Ignore Those Who Underestimate You

Around the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the picture here appeared on the cover of Seventeen Magazine with the headline: How to make a boy say wow! And, at least this too: How to get the most from a college visit. The message? Go to college and find a husband.

Rachel's Silent Spring unsettled a lot of scientists, specifically chemists working for the chemical industry who had everything to lose financially from her radical thesis. So they questioned it. Were we over using chemicals? Was the government not protecting its citizens?

Her message rattled farmers dependent on chemicals to protect their crops from pests, and scientists who advocated DDT would eradicate pests plaguing majestic street trees like the Elm. There was also the fact that our government used DDT during World War II to protect troops stationed in Italy and the Pacific against malaria. Everything she proposed in her book went against the standards of the time.

Predictably, she was ridiculed and demeaned by the press, by politicians, public figures who represented the agricultural industry, and by heads of corporations.

However, she had the public in her favor. In fact, the letters to the editor of The New Yorker after Rachel's excerpts appeared in their June 1962 issue were overwhelming in her favor. Many were from state agencies of fish and wildlife that wanted copies of the magazine to distribute to politicians in their region. Luckily, an archivist saved me some time by providing a list of the handful of letters unfavorable to the article, and the majority that were favorable. So I didn't have to comb through each one. I went right to the disgruntled letters. 

"In any large scale pest control program in the area, we are confronted with vociferous, misinformed, ...bird-loving...citizenry that has not been convinced of the importance of agriculture..."

Another wrote that her work was misleading. It produced fear and didn't educate.

Another stated that her reference to the selfishness of the chemical industry is from her Communist sympathies.

And we can live without birds and animals, but not business. Isn't it like a woman to be scared?

There were other attacks on Rachel after Silent Spring was published in the fall of 1962. She handled it with grace. In a CBS  documentary titled The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, she didn't lose her composure as she adamantly defended her work. As a counter-point, the show also interviewed chemist Dr. Robert White Stevens who claimed if we were to follow her advice, man would return to the Dark Ages. An over-generalization if I ever heard one.

In her statement before the Senate Government Operations Committee in 1963, she raised awareness that the indiscriminate application of pesticides. Their ubiquitous presence in the environment, she intimated, could be wreaking havoc on humans, and there was no effort to examine the implications at a national level. 

I think what she demonstrated is if you know you're right about something, people eventually come around to the same conclusion. And they come to respect you for your determination. So as long as you can hold on to your conviction, whatever that might be, without losing your dignity in the process.

Source: New York Public Library The New Yorker Records. 

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