the same time better understand Carson’s eclectic contribution to modern environmentalism. 0963-6625/01/040403+18$30.00

© 2001 IOP Publishing Ltd and The Science Museum

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This analysis demonstrates the value of a contextual approach in gauging the impact that a popular book may or may not have on the public understanding of science. Environmental debates provide an ideal setting for such an analysis because they are scenarios in which science plays an ambivalent role—at times, blamed for the environmental crisis and at other times, called upon for environmental amelioration.4 But too often historians turn to popular books written by scientists without considering the wider context. What impact did books written by scientists—William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948), Fairfield Osborn’s Plundered Planet (1948), Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968), and Barry Commoner’s Closing Circle (1971), for example—have on the public understanding of science and the environment?5 The project of demonstrating text/reader interactions presents obvious methodological problems, many of which go unresolved here.6 Yet this essay shows the value of examining the overlooked tendrils that such books extend within a sprawling media environment. The history of a polysemous “Silent Spring” speaks to a lingering problem among historical treatments of the origin of modern environmentalism as a social and political movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The reasonable explanation for the rise of environmentalism is that a post-war culture of prosperity enabled the American populace to place great value on their personal lifestyles, their “quality of life.” Economic abundance spawned a change in values, a desire to maintain commodities “for their aesthetic and amenity uses.” This desire explains the many efforts to address environmental degradation at the local level, as activists pushed for more environmentally sensitive policies that would preserve the beauty and health of the spaces they inhabited.7 But to move from a local to a national discourse, environmentalism needed, according to Hal Rothman, a “galvanizing event” that would bring environmental issues to the attention of the public. For instance, in the struggle to prevent the flooding of Dinosaur National Monument, opponents “had learned the primary rule of success in policy issues in post-1945 America: fight battles in the press where the public can make its own decisions.”8 Through mass media, opponents of the water-works project appealed to the transformed values of the American public to make a local issue a matter of national consensus. Rothman’s intriguing analysis presumes a diffusionist model of communication, which seems to be shared by historians of modern environmentalism. Media is thus a conduit for transmitting environmental ideas, but mass media often have their own transforming power that is worthy of exploration. This essay assumes that, as with the struggle to save Dinosaur National Monument, the pesticide controversy was another such galvanizing event. I therefore offer an analysis of three “Silent Springs” in which the media itself is the focus. What was the nature of the media? What was its history? Who was its audience? How did Carson’s previous experience shape her attitude and action toward the media? What was the central thrust of the message? How did the constraints of the medium shape that message?9 I show how each text brought a constellation of stylized issues to a specific audience. The serialized version of the book was geared to an urban audience, and its salient message was that pesticides posed a threat to the individual’s body through ingestion of staple foods coated with cancer-causing chemicals. A suburban “Silent Spring” was manifested by the book itself—largely distributed by the Book-of-theMonth Club—which outlined the dangers presented to personal property, home, and family within the context of a post-war domestic ideology. Finally, the televised “Silent Spring” introduced a mass audience to a philosophical discussion about the problems created when science assumes an arrogant confidence in its ability to control nature.10 Each “Silent Spring” emerged from a unique interaction among media constraints, editorial decisions, producer directives, and the author, Rachel Carson. In the end, the many “Silent Springs” transcended the local problems of pesticide use by speaking to several constituencies within America’s diverse populace.11


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2. Serializing an urban nature The New Yorker’s version of “Silent Spring” was more than a mere serialization of Carson’s famous book. It was constructed to appeal to an urban audience, a readership more concerned with the threats pesticides posed to their bodies than with the possibility of widespread environmental contamination. Thus, The New Yorker “Silent Spring” was a conservative indictment. The thrust of the message was that chemicals posed a danger to human physiology. While this was certainly an important theme of the book version, it became the dominant thesis of the serialization. Throughout its run starting in 1926, The New Yorker was aimed at an urban audience, and even in 1962, the magazine remained a staple of America’s cities. It was a metropolitan magazine that generally appealed to the “refined” taste and humor of sophisticated urbanites. It was replete with advertisements and was one of the most lucrative publications in the industry. With a circulation of between four and five hundred thousand, the magazine was a powerful mechanism for reaching a large, educated audience. Aside from the social achievements of The New Yorker, it held a unique position of cultural authority—a position historically constructed in the shifting cultural matrix of the early twentieth century. The New Yorker was a latecomer to a new genre of “smart magazines” aimed at the upper and middle class. It entered the publishing field in 1926, under the auspices of journalist and advertising man, Harold Ross, who created the magazine, written by and for cosmopolitan New Yorkers. The urban-dweller read the magazine for a bit of fiction, a profile of a celebrity, or for its humorous columns and cartoons. At the same time, the reader was exposed to an array of perfume, jewelry, cosmetics, and restaurant advertisements, as well as schedules for art and theater openings throughout the metropolitan area. In short, the magazine became something of a guide to what the properly cultured New Yorker should do, buy, and know.12 In 1952, Harold Ross passed the editorial reins to William Shawn. While hewing close to the formula that made The New Yorker so successful, Shawn “presided over a shift from its original flippancy to a more serious tone, which, he insisted, merely mirrored a ‘new awareness’ among writers and readers.”13 It was in this context that Carson would deal with The New Yorker. By the time she began the pesticide project in 1958, Rachel Carson had already achieved fame as an author and scientist. Carson’s texts had often appeared in middlebrow magazines of the 1930s. She was no stranger to the practice of essay writing, since much of her work at the Fish and Wildlife Service involved composing short and concise pieces, and in 1936, the Atlantic Monthly had published Carson’s article, “Undersea.”14 Throughout her early career, Carson published articles in Reader’s Digest, Colliers, and other magazines.15 Carson did, however, meet with some difficulties in getting her work into print. Prior to its publication as a book, Carson attempted to publish individual chapters of her first best seller, The Sea Around Us (1951), a work that popularized recent developments in physical oceanography. Atlantic, Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post, Tomorrow: The Magazine of The Future, Holiday, The New York Times, Coronet, Town and Country, National Geographic, Collier’s, Scientific American, and Reader’s Digest all turned down submissions, most of them because Carson’s work was of “limited appeal,” or because the magazine had already published “sea theme” articles.16 But when Oxford agreed to publish The Sea Around Us, The New Yorker published a serialized version, and the Yale Review printed one chapter. There was obviously a financial incentive for breaking up the book into multiple, short publications; Carson received money for the chapters, and magazine publications certainly boosted the sales of the larger text. But Carson’s texts also had a middlebrow agenda. One of her most important objectives as a popular writer was to make science available and enjoyable for a lay public, outside the structure of


