The Mosquito Crusades: A History of the American Anti-Mosquito Movement from the Reed Commission to the First Earth Day

Chapter 6: Advances and Retreats during the Great Depression

122 Chapter 6 Advances and Retreats during the Great Depression Six months before the October 1929 stock market crash, humorist and Oklahoma cowboy philosopher Will Rogers discovered the mosquito crusade. Thomas Headlee’s presentation on “The Relation of Rainfall to the Seasonal ‘Peak Load’ of Mosquito Control” at the sixteenth annual meeting of the New Jersey Mosquito Extermination Association provided the unlikely occasion for Rogers’s musings. Headlee had traced the breeding potential of a single female Culex pipiens mosquito through six generations. By the sixth generation, Rogers learned, a house mosquito could theoretically have produced nearly eighty billion descendants.1 This astounding number prompted Rogers to quip “what we need . . . is pamphlets for the female mosquitoes on birth control. . . . Teach them that the days of the big families in mosquitoes are past. . . . Don’t try to kill off the females. Educate ’em to modern ways.”2 Despite Rogers’s homespun whimsy, the anti-mosquito movement had accomplished much in the 1920s. Once an object of ridicule, mosquito crusaders were active in more than two dozen states. Six states (New Jersey, California, Utah, Florida, Illinois, and Mississippi) had passed legislation authorizing the formation of independent mosquito abatement commissions . Forty towns in Mississippi were conducting anti-malaria campaigns. In Texas the state department of health had appropriated ten thousand dollars to support anti-mosquito work in one hundred communities. Twenty-three counties in Alabama and forty cities and towns in Georgia had started control work. In Virginia Norfolk, Newport News, and twenty other towns had built on U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) anti-malaria initiatives.3 In New England in 1923 the Connecticut legislature amended the state’s mosquito control law mandating that “the State pay all expenses in maintaining drained areas.”4 In neighboring Massachusetts twenty-one communities Advances and Retreats during the Great Depression 123 announced their intention to form the Massachusetts Mosquito Control Association in 1929.5 In New Jersey eleven counties had formed independent mosquito commissions . By 1926 the commissions were spending $325,000 annually to eradicate mosquitoes. The movement’s leaders thought this figure would grow. Trenton lawmakers had recently amended the 1912 abatement law giving the freeholders (county commissioners) the right to issue bonds (up to $300,000) to support mosquito control work.6 Veteran New Jersey mosquito fighters believed the bond money would give counties the resources to complete their salt marsh work years ahead of schedule through the purchase of a new generation of expensive, powerful ditching machines. In 1903 workers used shovels and ordinary garden spades in John Smith’s drainage experiments in Monmouth County. During the next decade Harold Eaton, a mosquito inspector in Atlantic County, tested several different types of mechanical trenching machines. By 1914 Eaton had developed the Eaton Ditching Machine, a gasoline-powered engine mounted on two large metal drums that pulled a plow.7 Keeping the commissions’ ditches in the tidal salt marshes open provided an incentive to develop a new generation of mechanical ditchers and ditchcleaners . Under Headlee’s leadership, researchers at the agricultural experiment station in conjunction with the New Jersey Associated Executives in Mosquito Control (NJAEMC) deployed a new generation of mechanical behemoths along the Jersey Shore. By the decade’s end, massive ditching machines weighing twelve tons with a ten-thousand-dollar price tag and powered by five-ton Holt tractors had cut a latticework of ditches through the state’s salt marshes.8 Frank Miller, Headlee’s assistant at the experiment station, reviewed the mosquito brigade’s accomplishments in the 1920s in an Atlantic City speech at the annual meeting of the NJMEA. “A more extended use of mechanical equipment,” he explained, “the general return to backyard inspections, the use of better larvicidal oils, . . . and the spirit of cooperation and helpfulness that existed between the different county units, aid in large measure towards making last season ‘the best ever.’”9 Miller prophesied a bright future. The Great Depression provoked tremendous changes within the antimosquito movement. The downturn forced drastic cutbacks. Prospects for mosquito control dimmed as the depression worsened. On Florida’s east coast, Martin County dissolved its mosquito commission. In 1933 the Florida AntiMosquito Association cancelled future meetings “due to shortage in funds.”10 The ambitious plans for the Gulf and Atlantic Coast Anti-Mosquito Association were shelved. 124 the mosquito crusades The movement reached its nadir in 1933. Four years of depression robbed communities of the resources...