On a Farther Shore (50 page)

Carson’s critics in the chemicals industry pointed to the term
“toxic chemicals” as unfair and misleading, as almost any chemical in the right dose and through the right exposure can be toxic. The counterargument, of course, was that pesticides were formulated to be toxic and, unlike other chemical compounds, were lethal when used as intended. Another common complaint against
Silent Spring
was that Carson portrayed a universal contamination of the environment—of the soil and water and all living things—based on examples of poisonings and circumstances that were actually rare and isolated.
The
Economist
thought this and argued in a long, critical piece that the pesticides industry would probably survive
Silent Spring
with little damage, as American farmers weren’t going to pay the book any heed. The magazine thought Carson had probably “damaged seriously her professional reputation as a reliable scientific journalist.”

Financial World
magazine took much the same position in an article examining the high stakes for American pesticide makers and the efforts they were launching to fight back against
Silent Spring
. According to the magazine, Monsanto’s agricultural chemicals division had been growing 20 percent annually for a decade. No wonder their vision of a world without pesticides was a “desolate” one. Sales growth rates for most other manufacturers were lower, but pesticides were still a robust segment of the business for many of them. Pesticides were a big business worth protecting for the manufacturers. American Cyanamid, for example, derived nearly a fifth of its total revenues from pesticide sales.
No one was surprised when a pompous man named Robert H. White-Stevens, who worked in the research and development section of American Cyanamid’s agricultural chemicals division, began barnstorming the country, giving speeches and debating Carson supporters while extolling the virtues and necessity of chemical pest control.

White-Stevens overnight became the anti-Carson. With his slicked-back hair, thin mustache, and black horn-rimmed glasses he was a dead ringer for the horror actor Vincent Price. He seemed to be everywhere, unctuous and sour, rolling his r’s and speaking in echoey, Shakespearian cadences. White-Stevens’s defense of pesticides always
circled around two assertions. One was that if you looked dispassionately at the world you would see that starvation and disease tended to occur in places where pesticides were not available. Unhitch modern society from pesticides and you invite malnutrition and sickness back into the picture. The other repeated claim was that the government and the chemicals industry took more than adequate care in licensing pesticides and instructing users in their safe application.

Although few reviewers in the press agreed with the pesticide industry’s take on
Silent Spring
, the handful who did were puzzled by what they considered Carson’s strident, unbalanced portrayal of products that had done so much to improve the world.
A notable critique came from
Time
magazine, which in an unusually long and sharp-elbowed review—it ran in the magazine’s Science section—called the book an “emotional and inaccurate outburst.”
Time
said the drama in
Silent Spring
was high but based on a distortion of reality:

Time
, relying on the several-years-old study of DDT effects in convict volunteers by the U.S. Public Health Service’s Dr. Wayland J.
Hayes, called DDT “harmless.” The magazine conceded that other, more toxic pesticides posed potential threats to human health—but reported that so far there wasn’t any evidence of such effects. And while it was true that DDT was dangerous to fish and that robins had been killed in DDT programs against Dutch elm disease, none of these impacts on the natural world were “complete.” Not even Miss Carson,
Time
said, could point to a place where “no birds sing” as a result of pesticide use.

Many months after the reviews of
Silent Spring
had ceased—in fact, a full year after the book was published—Carson was savaged in a long, sarcastic essay in the
Saturday Evening Post
written by her jilted would-be collaborator Edwin Diamond, to whom Paul Brooks had so casually sent an advance copy of the book.
Diamond agreed with the
Silent Spring
detractors who called the book unfair and said that Carson greatly overstated the risks from pesticide use—but he was more concerned with exploring why the book had been such a success, the implication being that there can be no good reason for a bad book to sell so well.

Diamond drew the obvious conclusion that Carson’s reputation and stylish prose had something to do with it—though he said
Silent Spring
had none of the beauty of her earlier books beyond a measure of “expository gloss.” Diamond also thought the thalidomide scandal had primed the public for scary stories about chemicals—the more exaggerated the better. In an odd partial inversion of the claim Velsicol had made that Carson was in league with Communist influences, Diamond said he thought
Silent Spring
appealed to the sort of person who might believe that pesticide pushers were Communists. Rather than consign Carson to the lunatic fringe as Velsicol had, Diamond thought she was instead playing to the nuts out there. To love this book was to be at least a little bit crazy:

Showing some expository flair of his own, Diamond also wondered if Carson’s bestseller was not the product of the same venal motivations that drove pesticide makers in their heedless quest to earn millions:

None of this criticism slowed down
Silent Spring
. In February 1963 it was published in England, where it was a huge success, and soon after that in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and a host of other countries. In London, Lord Shackleton—member of the House of Lords and son of the famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton—wrote an introduction for the book.
A couple of months after the English edition was published, Shackleton told the House of Lords that cannibals in the South Pacific now preferred the flesh of Englishmen over Americans—as Americans had higher body burdens of DDT. Shackleton dryly added that his comments were strictly “in the interests of the export trade.”