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formal scientific knowledge consumers.17 By making the restricted realm of science available for public consumption, Carson intended her texts to reach a wide audience. Carson was fully cognizant of the important role The New Yorker played in the publishing world. In attempting to get the chapters of The Sea Around Us published in various magazines, Carson continuously stressed to Marie Rodell, her literary agent, that it was important to push material to The New Yorker above all other magazines. This premier magazine provided a unique forum for addressing the public as an “author-scientist,” someone with both factual knowledge and literary skill. Scientific magazines turned down chapters from The Sea Around Us because they were too “soft.” Conversely, non-scientific magazines complained that readers did not want to be bothered with scientific matters. The New Yorker provided a more balanced venue—a magazine of high repute for both factual reporting and literary style. Another and more obvious reason Carson sought publication there was that The New Yorker had a circulation of a half-million readers. Such an audience would make science accessible to a mass audience and bolster her own cultural authority by building a trustworthy relationship with the public. It is therefore not surprising that Carson turned to The New Yorker when she wanted to call the public’s attention to the pesticide problem. In the late 1950s, Carson was carefully following several citizen groups that aimed to challenge the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) policy of indiscriminate pesticide use. Aware that the findings of one particular Long Island case might very well be important, Carson approached E. B. White and suggested that he cover the case for The New Yorker. White declined the project, but passed the news on to William Shawn, who suggested that Carson write the piece herself. Carson spent the next four years researching the project, whose scope continued to escalate. During that time, Carson and Marie Rodell decided to turn the article (which had grown in length, at Shawn’s urging) into a book to be published by Houghton Mifflin and edited by Paul Brooks. Carson seems to have proceeded as if she was writing a book, and most of the editorial decisions involved Rodell and Brooks, though Shawn was privy to an early chapter. In January 1962, Carson sent the bulk of the book to both Brooks and Shawn. At this point, Shawn, along with The New Yorker editor Robert Gerdy and wildlife biologist James DeWitt, edited the text for the magazine publication, though Carson was physically present for the final editing.18 In June 1962, the first article went to press. As it appeared in The New Yorker, the first page of “Silent Spring” is completely filled with text, but for a small rectangular spacer that displays the silhouette of a suited man holding a hat and looking at ties displayed on the counter of a display case, behind which a thinwaisted woman tends to her customer. The second page sports a cartoon strip involving a Soviet who emerges from a submarine, goes to Disneyland, and brings his booty of balloons and teddy bears back home (three-quarters of the page). Half of page three shows a cartoon parodying artists; page four contains a small sketch of senior citizens playing chess. The advertisements commence on page seven and continue on each page through the rest of the article. Often two massive ads frame a thin strip of text in the middle of the page. The advertisers vary: vacation resorts, silver coffee pots, perfume, jewelry, camera equipment, imported beer, liquor, music, high fashion, restaurants, portrait studios, tanning lotion, and airlines. The themes are not surprising: entertainment, vacationing, and fashion—everything the middle- and upper-class urbanite requires. Thus the experience of reading the Carson text becomes a collage of bourgeois satire, corporate advertising, and environmental critique.19 The New Yorker serialization was an abridgment of the book. Carson wanted the book to be the fullest development of her ideas, the least restrictive context in which to situate her critique of “man’s control of nature.”20 Since the serialization was an abridgment, a comparison of the two texts demonstrates the constraints that the magazine placed on the message. The changes to Carson’s original manuscript were made in the interest of brevity; nonetheless, William



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Shawn and Carson decided what to include and thus how to convey a meaning appropriate for The New Yorker’s readership. Shawn and Carson produced a text shorn of some of its science and—to some degree— of Carson’s concerns for non-human nature. The New Yorker’s readership, after all, was unaccustomed to science-related articles. “Nature” in The New Yorker was less Carson’s ecologically interrelated nature and more a euphemism for human consumption. Shawn and Carson constructed this alternate “Silent Spring” by omitting key sections of text. Not printed was one important chapter that was central to Carson’s notions of the relationship between human beings and nature. Also excised was Carson’s scholarly apparatus—a lengthy list of citations and explanations. Finally, the chapters were reordered, thus conveying a meaning that differed from that of the book. Several examples demonstrate the effects of the textual differences. The article omitted a three-page sequence on the relationship between pesticides and cancer. The first sentence of the missing text starts, “An arsenic-contaminated environment affects not only man but animals as well.”21 By omitting this text, pesticides are shown to be a threat to human beings, while the threat to non-human nature becomes subsidiary. Similarly, the authoritative voice of science becomes inaccessible because of the exclusion of a six-page physiological explanation of the chemically induced mutation of cells.22 To be sure, this change eliminated abstruse concepts inappropriate for the typical New Yorker reader, but a crucial scientific foundation disappeared with it. As a consequence, to the chemist or agriculturist, the article becomes less “scientific” and more “popular,” even “sensational.” Although chemical companies began preparing for a campaign to mitigate the impact of Carson’s book, a scientific rebuttal remained inappropriate. The text gave Carson’s fellow scientists no avenue along which a discussion could occur. Other exclusions had the same effect and reduced the length of the original book by about a fourth. The endnotes were also omitted. Carson’s evidence is documented in rich detail at the end of her book. It was this bibliography that scientists would come to criticize time and again, attempting to point out weaknesses, contradictions, and misinterpretations.23 Again, The New Yorker omitted the notes because its audience was uninterested in such technical details, and the casual reader would not flip to an index to reference statements with evidence. The powerful conclusion of the book, actually written after she had submitted the rest of the chapters to Shawn, was never incorporated into the article. This missing chapter stated the contemporary dilemma with utmost clarity—we may continue to live a perilous existence by upholding faith in the “chemical” control of nature, or we can choose the “other” alternative, biological control of nature. In a style characteristic of Carson’s writings, she begins the chapter, We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one “less traveled by”—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.24 The remainder of the chapter details the many methods of biological control available for agriculturists. The omission of this all-important chapter amounted to a pulled punch. While most of the serialized version is critical of the scientific structure supporting the use of pesticides, nowhere else does Carson so explicitly characterize the regulation of life as requiring a choice between chemists and biologists. The absence of this dual structure made The New Yorker article less threatening to the scientific community than the book; the chemist’s and entomologist’s paradigm was not as forcefully challenged as it would be in the book’s concluding chapter.


