| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT. By James E. McWilliams. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xii, 296 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-231-13942-7.)
James E. McWilliams's book seeks to frame within a paradox a comprehensive interpretation of agricultural insect pests from colonial times to the present. He argues that Americans sought to control nature for economic development but that insecticides undermined the ultimate goal. McWilliams recounts the contributions of early scientists such as Timothy Dwight (president of Yale University), Thaddeus William Harris (librarian at Harvard University), and Charles Valentine Riley (entomologist for the state of Missouri and later at the U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA]). He characterizes early insect-control practices as local, pragmatic, farmer oriented, and biologically based. He notes that these methods were not always effective but that they were preferable to what came later.	1
McWilliams argues that starting in the late nineteenth century, entomologists in the USDA began to promote insect-control practices that were national, monolithic, scientist centered, and based on chemicals. Leland Howard, director of the department's Bureau of Entomology from 1894 to 1927, participating in the Progressive Era's enthusiasm for science, moved entomology toward a focus on chemicals. First the arsenicals and later ddt rapidly eclipsed the earlier practices. Harvey Wiley from the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry and Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962) were able to reconfigure American attitudes toward the new chemicals only slightly.	. . .

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