• • •

By Christmas 1962
Silent Spring
had climbed to number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list, fallen back, then returned to the top spot. Houghton Mifflin prepared a ten-page, 5,500-word booklet rebutting Carson’s critics, and continued sending out regular press releases updating the book industry on sales and endorsements from important persons.
That same month, Carson got a letter from a girl named Elsie Baier, a high school senior in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Baier said she’d been assigned to defend the “thesis” of
Silent Spring
in an upcoming debate at school. The enterprising teenager told Carson she was worried that her opponent was likely to have a pile of material from the critics of
Silent Spring
. Baier asked if Carson could send her examples of support for the book from “reputable authorities.”

Carson, who routinely said no to prominent people and institutions asking for her time or help, gave careful thought to Baier’s naive request before writing her back at length and enclosing materials Baier could use in making her argument. Carson’s advice to Baier provided a rare insight into how she perceived much of the criticism directed at
Silent Spring
:

Carson probably found her correspondence with Baier a pleasant diversion from the noise that had enveloped
Silent Spring
—and from her continuing health problems.
In late October 1962, Carson had
gone to Cleveland for the dual purpose of attending a reception in her honor at the Museum of Natural History and a checkup at the Cleveland Clinic. Carson’s cancer was thought to be under control for the time being—more X-rays a few weeks later seemed to confirm this—but Carson told Dorothy Freeman she’d had a terrible premonition.
She said she could write letters as though a “menacing shadow” did not exist, but that just before she’d left for Cleveland she had a moment when she felt time stop and it had occurred to her that “there might even be no tomorrow.”

In December, Carson made her most thorough public response to the attacks on
Silent Spring
.
It was in a speech to the Women’s National Press Club, and in it Carson’s frustration with critics who had twisted or ignored her meaning—as well as her amusement at those who attacked the book without having read it—came out at last. After being introduced as “Silver Spring’s Joan of Arc,” Carson told the audience that the industry response to
Silent Spring
—what she called the “unquiet autumn” following its publication—was something she and Houghton Mifflin had anticipated all along, and that it had employed “all the well-known devices” for weakening a cause, which included claims the book said things it did not.

Carson quoted an editorial from Vermont’s
Bennington Banner
that said, “The anguished reaction to
Silent Spring
has been to refute statements that were never made.” Another line of attack had been the effort to discredit the person behind the book. Carson, bemused, said she had been branded a bird lover, a cat lover, a fish lover, and—heavens—a “high priestess of nature.” To her detractors, Carson belonged to “a mystical cult having to do with the laws of the universe which my critics consider themselves immune to.”

She offered a number of examples that demonstrated continuing problems with pesticides, and she specifically challenged
Time
magazine’s claim that accidental poisonings from pesticides were rare. California—one of the few states with accurate records, Carson said—was reporting as many as one thousand accidental poisonings a year. Carson also warned that the chemicals industry protected its
interests among academic researchers and government regulators in ways that were often invisible to the public. She said pesticide makers routinely underwrote the cost of studies that reported favorably on pesticide safety. Not even the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, which had recently reviewed the pesticide issue, was immune—the NAS committee behind its latest report, Carson said, included no fewer than nineteen chemical companies representing the interests of the pesticides industry.

Carson’s voice that day was firm and clear.
But only days later she was flattened with crippling back pain. Her doctors assured her this was the result of “normal” joint deterioration from her arthritis. Dorothy sent her some exercises designed to relieve back problems. Carson told Dorothy she was looking forward to having a couple of weeks off. She said she’d just enjoyed a performance of the annual Christmas pageant at Roger’s school in which he at last had the role of King after playing smaller parts in previous years.
As the year came to a close, Carson told Dorothy she wouldn’t have appreciated the impact
Silent Spring
was having or been able to endure her deepening health problems without Dorothy’s constant support.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1963, Carson wrote to Dorothy with a grim update that canceled many of the hopes they had maintained about her condition. Carson admitted to “holding out” on Dorothy “a little” before remembering that they had promised each other not to conceal anything.

Carson said that about a week before Christmas she’d complained to her doctor again about back pain—wondering if there wasn’t something more that could be done for it. When the doctor reexamined her X-rays he unexpectedly suggested they begin a course of radiation treatment on her spine right away. Checking with Barney Crile in Cleveland, Carson was told this was a wise course, as when cancer invades the vertebrae the patient may experience pain before anything shows up on X-rays. The sooner radiation treatments began, the better the chance they would stop the spread of cancer if that’s what it was. The good news was that this time the treatments were
with a smaller, less frightening machine that made the sessions more bearable, Carson said. The radiation had again caused severe nausea, but now it was over and the hard part was behind her. Carson was told to expect it would take several weeks before her pain subsided, but she told Dorothy there seemed to be little change.