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Reordering the chapters effected similar alterations in meaning and impact. Carson’s chapter 11 of 17 (in the book version), “Beyond the Dreams of Borgias,” appeared last in The New Yorker serialization. It was by far the most sensational chapter in the text and criticized in the most scathing prose the USDA’s method for determining the maximum safety tolerances. For example, close to the conclusion of the serialized piece was this critique of FDA practices. Beyond these limiting factors, the system under which the FDA establishes tolerances has obvious defects. Under the conditions prevailing, it provides mere paper security. . . . As for the safety of allowing a sprinkling of poisons on our food—a little on this, a little on that—many people argue that no poison is safe on food.25 In addition, the serialized text points out the accessibility of dangerous pesticides to children and raises the specter of bottles of poison sitting next to baby food at any local department store. That this part of the book became the final statement made it the most memorable. More important, it gave the general urban audience the most sensational topic of discussion. Our current understanding of the significance of Silent Spring is that it ushered in an environmentalism that questioned unflagging faith in the scientific control of nature. The New Yorker’s “Silent Spring,” while also dealing with this important theme, reconstructed the thrust of Carson’s message as the immediate and personal threat that pesticides pose to practical human consumption. At the heart of “Silent Spring” was a concern that might be described as a preoccupation with thoroughly washed vegetables—a political concern that resonated with The New Yorker’s urban sphere of public influence. Even if readers failed to ponder the relationship between human beings and non-human nature, they would certainly be interested in the dangerous substances that coated the food in their refrigerators. So there was nothing paradoxical about situating a critique of unrestricted human progress between advertisements for Caribbean resorts and automobiles. The New Yorker’s “Silent Spring” was no such critique. It was an informative piece that shook people’s faith in their grocers—a point bolstered by the fact that the Consumer’s Union offered to print 40,000 copies of the book based solely on a reading of The New Yorker serialization.26 An example of the conservative response to the serialization can be found in a letter to the editor of The New York Times. Gerald Jonas wondered “how many New Yorkers know that their clothes are being impregnated with a DDT mothproofing solution by most dry cleaners?”27 In this case, pesticides were little more than an inconvenience impinging upon the urbanite’s sense of fashion. Another response was that of a physician who wrote to The New Yorker. “She will have accomplished as real a service as any physician who devoted a lifetime to patients, and she will have reached a ‘practice’ encompassing everyone!”28 The New Yorker printed this reader’s letter confirming the threat of pesticide use to human beings. Certainly, this was one of Silent Spring’s strongest points. Nevertheless, if “Silent Spring’s” textual history had stopped with the article, there is little doubt that it would not have become the classic environmentalist text that it is today. The pesticide problem had not yet kindled a firestorm of controversy. The New York Times had printed only three pesticide-related articles in the month following The New Yorker articles (July).29 Scientists who disagreed with Carson’s message put off their reaction until the publication of the full text so they “could mount their counterattack under the guise of book reviews in both popular and scientific periodicals.”30 But by that time, The New Yorker and its readers had already legitimized the Carson indictment. To be sure, this readership was relatively small. Nonetheless, the support of the magazine gave Silent Spring a boost both from the publishing industry and politically active urban readers. But The New Yorker indictment was context-specific and certainly not the final statement on the matter. A different message was constructed by the published book.



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3. The suburban “Silent Spring” According to one historian, “Silent Spring’s influence rests in part on Carson’s brilliance in reaching into the supposed sanctuary of suburban homes.”31 Indeed, it can be argued that Carson’s critique was born and inspired within America’s suburbs and that it resonated in a particular way with that audience. The suburban “Silent Spring” did not merely express a new concern with threats to human physiology, for the suburban life was intimately connected to property rights: lawn, garden, park, and the agricultural vestiges that continued to coexist with suburbs. Passing beyond the sphere of the human body, the suburban “Silent Spring” outlined the dangers of pesticide use to those people existing in a liminal state between urban and rural America. Moreover, the suburban home had become a key tenet to a “domestic ideology” in Cold War America, a site of “containment,” preserving both the stability of the American family and the family’s potential for enjoying material prosperity. Pesticides posed a direct threat to that ideology. Akin to the dangers of nuclear radiation and communism, pesticides endangered the health and security of the American suburban family—the message clearly enunciated in the suburban reading of “Silent Spring.” Rachel Carson was born and raised in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a small town bordered by Pittsburgh some fifteen miles to the southwest and small farms to the north and east. The Carsons lived on a few acres of land atop a hill, where they raised chickens and a few farm animals; the family’s chief source of income came from Rachel’s father, who worked as an insurance salesman, and from her mother’s piano lessons. Carson’s love for nature was first nourished by her mother on long walks in the woods and orchards and along the springs and streams of the Springdale environs.32 Springdale could easily be mistaken for the mythical town in which Carson began Silent Spring. Entitled “A Fable for Tomorrow,” Carson opens her story in “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” But then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. . . . The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. Carson admitted that no single town had witnessed all these horrors, yet all the problems mentioned had occurred in towns scattered across the country. In the late 1950s, residents of a number of such communities in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England came together to form a Committee Against Mass Poisoning, which sought to fight the USDA’s policy of combating infestations of gypsy moths, tent caterpillars, and mosquitoes through the indiscriminate spraying of DDT. Citizens from one suburban Long Island town even filed an injunction against the USDA. Carson followed these activities and began to cull material on the use, damage, and potential dangers caused by pesticides. Her original goal was to discourage Reader’s Digest editor, DeWitt Wallace, from publishing an article praising the virtues of pesticides. Wallace’s lack of interest caused Carson to propose an article for the Ladies Home Journal.33 The decision to approach this popular women’s magazine may have been a deliberate attempt to catch the attention of those women, mothers, and caregivers who were in charge of maintaining healthy families. Carson followed the details of the Long Island suit with great interest. In the late 1950s, north-central Long Island was still a melange of small communities and agricultural areas. Since 1952, the USDA had been spraying DDT over areas in Long Island as part of a campaign


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to create a “barrier zone” to contain gypsy moth populations. Unfortunately, the planes that distributed the pesticides often released their loads over the residential sectors of Stony Brook and Nassau County. In 1957, a group of citizens, led by Marjorie Spock and American Museum of Natural History naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy, mobilized to take civil action against the USDA. The legal objective was to show that the spraying of residential areas violated people’s private property rights. “Owners of homes, woodlands, and gardens, including organic gardens” contested that the USDA’s policy violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution in depriving the plaintiffs of property without due process of law; defendants had also violated the Fourteenth Amendment prohibiting trespass and damage to private property. The citizens complained that the oil medium coated their property—houses, lawns, automobiles, ponds, and gardens—with an undesirable film. They also pointed to specific instances in which pets, birds, squirrels, and fish suffered and died as a result of ingesting lethal quantities of DDT.34 In short, the plaintiffs viewed the USDA’s policy of unauthorized spraying as a violation of their personal property rights, rights that radiated out from the domicile in ever widening circles. Despite the court’s decision to deny the petition, the Long Island case crystallized the key issues that would become a large part of the substance of Carson’s work. That the pesticide critique would originate, and later resonate, with suburban audiences should not be surprising. In a sense, urbanites had a much different stake in the issue than suburban residents, who watched twin-prop cargo planes leave thick clouds of DDT as they soared some seventy feet over a neighborhood. Carson’s claim that people spraying their lawns with herbicides such as 2,4-D “have occasionally developed severe neuritis and even paralysis” was a clarion call to those suburbanites caring for their manicured lawns.35 Moreover, the sphere of rights extended beyond the green borders of the home. “To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right.”36 Whether to protect their own property or to enjoy the outdoors in recreational pursuits, suburbanites possessed tangible rights to an undamaged—and perhaps pesticide-free—environment.37 More than just a threat to the suburban homeowner, Carson’s text very clearly outlined the multitude of dangers that pesticides presented to the suburban home. Historian Elaine Tyler May has shown how a powerful and pervasive domestic ideology saturated Cold War American culture. As the baby boom generation worked its demographic magic, Americans fashioned a new culture that prized the sanctity of the family, motherhood, pregnancy, consumer goods, and even sexuality. Most important, the home—ideally, the suburban ranch-style home—became the crucial site for containing and protecting these virtues from the seemingly omnipresent dual threats of communism and nuclear annihilation.38 Pesticides, too, presented a threat to the domestic virtues found in both human culture and the natural world. The domestic imagery of a number of Carson’s examples highlights the way pesticides threatened the integrity of the family unit. In describing a Michigan plan to enlist aldrin, a chlorinated hydrocarbon, in the fight against the Japanese beetle, she notes that poison descended “on people shopping or going to work and on children out from school for the lunch hour. Housewives swept the granules from porches and sidewalks, where they are said to have ‘looked like snow.’ ”39 The rhetorical implications of such language produced a powerful effect. A shower of poison threatens the innocent activities of children coming home from school and housewives tending to their chores, all the trappings of domesticity. Silent Spring warned women to protect their families, and most notably their children, from insidious threat. Carson was thinking along these lines as early as 1959, when she wrote to her editor, Paul Brooks, that “we do know that every child born today carries his load of poison even at birth, for studies prove that these chemicals pass through the placenta. And



