Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE twentieth century, Americans and western Europeans believe they live in a golden age of progress. The second industrial revolution has transformed every aspect of modern life. Everything is bigger, better, and faster than it had been before. Mass production creates a mass society, making more goods available to more people. Revolutionary processes for creating steel make it possible to build bigger ships, taller buildings, and a network of railroad tracks that circles the globe. Messages fly across continents, carried by the newly tamed forces of electricity and radio waves. People travel faster too: by train, by steamship, and by automobile. For the first time in history, humans have an effective weapon against infectious disease. Perhaps most amazing of all, the Wright brothers’ first flight makes one of mankind’s oldest dreams come true. Flight brings with it a new sense of freedom and speed. It seems like the sky is no longer the limit.

  But humanity’s new sense of progress is not universal. The spread of industry comes at a price. Factory workers are often treated like little more than cogs in society’s machine. Traditional crafts are disappearing. Less developed countries are plundered as the source of raw material for Western progress. And with worldwide war on the horizon, mankind prepares to turn its newfound gift of flight into a deadly weapon.

  As we move forward, unlocking the secrets of nature will give us our greatest challenges and our greatest opportunities.

  Flasks growing penicillin culture, 1943

  12

  OBLIVION or ETERNITY

  Iowa farmer-salesman Roswell Garst championed the adoption of scientific breakthroughs that created an agricultural revolution in mid-twentieth century America.

  IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. ONCE A RELATIVELY DEFENSELESS MAMMAL AT THE MERCY OF THE PLANET, OUR SPECIES HAS COME TO DOMINATE IT. EXPLOITING ITS RICHES.

  Exploring its farthest corners. Overcoming its geography. For generation after generation, we have overcome problems with engineering marvels, from Stonehenge to the skyscraper. We have found new sources of energy and new ways to communicate.

  Now we cross new boundaries as the human race moves from the age of the tinkerer and the independent researcher to the age of Big Science. Humans form focused research teams dedicated to solving clearly defined problems and reaching specific goals. Working together, humans unlock the secrets of the atom, of the stars, and of our own DNA. We find life-changing uses for previously untapped resources, utilize technology to combat the frailties of our bodies, and reach beyond the limits of Earth’s atmosphere into space. Breakthroughs in Big Science, from the Manhattan Project to the Human Genome Project, are the modern equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, monumental developments that define their place and time.

  For the first time, humans have the knowledge to transform the species and the power to annihilate it.

  FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO, maize was mankind’s first genetically modified crop: a wild grass from Central America that was bred into an adaptable grain. By the middle of the twentieth century, it is the staple diet of a billion people. Dried and ground into flour, it is served as polenta, corn meal mush and hominy grits, as cornbreads, tortillas, and fried cakes. Treated with lye, it becomes posole. Served fresh, it appears in Indian raitas and American succotash. The United States produces more maize than any country on earth. Now, American farmers blend four strains of maize into one superstrong hybrid that will create an agricultural revolution.

  GARST’S HYBRID CORN

  IOWA. 1936. ROSWELL GARST TRAVELS ON DUSTY roads from farm to farm in a battered pickup truck loaded with eight-pound sacks of seed corn. In his plaid shirt and suspenders, he looks more like a farmer dressed up for a day in town than the salesman and part owner of Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company.

  Garst has mortgaged his farm to launch a new company selling a revolutionary product that will transform agriculture around the world—if only anyone could afford to buy it. Garst’s hybrid corn sells for five dollars a bag. More than a week’s salary for a farm laborer. Four dollars more than a bag of ordinary seed corn. It’s a tough sell in hard times. Depression and drought have struck America’s heartland. In Iowa, some of the richest farmland in the country, almost half the crops are so damaged by the lack of rain that they aren’t worth harvesting. In Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, the losses are much worse.

  Garst has been selling seed corn for six years now. He has spent whole days on the road, selling a bushel or two a day. His sales pitch has been greeted with amusement, resignation, hostility, and, sometimes, with the wrong end of a shotgun held by a farmer who’s at the end of his rope.

  Now, almost as desperate as the farmers, he has decided to gamble everything and give his seed corn away for free. He persuades farmers to plant half their fields with his hybrid corn and the other half with their usual seed corn. All he asks in return is a share in the increased profit from his hybrid corn. Ten years ago, prosperous farmers would have laughed off such a proposition. But now, crippled by the Great Depression, they have nothing to lose.

  Corn and its derivatives play a role in almost every aspect of modern life, from toothpaste to automobile tires.

  From the beginning, the size and shape of human society has been limited by our ability to supply ourselves with the food we need to keep us alive. Hunter-gatherers lived in small bands. The advent of farming led to the creation of towns, then cities. Cities grew explosively when the development of the steam locomotive gave merchants the capacity to move food from one region to another.

  In the twentieth century, an agricultural revolution that would feed the world began in the heart of the American Midwest. It was led by Roswell Garst, an Iowa farmer turned salesman who became an agricultural evangelist. Not a scientist himself, he grasped the importance of new ideas developed by creative thinkers such as agronomist Henry A. Wallace and demonstrated their value in practical ways that the small farmer could understand and use.

