Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  The 1965 immigration law contained these basic provisions:

  The national origins system, the central feature of U.S. immigration policy for 40 years, was abolished by July 1, 1968. Thereafter immigrants would be admitted by preference categories—family relationships to American citizens and resident aliens and occupational qualifications—on a first come, first served basis without reference to country of birth. During the three-year interim period unused portions of national quotas would be placed in a pool from which preference immigrants from oversubscribed nations might draw.

  The Asia Pacific Triangle was abolished immediately. Under that system a person who was at least half-Asian was classified not by nation of birth but by Asiatic ancestry.

  Immigration from the Western Hemisphere would be limited to 120,000 annually starting on July 1, 1968.

  The number of Eastern Hemisphere immigrants would be 170,000 annually with a 20,000 limit per country. Neither restriction would apply to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens.

  The old list of four preference criteria was increased to seven with reliance on family relationships over occupational skills. A new quota of 10,200 annually was established for refugees from Communism, the Middle East, and natural disasters. Individuals suffering from mental illness would be admissible if they were close relatives of U.S. citizens or resident aliens.

  While the new law generated little public interest, it was to be of enormous significance in several ways. Both those who supported and those who opposed its passage looked to the past. At a time when the government was intervening to eliminate discrimination based on race and sex, it was hardly surprising that it should seek the eradication of discrimination stemming from national origin. The idea that America must preserve historic northern European domination in the distribution of its population was eradicated. Henceforth all the peoples of the world who wished to settle in the United States would be treated equally.

  Neither members of Congress nor of the administration spoke of the future. The Immigration and Naturalization Service issued estimates only for the three-year interim period, which projected a decline to 310,000. No one anticipated the dramatic changes that would soon take place. In particular, Charles Reimers wrote, “Congress did not foresee exactly how the 1965 act would work, especially in the case of Asian workers.”

  Between 1966 and 1980 the average number of legal immigrants admitted annually was 435,000; from 1978 to 1980 it was 547,000. This did not count a heavy illegal flow from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. In the 1920 census the foreign-born numbered 13.9 million, 13.2 percent of the population. Thereafter through 1970 each successive census showed a decline in both of these figures. The 1980 census, however, produced the first reversal. The number of foreign-born returned to 13.9 million, 6.2 percent of the population. In the 1970s immigration accounted for 40 percent of population growth. The new migrants poured into California, Hawaii, New York, Florida, and New Jersey, overwhelmingly into large metropolitan areas.

  Immigrants from the Western Hemisphere were free to enter prior to 1968. Those who came sent for their relatives under the new law. The Vietnam War created a large flow from Southeast Asia. Legal immigrants could now enter from the Philippines, China-Taiwan, Korea, India, and Hong Kong. Those who came earlier from the Philippines and China-Taiwan brought their families. Professionals from Korea and India qualified under the occupational preference. As a result, by the late seventies 42 percent of the immigrants were from Latin America, 39 percent from Asia, and only 13 percent from Europe (5 from the northwest and 8 percent from the south). By 1980 the five leading nations of origin in descending order were Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, and China-Taiwan. The 1965 law, Briggs wrote, is “contributing to an ethnic pluralism of the population to a degree that has never truly existed before.”

  The credit for passage of the immigration reform law is clear. Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson played central roles. The Department of Justice team, particularly Nicholas Katzenbach and Norbert Schlei, was extremely effective. On the Hill the accolade must go to Emanuel Celler, after whom the law was called. His maiden speech in the House four decades earlier had been an attack on the national origins quota system. Now he proudly presided over its demise.

  Politics, one might say, is sometimes the art of the implausible. Michael Feighan, who was extremely well stocked with both chutzpah and monkey wrenches, insisted after the law was passed that he was its author and that he deserved credit for eliminating discrimination based on national origin. He seems to have had some success in foisting this fiction off on the public. The headline over his obit in the New York Times in 1992 called him “Architect of ‘65 Immigration Law.”5

  10

  The Environment: From Conservation to Pollution

  THE Carsons lived on 65 acres outside Springdale in the lower Allegheny Valley of western Pennsylvania when Rachel was born on May 27, 1907. While they kept a few cows, horses, and chickens, most of the property remained wooded. Her mother, who had a great influence on Rachel, gave her a passionate love for nature and for books. “I was rather a solitary child,” she wrote, “and spent a great deal of time in woods and beside streams, learning the birds and the insects and flowers.” She was read to and read widely herself “almost from infancy.” She assumed that she would become a writer. At 10 a story she wrote won a prize from the children’s magazine St. Nicholas,

  At the Pennsylvania College for Women she had two inspiring teachers, one in English composition and the other in biology. The latter led her to major in zoology. She then took a masters degree in that field at Johns Hopkins and taught there and at the University of Maryland. She had always dreamt of the sea and studied during the summers at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory.