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after birth, whether breast fed or bottle fed, the child continues to accumulate poisons.”40 This issue was set out in Silent Spring in alarming prose: “In experimental animals the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the traditional protective shield between the embryo and the harmful substances in the mother’s body.”41 Carson’s warning that both baby food and America’s milk supply contained traces of chemicals further raised the ire of concerned mothers. More than just caring for the family, women had a special duty to care for the living environment. This had long been a theme of Carson’s work. In a 1954 speech she remarked that “[w]omen have a greater intuitive understanding of such things [the destruction of the environment]. They want for their children not only physical health but mental and spiritual health as well.”42 Moreover, as historian Vera Norwood has shown, Carson’s indictment spoke to a network of women’s organizations and garden clubs that became actively involved in environmental politics.43 That her critique of pesticide use would have a special relevance to women is indicated by the decision to send free copies of Silent Spring to the wives of governors and the chief health officers of each state.44 Certainly, one of Silent Spring’s greatest virtues was in outlining pesticides’ clear and present dangers to human families; but it extended a domestic ideology to cover the natural world as well. Pesticides posed an equal threat to both human domesticity and, more broadly, nature’s domesticity. For instance, Carson portrayed every part of the environment as a “home” for nature’s creatures.45 She used the word deliberately to call on her readers’ domestic sensibilities. Perhaps the most poignant example is presented in her discussion of the efforts to clear the so-called “weeds” from America’s roadsides. “In the economy of nature the natural vegetation has its essential place. Hedgerows along country roads and bordering fields provide food, cover, and nesting areas for birds and homes for many small animals.”46 Her point was more than an effort to preserve beautiful wild flowers along country roads; she showed that the eradication of roadside vegetation also meant the destruction of yet another of nature’s homes, of nature’s communities. Whether she was discussing soil, rivers, lakes, grasses, or forests, the implications were clear—chemical pesticides and herbicides violated the health and sanctity of nature’s home life. Certain pesticides also endangered the very processes of reproduction. Use of chlorinated hydrocarbons, according to Carson, “projects a menacing shadow into the future, the shadow of sterility.” One of Carson’s most tangible achievements was calling the public’s attention to the threat pesticides posed to birds, and most notably, America’s national symbol, the bald eagle. The specter of a “silent spring” signaled the vulnerability of birds to pesticide poisoning. Again, the argument was heavily imbued with a domestic ideology, for the chemicals made their “sinister” presence most visible in birds’ reproductive cycles. In a portion of text that was excised from the serialization, Carson detailed the work of naturalists who had found that significant numbers of eagles’ nests either possessed no eggs or eggs that failed to hatch. DDT was a possible culprit, for in a Michigan study, the chemical was found “in developing egg follicles, in the ovaries of females, in completed but unlaid eggs, in the oviducts, in unhatched eggs from deserted nests, in embryos within the eggs, and in a newly hatched, dead nestlings.” DDT’s effect on the nesting and egg laying habits of bald eagles, according to Carson, “may well make it necessary for us to find a new national emblem.”47 To be sure, these suburban themes of property rights and domestic ideology imbued The New Yorker serialization just as much as the book. What set the book apart was the mechanics of distribution. The New Yorker was an urban magazine, and its serialization was not sufficient to reach into the “sanctuary of suburban homes.” The book did. One key to this success was the text’s distribution by the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). The BOMC had enjoyed a large membership in small towns simply because large bookstores were often located in major


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metropolitan areas. The BOMC was essentially a mail-order bookstore that distributed books to small towns and out-of-the-way communities throughout the nation. The post-war suburban boom swelled the ranks of BOMC registers, as “middlebrow” suburbanites began looking for easy access to the culture that had traditionally been the province of metropolitan areas. A 1948 survey found that 90 percent of the club’s business came from towns with between 25,000 and 50,000 people.48 A more recent survey found that over half of the club’s members were suburbanites, while urban and rural areas each contributed one-quarter of subscribers.49 In sum, it would be fair to say that there were significantly different readerships for the BOMC distribution, which often appealed to suburban residents, and The New Yorker, whose area of distribution centered on major cities. Indeed, when Carson heard the news that Silent Spring was selected, she stated that the club would “carry it to farms and hamlets all over the country that don’t know what a bookstore looks like—much less The New Yorker.”50 The quantitative effect of the BOMC’s distribution should not be underestimated. Their first printing ran over 150,000 copies, while non-club sales figures through late 1962 were around 106,000. Thus the club was directly responsible for distributing a substantial number of texts.51 But “Silent Spring’s” textual history did not end on this suburban and domestic note. The airing of the “CBS Reports” episode entitled, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” brought a new constellation of issues to the pesticide problem, this time pitting science against anti-science.52 4. Nature over the airwaves “CBS Reports” was an important forum because the program served as a placeholder for the public’s faith in factual reporting. This public perception resulted from the cultural interaction between CBS producers, the corporate structure that supported the industry, and the public audience. In this context, Carson’s text achieved renewed emphasis through the surroundings, audience, and the constructed message of the television program. The critical responses that resulted from the program differed from the two previous texts. One could argue that “Silent Spring” became a household name in 1963 because of the program.53 The effect of the program was not only to criticize the practices of “arrogant” science, but to lambaste science in general, and specifically the experimental sciences. Television’s coverage and the public response further clarify the story of why and how “Silent Spring” has become a key text in environmental history. Rachel Carson was vexed by her past experiences with non-print media. After the initial success of The Sea Around Us, Irwin Allen of RKO offered to produce a film adaptation of the best seller. Again, Carson’s goal as a scientist and author was to translate, even democratize, scientific knowledge for a lay public. Carson would later accept an offer to do a short TV spot for “Omnibus” by rationalizing, [r]egardless of my own indifference to television, it is probably the medium that reaches the largest audience. I should therefore be open-minded about opportunities to present certain facts, or to foster certain attitudes that I consider important. As far as I know, this program is the only one that offers me an opportunity to have an important hand in it without actually appearing on the program, which, as you know, I am reluctant to do.54 So it is no surprise that Carson accepted the opportunity to get The Sea Around Us into America’s theaters. Carson and Oxford University Press signed a contract with RKO and agreed to limited control over the production. Carson was horribly unsatisfied with the product and attacked RKO for not adhering to scientific fact. Carson’s greatest concern was the climax, which ended with the earth “drowning” due



