Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South (review)

In Toxic Drift, a leading historian of the rural South addresses the role of pesticides and the federal bureaucracy in shaping the health of southerners after World War II. Building on his previous study of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) as a "rogue bureaucracy" in Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2002), Pete Daniel criticizes that agency for serving the interests of chemical companies and large-scale farmers instead of the public. Daniel argues that the department and the ARS accelerated the rise and dominance of capital-intensive agriculture by putting lives at risk, ignoring concerns of scientists and the public about toxicity and health risks.

Even though civil rights struggles were in the foreground of public consciousness, pesticides were also a significant presence in the southern landscape after World War II. The immediate and long-term effects of chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides became apparent as those chemicals gained popularity. In August 1956 an employee at a Mississippi cotton gin became ill after a crop duster doused him with insecticide. He enlisted the help of a local physician who believed that his symptoms and those presented by many field hands were consistent with chlorinated hydrocarbon poisoning. His health permanently impaired, he sued for damages, but the chemical companies, Farm Bureau, and planters used chemical company experts to turn opinion against him. Crop dusters and others who had direct experience with insecticides also learned that chemicals were extremely harmful. Scientists determined that pesticides caused massive fish kills in the Mississippi River from 1961 to 1963, and the public discovered that insecticides could be as lethal to non-target species as they were to insects.

Much of the story was sited in Washington, where bureaucrats and policymakers dealt with the consequences of pesticide use. Department of Agriculture officials and Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten, an outspoken defender of chemical agriculture and the chemical industry, emphasized the benefits, ignored negative effects, and engaged in scare tactics to discredit critics of chemical farming. The ARS blamed fish kills on chemical manufacturers rather than insecticide runoff from farmland, diverting attention from agriculture. Public criticism of pesticides mounted after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. The ARS maintained a "chummy" (p. 101) relationship with the chemical industry throughout the 1960s, even as the Department of Agriculture postured as protector of health and the environment. The fact that the ARS spent $148 million from 1958 to 1974 for fire ant eradication but only increased fire ant numbers and range did not convince agency leaders that the campaign was a failure. Meanwhile, the Pesticide Regulatory Division (PRD) of the ARS refused calls to have the labels on pesticides include antidotes or information that the chemicals, insecticide vaporizers, and pest strips were harmful. As Daniel states, "There was little left for the PRD not to do" (p. 157). Although Daniel concedes that in many cases pesticides were useful in improving human health and producing wholesome food, he contends that the Department of Agriculture and ARS were tools of the chemical industry and paid more attention to "the death of insects than to the health of humans" (p. 170).

Toxic Drift is a significant and persuasive contribution to our understanding of technology, health, the American South, and government in the postwar period. Daniel mined Department of Agriculture and ARS records, congressional reports, court documents, and oral histories to demonstrate the consequences of misguided federal policies which resulted from a collaborative relationship between government and industry. The cozy relationship between the ARS and the chemical industry was not unique, however. During this same period, many governmental agencies responsible for industrial oversight were intertwined with those same industries.

Daniel could have more fully developed the argument that racial segregation and chemicals served white elites. Fearing retaliation, African Americans...