Read On a Farther Shore Online
Authors: William Souder
M
y deepest thanks to Stanley Freeman, Jr., and Martha Freeman, and to their spouses, the late Madeleine Freeman and Richard Barringer—an accomplished and gracious family who spent a lovely summer morning showing me the Freeman cottage at Dogfish Head on Southport Island in Maine, where we sat on the deck overlooking Sheepscot Bay as they shared their recollections of Rachel and Dorothy. My conversations continued with Stan and Martha for many months thereafter, and I appreciate their help, their openness, and their encouragement more than I can say.
Thanks, also, to Roger Christie and Wendy Sisson for allowing me to spend a week at the Carson cottage on Southport Island, where I wrote portions of Chapter 7 at Rachel’s desk as the sounds and smell of the sea came to me through an open window.
I started work on this book by asking Linda Lear whether she thought I should, and I am grateful to her for encouraging me to do so. Linda’s essential biography,
Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
, and her collection of research materials at Connecticut College were invaluable sources of fact and inspiration. I am also indebted to my friend Mike Lannoo, of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions for its improvement. Mike’s own fine book,
Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab
, was essential to my understanding of both of these men. Many thanks to Mark Madison, David Klinger, and Anne Post at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center. Mark,
an early and enthusiastic adviser on this book, opened the Fish and Wildlife archives to me, while David and Anne helped with personnel and publication records from Carson’s time at the agency.
Special thanks to my longtime friend and prose mentor, Dan Kelly, who read the manuscript and made me make it better, as I knew he would.
Thank you to Fran Collin and Sarah Yake of the Frances Collin literary agency, trustee of the Rachel Carson literary estate, for reviewing quoted passages from Carson’s writings and granting permission for their use. Thanks to Brian Goldberg of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota for a helpful interpretation of “Locksley Hall” and to Mark Edlund of the St. Croix Watershed Research Station for a tutorial on diatoms. Thanks also to Simon Ratsey and Gwyneth Campling in England for their help with terminologies peculiar to the countryside and waterways of Devon. And thank you to William H. Calvert for information on the migration and life cycle of monarch butterflies.
Thank you to Nell Baldacchino of the Patuxent Research Refuge for showing me around that sprawling facility and to Greg Piniak for doing the same at the Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research at Beaufort. Thanks as well to lab director David Johnson for his historical perspective on the Beaufort station and the region. Thank you to Ron Orchard of the Southport Historical Society and Hendricks Hill Museum for the local lowdown on Carson’s summertime destination. Thanks to Patricia M. DeMarco, former executive director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association, for showing me Carson’s childhood home in Springdale. And thank you to Diana Post, president of the Rachel Carson Council, and to her husband, Clifford C. Hall, who showed me Carson’s last house in Silver Spring.
Special thanks to my good friends Paul Lombino and Leslie Schultz in Boston, and Karl Vick and Stacy Sullivan in New York for putting me up and keeping me fine company when I was doing research in those cities.
I would have been lost without the capable and friendly assistance of the librarians and archivists who guided me through the long written record of Carson’s life and work. Most sincere thanks to Elaine Ardia at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates College; to Rachel M. Grove Rohrbaugh, archivist at the Jennie King Mellon Library at Chatham University; to Benjamin Panciera and Nova M. Seals at the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College; to Lynda Garrett at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center library; to Thomas Lannon of the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division; to Stephen Plotkin, reference archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; to Maureen Booth, law librarian, U.S. Department of the Interior Library; and to Ann Roche of the Southport Memorial Library. Thanks also to the dedicated staffs at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, at the Washington Historical Society, at the Historical Society of Old Newbury, and at the Hennepin County Central Library, my hometown go-to resource for odd books and obscure articles.
Apart from some of the early letters from Dorothy Freeman—which regrettably are lost to history—Rachel Carson never threw away anything written by or to her, and through good fortune her personal papers ended up in New Haven. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University houses one of the world’s great literary collections in one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. It was for many weeks my home away from home. I am deeply indebted to the entire staff there, especially to those on the front desk who retrieved materials, answered my questions, and in general made my research a pleasure from start to finish. Very special thanks to Karen Nangle, who did all that and so much more.
Sincere thanks to Domenica Alioto at Crown, for her many suggestions and close attention to the manuscript and in helping me with permissions and other essential details. Rachel Klayman, my editor at
Crown, and Chuck Verrill, my agent, have been full partners in this endeavor. I thank them for their wise counsel and unflagging support, though I cannot actually thank them enough. Thanks, also, to John Glusman for his early and ardent support, and for finding me a home at Crown.
Finally, thank you to my wife, Susan, and to our children, Joe, Martha, Tom, and Liz, for letting me do this again.
R
achel Carson lived in the age of words and print. To say that she wrote professionally understates the case. Carson wrote nonstop, leaving behind four books, many newspaper and magazine articles, and, just as important, thousands of letters that tell the story of her work and her life. She corresponded regularly with scientists, doctors, colleagues, publishers, editors, publicists, agents, friends, students, politicians, and her legions of admirers. Carson’s letters were models of lean prose that exhibited the author’s knack for saying exactly what she meant.