  Garst and Wallace met in 1926 in Des Moines, where Garst was selling real estate and Wallace was editing his family’s newspapers, Wallaces’ Farmer and Iowa Homestead. During his free time, Wallace experimented with creating corn hybrids. At the time, farmers saved the best-looking ears of corn from each year’s crop for seed, selecting them based on uniformity and size. Wallace, who would later serve as Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1940 and his vice president from 1941 to 1945, had already proven that these factors did not necessarily predict which ears would produce the best crop the following year. Now he was trying to crossbreed plants to produce higher yields.

  Garst was so fascinated by the possibilities of hybrid corn that he bought several bushels of the seed from Wallace to use on his home farm. After several years of watching the performance of Wallace’s high-yield, strong-stalked hybrid in his own fields, Garst asked Wallace for a franchise to sell the virtually unknown product in northeastern Iowa.

  Even in good times it would have been hard to convince farmers to buy expensive, genetically modified seed instead of using the open-pollinated kernels from their own fields. During the Depression, it was virtually impossible. Garst had to come up with ways to prove that his advertising slogan, “An Astonishing Product—Produces Astonishing Results,” was literally true. His most successful tactic was the “half the increase” technique. Growing both Pioneer hybrid corn and their own seed corn gave farmers a graphic demonstration of the new corn’s value. In the worst drought in America’s history, Roswell Garst’s hybrid corn not only grew; it flourished. Bred to produce a higher yield, the hybrid also proved to be drought resistant. On average, the hybrid corn outperformed the old seed corn by ten bushels an acre. Once convinced, a farmer would sell the idea and the corn to his neighbors. The demand for hybrid seed corn exploded.

  NITROGEN

  Spewed from volcanoes during the birth of our planet, nitrogen makes up 80 percent of Earth’s atmosphere. It’s invisible. It’s odorless. And every living creature on Earth needs it to survive. Plant
s and animals alike use it to make the amino acids that are the building blocks of protein.

  Even though nitrogen makes up more than three-quarters of the air we breathe, we cannot directly use nitrogen from the air. Plants extract soluble nitrogen compounds from the soil. Animals eat the plants (or other animals that eat plants). The bacteria that help decompose animal waste and dead plants and animals release nitrogen and return it to the atmosphere.

  Each nitrogen molecule is made up of two nitrogen atoms that are tightly linked together. It takes energy to unlock the bonds of nitrogen molecules in the air so they can bond with other molecules to create nitrogen compounds, a process called fixing. Nature provides two ways of “fixing” nitrogen. One occurs when lightning heats up the air, forcing nitrogen to bond with oxygen. Rain washes the resulting nitrogen oxide out of the air and into the ground, where plants can absorb it. The other natural fixer comes from bacteria that live in the roots of legumes, such as beans, peas, and clover. These bacteria convert nitrogen into soluble compounds that can be absorbed by plants.

  When fields are overworked, they exhaust the nitrogen in the soil, making the fields less fertile. For centuries, farmers rotated legumes with nitrogen-hungry grains to protect the fertility of their soil.

  At the start of the twentieth century, German scientist Fritz Haber invented a technique for extracting nitrogen from the air. Originally used to make explosives in World War I, synthesized nitrogen compounds became the world’s first artificial fertilizer. Once used as a weapon, nitrogen was now a giver of life, making it possible for us to replenish the earth’s growing power.

  Nitrogen-fixing nodules on soybean roots

  THE DUST BOWL

  Depression and drought struck the American heartland in the 1930s.

  Rainfall was irregular in the 1920s. In 1932, it stopped almost completely. The record drought was accompanied by record heat and unusually strong winds. By 1935, what began as a dry spell had become the worst drought in American history. The Great Plains became a dust bowl.

  The seemingly rugged Great Plains are more fragile than they appear. By the 1920s, the native grasses that held the soil in place had been plowed under and stripped by overgrazing. Wheat had exhausted the topsoil. When the drought came, there was nothing to protect the dry soil from the winds. Known as “black blizzards,” the dust-laden winds traveled east at sixty miles per hour. The storms came so often that people on the plains could tell where the wind originated based on the color of the dust. In May 1934, a dust storm fifteen hundred miles long, nine hundred miles across and two miles high reached as far east as New York City. The storm deposited a film of dust on President Herbert Hoover’s desk in the White House and dropped prairie dirt on ships five hundred miles out in the Atlantic.

  With no crops, 2.5 million people, about a quarter of the population of the Dust Bowl region, were forced off their ruined farms when they could not pay their rent or mortgages. Many moved to the nearest city. Others joined the army of migrant farm workers that followed the harvest from Florida to Montana and squatted in shantytowns on the edges of California’s cities.

  The Great Plains did not begin to recover until regular rainfall came again in 1939.

  In fewer than ten years, more than half the fields in America’s Corn Belt were planted with Wallace and Garst’s high-yield corn.

  High-yield corn wasn’t Garst’s only contribution to America’s agricultural revolution. In the 1940s, he began to sell newly developed nitrogen fertilizer with the same passion he had brought to hybrid seed, convinced that the old-fashioned methods of crop rotation limited the output of farmers’ fields. Once again using the idea that a demonstration is worth a thousand promises, Garst would mark the letter N with nitrogen fertilizer on a hill near the road next to a farmer’s land. Dark-green Ns grew on fields across the countryside; so did the use of synthetic fertilizer.

  With the use of hybrid seeds, artificial fertilizer, and other agricultural innovations, farmers eliminated the natural limits on how much food we can grow for the first time in human history. American farm production grew faster than the American population, even with the rise of the post-World War II baby boom.

  Beginning in the 1940s, American aid programs encouraged the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and new, high-yielding varieties of grain across the developing world, with the idea that increased crop yields would provide stable food supplies and defeat hunger. Between 1940 and 1944, fertilizer use around the world increased 50 percent, bringing with it amazing increases in production. India in particular was a success story, thanks to high-yield varieties of rice and wheat and government-sponsored improvements in irrigation.

  WAR COMES NATURALLY TO humans. Over the course of six thousand years, we have fought more than fourteen thousand wars, costing at least 3.5 billion lives. We have gone to war over land, gold, salt, cattle, and dynastic succession. We have clashed over eternal principles and small insults. We have fought over a slap in the face with a flyswatter, the severing of a sailor’s ear, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. We have battled on land, on sea and—in the last hundred years—in the air.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF

  THE GREEN REVOLUTION

  Concerns about Garst’s transformation of American farming appeared as early as 1962, when Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring documented the effects of farm chemicals on the environment.

  Today environmentalists and food activists are concerned about the loss of biological diversity due to the widespread use of hybrid seeds and the long-term effects of both genetically engineered plants and the use of nitrogen fertilizer.

  Hybrid corn (left) compared to non-hybrid corn (right).

  Humans have been in an arms race from the beginning, using our ingenuity to develop new weapons and different ways of going to war. The atlatl, and later the bow, allowed our ancestors to hurl sharp objects harder and faster than the unaided human arm. We invented gunpowder-propelled projectiles that would stop an armored knight—then destroy a city’s fortifications. In the twentieth century, we learned to attack from above, turning the combination of airplane and bomb into the ultimate weapon.

  AIRPLANES WERE FIRST USED as weapons in World War I. Less than a decade old, not much more powerful than a modern ultralight, planes transformed warfare. The success of air reconnaissance led to the development of fighter planes and a new breed of military hero, fighter pilots, as armies struggled to keep enemy planes out of their airspace. It was a short step from fighter planes to bombers. By the end of the war, it was clear that future wars would depend on mastery of the skies.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Western governments began to develop long-range bombers, hoping that strategic bombing would force an enemy to surrender quickly. Instead, the new bombers gave warring governments the ability to rain terror from the air. The lesson of modern warfare, first learned in the American Civil War, was that victory hinged on defeating the enemy off the field as well as on. With long-range bombers that could fly hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, it was possible to disrupt production of vital war materials. Destroying enemy factories and transportation systems became as important as killing enemy soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Weakening civilian morale was as critical as wiping out the factories where civilians worked.

  The Eberhart SE-5E first flew in December 1916

  By the time President Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, World War II had already raged for six years, from Europe to Africa, from America to Japan and the Pacific. Fifty million people were dead. The combination of devastating new technology and the global scope of the battlefield made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history.

  Corsair fighter unloading its rocket projectiles against a Japanese stronghold on Okinawa, 1945.

  The opposing powers were in a race to make war even deadlier. Conventional explosives depended on chemical reactions. By 1942, Germany, Japan, and the United States were all working to produce a more powerful bomb based
on a nuclear reaction.

  The United States’ bomb program, code-named the Manhattan Project, was under the direction of physicist Robert Oppenheimer and Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers. The project was so highly classified that president Harry Truman only learned of its existence when he assumed the office after Roosevelt’s death. By the time President Truman took office on April 12, 1945, American scientists predicted an atomic bomb would be ready for testing by midsummer.

  The Manhattan Project scientists did not know precisely how much destruction the bomb would cause. Oppenheimer claimed the bomb’s effects would be similar to those caused by dropping tons of high-explosive or incendiary bombs on a city, something the United States had already done in Dresden and Tokyo. Manhattan Project physicists knew that, in addition to its powerful blast effects, an atomic bomb would release deadly radiation, which they estimated would extend to a radius of up to two-thirds of a mile. Since anyone within that range would be killed in the blast, they assumed the radiation was irrelevant.

  GERMANY SURRENDERED IN May 1945, shifting attention to the war in the Pacific. The outcome of the war was clear; the only question was how long it would take and how many men each side would lose. Determined to avoid the ultimate dishonor of surrendering, the Japanese cabinet developed an official strategy—known as Ketsug, the “decisive” operation—of inflicting casualties so horrific that Americans would lose the will to fight. The number of kamikaze missions multiplied. The Japanese mobilized all men from fifteen to sixty and all women from seventeen to forty into a civilian force prepared to swarm the American invaders. These citizens were instructed to kill American soldiers even at the cost of their own lives.