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to increased sea levels as polar ice melted—an unfortunate consequence of global warming. Carson retorted that the sudden cataclysmic submergence of the earth had no basis in scientific fact. Allen simply grafted a standard narrative structure onto the documentary. So what purported to be a record of scientific information was transformed into a sensationalist drama of impending doom. Carson resisted the medium’s restriction of meaning. She found the dramatic narrative to be incompatible with scientific knowledge. The movie was released after the required editing; and although it won an Academy Award, Carson found the whole experience distasteful. “CBS Reports,” however, gave her an opportunity to air her message in a context amenable to scientific knowledge.55 “CBS Reports” appeared in the context of truth in reporting and sensational quiz shows, both of which bear on the presentation of “Silent Spring.” Fred Friendly’s first CBS news show, “See it Now,” with Edward R. Morrow as the investigative reporter, quickly became a forum for attacking governmental Red-scare tactics in the 1950s. Morrow challenged the tirades of Joseph McCarthy and reported the dismissal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been stripped of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission.56 While the tradition of truth and faith persisted, the glamour and popularity of “See it Now” proved transitory with the arrival of widely popular quiz shows. “The $64,000 Question” erupted onto the television scene in 1955, with spectacular commercial success. Quizshow imitators rapidly sprang up and supplanted the Murrowesque documentaries and social commentaries of the early 1950s with higher Nielsen figures. In 1959, however, the reputation and popularity of the quiz show fell into disrepute with Charles Van Doren’s confession that the producer of “Twenty-One” had given him the answers to questions so he could defeat an unpopular and insurmountable champion. The scandal spurred investigations that ultimately revealed similar corruption in “The $64,000 Question.” The public showed great consternation over the scandal, which even elicited comment from President Eisenhower, who likened it to the White Sox baseball scandal of 1919. The inception of “CBS Reports” in 1959 was a response to the quiz-show controversy. CBS president Frank Stanton introduced a new series of documentaries on important subjects. With the same urgency that canceled “See It Now,” the network hurried to prepare a similar series, “CBS Reports,” to be produced by Fred Friendly.57 The program was designed to regain the public faith lost due to the rigged contests. This incident is important because it highlights the relationship between television producers and the audience. Viewers built a trusting relationship with their programs. They tuned in every week and sympathized with Charles Van Doren, whose winnings continued to mount. But the quiz-show scandals did more than upset the popularity of a specific program; they displaced the trust the public had invested in television. The television would maintain itself as a source of entertainment, but as a source of information, its credibility was called into question. In this view, “CBS Reports” became a site, or placeholder, for truth, fact, and certainty, designed to regain the trust of the viewing audience. Television executives designed “CBS Reports,” and other documentaries in the early 1960s, to educate and inform a mass audience. More specifically, these shows were intended to appeal to white middle-class viewers, or, in the words of Michael Curtin, the “fathercitizen-producer.” Both minority viewers and women were de-emphasized in this equation, and the documentary genre as a whole had difficulty attracting female viewers, especially in the suburbs. Viewer demographics are difficult to gauge, but a 1962 Nielsen study found that the average prime-time documentary reached approximately five million houses and ten million viewers, and CBS estimated that the pesticide episode reached an audience of ten to fifteen million.58


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This was the context in which “CBS Reports” simultaneously became a site of factual knowledge and a forum for challenging entrenched authority. “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” aired in 1963, riding the renewed faith in news. It became one with other controversial stories, such as episodes on McCarthy, Oppenheimer, and the famous examination of migrant farm workers, “Harvest of Shame.” The viewing public had invested their faith in “CBS Reports,” which translated into the cultural capital that Carson borrowed to enhance its public legitimacy.59 In the face of public criticism, Friendly had to maintain “CBS Reports” as a site of privileged knowledge. To do so, he separated editorial decisions from commercial marketing influences. Just as the BOMC judges maintained a critical distance from the business side of the organization, “CBS Reports” had to prove its existence outside the sphere of commercialism. When corporate sponsors discovered that Friendly was producing the Silent Spring story, they pulled their commercials. On the basis of the information to be presented about pesticides, Standard Brands, Lehn and Fink, and Ralston Purina refused to authorize the airing of their commercials during the episode. They were “not taking sides on the issue raised in the book. It is the subject matter of the program that is incompatible with our products.”60 Far from damaging the episode, the commercial pullout gave the viewing public an opportunity to examine the nexus of commerce and media. One reviewer remarked, developments such as this only point up the weakness of the sponsor system of American commercial TV. The ideal program, from the sponsor’s point of view, is a pleasant story about pleasant people with pleasant problems. That’s why so much of our programming remains a vast wasteland. Sponsors think controversy is unhealthy—for their business anyway.61 Both before and after the episode, commentators around the country praised Friendly and CBS for not caving in to corporate threats.62 “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring” thus aired in an atmosphere that gave it special status. Not only was it the “truth,” but it was a truth feared by the industrial complex that had become a public danger. The ultimate effect was to remove the program from all implicit obligations and to free the subject from commercial influences. This lent an air of objectivity and impartiality to the factual nature of the show. The program aired on April 4, 1963, a Wednesday evening during the popular 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. time slot. The first scene shows a press printing the jacket to the book. The familiar voice of Eric Sevareid introduces the text, “Printed on September 27, 1962, fivehundred thousand copies have been sold. It is the most controversial book of the year.” This is followed by a mid-shot of Rachel Carson in a chair on a porch overlooking her Maine coast property. Carson: Chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of life. [Shot of cropduster flying over a suburban neighborhood] Pesticides are nonselective; they kill everything, though the intended targets are only a few organisms. They should not be called pesticides, but biocides. [Mid-shot of scientist, Robert White Stevens of American Cyanamid, sitting at desk in white lab coat and dark thick-rimmed glasses.] Stevens: Silent Spring is a gross distortion of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific research and general practical experience in the field. The real threat to the survival of man is not chemical but biological, in the shape of hoards of insects that denude our forests. . . . [Shot of developing country, locusts scampering around a person’s legs; shot of hungry and impoverished group of children.] If man were to practice agriculture as Carson indicates, we would return to the dark ages, and the



