Earth Day

America at the Environmental Crossroads

Jean Griffith, Jean Griffith

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781644249451
• eBook ISBN: 9781644249468
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Issues. They are the conflagrations, the bonfires, the burning controversies so profound, so personal they move people to take action and generate the momentum to change the political system and the course of history. Be it the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Jacob Coxey's Army, the Bonus Army March of June 1932, the National Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the Women's March of January 2018, or March for Our Lives to end gun violence in America in March of 2018, all came about because of Americans motivated by issues so much so they took their message of change to the street. Driven by issues which galvanized public opinion, people protested, demonstrating public solidarity for a cause. Earth Day: America at the Environmental Crossroads is a political history focusing on the issues which generated the first Earth Day in April 1970. It is about the people who brought about this momentous political turning point during a period in American history of unprecedented turmoil and political protest. Open its cover, and you will learn about the agents of change. Some have risen to take their place in the pantheon of environmental history; others are all but forgotten in the collective public mind. It begins with herbicide contamination and the Cranberry Scare of November 1959 then explains the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and its impact on the environmental movement. Though the use of two nuclear weapons by the United States military ended World War II in the Pacific, the inevitable arms race with the Soviet Union during the Cold War led to the testing of these weapons of mass destruction. The second chapter explains how nuclear contaminated fallout became a health threat and a concern for environmentalists and the general public.Overpopulation seems to be a nonissue today. During the decades prior to Earth Day in 1970, the world's population numbers were a concern of monumental importance. This is the focus of chapter three. No credible treatment of the twentieth century environmental movement would be complete without addressing the contribution of Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring. Unlike pesticides, the effects of which oftentimes surface years after exposure, deteriorating air quality burned the eyes and made it difficult to breathe. Polluted air particularly in the country's urban areas not only left an indelible impression in the minds of environmentalists, but it also threatened public health. And clean water, taken for granted today by most Americans, is the subject of chapter six, which describes the extent to which the country's waterways were part of a multibillion-dollar restoration project on the part of the states mandated by the federal government. The seventh chapter is a retelling of the oil spill disaster in Santa Barbara, California, and the radical fringe of the environmental movement which manifested itself before Earth Day, a fitting precursor to the event itself the subject of the final chapter.

Chapter 1

The Great Cranberry Scare and Ecocide

By November of 1962, when Gaylord Nelson won election to represent Wisconsin in the United States Senate, the phrase “environmental pollution” had entered the American vernacular. Three years earlier, with Americans glued to their new black-and-white televisions awaiting news on the Quiz Show scandal and baseball fans paid their respects to Claude “Lefty” Williams implicated in fixing the 1919 World Series, a front-page headline grabbed the public’s attention in The New York Times just days before Thanksgiving 1959. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Arthur S. Flemming stepped to the dais warning at a press conference that food and drug agents had detected traces of aminotriazole in the cranberry crop harvested that year in Oregon and Washington state.

Aminotriazole, it was discovered, caused cancer in laboratory animals when exposed to it. With Thanksgiving just days away, housewives fretted on what they planned to serve on the menu for the big meal. This despite assurances from cranberry growers the contaminated Oregon fruit was safe.4 The first report appeared in The New York Times on November 9, 1959, and in Oregon just prior to that date. Any reference to the possibility of a chemical which caused cancer reverberated throughout American society as a whole. What caused the federal government to act was an obscure add-on to a federal law; traces of aminotriazole in food violated the Delaney amendment of the Food and Drug Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt. The amendment declared no additive to be considered safe if it caused cancer in laboratory test animals or humans.5

The public’s reaction to a known carcinogen in the food supply can not be understated. Not since Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, had there been such a reaction from pundits and the American public. The great cranberry scare of 1959 given the popularity of the fruit near a traditional holiday grabbed American’s attention by the shirt collar and apron strings lifting the consciousness of a people to a higher level. Washington Post journalist Milton Viorst in The Nation examined the formidable obstacles facing the Food and Drug Administration in screening the food supply and protecting the public from chemical contamination in this case herbicides used by agriculture to eliminate noxious weeds. Viorst made the case the HEW director had no ulterior motive in warning the public and calling for an investigation. Instead he argued Flemming used his press conference to serve notice on cranberry producers who undoubtedly were guilty of excessive herbicide use, a potential health hazard.

