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Book Review
| Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South. By Pete Daniel. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press with the Smithsonian Museum of American History, 2005. xii + 209 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $26.95.
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| How does public policy get shaped when governmental agencies are captured by industry? How do we address critical social and environmental issues when the regulators are advocates for the regulated? How does science get used by those with special interests? These questions are at the heart of Pete Daniel's new book, Toxic Drift. |
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Daniel, incoming OAH President and also a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, has produced a tightly organized, beautifully researched examination of the interlocking goals and interests of the chemical industry and the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. In his book, Daniel details how this unit of the USDA addressed, indeed promoted, the widespread use of chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates, and herbicides as a mainstay of our agricultural economy. In his close examination of the agency's relationship to pesticide manufacturers—whose synthetic products began to dominate American agricultural practices in the South following World War II—Daniel outlines a sordid tale. An agency that was charged with the responsibility to protect the nation's health and environment lost sight of its mission as it became an advocate for a new vision of a pest-free world. Through the use of a variety of reports, correspondence, and memos gathered from the National Archives, Daniel reveals the close interlocking relationships between chemical manufacturers, government toxicologists, regulators, and politicians all of whom joined hands to promote DDT, endrin, heptachlor, malathion, parathion, and 2,4-D, with little regard to the environmental or human health impact. Daniel describes how the ARS colluded with industry in its attempt to sell pesticides to the nation and to squelch concerns that were raised about the potential environmental and health problems that might accrue. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, "Chemical industry representatives roamed ARS hallways," Daniel reports, "consulting with staff about labels, residues, control projects, research, and other issues" (p.59). ARS continually argued that "pesticides were benign" and "used public relations to deal with the consequences" (p.59). |
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In the process of describing the misdeeds of the ARS, Daniel provides an intimate portrait of the huge interests that shaped our federal policies and activities. "The agribusiness infrastructure stretched from county USDA offices to state Agricultural departments, from chemical companies to the ARS, from federal experiment stations to land grant universities, and from ... such lobbying powers as the Cotton Council, the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, the Delta Council, and the American Farm Bureau. When united these components possessed enormous financial and political power," Daniel informs us. "The agribusiness agenda ... downplayed human health concerns. Acting in concert, agribusiness interests quashed residue reports, rushed in experts when chemicals were suspected of causing health problems, and ensured that the emerging capital-intensive structure succeeded" (p.13). |
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Daniel details the early warnings about the dangers from pesticide use, aerial spraying, and storage that should have alerted federal officials that these substances were anything but benign. He provides a moving and detailed account of the experience of Charles Lawler, a white Mississippi gin manager who was doused with insecticide by a crop duster as he worked in the middle of a cotton field in the mid-1950s. Overcome by a series of symptoms, he was forced to quit work. In an ensuing lawsuit, the full power of the chemical industry and its experts overwhelmed Lawler, a local physician, and the local attorneys who represented him. Lawler had lost his income, became incapacitated, and had turned to the Mississippi welfare system to support himself and his family. Industry experts reinforced common beliefs that held that insecticides were harmless unless used "inappropriately," and Lawler lost his suit. Despite an appeals court ruling that found reason for the case to be retried, the case was never returned to court. The expense and the obvious futility of bringing the suit against the corporate giants with unlimited resource obviously were too much for the financially depleted Lawler. |
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While the Lawler case involved a white worker, Daniel makes clear that African American field hands and sharecroppers were at extraordinary risk. By the 1950s their exposure to insecticides further undermined the African American tenant farmer. One crop duster who remembers spraying recalls that sharecroppers lived in "little old shotgun tenant house[s]" and that "back in the old days [of the 1950s] we'd just spray or dust right on over 'em." Daniel points out that among farm workers African Americans were at special risk of exposure but that the "impact on their health has gone unrecorded"(p.53). |
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The final chapters of this fine book detail the unraveling of the chemical consensus that reinforced the power of the chemical industry and its ARS supporters. Daniel makes good use of Linda Lears's biography of Rachel Carson as well as his own original research to trace the challenges to the industry following the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. In the process he also describes the reaction by the industry to the book's publication and the harassment of Carson herself in the two years before her death in 1964. Finally, he describes the tensions among government agencies which, in the late 1960s and 1970s, began to respond halfheartedly to the huge outpouring of public concern regarding the impact of chemicals on the environment as well as on human health. Today, we are subjected to ever-more intense use of chemicals that have polluted our food supply. |
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In sum, this is a rich and close study of one government agency and its relationship to an ever-expanding and largely uncontrolled industry. It joins a number of other books that have recently appeared that begin to detail the unfortunate power of an industry to shape our lives and our health. |
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David Rosner is professor of the history and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. He is author, with Gerald Markowitz, of a number of books on the history of environmental and occupational health, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (California, 2002), which looks at the chemical industry. |
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