Making Catfish Bait out of Government Boys: The Fight against Cattle Ticks and the Transformation of the Yeoman South (review)

In the early twentieth century, the federal government quarantined cattle herds in the American South, fearing that livestock carrying Texas fever would infect other cattle. Scientists, bureaucrats, and Progressive Era elites, whom Claire Strom calls "New Southerners," formulated a policy of tick eradication that led to compromise and conflict. Through tick eradication the federal government extended its jurisdiction, scientists and bureaucrats battled to control the natural world, and yeoman farmers clashed with federal authorities.

Strom organizes her work in a way that makes the complex science surrounding the topic understandable. The chapter "The Animals," for example, provides an accessible account of the biological relationships between the diverse organisms involved in spreading Texas fever. The chapter "Scientists" follows United States Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Animal Industry scientist Theobald Smith, who discovered that ticks served as the vector for the protozoa Babesia that infected the livestock. Despite Smith's findings, not all farmers would be convinced of the need for a quarantine and tick eradication program.

In fact, many southern farmers put up a fierce and often violent resistance to the tick eradication program, which started in 1906 and required all farmers to dip their cattle every two weeks, most often in an arsenic solution, to rid the livestock of ticks. The environmental and human obstacles made the cost of eradication prohibitive. Cattle that roamed freely over the diverse topography of swamps, mountains, and pine forests of the south were hard to find, round up, and move to dipping vats. Eventually, "state and federal authorities adopted more authoritarian policies to ensure regional and local compliance." (104)

For many small farmers tick eradication challenged their independent way of life, but New Southerners used tick eradication to consolidate economic and cultural dominance in their regions and industries. Strom delves into state politics, including bureaucrat Peter Bahnsen's mission to eradicate ticks in Georgia, Huey Long's attempts to block the federal program and please his yeoman constituency in Louisiana, and the widespread Floridian resistance to the program, which led to Florida being completely quarantined from the rest of the Union.

These "progressive improvements" seemed beneficent on the surface, but they discounted the local environment and culture. Environmental damage wrought by arsenic dips and DDT outweighed the mixed economic impact. Dairying and meatpacking did benefit, but "claims that tick eradication would increase the number and value of southern cattle proved false." (213) Yeoman farmers challenged tick eradication because it undermined their economy and conceptions of private property, but when resistance escalated into violence, the federal authorities responded with superior force, establishing armed camps, mounting machine guns on dipping vats, and literally forcing the dissenting farmers to participate in the program.

The Great Depression led to an opportunity for the federal government to gain new control over the tick problem. Individuals, counties, and states weakened by economic woes turned to the federal government for jobs and aid. The New Deal infused federal funds into tick eradication, which at the same time helped to expand federal authority. The federal government brought the program to conclusion in 1944. A buffer zone, however, still exists in South Texas where the ticks could never be completely eradicated because of the porous border.

Historians interested in environmental history and the New South will find the well-researched Making Catfish Bait out of Government Boys an important addition to the historiography. Despite the complicated science involved in tick eradication the work is accessible and timely, especially considering the issues surrounding the proper extent of federal power. The narrative, with plenty of shotgun blasts and dynamite explosions alongside helpful maps, makes this work an engaging and worthwhile read.