Viorst’s article, more importantly, warned of how agribusiness use of chemicals had inconspicuously worked their way into America’s food supply affecting unsuspecting consumers. For his outspoken criticism, Viorst would eventually appear on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list. Nevertheless, at the dawn of the decade of the 1960s, Viorst drew public attention to a problem, “the kind that kills or lays its victims low as dinner goes through the digestive process…the kind that lies concealed in the diet and spreads its damages over a lifetime.”6

Viorst went to great lengths to determine where to cast blame. With his thumb on the pulse of the Beltway and public opinion, he identified the cause of the problem. Consumer advocates in the United States Congress lobbied for FDA research funding: the Budget Bureau then “refused to assign the funds to test new products in the chemical pipeline awaiting approval.”7 That and cranberry growers used the herbicide improperly applying it to control weed infestations before the harvest rather than after the fruit’s harvesting as proscribed by FDA regulations. Viorst called Flemming’s announcement “enforcement by press conference” in recalling the cranberries now on grocery store shelves. Viorst went even further. He called FDA. the “stepchild” of the federal regulatory bureaucracy. Congress “assumed that agricultural products needed little policing, while manufactured drugs and foods were so uniform that sampling was good enough.” The reporter drew the obvious conclusion: “This thinking established the ‘spot-check’ tradition in FDA enforcement.” Complicating matters, the Congress and the Eisenhower administration cut the regulatory agency’s funding. By the fall of 1959, three hundred FDA inspectors inspected four hundred thousand pill and food manufacturing facilities and at least two hundred thousand food growers nationwide. Viorst cited more evidence: only two inspectors covered an area stretching from Maryland to North Carolina. Their job made more difficult by the lack of adequate laboratories to test the cranberry samples they believed suspect.8

Viorst’s warning did nothing to dissuade presidential candidates Vice President Richard Nixon and Massachusetts’s Senator John F. Kennedy from consuming cranberries on the campaign trail. Campaigning in Wisconsin Rapids, Nixon devoured four bowls of cranberry sauce at a single setting during a photo-op; Kennedy, in aristocratic style, sipped cranberry juice from a glass at a campaign fundraiser in Marshfield, Wisconsin, shadowing Nixon less than an hour’s drive from his opponent’s campaign stop. This despite Flemming’s press conference warning the public to avoid eating the fruit until lab techs had tested samples to determine the fruit’s toxicity. Not surprisingly, the FDA’s dragnet in the process occurred on an unprecedented scale: Berries from Oregon, Washington state, Massachusetts, and New Jersey were also tested. All regional offices of the FDA bureaucracy reported their findings. Tests on cranberries took place in Atlanta, Georgia, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. All total testing occurred in at least seventeen regional offices around the country. And 3 percent of the time, the 1959 cranberry crop tested positive. A total of 325,800 pounds and had to be disposed of. That the sale of canned cranberries plummeted more than 60 percent and raw cranberries nearly 75 percent that fall, reflected the reaction of American consumers.9 And public opinion sided with Secretary Flemming’s decision to pull cranberries from the shelf to be tested.

Letters on behalf of concerned citizens addressed to HEW, primarily housewives, ran overwhelmingly in favor of Flemming’s decision by a margin of seven to one. The names and addresses of concerned letter writers were withheld from the public. Of the 295 letters the department received, the majority supported Flemming’s decision, expressing gratitude that he had taken action to protect the public; only thirty-nine opposed it. Those supporting Flemming’s decision wanted information on other contaminated foods consumers were exposed to. Typical was one health care professional who expressed their gratitude while trying to grasp the enormity of herbicide and chemical contamination in food. The letter read, “Far more important than the use of aminotriazole on cranberries is its use on other crops. We know it has been used on pasture lands, apple and pear orchards, in wheat fields and presumably many other fields. There are a lot of unanswered questions. Is it present in meat of the grazing animals? Is it on pears, apples? Doesn’t the average consumer ingest a significantly higher amount of chemicals than anyone realizes?”10 Presidential candidates doing a taste tests for the news media to bolster public confidence during the 1960 presidential campaign did not have the intended effect. Fears persisted.

Half a world away in a country most Americans in 1959 had never heard of, the use of herbicides would take centerstage. Like something lifted from the plot of an Ian Fleming spy thriller, the Kennedy administration embarked on a counterinsurgency strategy using herbicides. With the exception of the Reclamation Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers’ dam construction in the United States, this was the greatest scheme to alter the natural environment in American history. The thought of herbicides contaminating the food supply was one thing. The thought that the American government with the blessings of the Pentagon putting herbicides to use to fight a Communist insurgency in Vietnam exposing American military personnel and unsuspecting Vietnamese civilians to the hazardous chemicals another. By the end of the decade, every American had been affected in some way by the Vietnam War and the use of defoliants was no longer a secret.

Agent Orange it was called. It had been developed in the laboratory at the University of Chicago by botanist E. J. Kraus and his assistants prior to Pearl Harbor. Kraus was convinced herbicides could be an effective aid to reduce and eradicate the dense jungles on Japanese occupied islands in the South Pacific. Though never used during World War II, Kraus’s idea remained in the US military files and held sway in the Pentagon and with certain politicians seeking an advantage over the Japanese military during World War II. Kraus even provided insight into his work in theory in a position paper entitled “Plant Growth Regulators: Possible Uses.”11 Test trials of the chemical 2, 4-D, Agent Orange, by the military in the jungles of Panama and Malaysia proved to be an effective ...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8