Carson’s correspondence with Dorothy Freeman is held in the Dorothy Freeman Collection at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates College. Most of the balance of Carson’s letters, along with an extensive inventory of personal papers and records—including notebooks, manuscripts, research materials, speeches, and unpublished writings—make up the Rachel Carson Papers, which are in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The original documents from these two collections, or in some instances facsimiles of originals, are the primary sources for this book.
I also found important source materials in other archival collections. These included the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; the Linda Lear Collection of Rachel Carson Books and Papers, held in the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College; the Rachel Carson Collection in the archives of the Jennie King Mellon Library at Chatham University; the
New Yorker
records and the National Audubon Society records in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library; the archives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Conservation Training Center Museum and Archives; the Historical Society of Old Newbury; the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; the library of the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center; the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; the Southport Historical Society and Hendricks Hill Museum; and the Southport Memorial Library.
I have also drawn on many secondary published sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, industrial and trade publications, and peer-reviewed papers from scientific journals. Books, cited in detail in the accompanying bibliography, were also vital sources, and three deserve special mention:
Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
, Linda Lear’s seminal biography and the essential road map for all subsequent Carson scholarship;
Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman 1952–1964
, edited and annotated by Dorothy’s granddaughter Martha Freeman and that includes most of the letters from the Muskie collection; and
The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon
, Ralph E. Lapp’s superb account of the Castle Bravo incident and its aftermath.
In the interests of economy, I have dispensed with source citations for factual information of a general and easily retrievable nature—geographical details, name and place spellings, dates of major events, routine biographical accounts of prominent persons, and so on—as well as for broad assertions that are my own conclusions based on having read the record. All other factual statements are derived from the sources that follow in the notes below.
Over time, copies of documents have migrated among various archives, so that some are now found in more than one place. Where possible I have indicated the location I believe to be the primary repository; otherwise I cite the location where I found the document. For frequently mentioned collections, the following abbreviations are used:
Beinecke Rachel Carson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Chatham Rachel Carson Collection, archives of the Jennie King Mellon Library, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
JFK Library John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts
Lear Collection Linda Lear Collection of Rachel Carson Books and Papers, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut
Muskie Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
NCTC U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Conservation Training Center Museum and Archives, Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Patuxent Library of the U.S. Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, Maryland
Late in the summer of 1962
: Washington Post
, August 29, 1962. 3
That same day, President John F. Kennedy appeared:
News Conference 42, JFK Library.
Although not yet actually a book
:
Carson, “Silent Spring,”
New Yorker
, June 16, 23, and 30, 1962.
Although it had been first synthesized
: New York Times
, October 29, 1948.
When the U.S. Army sprayed
:
Ibid.
At the award ceremony
:
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1948, Presentation Speech,
http://www.nobelprize.org/
.
On June 5, 1945
:
Clarence Cottam and Elmer Higgins, “DDT: Its Effect on Fish and Wildlife,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Circular 11, 1946, Patuxent.
Further laboratory studies
:
Ibid.
On August 22, 1945
:
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service press release, August 22, 1945, NCTC.
By 1947, Patuxent had a staff biologist
:
Patuxent Research Refuge Field Program and Economic Investigations Laboratory, Quarterly Report, March 1947, NARA. The biologist was Joseph P. Linduska, then near the beginning of a long and storied career as a government scientist and conservationist. In 1950, Linduska warned that the aerial application of DDT over large areas would lead to “dire effects” on the balance of nature.
That same year
:
Patuxent Research Refuge Field Program and Economic Investigations Laboratory, Quarterly Report, June 1947, NARA.
In July 1945
:
Carson to Harold Lynch, July 15, 1945, Beinecke.
The uses for DDT seemed endless
:
“DDT: How to Use It,”
Mechanix Illustrated
, December 1945, Beinecke.
and in 1955 the World Health Organization launched
:
Packard,
Making of a Tropical Disease
, pp. 151–52.
By 1959, some eighty million pounds of DDT
:
“DDT Regulatory History: A Brief Survey (to 1975),” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, September 10, 2009,
http://www.epa.gov/
.
In early 1958, Carson
:
Carson to DeWitt Wallace, January 27, 1958, Beinecke.
About that same time
:
Carson to E. B. White, February 3, 1958, Beinecke. 10
Carson, disinclined:
Ibid.
By spring, Carson had signed a contract
:
Carson to Paul Brooks, April 20, 1958, Beinecke. Brooks was the editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin. 10
In 1945, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:
Miller,
Under the Cloud
, pp. 34–57.
A moratorium was agreed to
:
U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office, “United States Nuclear Tests: July 1945 through September 1992,” December 2000, p. vii.
Over the course of the next three months
:
“JFK in History: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” JFK Library.
Between April and November
: New York Times
, June 1, 1963.
