The article included several striking photos of Carson—though in one showing her at home with her microscope she looked pallid and unwell. The story itself was muddled with contradictions that suggested the magazine’s editors were hedging their bets so as not to end up on the wrong side of a controversial issue. Life said the book was “amply buttressed by research” and featured “Miss Carson’s usual literary grace,” but added that in making this “undeniable case against the pesticides” Carson had “overstated her case.” Life suggested to its readers that there must be some happier common ground where “chemistry, biology, wildlife, and mankind can achieve a peaceful coexistence.”
Silent Spring was reviewed everywhere. More than seventy newspapers also ran editorials on it, and many published excerpts. The press was overwhelmingly favorable. This was not the case with articles and pamphlets put out by the chemicals industry—which matched the flood of press coverage and were sharply critical of Carson and her methods.
Writing in the New York Times two weeks before the book came out, Brooks Atkinson noted approvingly that the book came with fifty-five pages of source citations and references. He called Carson a “realist as well as a biologist and writer” who understood that chemical pesticides were a fact of modern life that could not be made to go away entirely, and that her plea instead was for their intelligent use with the knowledge of their potential for “deadly peripheral damage” to the balance of nature. Atkinson paid particular attention to Carson’s assertion that chemical pest control was an act of arrogance in which we deceived ourselves over our place in the web of life: “The basic fallacy—or perhaps the original sin—is the assumption that man can control nature,” Atkinson wrote. “Nature returns with a massive assault from an unexpected quarter. For nature has devoted millions of years to creating an order of life in which parasites and predators control one another.”
Atkinson said that Carson had a sober way of stating “alarming facts” that made them the more believable. Her case for ecology was actually a case for humanity. Atkinson’s preview was followed days later by two full reviews of Silent Spring—one on the cover of the Sunday Book Review that was glowing and another, by science reporter and editor Walter Sullivan, that was admiring but mixed.
Sullivan started off appreciatively, mentioning the debt owed to this “gifted writer” for having brought the wonderment and beauty of the oceans to millions of readers. Silent Spring, however, was a departure for Carson that was likely to shock her many fans—a book that Sullivan likened to an earlier American classic: “In her new book she [Carson] tries to scare the living daylights out of us and, in large measure, succeeds. Her work tingles with anger, outrage and protest. It is a 20th-century Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Sullivan wasn’t the only reviewer to make this comparison, nor was he alone in saying that the one-sidedness of Silent Spring opened Carson to attack from people who would claim she had not told the whole story. But Sullivan thought the book’s “drawbacks” were actually part of its appeal. After all, he said, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin would never have stirred a nation had it been measured and ‘fair.’ ” Sullivan said that considering world events, Silent Spring could not be more timely. “If our species cannot police itself against overpopulation, nuclear weapons, and pollution, it may become extinct.”
Sullivan also previewed one of the more ambitious responses coming soon from pesticide makers—a parody of the opening fable from Carson’s book. Titled “The Desolate Year,” it had been written, according to Sullivan, by “some unsung hero of the chemical industry.” It appeared in the October issue of Monsanto Magazine—which had a surprising circulation of 140,000 among business leaders, educators, and government officials. Even Carson must have grudgingly thought the piece well done. Flipping Carson’s depiction of a dead and brown world devastated by pesticides, “The Desolate Year” pictured one without chemical controls—a world where the springtime brings not renewal but revulsion, as ravaging hordes of insects and vermin lay waste to the countryside. The plague moves north with the warming weather, wreaking havoc on crops and spreading disease to humans suddenly defenseless against their ancient and fearsome enemies:
Genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged. Creeping and flying and crawling into the open, beginning in the southern tier of states and progressing northward. They were chewers, and piercer-suckers, spongers, siphoners and chewer-lappers, and all their vast progeny were chewers, rasping, sawing, biting maggots and worms and caterpillars. Some could sting, some could poison, many could kill.
Sullivan offered the dubious observation that the luridness of “The Desolate Year” amounted to an “imitation of Miss Carson’s poetic style.” But, of course, it wasn’t meant to be literature. Several times longer than Carson’s opening chapter, “The Desolate Year” left no grotesque assault from the insect kingdom unexplored. By the end the crops are destroyed, famine is imminent, and millions are succumbing to malaria and yellow fever. Could anyone wish for that world? Helpfully, the article included an appendix of factual findings that supported the plausibility of everything it claimed—plus a selection of public statements by various governmental and academic experts testifying to the need for pesticide use and to their safety when applied properly.
One of Carson’s most determined attackers was a New York–based organization called the Nutrition Foundation, whose president, C. G. King, issued a formal rebuttal to Silent Spring as an accompaniment to the negative reviews the Nutrition Foundation collected and redistributed far and wide. King said that most scientists held the view that Americans had never been safer, better fed, or healthier—facts that, on their face, refuted any claim of general poisoning and declining health as a result of pesticide use. Government and industry worked tirelessly, King insisted, to make pesticides safe and to inform users how to apply them. Besides, King added, the charges made in Silent Spring were obviously the ravings of a poorly informed and probably deranged person.
