by Eric Rutkow
As the 1960s wore on, the effects of this toxic stew began to surface across the nation. America’s lakes and rivers were turning into industrial sinks. Lake Erie, once a thriving fishery, was essentially dead by the mid-1960s. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio was covered in a near-constant oily slick that occasionally burst into flames. Industrial smokestacks built near sprawling urban environments were filling the surrounding atmosphere with nonstop streams of pollutants. Air quality in many cities was becoming perilous, and cases of asthma appeared on the rise.
Despite mounting evidence of a crisis, these issues garnered relatively little public attention. They rarely appeared on television or in newspapers—not surprising, since no major media outlets had journalists devoted to such themes. They gained somewhat more traction on college campuses, which had evolved into hotbeds of civic activism. But even there, most of the political energy went toward fighting for civil rights, opposing the Vietnam War, and trying to build a counterculture.
Without public pressure, politicians saw little need to act. President Richard Nixon paid lip service—his January 1969 inaugural speech mentioned “protecting our environment and enhancing the quality of life”—but his administration hesitated to fully embrace a potential regulatory scheme that seemed complicated, costly, and likely to alienate some within the business community. Many in Congress followed the president’s lead. And in their inaction, air quality continued to deteriorate, lakes and rivers continued to go fetid, toxic chemicals continued to coat the landscape, municipal drinking water continued to turn sour, and fragile ecosystems continued to degrade.
It might have continued this way further into the future but for Gaylord Nelson, the junior senator from Wisconsin. Through his efforts, a new holiday would soon appear and a new movement would coalesce.
Nelson was born on June 4, 1916, in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, a small village in the northern part of the state. His hometown fell within the region that had once contained endless stands of pristine white pines, the same mythic spires that had entranced Frederick Weyerhaeuser. But by the time of Nelson’s birth, the primeval trees were long gone, victims of the industrial lumbering boom led by Weyerhaeuser’s syndicate. As Nelson wrote, “We wiped [the forest] out in an eyewink of history and left behind fifty years of heartbreak and economic ruin.” Nelson grew up as a witness to the problems that followed when industry showed little regard for natural resources, such as trees. It was an experience that would shape his worldview and set the path for his future career.
After serving in World War II, Nelson decided to enter state politics. He was a staunch Progressive, formed in the mold of “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the legendary Wisconsin senator. The Progressives at the time were still part of the Republican Party, but this alliance crumbled when Robert La Follette, Jr., who had inherited his father’s Senate seat, lost a heated 1946 primary contest to Joseph McCarthy, a little-known conservative who would soon mature into one of the most controversial demagogues in the nation. McCarthy’s victory pushed the Progressives into the arms of the state Democratic Party, and Nelson, who won a state senate seat in 1948, became one of the party’s young lions.
In 1958, Nelson successfully ran for governor. The conservationist impulse that had been formed among the cut-over pine forests of northern Wisconsin now began to assert itself. During his inaugural address, he declared, “We need more parks and playgrounds, more wetlands, more stream improvement, better use of our lakes and streams, and more careful husbanding of our wilderness areas.” At first, Nelson struggled to turn his rhetoric into action, but during his second term as governor he managed to push through a massive conservation initiative that would cement his reputation as “the conservation governor.” Known as the Outdoor Recreation Act Program (ORAP), Nelson’s plan used a penny tax on cigarettes to fund a $50 million war chest for the acquisition of state land. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall described ORAP in 1961 as “a landmark in conservation history . . . the boldest conservation step ever taken on a state level in the history of the United States.”
In early 1962, Nelson announced that he would not seek a third term as governor. Though he remained popular, he felt that he “had achieved practically everything that [he] could achieve.” He set his sights on the U.S. Senate, where the longer terms would relieve some of the campaigning pressures and where he could bring his conservation cause to the federal level. The senatorial race that followed was a close one, but Nelson triumphed with almost 53 percent of the vote. By this point, it was beyond evident that conservation would be his main focus moving forward. He told a reporter shortly after winning the election, “I think the most crucial domestic issue facing America . . . is the conservation of our natural resources.”