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insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth. At this point they roll the title, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” and commence playing Copland’s rendition of the short hymn, “Gift to be Simple,” from his Appalachian Spring. The program began with the “word,” i.e., the text that had spurred the controversy. It immediately introduced the dichotomy: biology versus chemistry. It coded biology as soft, familiar, and female. In contrast, it made chemistry cold, hard, rational, male, and patriarchal. Two natures appeared in the program, one the idyllic nature of interrelationships, the other the factual and linear nature of dominion and controlled effect. The booming western sounds of Copland’s popular score coded the program as the site of truth, knowledge, justice, manifest destiny, and the American way. A multiplicity of signifiers quickly paraded through this quick visual and aural exchange: historical, visual, musical, factual, and narrative. The division between the two approaches toward nature had never been so explicit, and this dichotomy had been almost completely absent from The New Yorker serialization. The subject was breached by the book, but only to a small readership. Working with nature, and working against it—that is, managing nature—were two constructed extremes between which social actors situated themselves. In fact, Carson would have considered herself to lie somewhere in the midst of this continuum. She consistently reminded her critics that she did not call for the complete elimination of pesticide technologies, but rather for wise and discriminate use. She advocated a new way of understanding nature, one that embraced a respect for the ecological nature of life and did not pride itself on the notion that absolute knowledge was possible. But the division became something other than good science versus bad science, or biology versus chemistry. Through the work of television’s overlaying images, Carson took on the overtones of a natural historian, a non-experimental scientist, or rather, not a scientist at all. With this television program, the pesticide problem took on a mythic status that represented contesting epistemologies of knowing nature and competing ethical attitudes toward dealing with nature. For instance, one shot shows a flock of birds, signifying the life, health, and the hygiene of nature and the environment. The next shot is situated within a dialogue concerning the buildup of DDT in the fatty tissues of animals. Two birds spasmodically flit about, supposedly as a result of toxic chemicals. The dying birds do not simply signify their own death, the destruction of nature, or the contamination of the environment. Something, someone is causing such pain—arrogant and irresponsible chemists, according to Carson. It is important to note here the dissolution of the specificity of “chemistry” into the more ambiguous realm of “science.” Nuance had no place in this episode. The battle was not between two scientists making competing claims about nature. Instead, the opposition was between science and nonscience. We must wonder, how could such a meaning be received? Wasn’t Carson a scientist? Yes, but Carson is not coded as a scientist; she is coded as a storyteller (recall the shot of Carson sitting in a chair on her porch). The net result was to convey a fragile environment susceptible to the arrogant and ignorant manipulation of science. This reading reveals an original moment in modern environmentalism’s ambivalent relationship with science.63 We can observe here the extension of “ecology” into a realm beyond the territory of traditional science. Today, we can speak of an ecological movement and only peripherally discuss science, for modern ecology embodies a much broader range of meanings than simply a scientific field.64 Carson often is acknowledged as a popularizer of “ecology.” More than just popularizing the science of ecology, Carson’s ecological writings are often noted for their anti-scientific critique of Western progress gone awry. While Carson’s writings are seldom so explicitly critical (on an ideological level), the televised program did convey such a meaning. The notion that there were two philosophical choices was a construct of the medium itself. The building of the “CBS Reports” program started with reporters and camera crews


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conducting interviews of experts in settings totally devoid of a social context. Editors selected the proper information to convey the desired message and then pasted the pieces together to create the illusion of debate.65 Jack Gould, a New York Times television reviewer who played a large role in pressuring networks to expand their information programming in the late 1950s, noted the impact of the medium on the message. “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” was largely a symposium of experts giving their views on different facets of the issue raised by Miss Carson. But at times the TV medium illustrated points in its own distinctive way. There was a moment of striking contrast in scenes of small children covered with filthy insects and later of majestic mountains and streams in all their unspoiled glory.66 The show’s final effect was to pit naturalist and author Rachel Carson against chemist Dr. White Stevens, both of whom were given time for concluding remarks. This time they appeared in reverse order. Stevens: Carson maintains that the balance of nature is an integral force in the survival of man. As opposed to the modern biologist, the modern chemist believes that man is increasingly controlling nature. [Shot of Rachel Carson walking through woods at home in Maine. She comes to a cliff and stares down at the vast ocean.] Carson: The balance of nature is built on a series of interlocking relationships between living things. You can’t just step in with brute force and change one thing without changing many others. We still talk in terms of conquest, we still haven’t gotten mature enough to think of ourselves only as a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Copland’s “Gift to be Simple” plays one last time. The impact of the show can hardly be overestimated. Certainly it mobilized communities to take a more responsible attitude toward pesticide use.67 Citizens demanded tighter controls on pesticide regulation. They called for further research into the short- and long-term effects of pesticide use. The President’s Science Advisory Committee issued its report on “The Uses of Pesticides” on May 15, shortly after the televised program. While the report was “balanced,” in that it pointed to the benefits of pesticides, it nevertheless confirmed the core of Carson’s argument that there may be unforeseen consequences of pesticide use that science knows nothing about. Indeed, science does not have all the answers. In fact, the authority of science to give definite answers to matters of public policy was called into question. Thus, the televised “Silent Spring” provided an epistemological critique of the relationship between Western progress, human culture, and the limits of the environment to withstand manipulation in the name of progress and culture. Equally important, “CBS Reports” brought the pesticide debate to an enormous social base that gave the philosophical debate immense impact. An antiexperimentalist and anti-science agenda became a recurring theme in the narrative of popular environmentalism. It is beyond doubt that Rachel Carson helped the American public become aware of a pesticide problem. While the issue would not be resolved quickly, a broader environmentalism continuously gained political power throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Silent Spring stands as a pivotal text. But Carson’s indictment was morphed during each step of its publishing history by editors, literary agents, television producers, reporters, investigators, and by the medium itself (advertisements in The New Yorker, or commercial pullouts on “CBS Reports”). Much more than Carson’s thoughts were reflected in three different media. Each medium conveyed a unique “Silent Spring” to a different public sphere. The New Yorker disseminated an attenuated “Silent Spring,” shorn of some of its science and extra-human concerns, to a



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cosmopolitan readership that longed for entertainment. Houghton Mifflin and the Book-ofthe-Month Club distributed Silent Spring to a suburban audience that was situated in a Cold War domestic ideology. “CBS Reports” created an anti-science and anti-progress “Silent Spring” that challenged the unflagging faith in science’s ability to know and control nature. Such heterogeneity helps to explain how environmental politics transcended local circumstances to become a subject of national debate. Environmentalism spans a continuum that in the same breath demands clean water for human consumption, the preservation of ecosystems in the name of environmental responsibility, and the destruction of technocratic Western capitalism. The book, Silent Spring, can now be read as a testament to this array of issues. But the multimeaningful “Silent Springs” have discursive histories that reside in the book’s extended media manifestations. The publication and reception of Silent Spring have been seen as among the most crucial events that introduced the central issues of environmentalism to the American public—an introduction that achieved the consensus requisite for making environmentalism a subject of national debate. We have to credit Carson’s genius as both naturalist and writer in making this possible. But it is also important to examine the structure and culture of the media that conveyed various meanings of Silent Spring to a wide spectrum of constituencies— the citizens who displayed considerable differences of opinion about what was valuable in the environment and worth protecting. If we are to evaluate the historical impact of similar landmark books on the environment, we should pay closer attention to the text’s natural history within a mass media environment.