The problem is magnified in that publicists and the author’s adherents among the food faddists, health quacks, and special interest groups are promoting her book as if it were scientifically irreproachable and written by a scientist.
Neither is true. The book presents almost solely selected information that is negative and uses such bits from a period of many years, building a vastly distorted picture. The author is a professional journalist—not a scientist in the field of her discussion—and misses the very essence of science in not being objective either in citing the evidence or in its interpretation.
Reading this, Carson could not help but feel it represented the more or less official reaction to Silent Spring from everyone in industry, academia, and government with a commitment to pesticide use. Among the members of the Nutrition Foundation board were the heads and senior executives of the National Biscuit Company, H. J. Heinz, General Foods, General Mills, Standard Brands, the Borden Company, and others. Also on the board was the surgeon general of the United States and the presidents of Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, and MIT.
The love/hate split response to Silent Spring continued for months after it was published as it climbed onto the bestseller lists. A few reviewers managed to be in both camps. Writing in the journal Science, I. L. Baldwin, an agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin, called Silent Spring “beautifully written” and likened Carson to a prosecuting attorney who concentrated on the evidence that supported her case while sidestepping facts that did not. Baldwin argued—not unfairly—that the widespread use of chemical pesticides was the result of the “obvious benefits” they produced. But he said those same benefits in agricultural production and public health might have created an attitude of complacency that ignored the fact that synthetic pesticides are poisons and therefore present serious hazards. The right course, Baldwin argued, was greater care in the safety testing and use of pesticides. Backing away from them entirely was not an option:
Modern agr
iculture, with its high-quality foods and fibers, could not exist without the use of pesticides. Weeds, disease, and insect pests would take an extremely heavy toll if these chemicals were not used. The yields per acre, the yields per man-hour, and the quality of the product would all suffer materially if these chemicals were withdrawn from use. One cannot do more than guess about the changes that would be necessary in American society if pesticides were banned. An immediate back-to-the-farm movement would be necessary, and this would involve many millions of people. It is hoped that someone with Rachel Carson’s ability will write a companion volume dramatizing the improvements in human health and welfare derived from the use of pesticides.
The editors at Chemical Week judged correctly that press reactions to Silent Spring were likely to “come out pretty squarely on Miss Carson’s side” and were not going to be nearly so judicious or so knowledgeable as Baldwin had been in the pages of Science. The trade magazine reported that the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association and the National Agricultural Chemicals Association had devised an industry response different from that offered by the Nutrition Foundation. The idea was to avoid a direct attack on Carson’s book and instead emphasize the benefits of pesticide use. Paul Brooks heard the campaign had a $250,000 war chest.
But Chemical Week also noted that Monsanto had already broken ranks in going at Carson head-on with “The Desolate Year,” reprints of which had been sent by the company to newspapers and radio and television stations across the country. Pesticide makers thought sales of products intended for homes and gardens would probably experience little impact from Silent Spring, as the book had come out in the fall and consumers were likely to forget about it come spring when the pesticides market bloomed. But companies with heavy sales in agriculture and forestry prepared for a protracted siege. More worrisome than Silent Spring itself for the industry was President Kennedy’s pesticide commission, which Chemical Week doubted had the scientific depth among its members to properly evaluate pesticide safety.
Carson’s critics in the chemicals industry pointed to the term “toxic chemicals” as unfair and misleading, as almost any chemical in the right dose and through the right exposure can be toxic. The counterargument, of course, was that pesticides were formulated to be toxic and, unlike other chemical compounds, were lethal when used as intended. Another common complaint against Silent Spring was that Carson portrayed a universal contamination of the environment—of the soil and water and all living things—based on examples of poisonings and circumstances that were actually rare and isolated. The Economist thought this and argued in a long, critical piece that the pesticides industry would probably survive Silent Spring with little damage, as American farmers weren’t going to pay the book any heed. The magazine thought Carson had probably “damaged seriously her professional reputation as a reliable scientific journalist.”
Financial World magazine took much the same position in an article examining the high stakes for American pesticide makers and the efforts they were launching to fight back against Silent Spring. According to the magazine, Monsanto’s agricultural chemicals division had been growing 20 percent annually for a decade. No wonder their vision of a world without pesticides was a “desolate” one. Sales growth rates for most other manufacturers were lower, but pesticides were still a robust segment of the business for many of them. Pesticides were a big business worth protecting for the manufacturers. American Cyanamid, for example, derived nearly a fifth of its total revenues from pesticide sales. No one was surprised when a pompous man named Robert H. White-Stevens, who worked in the research and development section of American Cyanamid’s agricultural chemicals division, began barnstorming the country, giving speeches and debating Carson supporters while extolling the virtues and necessity of chemical pest control.