During his first trip to Washington as a senator-elect, Nelson requested a special meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother and chief advisor. The subject at issue was the possibility of the president’s embarking on a national conservation speaking tour, something that no sitting president had ever done. In Nelson’s view, federal conservation efforts could not advance until the issue’s profile was raised nationally, and the chief executive’s bully pulpit seemed like the best place to start. President Kennedy, who saw himself as a champion of natural-resource protection, responded positively when he learned of Nelson’s suggestion. And in May 1963, it was announced that the president would embark on a five-day conservation tour later in the fall.
Nelson was brimming with anticipation when the trip finally began in mid-September. The first destination was Milford, Pennsylvania, where the president dedicated the family home of Gifford Pinchot as a national monument and paid homage to the greatest conservationist of an earlier era. The trip then headed west, including a special stop in Wisconsin during which Kennedy publicly thanked Nelson for suggesting the speaking tour. The speeches quickly piled up as Kennedy visited ten more states throughout the greater West. But to Nelson’s dismay, the effect that he had been hoping for didn’t seem to be materializing. His initial optimism began to transform into resignation. The president’s speeches, he wrote, “didn’t have much sweep or drama to them.” Even worse, the media that covered the president seemed more concerned with his thoughts on foreign policy than with the stated purpose of the trip. By the time the itinerary was completed, Nelson concluded that it had been “poorly conceived” from the start and that its ultimate impact was negligible. However, it would become, in his words, “the germ of the idea” that ultimately defined his personal legacy and reordered the national political agenda.
Six years passed before this germ of an idea finally blossomed. In August 1969, Nelson was carrying out a smaller conservation speaking tour of his own when he stopped in Santa Barbara, California. The city was in the midst of a catastrophe: Six months earlier an offshore oil platform blowout had released up to a hundred thousand barrels of crude oil into the Santa Barbara Channel and nearby beaches. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history (and would remain so until the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, itself eclipsed by the Deepwater Horizon explosion of 2010). The scenes of environmental degradation around Santa Barbara shook Nelson to his core. He wanted to do something, but didn’t know what. Then, on the way to another tour stop, Nelson read an article about the effectiveness of recent college campus teach-ins in raising awareness about the war in Vietnam. As Nelson explained, “[T]he idea occurred to me that we could get political attention by having a nationwide environmental day patterned after the[se] Vietnam teach-in[s].”
It took Nelson a month to develop this initial burst of inspiration into a practical plan, and he finally went public with the rudiments of his proposal in mid-September. During a speech in Seattle before the Washington Environmental Council, he declared, “I am convinced that the same concern the youth of this nation took in changing this nation’s priorities on the war in Vietnam and on civil rights can be shown for the problems of the environment.” He suggested that a single day be set aside in th
e spring for a national teach-in devoted to what he called “The Crisis of the Environment.”
Nelson’s use of the term “environment” hinted at how his thinking had changed over the course of a decade. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he had spoken primarily of natural-resource protection, especially for the purposes of recreation and wilderness. But over time his outlook—like that of many conservationists—began to broaden. Toxins and dangerous chemicals had entered the discourse following the publication of Silent Spring. Air and water pollution had grown in importance as their effects began to resonate across the landscape. A concern for aesthetics had emerged in the middle of the decade, when Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Johnson, spearheaded a campaign to “Keep America Beautiful.” Excessive consumption was being recast from a symbol of prosperity to an indicator of irresponsible resource use. Runaway population growth—the subject of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb—was seen as a looming threat to the stability of society and the supply of raw materials. The word “environment” encompassed all of these new perspectives as well as the older ones.