When a comprehensive ban
:
National Research Council, “Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study,” 2003, pp. 9–11. While it would seem easy to keep track of things as noticeable as nuclear explosions, the counting of atmospheric nuclear tests has not been precise, and different sources disagree about totals. Some tests involved more than one device at a time. Others used low-yield devices intended only to test safety features or new trigger mechanisms and did not result in large explosions or produce fallout. But the number of tests that did both—and the widespread radioactive contamination that resulted—is appalling.
A by-product of these tests
:
Ibid.
In 1957 a group of prominent scientists
:
Mead and Hager,
Linus Pauling
, pp. 212–13.
Carson recognized an “exact and inescapable” parallel
:
Carson,
Silent Spring
, p. 208.
Some compared the book
: New York Times
, September 27, 1962.
A major pesticide manufacturer
:
Louis A. McLean to Houghton Mifflin, August 2, 1962, Beinecke. McLean was secretary and general counsel for the Velsicol Chemical Corporation.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture meanwhile
: New York Times
, July 22, 1962.
The Book-of-the-Month Club announced
:
Lovell Thompson to Carson, June 14, 1962, Beinecke.
A newspaper in London reported
: London Evening Standard
, September 5, 1962.
Along with the possibility of
:
Carson
, Silent Spring
, p. 8.
In 1959, just days before
: New York Times
, November 10, 1959.
Then, in 1961, came devastating news
:
Gilbert,
Developmental Biology
, pp. 18–19, 666–67.
The U.S. maker of thalidomide
:
Lear,
Rachel Carson
, p. 412.
When a reporter questioned
: New York Post
, September 14, 1962.
In October 1962, just after
Silent Spring
arrived
:
Chief of Naval Operations, “The Naval Quarantine of Cuba, 1962,” Naval Historical Center,
http://www.history.navy.mil/
.
The day after his press conference
: New York Times
, August 31, 1962.
Meanwhile, the FBI
:
U.S. Department of Justice, FBI investigative report, December 11, 1962, NCTC. The contents of this two-page document are, regrettably, lost to history. A severely redacted version, in which all but a handful of words were blacked out, was released in 1995 in response to a Freedom of Information of Information and Privacy Act request from Linda Lear. In May 2010, I initiated a second FOI/PA request for an unredacted version of the report. In August 2010, the FBI informed me that the record had been destroyed in a routine file clearing in 1997. I appealed this response in October 2010, asking the FBI to look for it in backup files. I also asked the FBI if it could determine who requested the investigation and who received the report. In March 2011, the FBI answered again, reaffirming its earlier finding that the report had been destroyed. The agency said it could not respond to my request for a “cross reference” search of other files or for additional information about the report unless I could provide, among other things, the dates, locations, and “specific circumstances” of contact between Carson and the FBI—the very information blacked out on the report—and at that point I gave up. All that can be gleaned from the redacted version is that the investigation was launched at least as early as August 30, 1962, the day after President Kennedy’s press conference, that it in some way involved the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and that Carson’s phone was either tapped or a record of her incoming calls was obtained. The report was marked “Confidential.” The date “December 11, 1962,” was corrected by overtyping and could alternatively be December 14.
Immediately following the
New Yorker
serialization
:
Orville Freeman, USDA internal memo, July 16, 1962, JFK Library.
Beleaguered over what to do
:
Ibid., July 18, 1962, JFK Library.
What did surprise her was how well
:
Paul Brooks to Carson, October 16, 1962, Beinecke.
And the Book-of-the-Month Club edition
: Book-of-the-Month Club News
, September 1962, Beinecke. 16
from U.S. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas:
Ibid. 16
Carson complained of “drowning”:
Carson to Anne Ford, October 22, 1962, Beinecke.
One notable request
:
Ibid., September 17, 1962, Beinecke.
But Carson was hiding
:
Paul Brooks to Carson, March 18, 1960, and Carson to Paul Brooks, March 21, 1960, Beinecke.
a minor procedure ten years earlier
:
Carson to Marie Rodell, September 10, 1950, Beinecke.
Carson required a radical mastectomy
:
Carson to Marjorie Spock, April 12, 1960, Beinecke.
Carson eventually discovered
:
Lear,
Rachel Carson
, pp. 378–79. Carson finally discovered the truth after visiting Dr. Barney Crile at the Cleveland Clinic in early December 1960—though she perhaps suspected she’d been misled after her mastectomy. She told Paul Brooks in late December 1960 that she had asked her doctors “directly” after her surgery if there was a malignancy (Carson to Paul Brooks, December 27, 1960, Beinecke). Linda Lear illuminates the situation by explaining that in the 1950s and ’60s it was common for doctors to discuss a cancer diagnosis with a woman’s husband and not with the patient herself—a disturbing practice that left the unmarried Carson in the dark about her condition (Lear,
Rachel Carson
, p. 368). Dorothy Freeman, who’d been desperately worried about Carson’s health, said at the end of 1960 that she was relieved Dr. Crile had set things straight (Dorothy Freeman to Carson, December 31, 1960, Muskie).