References 1 For instance, Time Magazine included Carson on a list of the top hundred “scientists and thinkers” of the century. Peter Matthiessen, “Environmentalist: Rachel Carson,” Time Magazine (March 29, 1999), 187. 2 The most detailed exposition of this history can be found in Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 313–346. 3 For the importance of the televised “Silent Spring,” see Linda Lear, “Bombshell in Beltsville: the USDA and the challenge of “Silent Spring,” Agricultural History 66 (Spring 1992): 151–170. 4 Maurie J. Cohen, “Science and the environment: assessing cultural capacity for ecological modernization,” Public Understanding of Science 7 (1998): 149–167; Sally Eden, “Public participation in environmental policy: considering scientific, counter-scientific and non-scientific contributions,” Public Understanding of Science 5 (1996): 183–204; and Craig Trumbo, “Constructing climate change: claims and frames in US news coverage of an environmental issue,” Public Understanding of Science 5 (1996): 269–283. 5 Robert Darnton continuously asks this question in unique ways. See, for instance, The Business of Enlightenment: a Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979) and Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Publishing histories now abound in intellectual history as well as the history of science, and while this essay does not pretend to be one, it does partake of the wider project of criticizing the myth that books are point sources of information. 6 While this essay presumes the heterogeneity of the “public,” it does not explain the public in all of its colors and classes. Recent work on environmental racism, for instance, implies that events such as the pesticide controversy were sure to provoke different responses from different people of color. See Ellen Stroud, “Troubled waters in ecotopia: environmental racism in Portland, Oregon,” Radical History Review 74 (Spring 1999): 65–95; and Giovanna De Chiro, “Nature as community: the convergence of environmental and social justice,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 298–320. 7 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Hal K. Rothman, The Greening of a Nation?: Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945 (Troy: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); Victor B. Scheffer, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); David Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 8 Rothman, The Greening of a Nation, p. 46. Also see Scheffer, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America, p. 113, and Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, p. 113.


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9 Such an approach is similar to those taken by rhetoricians of environmental discourse. See Carl G. Gerndl and Stuart C. Brown, eds., Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary Rhetoric (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Jimmie M. Killingworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); and Jane Benett and William Chaloupka, eds., In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). More than anything, my approach has been influenced by the work of Warren Susman who taught historians that analyzing culture can explain political history. See especially, Warren Susman, “The culture of the thirties,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 150–183. 10 This is not to argue for singular and exclusive readings of each text. A suburban reader could find relevant messages within The New Yorker version as easily as an urban reader could find relevant meanings within the book. The main point is that each medium refocused the central thrust of the critique in powerful and audience-specific ways. 11 See Christopher Sellers, “Body, place and the state: the makings of an ‘environmentalist’ imaginary in the post-World War II U.S.,” Radical History Review 74 (Spring 1999): 31–64. 12 Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1975); and E. J. Kahn, Jr., About the New Yorker and Me (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979). 13 “William Shawn, 85, is Dead, New Yorkers Gentle Despot,” The New York Times (December 9, 1992) A1, B15. 14 Rachel Carson, “Undersea,” The Atlantic Monthly 78 (September 1937), 55–67. See Rachel Carson, “Guarding our wildlife resources,” Conservation in Action 5:2 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1948) as an example of her writings in an official capacity. 15 Rachel Carson, “The bat knew it first,” Collier’s 20 (November 18, 1944), 23; and Rachel Carson, “The bat knew it first,” Reader’s Digest 34 (August 1945), 45–46. 16 Various letters between Rachel Carson, Marie Rodell, and publishers, (April 1950), Rachel Carson Collection (hereafter RCC), Box 103, Folder 1979, Bienecke Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 17 See for instance, Rachel Carson’s National Book Award acceptance speech for The Sea Around Us, delivered January 29, 1952, RCC, Box 18, Folder 491. Printed in Linda Lear, ed., Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 90–92. 18 Lear, Rachel Carson, pp. 394–408. 19 I am indebted to Daniel Jacobi and Bernard Schiele for demonstrating the value of this approach to reading scientific information in magazines. See Daniel Jacobi and Bernard Schiele, “Science in magazines, and its readers,” Public Understanding of Science 2 (1993): 31–20. 20 Carson had planned Silent Spring as a short article, after which she intended to write a comprehensive book on the relationship between humans and nature. The two projects seem to have melded into one. See Lear’s narrative in Rachel Carson, pp. 312–338. 21 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 223–225. 22 Carson, Silent Spring, pp. 230–235. 23 See Dr. Milton Carleton, “Silent Spring merely science fiction instead of fact,” Chicago Sunday Sun-Times (September 23, 1962); RCC, Box 63, Folder 1126. 24 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 277. 25 Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” The New Yorker, (June 30, 1962), 64. 26 Shortly after the serialization, Lawrence Davies published four articles in The New York Times that warned consumers of the dangers of pesticides in agricultural practices. Lawrence E. Davies, “Man and mite vie for a coast lake,” The New York Times (August 23, 1962), 54:1; idem., “Bees shielded in coast pest war,” The New York Times (August 24, 1962), 15:2; “Coast dairymen battle pesticides,” The New York Times (August 25, 1962), 44:1; “Pheasant danger seen in pest war,” The New York Times (August 26, 1962), 81:1. On the Consumer Union printing, see Lear, Rachel Carson, p. 411. 27 Gerald Jonas, letter to the editor, The New York Times (July 26, 1962), 26:5. A dry-cleaner shortly responded and wrote that his moth-proofing practices were in line with the Department of Agriculture’s Handbook of Toxicology. Louis A. Kinum, letter to the editor, The New York Times (September 6, 1962), 30:6. 28 Letter to the editor, The New Yorker (July 7, 1962), 4. 29 Including these three articles, there were only eight pesticide-related articles through August and the part of September prior to Silent Spring’s publication. In the month after publication, there were fifteen pesticide-related articles. 30 Frank Graham, Since Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 62. 31 Vera Norwood, Made from this Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 146. 32 Lear, Rachel Carson, pp. 15–16. 33 Lear, Rachel Carson, pp. 315–317.