To Nelson’s surprise, his environmental teach-in announcement in Seattle was covered by the nation’s two main wire services—the Associated Press and the United Press. Their interest prompted further exposure in the nation’s daily newspapers and on some television news broadcasts. According to Nelson, by the time he returned to his office in Washington, D.C., “the response by letter and phone was overwhelming. Inquiries were flooding in from all across the country.”
His senatorial office was ill-equipped to handle the onslaught of attention. Nelson appealed to some of his supporters for seed money and used their contributions to set up an independent nonprofit, The Environmental Teach-In, Inc. He then recruited Paul McCloskey, a Republican congressman from California, to serve as co-chair—Nelson’s hope was that this move might counteract any accusations of partisanship. The next step was to find someone to handle the day-to-day planning and organization. The job went to Dennis Hayes, a twenty-five-year-old student at Harvard Law School. Hayes had initially inquired about helping to coordinate the Boston-area teach-in, but his enthusiasm and dedication made a strong impression on Nelson and McCloskey. They asked him to consider running the entire show. Hayes soon accepted, dropped out of Harvard for a semester, and began assembling a staff, most of whom were equally young, passionate, and inexperienced.
Nelson now needed to select an actual date. It was, after all, somewhat difficult to mobilize around the notion that a teach-in would take place “probably in April,” a phrase Nelson’s office had initially used in promoting the event. Nelson’s primary concern was that the teach-in occur at a time that would allow all schoolchildren and college students to participate. The date, therefore, could not fall around the Easter/Passover holidays. Nor could it hit near a weekend, at least not if the college participants were going to be clearheaded. Nelson’s team eventually settled on Wednesday, April 22.
But that date was already spoken for, at least on the calendars of many conservationists and schoolteachers. It was the anniversary of the birth of J. Sterling Morton, the father of Arbor Day. In Morton’s home state of Nebraska, Arbor Day had been observed on April 22 since 1885, the year it became an official state holiday. Several other states also used this date, and even those that didn’t tended to recognize the holiday toward the end of April—the majority placed it on the fourth Friday of the month, which in 1970 would fall on April 24. Thus, Nelson’s teach-in would either conflict directly with Arbor Day or preempt it by two days and siphon off much of the energy.
This potential double-booking, however, generated little outcry. It may have been that the teach-in was conceived as a one-time event, so no one thought much about the overlap. Or, perhaps, it was that tree planting was viewed as a component of the teach-in, just as conservation had become one aspect of the broader concern for the environment.
Nelson, who knew firsthand the importance of trees and the consequences that stemmed from their abuse, made little mention of the Arbor Day conundrum. His only concern was mobilizing as many students as possible.
And, to his delight, college students were already beginning to mobilize on their own. The New York Times discussed this phenomenon in a front-page story in late November 1969. It was headlined: “Environment May Eclipse Vietnam as College Issue.” According to the article, “From Maine to Hawaii, students are seizing on the environmental ills from water pollution to the global population problem, campaigning against them, and pitching in to do something about them.” The two accompanying photos showed a group of University of Minnesota students conducting a mock funeral for a gasoline engine and a crowd of women wearing surgical masks and protesting smog in Los Angeles. The article ultimately treated all of this activity as a preview of what was soon to follow, explaining, “Already students are looking forward to the first ‘D-Day’ of the movement, next April 22.”
The Times’ use of the phrase “D-Day” revealed an early confusion over just what the teach-in ought to be called. Nelson referred to it, rather dispassionately, as the “Environmental Teach-In.” The official title simply didn’t concern him. He claimed that “[w]hatever name was attached to it didn’t matter one way or the other.” But not everyone shared this attitude. Organizers and the media toyed with a variety of different options as the date approached. The official title never actually changed, but in the popular consciousness the teach-in was beginning to be known as “Earth Day.”
