Pesticides, A Love Story

America's Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals

Michelle Mart

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700626496
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621576
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

“Presto! No More Pests!” proclaimed a 1955 article introducing two new pesticides, “miracle-workers for the housewife and back-yard farmer.” Easy to use, effective, and safe: who wouldn’t love synthetic pesticides? Apparently most Americans did—and apparently still do. Why—in the face of dire warnings, rising expense, and declining effectiveness—do we cling to our chemicals? Michelle Mart wondered. Her book, a cultural history of pesticide use in postwar America, offers an answer.

America's embrace of synthetic pesticides began when they burst on the scene during World War II and has held steady into the 21st century—for example, more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US in 2008 are Roundup Ready GMOs, dependent upon generous use of the herbicide glyphosate to control weeds. Mart investigates the attraction of pesticides, with their up-to-the-minute promise of modernity, sophisticated technology, and increased productivity—in short, their appeal to human dreams of controlling nature. She also considers how they reinforced Cold War assumptions of Western economic and material superiority.

Though the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the rise of environmentalism might have marked a turning point in Americans’ faith in pesticides, statistics tell a different story. Pesticides, a Love Story recounts the campaign against DDT that famously ensued; but the book also shows where our notions of Silent Spring’s revolutionary impact falter—where, in spite of a ban on DDT, farm use of pesticides in the United States more than doubled in the thirty years after the book was published. As a cultural survey of popular and political attitudes toward pesticides, Pesticides, a Love Story tries to make sense of this seeming paradox. At heart, it is an exploration of the story we tell ourselves about the costs and benefits of pesticides—and how corporations, government officials, ordinary citizens, and the press shape that story to reflect our ideals, interests, and emotions.

CHAPTER 1

Falling in Love: The Golden Age of Synthetic Pesticides

By many measures, life was good in post–World War II America. It was truly a golden age. The United States that emerged victorious from the war was transformed in extraordinary ways politically, militarily, and economically. For many ordinary Americans, economic change was most clearly demonstrated by their ever-improving material well-being—including access to plentiful, inexpensive food. Such bounty, moreover, seemed attributable to the triumph of modern industrial agriculture, which was increasingly reliant on synthetic pesticides.

Pesticides, thus, were revolutionary. They symbolized much about American modernity, superiority in the Cold War, and the ability to control nature. Most Americans embraced the chemicals and all that they represented—one could say they fell in love. Was it inevitable that people would embrace the revolution? Or were attitudes shaped by particular political and cultural forces? This chapter seeks to answer these questions, looking especially at the role of the press in framing this nascent love story and the reasons that positive attitudes toward pesticides would prove to be enduring.

One starting point in understanding the postwar embrace of chemical pesticides is to recognize how strongly many Americans supported economic growth and new technologies. Many, including politicians such as Harry Truman, had a fundamental bias in favor of development and scientific innovation. Such a bias was as natural as the embrace of modernity, progress, and the scientific revolution. For liberals who favored environmental projects such as those that were part of the New Deal, pesticides and the modernization of agriculture were an obvious continuation of that legacy. Truman’s Fair Deal agenda included large-scale dam and irrigation projects like those before World War II, and the president remained committed to the idea that human mastery over the landscape would bring prosperity to more Americans and benefit the nation as a whole in its Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.¹ Truman viewed nature pragmatically as a collection of resources waiting to be tamed and exploited.² Moreover, he and other American leaders worried that anything short of robust economic development could plunge the country back into its prewar depression.

The imperative of development was strong for philosophical, political, and economic reasons. Few people questioned possible environmental consequences of the chosen path. This perspective counters some of the criticisms from the late twentieth century of those who enthusiastically embraced pesticide use. Just as a certain inertia and inevitability led to the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima once the technology had been successfully mastered, so the discovery of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides compelled their use. It would have been shocking, indeed, if American policymakers had prevented the use of the atomic bomb—or the civilian adoption of synthetic pesticides.

Another aspect of the postwar embrace of synthetic pesticides was the assumption that increased agricultural output was by definition good and that this bounty was inextricably tied to modern techniques. A cursory look at the transformation of postwar farming bolstered widespread faith in new technologies. The amount produced on farms skyrocketed, dwarfing all previous output. Grain, dairy, and animal production all increased.³ Postwar productivity rested on an array of mechanized equipment as well as mass-produced feed, seed, fertilizer, and synthetic pesticides, with pesticide use increasing tenfold from 1945 to 1972.⁴ There were also genetic innovations in crops and livestock even before World War II; the most visible example was the spread of hybrid corn, going from just a few acres in Iowa in 1930, for example, to 90 percent of corn planted there a decade later.⁵ These and other innovations were the natural outgrowth of the industrial ideal that had taken hold in the prewar years and begun to reshape how people viewed agriculture.⁶

The infrastructure for the widespread mechanization of agriculture in the decade after the war was great. Not only was the American chemical industry large and thriving coming out of the war but there were numerous war-surplus planes and discharged pilots who could be cheaply and easily set to work spraying chemicals over fields (and forests).⁷ The complete package of modern farming, including a “bumper crop of chemicals,” as described in a 1955 New York Times article, along with mechanization, conservation, and improved technology generally, led to a 42 percent increase in output and a 13 percent increase in food consumption for the average American compared with the period before World War II.⁸

The technological revolution in agriculture was more accessible for some than for others. Many small family farmers could not afford the heavy investment needed for the new technologies, nor did they have the vast swaths of land that made the technologies economically feasible. By 1955, total operating costs for the average farm had tripled from just fifteen years before, precipitating a decline in the number of farms and in the number of people who worked on the land. From 1939 to 1959, the number of farms in the United States fell 40 percent, and the number dropped almost another 50 percent from 1950 to 1970, while the size of an average farm went up 2 acres each year. By 1959, the earnings of the top 6 percent of farms equaled those of the bottom 94 percent. And, finally, the number of Americans employed on farms went from 25 percent in 1945 to 6 percent in 1965 to 2 percent by the end of the century.⁹ Mechanized industrial agriculture took the place of the small family farms that had dominated earlier American history.