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34 Opinion by District Judge Byers, Murphy v. Benson Civ. A. No. 17610, U.S. District Court; Eastern District, New York; 151 F. Supp. 786 (May 24, 1957); and the opinion of District Judge Bruchhausen, Civ. No. 17610, U.S. District Court; Eastern District, New York; 164 F. Supp. 120 (June 23, 1958). 35 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 76. 36 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 86. 37 On American suburbs, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 38 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Harper Collins, 1988). For a reading of the nuclear and military imagery that imbued Silent Spring, see Ralph H. Lutts, “Chemical fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, radioactive fallout and the environmental movement,” Environmental Review 9 (Fall 1985), 214–225. 39 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 90. 40 Quoted in Paul Brooks, The House of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 244. 41 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 23. 42 Quoted in Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth, p. 152. 43 Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth, pp. 143–171. 44 Letter from Paul Brooks to James Rand, (July 1962), RCC, Box 105, Folder 1994. 45 Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth, pp. 148–152; and Vera Norwood, “The nature of knowing: Rachel Carson and the American environment,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (Summer 1987): 740–760. 46 Carson, Silent Spring, pp. 72–73. 47 Carson, Silent Spring, pp. 118–126. 48 Lee, The Hidden Public, p. 151. For histories of the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Janice Radway, “The scandal of the middlebrow: the Book-of-the-Month Club, class fracture, and cultural authority,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Fall 1990), 703–736, and Joan Schelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 49 Survey of Lifetime Readers, Prepared for the Library of Congress, Center for the Book, and Book-of-the-Month Club Project Director: Alicia J. Welch, Information Analysis Systems Inc., (October 19, 1992), 7. 50 Quoted in Lear, Rachel Carson, p. 408. 51 Lear, Rachel Carson, p. 419. 52 Indeed, we can take The New York Times’ coverage of pesticide issues to show that after the initial flurry of attention that accompanied the release of the book in September, debate slackened. There were fifteen articles written in September, four in October, four in November, one in December and January each, none in February, and one in March. Some forums of discussion were grinding to a slow halt. For instance, the interdisciplinary Pesticide Committee of the Federal Council for Science and Technology, having been assigned the task of “looking into the activities of government agencies in the field,” indicated that “making a definitive judgment on the hazards of pesticides will not be possible soon, however, because key facts lie beyond the knowledge of science today.” This committee’s work would be eclipsed by the report issued by the President’s Science Advisory Committee in early May. Robert C. Toth, “Pesticides study found difficult,” The New York Times (December 7, 1963), 41:8. Agriculturists favoring the use of pesticides argued that Carson’s message was understood, heeded, and the criticized practices fixed. See “Progress cited on pesticides: scientists report gains in controlling effects,” The New York Times (January 10, 1963), 15:1. This is not to argue for the insignificance of the book’s publication. The point is that in early 1963, both public debate and government action did not possess the energy that both had shown in the firestorm of controversy that met with the publication of Silent Spring in September. The slowly dying embers would be fanned into flame with “CBS Reports”’ coverage of the debate. 53 In April 1963, The New York Times published sixteen pesticide-related articles; twelve in May; seven in June; three in July; and nine in August. Perhaps the greatest impact of the show was to highlight what numerous government and industrial scientists “didn’t know.” Many of these articles either call for, or report evidence of, further research, but they also highlight the stunning limits of science in preserving a healthy environment. 54 Rachel Carson to Marie Rodell, (November 29, 1955), RCC, Box 104, Folder 1987. 55 Carson was at one time worried that too many oppositional scientists had been “weighted against” her on the show. Carson to Dorothy Freeman (March 26, 1963), published in Martha Freeman, ed., Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 445. 56 Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 182. 57 Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, p. 247. 58 Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 216–245. “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” however, seems to have achieved a much larger audience. “CBS Reports” followed up the one-hour show with a half-hour program some


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G. Kroll six weeks later. Also, among many end-of-the-year retrospectives, the “CBS Reports” coverage of the pesticide issue consistently ranked high on lists of the most important television programs in 1963. The viewer figures on “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” come from Lear, Rachel Carson, p. 450. CBS’s efforts here were part of a larger initiative by all the networks to redeem the questionable traits of television (as solely entertaining and profit-driven) through the rebirth of television documentary. Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland, pp. 1–34. Val Adams, “Two sponsors quit pesticide show,” The New York Times, (April 3, 1963), 95:4. “Three sponsors won’t sing of spring,” Virginia Pilot (April 3, 1963), RCC, Box 75, Folder 1335. Jack Gould, “TV: controversy over pesticide danger weighted,” The New York Times (April 4, 1963), 95:2. “CBS Reports” was designed with precisely this aim in mind. In 1959, a special committee of top CBS executives concluded that CBS should attempt to “counteract and, if possible, to overcome the impression that its management does not care enough about any of its responsibilities except making a profit.” Quoted in Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland, p. 120. David Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, pp. 68–146. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1977); Paul Sears, “Ecology—a subversive subject,” BioScience 14 (July 1964), 11–13. One reviewer was keenly perceptive regarding the constructed nature of the text. “Then, there’s the small matter of cutting from one interviewee to another. The effect, mainly, is to give a viewer the impression that he’s watching some kind of debate. Conflict can be made to appear to exist. Obviously, the interviews were filmed separately. The speaker has no way of knowing the context into which his words will be placed. . . . By cutting quickly, arguments can be shaded to fit the need for dramatic conflict.” Lawrence Laurent, “Filmed interviews made Silent Spring dry hour,” Washington D.C. Post-Times Herald, (April 5, 1963), RCC, Box 75, Folder 1336. This reviewer was somewhat confused by the images. The shots of “small children covered with insects” appeared while Dr. White-Stevens was hypothesizing a world without pesticides, i.e., Stevens’ reading of the impact of Carson’s message. Jack Gould, “TV: controversy over pesticide danger weighted.” On Gould, see Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland, p. 221. For instance, Ruth Desmond, Chairperson of the Federation of Homemakers, contacted the White House after viewing the television program. She urged the President’s Science Advisory Committee to publish its report on pesticides mentioned in the program. In her words, “we feel strongly that if the public can ’take’ the risks from use of pesticides—then it can also ’take’ the knowledge of these risks and the possible extent.” Ruth Desmond to Jerome Wiesner of the White House, (April 12, 1963), RCC, Box #43, Folder 788. On May 15, the PSAC released its report, Uses of Pesticides, which lauded Carson’s role in enlightening the public to the dangers of pesticides. Upon the report’s release, “CBS Reports” devoted a second show to the issue; while this latter program was shorter, it held the PSAC report as a vindication of Carson’s claims. Zuoyue Wange, “Responding to Silent Spring: scientists, popular science communication, and environmental policy in the Kennedy years,” Science Communication 19 (December 1997): 141–163.

Author Gary Kroll is assistant professor in the History Department at Plattsburgh State University of New York, where he teaches environmental history and the history of the life sciences.


Public Understanding of Science

Public Understanding of Science

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