  While in college Rachel Carson wrote poetry, which she submitted to magazines. After her death a number of rejection notices were found among her papers. While many of the readers of her books considered her a poet and she was often compared to Emily Dickinson, she seems to have written no verse later in life. Rather, she folded poetry into her prose style.

  When her father died in 1935 she took a job at the Bureau of Fisheries writing scripts called familiarly “Seven Minute Fish Tales” for the radio series “Romance under the Waters.” When that ended her boss told her to do something general about the sea. He read it and said, “I don’t think it will do. … But send this one to the Atlantic.” The magazine took “Undersea.”

  Hendrick Willem van Loon, then a famous author, thought it superb and urged Quincy Howe, an editor at Simon and Schuster, to get Carson to expand the article into a book. It became her first, Under the Sea-Wind, published in 1941. It was not a success at first, but after she became famous it was reissued, became a best-seller, and was widely translated abroad.

  During the war her job as chief editor at the Fish and Wildlife Service gave her the opportunity to learn about oceanography and meet with specialists. She decided to do a general book about the sea, and completed the manuscript of The Sea Around Us in July 1950.

  Her agent submitted chapters to a long list of magazines, virtually all of which rejected them. Edith Oliver of The New Yorker was enthusiastic and the editor, William Shawn, saw at once that this was a great book. He did the condensation himself and published half the book in a three-part series. The response was the greatest the periodical had ever received.

  The Sea Around Us was published on July 2, 1951, and took off at once for the stratosphere. The advance printing immediately sold out, with enthusiastic reviews. It was a Book-of-the-Month alternate, and the Reader’s Digest did an abridgment. By early November sales passed 100,000 and before Christmas it went out at the rate of 4000 a day. The New York Times poll picked it as the outstanding book of the year; it won the John Burroughs Medal and the National Book Award. It remained on the best-seller list for 86 weeks, a record for nonfiction, and displaced Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. By March 1, 1952, sales pushed over 200,000.
RKO made a documentary film based on the book which won an Academy Award. Carson had become an instant celebrity, a mixed blessing for someone who treasured her privacy. She no longer had financial problems. She built a cottage on the Maine coast at West Southport, overlooking Sheepscot Bay. She quit her job at Fish and Wildlife and returned a Guggenheim Fellowship to the foundation.

  For the next seven years Carson searched for the subject of her next book. She wrote a short volume, The Edge of the Sea, and several magazine pieces. During the war, when the powerful insecticide DDT was introduced, she had been concerned about its unintended side effects upon nature. In 1957 she became involved when the state of Massachusetts sprayed around Duxbury and wiped out a private bird sanctuary and when the authorities on Long Island sprayed to exterminate the gypsy moth, leading to a lawsuit. She busily collected material on the chemical menace. E. B. White wrote her that pollution “starts in the kitchen and extends to Jupiter and Mars.” In 1958 she signed a contract to publish what she thought would be a short book.

  In fact, it proved a formidable undertaking that consumed four years. She tracked down the published sources, corresponded with experts all over the U.S. and Europe, and scrupulously checked the accuracy of everything she wrote. Her health deteriorated—sinus trouble, strep throat, an ulcer, and the breast cancer that would eventually kill her. Both her mother, at age 87, and her niece, Marjorie, died, the latter leaving a small son whom she adopted.

  Exhausted, Rachel Carson sent off the manuscript early in 1962. She had always been enchanted with the alternation of the seasons, one of the “great earth rhythms,” and spring was her favorite, the “vernal blooming.” Her editor had suggested a new title for one of the chapters, “Silent Spring,” and she decided that it should be the title of the book. A friend sent her the lines from Keats that became part of the epigraph:

  The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.

  Unlike anything Rachel Carson had written earlier, Silent Spring was a polemic, a cry of rage and a call to arms. It seemed out of character for a woman of gentle manner with a strong taste for privacy. But she was furious because she felt that her deepest values were in danger. Powerfully composed, Silent Spring immediately took its place alongside the great American polemical works—Tom Paine’s Common Sense, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

  The enemies were “the elixirs of death,” synthetic chemicals employed as insecticides which were recently being sold in prodigious quantities.

  For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds—and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.

  Ingenious chemists in laboratories had produced the toxic chlorinated hydrocarbons—DDT, chlordane, heptachlor, dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin—and the even more poisonous organic phosphates—malathion and parathion.

  Carson traced carefully the penetration of these toxic chemicals into the land, the sea, and rivers and lakes. “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.” Rachel Carson pointed out that nature was fighting back. Through genetic selection insects developed strains that were resistant to the toxins. The chemicals upset the balance of nature. By eliminating one species, they breached the environment’s defenses, thereby allowing other species to take over.