Newspaper and magazine articles did not dwell on those left out of the agricultural revolution. They lauded the ballooning output and the technology that brought it. For example, a 1946 article in the New York Times on Iowa’s 100th birthday began with a large photo of a fertile cornfield, noting that the state enjoyed “the best corn crop prospects in history” and that farmers carried with them “cans of DDT for their cattle and pamphlets on artificial insemination for their cows.”¹⁰ Similarly, a New York Times Magazine photo essay three years later—titled “Another Bumper Harvest”—showcased lush fields with large threshing machines and combines.¹¹ One 1949 story in U.S. News & World Report observed that even if there was a decline in farm labor, with more machinery and new techniques, farmers raised “40 per cent more food and fiber than before the war.”¹² Another article in the New York Times extolled wide-ranging improvements in agriculture, from new hybrids with higher outputs per acre to a more efficient use of fertilizers.¹³ Although the fruits of agricultural innovation were everywhere in evidence, journalists made a point of celebrating them and thus increasing their readers’ awareness of the revolution in their midst.

Press stories most often highlighted the benefits brought by mechanization. For example, an article in Barron’s boasted that “the mechanical picker may give American cotton a new lease on life.” The article went on to explain that the picker, along with the flame weeder, might bring a revolution in the South and perhaps allow the region’s cotton to regain the market share that it had lost to that grown abroad and synthetics such as rayon produced at home.¹⁴ Articles in the Nation’s Business and New York Times Magazine described how mechanization in places such as Indiana had brought prosperity to average farmers, whose income and quality of life had increased since the war. Even those displaced from farm labor due to mechanization, the articles added, had new opportunities in factory jobs coming to small towns and rural America.¹⁵

Another way in which the press celebrated modern agricultural techniques—ranging from the development of hybrids to the more scientific management of livestock to the application of chemicals—was to describe them in almost miraculous terms. For example, a 1954 article in the Saturday Evening Post observed, “Airplanes swooping over a field leaving a trail of vapor of dust, are engaged in chemical warfare against crop-destroying insects. . . . You’ll also see spray machines squirting selective chemicals which kill weeds but don’t harm the crops.”¹⁶

Such press articles helped to strengthen a widespread feeling of confidence in the ability of modern American farmers to produce more-than-adequate food for the nation’s needs. With new technologies, new chemicals, and new science—“the factories in the fields,” as described in a Saturday Evening Post editorial—there was little worry for Americans about the food shortages that plagued the rest of the world.¹⁷ Even after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, there was no expectation of rationing or other wartime measures. As the same editorial phrased it, “Short of atomic disaster, it is hard to see how Americans can be seriously threatened by hunger.”¹⁸

It’s worth pausing to consider the impact of such confident press pronouncements. After all, if, as this chapter asserts, the mainstream press played a foundational role in the American love affair with pesticides, we cannot think of journalists as merely chroniclers of an objective reality, self-evident to all. Nor were journalists simply cheerleaders for attitudes that were inevitable. Instead, modern news media have both a political role in shaping government actions and a cultural role in establishing the common discourse of the public sphere.¹⁹

Despite the protests of journalists who frequently assert their independence from the political subjects about which they write, many communications scholars have observed that the relationship between media and government is, as described by Timothy Cook, “intertwined,” “interactive and interdependent.”²⁰ Thus, those with political and institutional power help determine what issues are most important, most newsworthy, by virtue of their authority. Journalists are dependent on the access and information granted by such elites, and elites are dependent on journalists to frame the discussion—and hopefully public support—that they seek. All are aware of the symbiotic relationship and the outsized role played by government sources in the news that makes its way into the public sphere.²¹

Along with government and official sources, other elite actors whose interest is to protect the status quo play an influential role in shaping the news. Communications scholar Julia Corbett argues that there is an important cultural consequence to this relationship: “Media decisions about what to publish by and large protect dominant cultural values such as existing power and class arrangements. . . . In general, there [i]s a lack of news that might appear offensive to the values of family, religion, community, patriotism, and business.”²² In this way, media sources can be seen as fairly conservative institutions due to their dependence not only on official sources but also on the advertising and other interests that support them. These relationships help to shape mainstream environmental news, as reflected in the frequency with which news media champion technological developments that favor economic and business growth.

Such an outcome stems not only from media conservatism but also from the widely held cultural assumption that technological progress and mastery over the natural world are inherent goods.²³ Those who suffer the consequences of what sociologist Ulrich Beck labeled a “risk society” have been marginalized, and only occasionally are these social and economic norms challenged in mainstream media.²⁴ Regarding the environment and pesticides, in particular, such examples are found when there are acute crises or events ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Falling in Love: The Golden Age of Synthetic Pesticides
• 2. Trouble in Paradise: The USDA and the Rise of Critical Voices
• 3. Breakup? The Cultural Impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
• 4. Foreign Affairs: How Pesticides Could Help Americans Feed the World and Win a War
• 5. The Twenty-Year Itch: Activists, Experts, and the Regulatory Era
• 6. Love Is Blind: Chemical Disasters at Home and Abroad
• 7. Recommitment: Endocrine Disruptors, GMOs, and Organic Food
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover