On a Farther Shore (3 page)

Silent Spring
arrived at a time when there was already unease about the unanticipated ways that science and medicine could betray the public welfare.
In 1959, just days before Thanksgiving, the government had abruptly halted the sale of cranberries after discovering that the crop was contaminated with residues of an herbicide known to cause cancer. The “cranberry scare” caused economic hardship for cranberry growers and created a never-before-seen loss of consumer confidence in the safety of the American food supply.
Then, in 1961, came devastating news from Great Britain—where some seven thousand babies had been born with appalling deformities. The
birth defects were caused by the sedative thalidomide, which had been prescribed for pregnant women to alleviate morning sickness. Thalidomide was thought to be safe even for expectant mothers and it was—except, as was learned after the damage had been done, for a sixteen-day period during pregnancy. Many women who consumed even a single dose during that fateful window of time gave birth to babies with abnormalities, including a condition called phocomelia, in which the long bones of the arms, and sometimes both the arms and legs, were drastically shortened, so that stubby hands and feet appeared to grow directly out of the torso—like the flippers on a seal.
The U.S. maker of thalidomide had asked permission to market it in this country and had been prevented from doing so only through the perseverance of a lone scientist at the Food and Drug Administration who had reservations and had managed to stall an approval until the problems with the drug were discovered.
When a reporter questioned Carson about thalidomide she unhesitatingly connected it to the pesticide issue. “It’s all of a piece,” Carson said. “Thalidomide and pesticides—they represent our willingness to rush ahead and use something new without knowing what the results will be.”

As
Silent Spring
was being set into type, everyone’s attention had turned back to the overriding fear of the times: the prospect of nuclear war and the unknown dangers of the fallout raining from the skies as the United States and the Soviet Union waged dueling programs in the perfection of mass destruction. When President Kennedy responded at his press conference to a question about the possible “long range” risks of pesticide use, many listeners felt an uncomfortable prickle, as the term was more commonly used to describe the intercontinental ballistic missiles that America and Russia had arrayed against each other—Armageddon at the push of a button.

In October 1962, just after
Silent Spring
arrived in bookstores, American intelligence discovered that the Soviet ships recently traveling to Cuba in large numbers were delivering missiles, launch equipment, and the personnel needed for construction of a base capable of initiating a nuclear strike against the United States from only ninety
miles away. By the time
Silent Spring
had made it to number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list on October 28, Cuba was under a naval blockade and the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war. Eventually the Soviets backed down in the face of U.S. resolve and removed the weapons from Cuba—but public anxiety about the nuclear age remained high, joined now by a new worry about chemicals contaminating the environment.

President Kennedy’s announcement that the government would look into the pesticide issue was reassuring—but it hid a more complicated reaction to
Silent Spring
forming behind the scenes in Washington and all along the web of connections that linked the government to agricultural and industrial interests.
The day after his press conference, Kennedy appointed a special commission, headed by his science adviser Jerome Wiesner, to conduct a thorough review of pesticide use. It also came to light that the DDT studies begun in the mid-1940s at Patuxent had continued at a cost that had risen to $3 million a year, despite little public attention and scant changes in the way pesticides were used. Joining the Wiesner panel to evaluate pesticide safety would be representatives from several federal agencies that were themselves heavy users of DDT and other pesticides, and whose lack of regard for the consequences had been pitilessly described in
Silent Spring
.
Meanwhile, the FBI did what the FBI usually did in such cases and quietly launched an investigation of Carson that just happened to coincide with the accusation that she was a Communist front.

Elsewhere within the administration a simmering hostility toward Rachel Carson and
Silent Spring
was shaping a different side to the government’s response.
Immediately following the
New Yorker
serialization, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman ordered his inner circle to begin developing plans for attacking the articles, apparently on the reflexive assumption that his job was to oppose anything inimical to the interests of farmers and agrichemical companies. But Freeman wavered.
Beleaguered over what to do about the milk supply in his home state of Minnesota, where strontium 90 contamination was approaching unsafe levels, Freeman simultaneously suggested
that, as an alternative to fighting with Carson, the agency could consider how it might explain to the public the benefits of pesticide use and the steps the government was taking to head off the kind of long-term environmental problems she predicted. Freeman apparently did not contemplate what to do if it simply turned out that Carson was right.

And so the terms of the long, partisan struggle to come were established. They stand to this day. On one side were the voices raised in the name of science and the defense of nature. On the other was the unbreakable coalition of government and industry, the massed might of the establishment.

Aware of the controversy swirling around her, Carson remained unfazed by it.
What did surprise her was how well
Silent Spring
was selling—some 65,000 copies in just the first two weeks.
And the Book-of-the-Month Club edition, with an initial printing of 150,000 copies, was coming with an urgent endorsement from U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who thought the book tremendously important. As with her previous books, Carson was swamped with fan mail that she found gratifying and overwhelming. She answered mainly with form letters, but she often took time to make personal responses to students who wrote asking for help with assignments or debates.

Carson complained of “drowning,” as she put it, in clippings from newspapers running pieces on
Silent Spring
. A steady flow of speaking requests also arrived—most of which she turned down—as she routinely did with inquiries from reporters offering to do stories on her. Carson did say yes to a few of these, however.
One notable request she initially rejected came from
Life
magazine, which proposed a portrait in words and photographs. Carson hated the idea. She knew all about
Life
profiles, she said, and didn’t care for their “tone,” which amounted to an invasion of privacy. But Carson relented—after having it pointed out to her that the chemicals industry would never turn
down a chance at such high-profile publicity—though only after extracting a promise that the piece would focus on the writing of
Silent Spring
and not on “silly personal details.”

Carson never specified exactly what kind of information was too personal for public consumption. She was used to the grudging acceptance accorded a woman writing knowingly and well about the challenging subjects she chose. And she was accustomed to, if not happy about, being identified in print as a “spinster.” Carson had no problem with being famous. It was something she relished, since for as long as she could remember no title had ever seemed more worthy to her than “author.”

But Carson was hiding one specific piece of information from everyone but a handful of her most intimate friends. In early 1960, while in the middle of writing
Silent Spring
, Carson had suffered through a succession of illnesses. First, it was a duodenal ulcer. She had barely recovered from that when she contracted pneumonia and had to stop working for a time. Then in the spring, just as she was finishing up two chapters on the link between pesticides and cancer, Carson discovered two masses in her left breast, which she was advised to have taken out. She thought these would be like a cyst she’d had removed in
a minor procedure ten years earlier. They weren’t.
Carson required a radical mastectomy, though she was led to believe afterward that it had been done mainly as a precaution because of an ambiguous pathology report. At the time, no further treatment had been recommended.

Carson eventually discovered this was all a lie—that not only was one of the masses in her breast malignant, but it had already metastasized at least as far as her lymph nodes. Over the next two years, as she struggled to finish
Silent Spring
, Carson endured the cancer’s steady spread and a series of brutal radiation treatments that at times seemed to slow but could not halt the progress of the disease.
When the
Life
magazine piece came out in early October 1962, Carson, who had never been sturdy looking, appeared haggard and elderly.
Life
glossed over this, describing her look as “gentle.”

Earlier that year Carson had been approached about appearing on
CBS Reports
, a popular and highly regarded hour-long TV newsmagazine devoted to in-depth reporting on significant issues. The program had caused a sensation two years previously with an installment by Edward R. Murrow called “Harvest of Shame,” which exposed the slavelike conditions of migrant farmworkers. CBS wanted to make
Silent Spring
and its author—along with some of her supporters and critics—the focus of an episode. The on-air reporter for the show was going to be the debonair former war correspondent Eric Sevareid.
Carson and Houghton Mifflin thought this was a great idea, but delays and postponements throughout the summer had them worried that whoever had been found to represent the chemicals industry in the program’s pro-and-con format was spending time sharpening their criticism of
Silent Spring
.
When a producer and cameraman finally arrived at Carson’s cottage on Southport Island in September to shoot background scenes of her in Maine, they were the ones who became concerned. Carson appeared seriously ill and seemed impatient to get on with the actual interview.

In late November 1962, after Carson had returned to Silver Spring, Sevareid and a film crew visited Carson’s home and began interview sessions that lasted for two days.
Carson looked terrible. Seated before the camera in an armchair, she wore a frumpy dark suit. On a shelf behind her were a typewriter and a starfish—a graceful touch in an otherwise inert, slightly claustrophobic setting. A heavy black wig hiding the hair loss caused by her radiation therapy made Carson vaguely resemble Lady Bird Johnson. Visibly uncomfortable—the long sessions seated under the lights must have been agony—Carson rolled her head slowly from side to side, sometimes resting it on an upraised hand, as if she were weary beyond words.

But all of that went away when she spoke. Her voice steady and precise, Carson’s flat mid-Atlantic accent suited her chilling message, which could only be described as relentlessly rational and at odds with the character assassinations that had branded her a kook. Carson’s virtuoso performance was more forceful for seeming anything but a
performance.
Afterward, Sevareid confided to his producer that he hoped they’d get the story on the air while their leading lady was still alive.

A few days later, Carson wrote to her friend Dorothy Freeman.
Carson had already told Freeman that she felt she’d never had any choice but to write
Silent Spring
, that it had been an obligation of the kind Abraham Lincoln meant when he’d said that “to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Now that it was done, she told Dorothy, she felt a mixture of pride and an indescribably heavy exhaustion, as if she had come to the end of a long and difficult road.

“
I’m just beginning to find out how much I wanted sleep,” Carson wrote. “It is delicious to give in to it.”

A
s winter gave way to spring in 1932, the already grim economic situation in America continued to worsen.
Since the stock market crash in 1929, thirteen million people had lost their jobs and by year’s end unemployment would stand at nearly 24 percent. Some ten thousand banks had failed—about four of every ten—and the value of farmland was less than half of what it had been.
Among the dispossessed were thousands of World War I veterans. In 1924, Congress had promised the veterans a deferred bonus, payable with interest in 1945. Now the veterans were pleading for an immediate payout. When a small group of veterans from Portland, Oregon, went to Washington, D.C., to promote the cause, they were spontaneously joined by forty-five thousand others who streamed to the capital from across the country. Some hitchhiked and others hopped freight trains. They called themselves the Bonus Army.

The veterans ended up hunkered down in several encampments, including a large shantytown on the Anacostia Flats, a dismal low-lying
area just across the Anacostia River from the city proper. The camp was so big it had its own streets, sanitation, and law enforcement. Some of the veterans living there were accompanied by their families. They all said they wouldn’t leave without their bonuses. On July 28, 1932, after an initial skirmish with police in which two veterans were killed, President Herbert Hoover ordered the army to expel the veterans from the city. That afternoon, regular regiments of infantry and cavalry, led by General Douglas MacArthur and Major George Patton, using tanks, tear gas, and fixed bayonets, drove the veterans out of the downtown area as office workers and shopkeepers looked on in horror. MacArthur pursued the fleeing vets across the river to their main base on the Anacostia Flats, where he ignored Hoover’s order to stop and instead burned the encampment to the ground. The country was shocked, and four months later Hoover was defeated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived in office with an ambitious plan to reinvigorate the shattered economy by making the government America’s foremost going concern. For the country at large, the New Deal held the prospect of a gradual return to stability and growth; for those who joined it, Roosevelt’s program was an immediate lifeline.