  Most infuriating to her was the fact that this was unnecessary. There was, she wrote, “a truly extraordinary variety of alternatives,” all biological rather than synthetic. Natural enemies could be introduced to keep undesirable insects under control. Sterilization of the male often produced this result. Other methods of biotic control, such as reactions to scents and sounds, were in the early research stage.

  Silent Spring was serialized in The New Yorker in June and was published in September 1962. The book was a sensation. It enjoyed enormous notice, critical acclaim, heavy sales (over 100,000 by Christmas), selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, condensation in Reader’s Digest, and translation into 18 languages. The author received a large number of honors. Perhaps the one she treasured most came from Lewis Mumford, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, announcing her election. There were 50 members, and only three were women. Mumford’s citation described her as “a scientist in the grand literary style of Galileo and Buffon.”

  The chemical industry, as the author had anticipated, mounted a massive campaign against her and her book. “Perhaps,” Paul Brooks wrote, “not since the classic controversy over Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species just over a century earlier had a single book been more bitterly attacked by those who felt their interests threatened.” But this onslaught failed because Rachel Carson had her facts straight.

  Silent Spring had a political impact. President Kennedy, evidently, read the New Yorker articles and promptly instructed his science adviser, Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, to investigate. The White House established a Panel on the Use of Pesticides. Professor Colin M. MacLeod of the NYU School of Medicine was chairman and the other members were mainly academic experts in chemistry and health. At his press conference on August 29 the President was asked about the “growing concern among scientists as to the possibility of long-range side effects from the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides.” He stated that “since Miss Carson’s book” the government was looking into the question.

  The panel submitted its report, Use of Pesticides, on May 15, 1963. It pointed both to the gains—the improved quantity and quality of foods and fibers—and to the hazards—those Silent Spring had addressed. Since little research had been done on the latter, it urged more study of the risks of these dangerous chemicals to all forms of life, including man, and of the use of biological controls. Rachel Carson regarded the report as an endorsement of her position. But she added, “It must now be translated into action.”

  Both Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall and Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut were enormously impressed with Silent Spring. Udall determined to push Interior to the forefront in dealing with environmental pollution, and Ribicoff, a member of the Committee on Reorganization, held hearings on the coordination of all federal activities in this field. Rachel Carson was a witness.

  Rachel Carson died at home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on April 14, 1964, at the age of 56. At the funeral service in the National Cathedral Udall and Ribicoff were pallbearers. Prince Philip sent a large wreath. Ribicoff on the floor of the Senate paid glowing tribute to “this gentle lady.”

  While the author could hardly have anticipated this, Silent Spring led to the dramatic broadening of the conservation ethic and movement that took place in the sixties. Historically the word “conservation” had meant the preservation of America’s natural treasures in national parks, national forests, and wilderness. Its heroes were John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harold Ickes. Now that stream became wider, encompassing a new concern for the protection of the environment against pollution. And now there was
a new heroine, Rachel Carson.1

  The national treasures for which the Department of the Interior was caretaker were located overwhelmingly in the trans-Mississippi West. Thus, Presidents traditionally named a westerner as secretary. When he campaigned in the West in 1960, Kennedy pointed out that the two greatest conservation Presidents—Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt—were from New York. Nevertheless, he conformed to the custom and chose Stewart Udall of Arizona, who would serve for the entire Kennedy-Johnson era. He was not just from the West. He had the lean athletic look of a movie cowboy hero. He loved the wilderness and spent his spare time hunting, fishing, hiking, and shooting rapids.

  The Udall family was prominent in Arizona. David King Udall had moved from Salt Lake City to St. Johns in the eastern part of the territory as a Mormon missionary in 1880. His son, Levi Stewart Udall, had served on the Arizona Supreme Court for 13 years. He had four children, two of whom became members of Congress—Stewart, born in 1920, and Morris (“Mo”), who was noted for his brilliant wit. Stewart attended the University of Arizona and its law school. He spent two years as a missionary for his church. During the war he served with the 15th Air Force in Italy as a gunner on a B-24 bomber.

  Arizona had two seats in the House—Maricopa County (Phoenix) and all the other counties in the state. Udall ran for the latter as a Democrat in 1954 and easily defeated Senator Goldwater’s administrative assistant. He was reelected handsomely in 1956 and 1958. He was a stalwart of the northern liberal bloc. He served on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and came to understand its prickly chairman, Wayne N. Aspinall of Colorado. He also got to know John Kennedy, was an early supporter, and turned the Arizona delegation away from Lyndon Johnson to Kennedy at the 1960 convention. Kennedy named him Secretary of the Interior. When Johnson became President, Udall wondered whether he would remember and dump him. There can be no doubt that Johnson remembered, but he never raised the question.