White-Stevens overnight became the anti-Carson. With his slicked-back hair, thin mustache, and black horn-rimmed glasses he was a dead ringer for the horror actor Vincent Price. He seemed to be everywhere, unctuous and sour, rolling his r’s and speaking in echoey, Shakespearian cadences. White-Stevens’s defense of pesticides always circled around two assertions. One was that if you looked dispassionately at the world you would see that starvation and disease tended to occur in places where pesticides were not available. Unhitch modern society from pesticides and you invite malnutrition and sickness back into the picture. The other repeated claim was that the government and the chemicals industry took more than adequate care in licensing pesticides and instructing users in their safe application.
Although few reviewers in the press agreed with the pesticide industry’s take on Silent Spring, the handful who did were puzzled by what they considered Carson’s strident, unbalanced portrayal of products that had done so much to improve the world. A notable critique came from Time magazine, which in an unusually long and sharp-elbowed review—it ran in the magazine’s Science section—called the book an “emotional and inaccurate outburst.” Time said the drama in Silent Spring was high but based on a distortion of reality:
There is no doubt about the impact of Silent Spring; it is a real shocker. Many unwary readers will be firmly convinced that most of the U.S.—with its animals, plants, soil, water and people—is already laced with poison that will soon start taking a dreadful toll, and that the only hope is to stop using chemical pesticides and let the age-old “balance of nature” take care of obnoxious insects.
Scientists, physicians and other technically informed people will also be shocked by Silent Spring—but for a different reason. They recognize Miss Carson’s skill in building her frightening case; but they consider that case unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic. Many of the scary generalizations—and there are lots of them—are patently unsound.
Time, relying on the several-years-old study of DDT effects in convict volunteers by the U.S. Public Health Service’s Dr. Wayland J. Hayes, called DDT “harmless.” The magazine conceded that other, more toxic pesticides posed potential threats to human health—but reported that so far there wasn’t any evidence of such effects. And while it was true that DDT was dangerous to fish and that robins had been killed in DDT programs against Dutch elm disease, none of these impacts on the natural world were “complete.” Not even Miss Carson, Time said, could point to a place where “no birds sing” as a result of pesticide use.
Many months after the reviews of Silent Spring had ceased—in fact, a full year after the book was published—Carson was savaged in a long, sarcastic essay in the Saturday Evening Post written by her jilted would-be collaborator Edwin Diamond, to whom Paul Brooks had so casually sent an advance copy of the book. Diamond agreed with the Silent Spring detractors who called the book unfair and said that Carson greatly overstated the risks from pesticide use—but he was more concerned with exploring why the book had been such a success, the implication being that there can be no good reason for a bad book to sell so well.
Diamond drew the obvious conclusion that Carson’s reputation and stylish prose had something to do with it—though he said Silent Spring had none of the beauty of her earlier books beyond a measure of “expository gloss.” Diamond also thought the thalidomide scandal had primed the public for scary stories about chemicals—the more exaggerated the better. In an odd partial inversion of the claim Velsicol had made that Carson was in league with Communist influences, Diamond said he thought Silent Spring appealed to the sort of person who might believe that pesticide pushers were Communists. Rather than consign Carson to the lunatic fringe as Velsicol had, Diamond thought she was instead playing to the nuts out there. To love this book was to be at least a little bit crazy:
Silent Spring, it seems to me, stirs the latent demons of paranoia that many men and women must fight down all through their lives. At one time or another, all of us have been affected by the feeling that some wicked “they” were out to get “us.” In recent years the paranoid among us could be observed in the ranks of such cultists as the antifluoridation leaguers, the organic-garden faddis
ts and other beyond-the-fringe groups. And who are the “they” intent on poisoning or tricking “us”? In the rough handbills passed out on street corners by the antifluoridationists, the plotters turn out to be Communists—scientists and dentists who want to soften, literally, the brains of the American citizenry to prepare them for Russian takeover by adding an insidious chemical to the drinking water.
Showing some expository flair of his own, Diamond also wondered if Carson’s bestseller was not the product of the same venal motivations that drove pesticide makers in their heedless quest to earn millions:
What, finally, is Silent Spring’s game? If we are to believe Miss Carson’s own description of our times—an era when the right to make an irresponsible dollar is seldom challenged—then the answer would be an easy one.
None of this criticism slowed down Silent Spring. In February 1963 it was published in England, where it was a huge success, and soon after that in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and a host of other countries. In London, Lord Shackleton—member of the House of Lords and son of the famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton—wrote an introduction for the book. A couple of months after the English edition was published, Shackleton told the House of Lords that cannibals in the South Pacific now preferred the flesh of Englishmen over Americans—as Americans had higher body burdens of DDT. Shackleton dryly added that his comments were strictly “in the interests of the export trade.”
• • •
On a Farther Shore Page 38