Regardless of what the day was called, one thing seemed clear: The purpose was to foment political change. Nelson had stressed this point from the outset, and he began developing a legislative agenda to support the anticipated demonstrations. In late January, he presented his plan on the floor of Congress in a speech titled “An Environmental Agenda for the 1970s.” One of his senatorial colleagues described it as “a Magna Carta on the environmental rights to which our fellow citizens feel themselves entitled.” The speech contained the outlines of more than a dozen pieces of legislation, ranging from bans on specific chemicals, such as DDT, to sweeping reforms, such as a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee every citizen “the inalienable right to a decent environment.” Nelson, who had spent much of the 1960s watching the environmental legislation he sponsored get passed over, realized that this new agenda would be hopeless unless the April 22 demonstrations were truly transformative.
As the date approached, it started to appear that Nelson just might get the support he desperately sought. More than two thousand universities, two thousand community civic groups, and ten thousand elementary and secondary schools had committed to participate. Mayor John Lindsay of New York City agreed to close a two-mile stretch of Fifth Avenue so that demonstrators would have ample space to march. Every major news broadcast blocked off space in its schedule for special coverage. And politicians, sensing the importance of the event, rushed to get involved—so many congressmen planned to give speeches that the legislative session for April 22 was actually canceled.
Much of the credit for this surge in enthusiasm belonged to Hayes and his staff, but in many ways the fervor was a truly grassroots phenomenon. Earth Day seemed to tap into the zeitgeist of the times. As Nelson liked to say, “The real story is that we didn’t have to organize Earth Day. It organized itself.”
When dawn broke on April 22, students on college campuses across the nation began gathering to welcome the day with readings and vigils. They went on to join local cleanups, partake in protests, plant trees, and attend speeches and rallies. The precise nature of Earth Day depended on where one looked. The issues could be local or general; the participants young or old; the tone hopeful or fearful, often both.
The largest demonstration took place in Manhattan. Several hundred thousand New Yorkers packed the stretch of Fifth Avenue that Mayor Lindsay had declared traffic-free. Many were just out to enjoy an atmosphere free of car honks and exhaust fumes, but countless tens of thousand
s also headed down to Union Square, where a full slate of Earth Day events transformed the scene into an “ecological carnival,” according to a New York Times reporter. There were folks singers, rock bands, chanters, and politicians eager to shake hands. The square’s lawn hosted a nonstop Frisbee game, while on nearby Seventeenth Street a block-long polyethylene bubble offered the chance to breathe pure, filtered air—however, the Times observed that the enclosure “carried unmistakable whiffs of marijuana.” The revelry and demonstrating continued straight through to midnight, when the floodlights were shut off and the streets were once again opened to traffic.
The day, taken as a whole, was not without its failures and controversies. In some cities, such as Washington, D.C., turnout was a good deal lower than expected. And in almost all cases, the day’s events lacked involvement from African Americans. One of the teach-in organizers told CBS News that a prominent black leader told him, “You’re part of a Nixon trick. You are basically doing what Nixon wants you to do, take energy away from the black issue, take energy away from the war issue.” Nixon, for his part, declined to participate in Earth Day. Dan Rather of CBS described the administration’s attitude as “one of benign neglect” and suggested that Nixon viewed Earth Day as a partisan stunt by Democrats. This critique was taken even further by those on the Far Right, such as the John Birch Society, which painted the teach-ins as a secret communist plot—it was an unfortunate coincidence that April 22 happened to be the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. Criticism came as well from the Left, with the influential college group Students for a Democratic Society condemning the day as an establishment con.
Nonetheless, when the dust had finally settled, and the cars returned to the streets, and the sun rose on April 23, Nelson was able to claim success. The media estimated that 20 million people had participated, a full 10 percent of the U.S. population. Hayes’s organization called it “the largest, cleanest, most peaceful demonstration in America’s history.” And even those who failed to join in could not avoid hearing about the events. As the New York Times observed, “There were so many TV specials, summaries and schedule changes during the course of Earth Day that no single set of eyes could hope to keep abreast of all that was offered on the home screen, let alone the radio.”